PimpZilla for Mozilla Firefox is one of the richest themes around. It was too ‘bling-bling’ and yellow for me to use at the office, so I modified it slightly. I can imagine the feeling of the original author about the hack, therefore I do not publish it. Contact me if you want a copy however.

PimpZilla in blue contains the official PimpZilla screenshot
click image to view in full size

Update: To avoid an E-mail load, I have put the Java archive in this page.

To test my algorithm for a paper (see related work), I needed to generate warped face images (approximately 300 of them) and found myself with a well-occupied workspace. I use the GIMP animation Script FU called “Ripple” to achieve the necessary effects. The script takes an input image and outputs a sequence of images which make up a video of a ripple effect, like a flag.

Example input:

One image of a sequence of outputs:

Thank you, Adam D. Moss, for sharing that excellent script.

he OS X Finder overwrites directories without aggregating files in both source and the destination. For example, when a directory called /Photos is copied to /Directory/Photos, it will delete its the contents of /Directory/Photos rather than merging. That serves as a case study where the user is not sufficiently involved and, consequently, data can be lost. This behaviour must have been inherited from Mac OS 9 as Linux does not have this problem and neither does Windows.

Yesterday I spent hours driving myself mad as I realised I had lost data 4 months ago. No back-ups could resurrect that data. File dialogues must always be verbose as data loss is the most frustrating experience of all.

A KDE “overwrite file” dialogue; click image for full-sized view

Developers must begin to involve users in choices that are made, as the example above suggests. “Easier-to-implement” or “automatic” are usually a bad idea. For the very same reasons, for example, image2.jpg appears after image10.jpg in file managers. That is simply a common ‘bug’ that mushroomed into a norm.

The Firefox community has become aware of ‘new-style’ pop-ups that manage to fool various built-in blockers. Here is a tweak that can make your life pop-up-free once again:

• In the address field, type in about:config and press ENTER
• Open a context menu (mouse secondary button) and hit New -> Integer
• Type in privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins at the first prompt
• Type in 2 at the next prompt (value)
• Also find privacy.popups.firstTime in the list and change its value to false

You can now enjoy the Internet without seeing its ugly sides. Also make sure that advertisements are blocked.

have the pleasure to have been ranked second in the world for my contributions to MATLAB last month. This equates to my position in July 2004, but exceeds the number of monthly downloads, which was just under 2,000 at the time. To celebrate this occasion, I treated myself to a cup of coffee with two three sugar.

n relation to the previous item, research in MIT has produced a small application which turns English into computer code.

This small milestone can have an effect on the entry bar for programmers. However, one would argue that this the strand of work is pointless. Ambiguous languages can now (supposedly) turn into (ambiguous) code, which cannot be trusted. Will one be able to rely on translated ‘code’ of this kind? It’s the equivalent of sending E-mail from speech-to-text recognition without prior proof-reading.

A little sarcasm of mine; click image to view

Big trouble lies ahead if planning is neglected before a project begins. This statement extends beyond the field of software development and reflects on situations in many aspects of work.

Spolsky who authors Joel on Software phrased this rather nicely:

Software engineers who dive into code without writing a spec tend to think they’re cool gunslingers, shooting from the hip. They’re not. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for.