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 I can imagine the feeling of the original author about the hack, therefore I do not publish it.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

One of the more amusing stories from Slashdot talks about an academic paper in computer science, which was accepted to be presented at a conference. The catch: all text, figures and references were randomly-generated and are completely incoherent (see Web site). Will a randomly-generated talk be delivered as the guys at MIT promise?

I have continously come across a couple of ducks that somehow found their way to the centre of Manchester. Today I dared to approach and take a picture — one of the 20 pictures that I take every day.