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.

It has been exactly one month since I started taking 20 photos a day. Although this commitment barely maintains an element of joy, it persists and I would love to see how far it can go. Why am I collecting all of this data? Being in the field of computer vision (my daytime occupation), I estimate that within a few decades we will be able to index visual data and extract rich information from it, including information about one’s daily life.

A computer will have a reliable understanding of image contents — understanding that surpasses the human eye and mind. Want a photo that which a Labrador drinking water from a fountain on a sunny day? Want a descriptive verbal interpretation of a given distorted image? This will probably be practical in the distant future. It is a machine learning/pattern recognition task taken to extremity.

The Maths Tower on campus (undergoing demolition)

There appears to be an increase in the number of Web sites with random, incoherent content that is aimed at attracting baffled and errant visitors. Some of these sites make use of public feeds and may have thousands of them. A pattern you might find:

http://.../feed275.htm

These sites will frequently try to sell something. Strong search engines penalise these sites as the algorithms sense unrelevance in the content. It sometimes seems like the World Wide Web is sinking into a jumble with more and more content spam, referrer spam, and comment spam (not to mention E-mail). This induces redundant traffic and frequent maintenance chores. What impact will high-speed connections have? Probably even higher capacity for the spammers.

PHP-Nuke is a free content management system, which is relatively difficult to install and involves a tedious learning curve. I spent the day investigating it in depth and eventually minimalised it to avoid unnecessary clutter a la Slashdot. The package was constructed by geeks and was intended for an audience of geeks.

My favourite example site is associated with Enemy Territory as I was badly addicted to the game (photographics evidence). PHP-Nuke is by far more sophisticated and complex than WordPress, for example,and I would rate it 9 out of 10.

The site I currently work on is titled The Computer Vision Digest. Also see:

• Topics
• Archive
• Surveys
• Submit News

any different forms exist for conversation over the Internet: site forums, wikis, newsgroups, IRC, blogs, mailing lists, IM and so forth. Each of these requires an application to be accessed — a Web browser being the most common among these applications.

The different communication methods have pros and cons, but they all can be bridged. All should be intrinsically entwined. Commercial interests have often pushed conversation protocols apart and disintegrated them to form the chaotic state we are in today. The result: poor compatibility, inter-operability and an endless number of installed applications, all of which are needed in order to keep up with the changing times (and people).

Will somebody, once and for all, take initiative and work towards a single comprehensive package?

Feeds have come a long way towards efficient,
standardised form of one-way communication.

am hoping to explain why spam, to me, has never been a real problem. I recently lost track of the ‘flowchart’ of my mail, so I visualised it for myself and later decided to make it public.

Some months ago I mentioned the need to separate boxes. Different addresses can then be disclosed to different people/sites. Below is an illustration of how my mail is managed at the time of writing (click to view in a legible size). None of the filters is a spam filter, hence no message is abolished; that’s where the power of this technique truly lies.

hanks to a wonderful tool from Ben Hammersley, search results from Google can be delivered as RSS feeds. Similar projects seem to have been brought down, perhaps by Google, so exploit it while it lasts.

Vis-a-vis Google results en masse, I updated my Google Cron tool, which aggregates statistics, PageRank etc. in a text file, updates it overnight, and flags changes.