I will not be going on vacation this Christmas, even though I did last year. I wouldn’t describe a wintry vacation as one which is anywhere near optimal. Instead, I will take my vacation in late January when flights get cheaper. The fare somehow makes up for the desire (or lack thereof) to travel.

This month I will attend 4 formal Christmas events. As usual, this proves to be the most social time of the year, which happens to incorporate a diverse professional and recreational ‘hattery’. I will be going parties involving my following affiliations:

• IT Services
• Manchester Computing
• Health Club (Midland Hotel)
• Research Division (namely Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering)

The parties are spread compfortably throughout the month of December. The celebration of Christmas, on its own right, will be quite costly this year. And yet, perhaps needless to mention, I very much look forward to it all.

Technical note: those who still use Internet Explorer (which is buggy) will have the tree rendered wrongly, position-wise. Version 6 still fails to cope with images alongside itemised lists (bulletpoints). Admittedly, I am through being kind and tolerant to Explorer bugs because they hinder Web development world-wide.

An appearance model of the brain after
perturbation has been applied to its training set

ATER today I will deliver an important presenation on my recent research work. This work has been done in collaboration with UCL for the past few months. This comes amidst 2 days of talks (the first day was yesterday), which slow down my activity on the Internet.

The presentation file that I practice with is in OpenOffice 1 format. This relates to my discussion on one-file presentations versus the more open and sparse (and in my opinion correct) form, as argued and published a couple of days ago. In-depth details on academic progress are periodically posted in MARS, which is a separate, research-related section that jointly resides on this domain.

Plenty of Web traffic and computer power drained in vain

OMBIE attacks on this site have persisted for over a month and have shown no sign of abatement. In fact, it only gets worse as more diverse locations get targetted for the puspose of referrer spam injection.

I have ultimately grown tired of these attacks rather than become accustomed to them. Each day, over 1,000 attacks are launched against my domain (2 of them actually) by hijacked Windows-powered machines. To remain kind to all genuine visitors, thus far I have re-directed suspicious page requests internally, displaying a forbidden (error 403) page. This has gotten me nowhere as the attackers are not deterred by any of this. Only more and more Windows computer get hijacked and ‘puppeteered’, so brute-force is never an issue.

Yesterday I became slightly more emotional and perhaps courageous enough to forward all of these leeches to microsoft.com/this-is-YOUR-zombie-NOT-mine. Let us wait and see how Microsoft handles nearly 50,000 of these zombie attacks per month. In my defence, all I do is merely pass on the zombies to the domain which I find responsible for their misfortunate existence. I look forward to some form of response from Microsoft with great anticipation.

A week back I enquired in nntp://uk.legal as to whether Microsoft could be held accountable directly for these attacks, which are due to major loopholes in their flagship O/S. Opinions which I received in response were mixed, but no doubt Microsoft’s faulty product, which allows computers to be used as weapons, ought to take at least part of the blame. I previously explained more on that stance of mine and arguments regarding liability.

Appearance model of the brain, ±2.5 standards deviations shown

T is difficult to submit a reasonably decent paper to an international conference. It is also rather unfortunate when two papers need to be completed before strict submission deadlines that are only one day apart.

I am planning to submit a paper on image registration assessment to ISBI 2006 and another on appearance model evaluation to CVPR 2006. Both deadlines have been set to the beginning of next week. That possibly, if not probably, warrants scarce blog activity. Both conferences will take place in the States and I will wind up attending at least one of the conferences.

As the documents adhere to IEEE-styled templates, I have finally descended to the level of raw L^AT_EX. I preferred to have avoided it for the past 4 years as I discovered the front-end L_yX, which has its pros and cons. L^AT_EX. feels like a step back nonetheless as failed attempts to compile a document are time-consuming. This is just one among the many deficiencies I could list.

HIS item is about my personal research and, in particular, its recent development and progression, which may take it in a different and exciting direction. I currently work on assessment of registration algorithms, which I have described in some depth over at MARS — my research-related publishing platform. The latest item discusses everything at a more technical level.

Below lies the diagram which describes a possible framework, which is still at its ‘propsal stage’. The ultimate aim is to provide an e-Science workbench for medical image analysis. My experiments account for a mere subset, where image/volume sequences need be aligned.

Click image for full-sized version

OME time ago I mentioned the three Linux machines which I have accumulated, but this situation has changed due to a miserable hard-drive crash. I received a new (and slightly better) machine as a replacement yesterday. Rather than having 2 Ubuntu boxes and 1 SuSE box, it is now 2 for SuSE and only one for Ubuntu.

The main motive for this shift was a video card incompatibility, but I also must confess that I do not like GNOME as much as I like KDE. Moreover, SuSE is a more comprehensive and self-contained distribution where fewer installation tasks need to be completed once the operating system has been set up.

Arbitrary screenshot of my SuSE Linux box at work

SuSE, which comes from Novell, has become one of the market leaders as far as Linux in the enterprise is concerned. Novell are among the most prolific vendors of Linux as they incorporate merely any modern desktop environment. When I installed SuSE on the new machine yesterday, I received the re-assurance that Novell, much like Canonical (makers of Ubuntu), simply understand usability, as well as the need for a friendly UI and stability. Therefore, they are bound to flourish at the expense of more ‘stubborn’ distributions, which often pose challenges rather than assist the user and adhere to abstraction. Their support and community are quite strong as well.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, continues to have a few weaknesses, so I will continue to favour and evangelise SuSE whenever I get the chance. I must stress that Ubuntu is an excellent distribution for beginners and it also boasts excellent hardware detection so it involves little or no gamble. Its accompanying Live CD gives further reassurance too.

ATER this morning I shall be leaving for a 10-day vacation. I will attempt to continue adding content to my blog, though pace will not be comparable with my usual. As I will be getting less input (i.e. reading and conversing), I don’t expect myself to have much to say either.

Shown above is a photo from my last vacation in springtime. A few transformations were applied to the image using the excellent GIMP, just for amusement. Knowing my past experiences, this vacation will only lead to accumulation of work and reslessness. Internet is an addiction to me.