HIS Wednesday I will deliver a talk to an audience of surgeons at the Royal Eye Hospital. The two short presentations gracefully run under Firefox and focus on computer security and data recovery, which are not my primary fields of expertise. Nonetheless, there is plenty of information to deliver on the subject as it is broad and open-ended. As usual, my presentations are publicised on-line (not finalised yet):

• PC Security in a Connected Environment (XHTML)
• Basics of Data Recovery (XHTML)

Please do remember that both presentation were composed with a non-technical audience in mind. They do not bog down to a low level of granularity and tend to refer to Windows more often than to other platforms, which I shall not neglect to advocate. It is by no means propaganda, but I hope to get across the message that Windows (and several applications including IE) is prone to failure and woe.

arly this morning I made a bold move; it was bold for me, at least. I decided to make both partitions on my hard-drive adhere to the Reiser filesystem (FS), overwriting an unused Windows 2000 (NTFS) partition, which was rarely ever accessed. At times it was exploited as a storage area, yet no more than once month, which made it a complete waste of space.

Before formatting the NTFS partition, I was able to transfer data to the Windows partition using special tools. Linux can read NTFS, but not write to it, whereas Windows only understands its own filesystems (FAT, FAT32 and so forth) so there is no reciprocity. Nevertheless, there are tools which enable Windows users to read a Reiser filesystem, which is a common Linux filesystem.

• rfstool – read ReiserFS under Windows
• YAReG – a .NET GUI for the above tool

They both require the user to boot into Windows, which is why I gave up on them and decided to stick to Linux partitions instead.

The moment of truth: so long Windows partition (click to enlarge)

To cut a long story short, I now have two Linux partitions, which I am extremely happy with. This move would not have been simple if it weren’t for the kind help from Houghi.

At an earlier stage I thought about installing Mac OS X on the new partition. Unfortunately, the process seems time-consuming, complicated and unreliable at its end. Moreover, it turned out that this had never been possible as Mac OS X (specifically the hacked version which runs on any machine) will not function under a partition, i.e. it requires a separate physical drive. To the curious, there are full instructions on how to installed Mac OS X on any standard PC. Many pictures and screenshots are included.

n a matter of hours I will head off to a plenary research meeting at Oxford University. I decided to catch the 5 AM train rather than arriving at Oxford yesterday. It has become rather difficult to stay off-line for more than half a day, let alone a day or two. Many hundreds of messages accumulate in the newsgroups, many dozens in mailing lists, and about 100 RSS feeds need catching up with. Moreover, error logs expire, server have potential of crashing, and physically speaking, no proper exercise can be undertaken.

A talk I look forward to describes work by Lewis and Chen. The presentation Lewis will deliver bears a title which intrigues me.

Below are 2 photos that I took in the previous Oxford plenary meeting in May 24^th – 25^th. I retain a comprehensive daily photolog so the corresponding entries of the first and the second day are included, as always.

“That MR brain image in the background is mine… but don’t tell anybody…”

am taking on a new project these days. Its name comprises the words Models of Appearance, Registration and Segementation. It may prevent me from posting items in the Web log and in the newsgroups. If you wish to have a look at research work that I currently do towards my Ph.D., have a look at the new site, which I have arranged using the almighty PHP-Nuke.

I have recently come across a German site which cloned my theme. Looking at the similarity in terms of layout is somewhat surreal. Sadly, that site appears to have become dormant last year.

Statistics for the month of April have just come out from MATLAB Central. I was ranked 1^st world-wide, jointly with Luigi Rosa.

I am nearing 20,000 downloads and this figure should be exceeded later this month. It is rewarding to know that many programs out there have my DNA.

I am going to present recent research work at UCL tomorrow. Bound to this presentation are some graphics files (with captions). Older, unused slides are available to anyone who is curious. I will most likely modify text on the train and upload the changes during the weekend.