OV-Ray, an Open Source 3-D rendering package that could compete with the commercial Maya, was mentioned a while back. Some months ago a competition was run which involved POV-Ray artists and a submissions gallery has been put up.

These images serve as excellent wallpapers. Several images are of very high resolution, which works well on dual-head displays.

Might be hard notice that the kitchen is computer-generated
Work by Jaime Vives Piqueres

igh-resolution satellite pictures of the States have been available for quite a few months. These have now been extended, by Google Maps, to including other major cities, London and Manchetser included. I took screenshots of places that are familiar to me and marked up my home among other key locations. It now seems obvious how close I live to most places, with the longest walk — to the health club — which takes only 15 minutes.

Click map to enlarge

Flexbeta have published some Internet Explorer 7 screenshots, which were taken in a recent demonstration. RSS will apparently be well-integrated and sit in the core of Longhorn.

Microsoft seem to be catching up and perhaps it is not too late given that Mozilla Firefox has captured only around 10% of the market. A question lingers on in many people’s mind: how can Microsoft ‘inject’ Internet Explorer 7 to the public? They have had a hard time persuading businesses to upgrade their operating system.

One final nugget: Microsoft are trying to break software of their competitors by actually ‘extending’ RSS.

Windows Longhorn: will it sell or perish?

Scientists in Japan are developing equipment that can enhance human strength. Awkward as it may seem, such developments might have a positive impact. Robotic assistance to one’s muscles means that more elderly and disabled people will walk up the stairs without great difficulties. One the other hand, when power suits like that get misused, they can make us appear like bunch of supermen, powered by batteries. This funny item from the Onion in 2056 comes to mind.

Picture and information from robotory.com.
 
 
 

Ever wondered how much you listened to a particular song?

XMMS possesses a great extent of flexibility. It provides facilities which, when customised appropriately, can dump complete song descriptions. XMMS can then progressively, accumulatively add song data to log files. Timestamps imply the duration of listening, which lead to possible future extensions, e.g.:

• Automatically parse (scan, hash, then analyse) the log file/s
• Compute an average listening time — that is before skipping to another track — for each individual song
• Erase music that is frequently skipped or just output a ‘prospective deletion list’ to another file

Input/output operations are made quite simple. These can be invoked as command-line strings whenever a new track begins. It is a built-in XMMS plug-in, which can be found under Preferences » Song Change » Configure (see illustration below)

Add the following line to the “Song change” Command field:

(date; echo %s) >> ~/My_playlists/playlist.log

I am providing an example log file, assembled naturally (not artificially. Honest!) over 20 minutes or so. I still need to get rid of the doubly appearances, apparently caused by xmms-kde in my dock (screenshot on the right). As well as giving a minimal user interface, xmms-kde enables control of the player with CTRL+SHIFT+keypad even if the player is neither visible nor in focus.

A music log file results in even more redundant data to store. According to a rough calculations, I will see it growing by 1 megabyte every month or so. Compression, however, should make it only 10-20% of its original size.

UPDATE 26/06/2005: The following command, which can be set to become a nightly cron job, will slice the large log file so that it is composed of daily ‘chunks’:

mv ~/[Path]/playlist.log ~/[Path]/playlist-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.log

This can be extended to form an annual and monthly hierarchy of directories.

See the later extension: producing history spreadsheets

“Because newer is not always better” is the motto of OldVersions.com. It is apparent that software vendors deny or disguise access to previous versions of their products. That is exactly why OldVersion.com archive previous releases of popular products, much like what the Internet Archive does with the World Wide Web.

Later versions typically become a resource hog and do not suit computers that are not modern. Winamp, for example, has become a heavy media player — a bloat if you like — which will rarely suit a user who only wishes to listen to music within an instance. That is where the potential of software archives practically lies.

ZDNet Australia writes (on behalf of Secunia) about potential phishing attacks which affect all major browsers.

How does this exploit work?

• A user arrives at a malicious site
• The site re-direct the user to a trusted site while opening a pop-up
• The user gets fooled into entering a password in the pop-up
• While the user believes that the password reaches the trusted site, it actually reaches the malicious one

Pop-up windows, JavaScript and their nasty siblings again take the blame, but if someone is foolish enough to log in via pop-ups, perhaps the flaw lies within the user. Very few sites, if any, will use child windows to request details. It is understandable that many surfers are unaware of that, but they probably ought to stay away from malicious sites to begin with, or at least disable some browser functionality.