HE BUSINESS model of Facebook is truly poison on the World Wide Web and the Internet at large. It is the very opposite of what the Web was intended to achieve. At risk of stating the obvious, Facebook is a multi-player popularity game where information about one’s real friends is hidden behind walled gardens. The access to such information is conditioned upon a sort of blackmail which is giving one’s personal details away, for advertisers to spy on individual people and in turn impose on them all sorts of proprietary lock-ins and barriers, at the behest of affiliates. Rather than a society that openly shares we become a society of cliques and stalkers — people to whom the rules of society are determined by sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg, who calls Facebook users “dumb fucks” (real quote) for trusting him.

People who never joined Facebook oughtn’t join and those who joined would be better off escaping it. Google+ is not much better. It’s just another brand and a perceived “underdog” (even though Google is the bigger company). What the Web needs is to provide people with personal space that they control. That’s what Tim Berners-Lee intended when he uploaded his physics papers for peer review; what the Web is becoming now is an advertising farm with paywalls and spying everywhere, including DPI. Then there’s SOPA and other nasty dictatorial legal mechanisms. The bad guys are winning. The Internet is losing. We are all losing, except those whom the Internet weakened while empowering the public in the nineties.

VERY once in a while we hear someone tell the public that, based on anecdotal evidence alone, people leave GNU/Linux for Apple. Well, on the phone front, if not on all fronts, Linux is actually beating Apple, which is why Apple is suing like mad.

My friend Fabio Milho described himself as an “Apple fanboi” a few months ago, but days ago he said he had a susprise for me and then he showed me that he had bought an Android phone, just days or weeks after I told him about the evils of Apple. He no longer uses his iPhone. No wonder Apple is scared. Taken using his Android phone was the following photo (less than a day ago).

ith recent milestones reached and a change in publication strategy, I decided to unleash some easy-to-run code along with the 535 pages which document the code as well as experiments that have been run using this code over the past year or so. The document is not as organised as it ought to be, but I hereby make a lot of stuff available in fairly raw form. I made an HTML version to overcome file size issues that are associated with PDF, not to mention accessibility issues.

Surface Matching With Statistics and Geometry: Technical Report for 2011 (PDF – 535 pages, HTML – multi-page layout)

In summary, performance verging state-of-the-art is reached. In order to pile up and share the approach/work done thus far (before proceeding with the exploratory direction of diffusion/other), these are hastily-assembled notes that weigh 60 MB (over 500 pages for this document) which contain a lot of material that can prove useful some time along the way. Here is a previous post with some shorter documents. They are all being uploaded as HTML and PDF once they become coherent enough, soon to be indexed and made accessible through the research page and Web search as well.

Direct download as Ogg (0:59:28, 11.9 MB) | High-quality MP3 (21.4 MB) | Low-quality MP3 (6.8 MB)

Summary: Tim, Rusty and Roy join again for a sort of pilot of the second series (season equivalent, but an annual division)

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AST year (or at the end of 2010 to be more accurate) I started posting a lot more often about my work in this blog. I resumed what I had done years beforehand, even if that meant a loss of focus for this personal blog. But then again, this blog hardly ever had any single point of focus, so after the upcoming release of one gigantic PDF I will resume posting updates about my research on a more regular basis. This ought to achieve a more transparent communication of ideas. It is also a departure from the disappointing pace of blogging (about a post per week as of late).

^AT_EX helps render for a variety of output types including posters and Web pages, not just A4 sheets. As a typesetting language it is very powerful, but for advanced functionality it requires additional packages, included in the preamble. It appears as though GIF animations are not supported in L^AT_EX despite the fact that, if exported as Web pages for instance, the notion of animation makes sense. This is a shame really and if someone knows of a workaround, please leave a comment. I am currently writing a 400-page report which is a comprehensive summary of what I am doing and without animations it might be hard to express what is going on. For example compare the following triplet of static and dynamic (which HTML is happy with):