I am going to present recent research work at UCL tomorrow. Bound to this presentation are some graphics files (with captions). Older, unused slides are available to anyone who is curious. I will most likely modify text on the train and upload the changes during the weekend.

Let us consider 3 types (‘families’ or ‘classes’ if you like) of headphones:

Standard arc headphones are not very popular these days. They are relatively gigantic, at least when compared with today’s gadgets. Pros: Often come with a thick single wire that connects to one side only (this minimises wear). Cons: Large and unfashionable, susceptibility to outside noise.

In-ear: Often cheaply made. My last set lasted only 4 days, but it had a nice mechanism for isolating noise. Many headphones these days penetrate the ears, yet research has shown that this is damaging to the ear. When I searched for a headphones replacement 5 days ago I saw an odd in-ear set which would penetrate nearly 1 inch inside the ears. My knees could bend seeing the scary otoscope-like design.

Large headphones: my favourite type, but only suitable indoors for obvious reasons.

The bottom line: unless you foresee yourself an old person who is unable to listen to people at the table, care less about noise reduction. We are yet to discover the damaging effects on a generation of Walkmans, Discmans, Minidisks, MP3 players, etc.

ollowing a recent intervention with a Mozilla Firefox theme, I decided to pull together a Mac OS X-like theme for Firefox. I have set up a minimalist download/install page, but I am unlikely to take this further. Much of the artwork is imported and stitched together. I wish I found the time to create everything from scratch.

click image to view in full size (low resolution/lossy)

ews that are just in speak of a takeover of Macromedia (best known for Flash) by Adobe (makers of Acrobat Reader, Photoshop, Illustrator and so forth).

The two companies had settlements in court in the past. So, what are the implications of this acquisition? Domination of rich media delivery? This 3.4 billion dollar deal is definitely going to shape our future.

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 I can imagine the feeling of the original author about the hack, therefore I do not publish it.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.

large number of users migrate from local mail store and private accounts (often provided by their ISP) to on-line E-mail services such as GMail. The two different mail management paradigms suit different people, though here are some factors to consider:

Experience has taught me that it is ‘healthy’ to combine both, but “different strokes for different folks”.