Archive for May, 2007

No! I did not fall for the tempting song of the sirens of SPAM and I will not force upon you the marketing message of a product willing to significantly improve your male potential (whatever sex you, my reader, have). Exactly the contrary, this is scientific information: A spider has been found in Brazil whose bite injects a toxin that dilates the blood vessels of the victim. In men, this translates into a marked priapism.

This could lead to significant progress in drugs. And probably to a lot more Internet-based hoaxes.

Sources :

• BBC
• LiveScience

Sometimes an artist uses craftsmanship, mathematics and arts at the same time. To me, Malcolm Tibbetts belongs rightfully to this category. If you look at what it does with wood carving, you should be amazed.

For the amateurs of models, trains and military dioramas, here is a site where you’ll find photos of a surprisingly good work at 1/6th scale.

It is well known that the human brain has pattern matching capabilities much further advanced than those of the best equivalent software programs. This explains that failure rates of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program may be as high as 1% (or even 2%) of errors, which is requiring later human proof-reading to ensure a reasonable quality for document scans. But when the document is old, badly printed, or degraded, error rates may climb further into the unusable (even more so when we address the scan of thousands of documents like is done by libraries and cultural institutions all over the world).

On another issue, the SPAM problem on the Internet became a major problem: Prorams try to make believe that they are human beings in order to insert advertisment anywhere a user can write (in the messages of a forum, in the comments of a blog, etc). For some time now, it became common that human users must identify themselves by their capacity to recognize a badly written word. Theoretically, this is a very efficient Turing test allowing to differentiate a human from a machine only by the results of their actions. Practically, the abilities of software programs have become so impressive that SPAM is slowly coming back again through those filters named CAPTCHAs (those images that you must read and copy back in order to be identified and approved for a specific action).

The problem appears to be: create CAPTCHA tremendously difficult for the automated software and, simultaneously, bring human beings to the task of checking scans of documents difficult to read by program.

The solution: reCAPTCHA.

The idea is to provide a CAPTCHA service to thousands of bloggers and forum administrators (WordPress, phpBB, etc.) Users are invited to recognize two words specifically difficult to read (profesional OCR programs failed during scans done by Carnegie Mellon University). The user must recognize them both. One is used to check that this is a human being, the other will fill a database of OCR translations that will be used to deliver even more CAPTCHAs and to improve the quality of a document scanned by Carnegie Mellon. Dual core technology: efficiently fight spammers and deliver millions of human users to improve the scan quality of thousands of ancient documents (without using slave labor).

Example of a difficult to read/scan document:

One of the key advantages is that most pro OCR programs can tell when they fail to recognize a character or a word (when they are not confident enough).

Some time ago, I stopped by a web site where I found some really neat photos. So, let me invite you to go and visit www.gianfrancomeza.com.

Copyright Farrokh Chothia

Canis pneumatis, or the common balloon dog, is a creature whose anatomy was not too well understood. Up to now. Today we have the first detailed poster about its anatomy.

While browsing through LifeHacker, I found this week a series of apparently interesting posts for Mac buffs. Let’s share:

• Top 10 Mac OS X tweaks
• Speed up your Mac
• Take screen shots on your Mac

Friday spare time (or spent time) is back and here is a new way to be unproductive (Shame on you!).

Your objective is to move the little blue-silver sphere through mazes, boxes, lakes and crates to the salvvation of the vortex (in limited time).

Are you able to be the silver sphere hero? Will you resist the urge? Will you be responsible?

Legal notice: I shall not be legally guilty of disturbing company workforce or of inducing a reduction in productivity of people unable to meet their professional deadlines.

Giraffes are endemic in all Africa. So, it’s no surprise that we can find some of them in South Africa. I suggest that you admire the softness in the eye of the giraffe.

Giraffe (male)


Giraffe (female)
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

The technique of Slow synch flash is somewhat difficult to master and this is why I invite you to check the Digital Photography School and its article about it: Slow Sync Flash.

I finally cracked and bought a new screen to replace my main working display. I chose a Dell 2407WFP to have a large work surface (1920 x 1200 in 24″), a wide form factor (useful to push the Photoshop tool bars to the side -they use up a tremendous space on a 4/3 screen), a display quality famous for photography as well as video games (for this, I will certianly be limited by my current ATI 9800pro AGP graphics card that is not really up to the task of 3D display on such a large screen resolution).

Delivery was -as expected- done under 10 days (despite the presence of bank holidays in the delay, the LCD display even arrived three days before the deadline). There is no doubt that Dell has considerable expertise in shipping and delivering computer products and this is easy to perceive here (including the fact that they do not overestimate their possibilities by announcing an optimistic 24h delivery time like so many others).

Unpacking was trivially obvious. I was even positively surprised by the quality of the unpacking instructions (color photos, clear explanations, etc.) and by the light weight of the screen (even knowing that LCD displays are lighter than CRT screens…)

My first impressions are very positive. Obviously, the work space has grown from OK (on the old Hyundai ImageQuest Q17 17″ LCD) to really vast and confortable (on the new Dell 2407WFP). This is real luxury and I think that I will grow the habit of not keeping windows fully maximized but stacked in the screen real estate. For the time being, I am even keeping the 17″ as a secondary along with the Dell 2407WFP. It allows to keep a few utility programs always available.

The first feeling comes from the nice black of the screen (even though there is a very slight glow on the right side when displaying a fully black image, which is not perceptible as soon as the display is lighter). But my first reflex has been to push the brightness down to the minimum (As for many LCD displays, the backlight feels too powerful for me and a use in a moderately lit room).

Color quality seems good right out of the box, but I did not do any serious check. Let’s wait for the results of a complete color calibration later this week.

As I spend a lot of time and energy playing with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl (a Doom-like FPS video game for the PC), I immediately started to check its behaviour on such a large screen. The first constraint is that I need to play with a lower screen resolution (my old ATI 9800 pro AGP graphics card is not able to handle a 1900×1200 resolution - I need to go down in quality to ensure that the frame rate is not too low). The comfort of a huge visual field (24″ is big!) is easy to appreciate. But I will wait a little more until I climb up the graphics performance ladder with a graphics card more in line with the needs of such a screen (probably either an AMD Radeon HD2900 XT or an nVidia GeForce 8800 GT/GTS).

Summary: A darn nice screen.

For both pro electronic engineers and amateur tweakers/hackers.