emonstration below is no screenshot. It is a fake composition which I pulled together under the GIMP, yet where are the spherical desktops? Where has this initiative disappeared? Microsoft are finally incorporating some transparency in Windows Vista, but why concede an attractive spherical environment? Surely in pragmatic terms, the gain from this graphical developments is nill; it is probably a loss. The heavy computational load, however, can be handled using graphical acceleration hardware.

Wallpaper from Houghi (click image above to enlarge; non-lossy PNG version)

here are healthy competitions and morbid competitions. A competition which involves handicapping the opponents is always a destructive and dangerous one. Nevertheless, there are examples in industry where Xerox, Microsoft, Amazon and other leaders file laughable patents for what should certainly remain a taboo — a no-go area. After 5 years and 4 rejection, Amazon received exclusive rights to inform customers of what they already bought (history). Sounds outrageous? It gets worse…

Microsoft are patenting the custom emoticons, practically opening the door to control of social behaviour with an army of lawyers. Instead of following such footsteps, companies must strive to innovate and offer some added value, not imitate and shield uninnovative ideas that have floated around for decades.

Bill Gates posing for a teen magazine in 1985
with a Mac at the back, from which he nicked the GUI

A competition where giants impose legal barriers to obstruct smaller opponents is like taking the lead in running race, tossing water bootles back at the track. Proprietary, patents and artificial channelling of users all have this effect. At the end of the day, Bill Gates wonders why computer science is slowly dying in the United States.

A guy called Derek posted photos from a personal project to nntp://uk.tech.home-automation. His work is inspiring and a lot of DIY was involved. Posted below are some specs and features, explained in his own words.

…

• Monitor mounted
• Fan and vent installed in cupboard
• Benchtop drilled
• Test fire of PC!

Some of the uses of this system:

• Recipe database (incl barcode scanning of ingredients for online supermarket ordering)
• Entertainment (MP3s, videos, TV etc from the LAN and internet)
• Web browsing
• VoIP calls
• Security (four cams around the house + alarm)
• Lighting control (possibly power down the track)

Awaiting additions:

• Globetech keyboard/trackball
• Install/config of Meedio

Looking a decade back, only a small proportion of homes had a computer. Nowadays, with costs that continue to fall and functionality that is on the rise, computers are lavishly bought, much like TV sets in the previous decade.

Maui Beach under KDE (click to enlarge)

have recently come to grips with my slight wallpapers obsession. I currently have 370 megabytes of wallpapers that suit dual-head (two-monitor) displays. I get most of them using keyword-based searches in Webshots and PBase. Older sources which I made good use of are mentioned in my Utilities Section.

KDE has many powerful features built-in and they are relatively well-integrated. Among these many features, it allows users to specify a random cycle of wallpapers and applies colour blending on-the-fly. Maui is shown above with a hue shift applied (the colours are not manipulated off-line, only when loaded). Background pictures get shuffled every 2 minutes and similar third-party applications offer these features to Windows users.

Even on a rainy day you can get absorbed in this illusion that your surroundings are as peaceful as you choose for them to be. The variety and choice of wallpapers is endless. Moreover, the frequent change of wallpapers requires no user intervention. I use KDE under SuSE (one of the best Linux distributions). Unfortunately, Gnome which is yet another desktop environment that I happen to use at work, does not provide me with similar, much-needed options (under Ubuntu Warty Warthog).

Related item: comparison between KDE and Gnome.

An example of a poor appearance model of the brain

IPMI, an international conference on medical imaging, has come to its end. Worth pointing out is the fact that our presentation was delivered first among hundreds in this conference, which began last Monday. I am not the first author; Carole Twining is.

If you take interest in my research, have a look at project MARS, AART or the comprehensive research index. I also maintain the Computer Vision Digest, which is much broader in terms of scope.

t is relatively simple to incorporate valid printer-friendly versions into WordPress (see above for example). I coded up the feature early this morning; it did not require much time or effort. This involved little more than stripping of styles as well as other heavy features which contributed to clutter. More details and code at the hacks and themes page.

Contextually-related: PDF version of WordPress posts

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

eople without hands-on experience with site management ought to know that Microsoft attempt to ‘re-invent’ the Web by introducing a set of Windows binaries and then requesting them from sites all across the open Web.

The consequence: errors get raised in every site that is not powered by Windows.

Such files include:

• /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll
• /MSOffice/cltreq.asp (Office)
• /_vti_pvt/service.pwd (Frontpage — grey area and an illegal password request)

On a roughly daily bases, my error logs will list these files. So, I have just re-directed requests for all such files to microsoft.com/eat_your_own_garbage

This shifts the errors over to Microsoft’s own domain and takes up their own bandwidth. If enough people take similar steps, the folks at microsoft.com will soon get the message, which will ‘bubble’ up their error log tables.

There are previous, contextually-related items on:

• MSNBot causing havoc to Linux servers and
• ways in which Internet Explorer breaks the Web