few moment ago I realised that our beloved dog Jenny does not appear anywhere on this site. How can this be? As Jenny is nearing the age of 15, I decided to post a picture of hers, pulled from September 27^th, 1992. It was extracted from the digitised photo albums archive, which I had acquired on my most recent home visit.

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I can vividly recall the day that we got Jenny as a puppy. I must have been 9 or 10 years old at the time.

EVR the past few years I have grown closer to my older sister. We have always gotten along just fine. She is a wonderful person, yet sometimes ideaology gets in the way. Allow me to elaborate if I may.

We are both computer scientists, but she insists on using Windows. She has never tried anything else and her job involved programming for that platform. This observation was the next worse thing to me realising that had gone to interviews at Microsoft. She did that once several years back and once again more recently. If she worked for the ‘dark forces’, that could possibly lead to tension between us. I sure hope that the prospective employer and recruiters ‘Googled’ (or MSN’d) her name to discover she comes from a ‘wrong neighbourhood’. Her brother is a stubborn Linux advocate, though it may be irrelevant altogether.

Bottom-right, from left to right: Me, my father and my sister in our younger days (click for full-sized version but beware: 1.3 MB JPEG)

HIS afternoon I will present Assessing the Accuracy of Non-Rigid Registration with and without Ground Truth (HTML version). The talk is part of a local symposium that involves all Ph.D. students in the Division. The presentation is a gross re-use of a previous presentation file and I was not using OpenOffice out of choice, I feel compelled to add.

I always attempt to use preparation time effectively. It seems most valuable to practice and rehearse on the day of the talk by getting familiar with the slides, remembering its flow, and having a clue about time constraints. I believe that, in order to stay fresh in one’s mind, this cannot be done days in advance; not effectively anyway. I will also stick to the habit of having a prominent-yet-discreet PDA unfolded with a timer in front of me while talking.

Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM

have just had a rare chance to become part of an exciting experiment. It took place at the The Manchester Visualisation Centre, which is near my office. This involved a new method for interaction with visual data.

A pen is being moved in 3-D space and its route gets traced in real time. Atop that, vibrations are as subtle feedback that indicates contact with items on the screen. It was only a week ago that I discussed the issue of 3-D desktops, i.e. ones with depth, where one can interact with items and be able to feel them. That notion of depth could become a good surrogate for virtual desktops. Another issue is the sensitivity of touch, realisation of depth without special displays and stereo-imagery glasses, and also the motion arms that move up and down, thereby leading to tiredness.

I must admit that got quite excited about the device and asked the lady how much it would cost to purchase one for my workstation. When I was told that the cost is 10,000 pounds per unit, I immediately gave up on the idea. Needless to mention!

Related items:

• Spherical Desktop
• The Desktop Sphere
• Spherical Display
• The User Interfaces of Tomorrow

Photo from around 1984

Warning: shameless rave lies below, but it is no lie.

sometimes wonder how my life would have turned out if I had chosen a different career path. I believe I could stick to a particular sport and make a living out of it. Yesterday, the guy at the cashout (a friendly lad) asked me if I was a bodybuilder, making me shy and flattered at the same time. He then began asking for some general guidance and workout tips, while packing the groceries very slowly with the intention of earning time.

More often than before I find myself giving others advice on fitness, diet and exercise (apart from computers). Yet, on many other occasions I sought help from personal trainers with whom I am in good terms and, as a matter of fact, it was my father who got me started with regular exercise over 10 years ago. So, I merely pass on the experience I have absorbed from others.

This year’s fitness competition is coming up and I am already obliged to sign up and participate. I was the winner in all previous contents among this series, which got me in an ecstatic mood.

FTER a few sleepless nights, I am finally through submitting two papers. They have put me under great pressure recently, so I even curtailed my blogging activities. I have mentioned these submissions before, but they were only impending work at the time.

One paper has already been accepted, so the camera-ready version needed to be produced. Within a few days I will know if another paper (mentioned months ago) has been accepted and the reviewers rebuttal period will commence. All submission are to IEEE conferences or journals where I am the corresponding author. This is something that I never dreamed would be attainable. If someone predicted this out loud, I probably would have laughed. In the past year I have been fortunate enough to find myself on cloud number 9.

Another deadline approaches, namely (Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), which gives us an opportunity to introduce and outline our entropy-based model and registration assessment, which is novel.

VER a year ago, I decided to spend a few hours of my vacation congragating and picking up school archives of mine, which were rather comprehensive. This time, for a change, I opted for digitisation of a lifetime of photographs, having already accumulated every recoverable paper archive in my possession. It is a project I have envisioned for myself over a year ago, in parallel to the aforementioned activity.

So, I took a large collection of albums and began scanning them by the page at the high resolution of 2552×3508 pixels. I then saved as highest quality JPEG‘s, which suffer from no visible ‘lossiness’. I am far from completion, having spent just a couple of days mechanically handling these albums. In the future I will begin by scanning albums of myself, then process the combined albums, siblings, parents, and finally grandparents and ancestors. Many days of work remain on the horizon. It may take years to cover the many decades of photography into digital form. It is like a housekeeping duty that compensate for a century of memories, which have been stored in a volatile and degrading form.

I finally have all my family pictures (baby pictures included) readily available on the hard-drives and I can make copies or burn CD-ROM‘s to relatives, shall I ever wish to do so. At some point, I could run overnight enhancement scripts to remove speckles, calibrate, slice, and balance the colours of all scans. Below is a sample page; one among 500+ page which I have scanned so far. It contains a few photos that remind me of simpler times.

I am more than pleased to share and show more baby photos. It is a simple cut-and-paste job, having completed all of these digitisation.

Click image for full size (warning: 1.3 MB JPEG)