links for 2009-11-10 November 11, 2009
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Handy service that acts as a single point of checking
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They have a big catalogue of Hindi, Bengali & other regional movies & songs available for free viewing online. Quite an interesting development. They also have their own youtube channel – http://www.youtube.com/user/rajshri
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Interesting way to use the robots. They also have photos & videos along with other details.
'Three computer scientists at Colorado University programmed several Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners to act like Pac-Man and the ghosts which chase him. Jack Elston, Cory Dixon, and Maciej Stachura did so in order to demonstrate the unmanned aerial system that they are developing. Click on the link for more videos, pictures, and schematics for this project.' — http://www.neatorama.com/2009/11/09/roombas-playing-pac-man/ -
From fixing scratches on glossy devices to fixing loose lenses on spectacles
links for 2009-11-09 November 10, 2009
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From fixing scratches on glossy devices to fixing loose lenses on spectacles
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Black & White at that
links for 2009-11-08 November 9, 2009
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Quite an analysis of the bunch of themes present in the movie
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A longwinded approach though. May not be suitable when trying to do it for many applications.
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'The Norton User Account Control tool will replace parts of the Windows Vista UAC system. It will utilize the UAC security feature from the Windows Vista architecture, while simultaneously improving user-friendliness significantly. The tool prompts recommendations based on an assessment on the user-action i.e. the signature information of the executable. The tool also has a "remember me" feature that allows users to suppress future prompts from the same action.'
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A handy tool that lets you to turn off UAC or switch it to a quiet mode in Windows Vista
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A set of test files with viruses/malware to test your antivirus product
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Results from AV-Comparative.org for malware & residual removal by 16 anti virus software.
avast is rated as average-average like many others. eScan, Symantec & Microsoft seem to be the only ones rated good-good. A detailed report is available for download.
Caveat: It used a sample of 10 random malware for the test, so the results could be quite different for a larger set.
links for 2009-11-07 November 8, 2009
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'It looks like a lion has jumped up on the hood of an open vehicle! Look closely, though -it's an illusion, as the front of the car and the passenger area are separated by a sheet of glass. Invisible lion cages are the mane attraction Werribee Open Range Zoo, in Melbourne, Australia. VERY strong glass is used in place of other enclosure types more familiar in zoos – the result is stunning shots of the lions and a unique visitor experience.'
via http://www.neatorama.com/2009/11/07/invisible-lion-cages/ -
Almost always, the best gig I could get is shorthand for the easiest gig I could get.
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Recreating some of the masterpieces using coffee to paint. They have a kind of sepia look to them, but a very innovative concept.
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The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management – BBC World Service | Learning English | Business EnglishA series that examines the roles and teachings of Business Gurus, with text, audio and an explanation of common management terms.
Includes Peter Drucker, Bill Gates, Michael Porter among others -
If only we were cats…
'In several cases, pet animals (most often cats) have successfully been "enrolled" in suspected diploma mills in order to investigate or demonstrate the fraudulent nature of the degrees issued by those institutions. Several such cases have received extensive media attention, and at least one cat's degree helped lead to a successful fraud prosecution against the institution that issued the degree.' -
'We'll be honest, while others were predicting how poorly implemented the new Managed Copy system for Blu-ray would be — mostly because the studios can charge for copies — we were dreaming of new ways we'd like to enjoy our favorite movies. With DVD's CSS, everything was very restricted; simple tasks like transferring a movie to your PMP or storing 'em all on a Media Center PC was way, way more complicated than it should be — not to mention a violation of the DMCA. Obviously we wanted to know more, so we went straight to the source and asked the AACS-LA exactly how it'll work, as well as how it'll handle things like rent, rip and return. Surprisingly, we were actually happy after the call and contrary to what you might believe, Managed Copy was actually designed with the consumer in mind.'
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Quite a collection of family portraits of American presidents starting from Obama & going back to Theodore Roosevelt.
links for 2009-11-05 November 6, 2009
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'The Web is certainly a transformative technology, just as TV and radio and newspapers once were. There’s a temptation, as a result, to confuse the medium with the message, to assume that, because the Internet is being used to produce a certain political effect, it was somehow destined to do so. This account is, in the end, too easy on us (or at least on them). To borrow that old favorite of the right: computers don’t spread rumors; people do.'
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Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller
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'More access to information doesn't bring people together, often it isolates us.'
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'The past decade in business belongs to Jobs. What makes that simple statement even more remarkable is that barely a year ago it seemed likely that any review of his accomplishments would be valedictory. But by deeds and accounts, Jobs is back.
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It's often noted that he's a showman, a born salesman, a magician who creates a famed reality-distortion field, a tyrannical perfectionist. It's totally accurate, of course, and the descriptions contribute to his legend.'
links for 2009-11-04 November 5, 2009
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The record label EMI has sued a little known online music site called BlueBeat.com for selling Beatles songs without permission, an EMI source told Wired.com
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'In a bad mood? Don't worry – according to research, it's good for you. An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.'
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Including classics like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Iron Maiden
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A simple visual guide on the usage of an apostrophe
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Instructions to make your own Jacob's Ladder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob%27s_ladder_%28toy%29 -
'Between October 2007 and August 2009, a new digital all-sky mosaic image was assembled from more than 3000 individual CCD frames. Using an SBIG STL-11000 camera, 70 fields (each covering 40° × 27°) were imaged from dark-sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. In order to increase the dynamic range beyond the 16 bits of the camera's analog-to-digital converter (of which approx. 12 bits provide data above the noise level), three different exposure times (240 s, 15 s and 0.5 s) were used. Five frames were taken for each exposure time and filter setting. The fields were photometrically calibrated using standard catalog stars and sky background data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes.'
via http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/11/all-sky_milky_way_panorama_20.html
links for 2009-11-03 November 4, 2009
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Rediff slideshow of Avenues 2009, the annual B-school festival of SJMSOM, IIT Bombay
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Now that's what you call innovative marketing:
'A company at a German trade show has attached tiny banner advertisements to flies and set them loose on unsuspecting visitors, in a bizarre yet effective marketing stunt.' -
An article by William Deresiewicz about how universities should exist to make minds, not careers from The American Scholar
Not very different from the way things are shaping up in India -
Interesting way to use the unfinished code that's part of Windows 7 to turn a laptop into a wifi hotspot. Wonder whether this will be patched up eventually by microsoft or will they ship their own finished frontend.
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I wonder whatever would happen if revenues continue to grow the way they are in the entertainment industry. In fact they seem to be at an all time high. Maybe just kill the internet & wait for things to happen.
Transcript & MP3 available on the site – http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2009/2726710.htm -
Kind of like initially mutilating the hand that will feed you in the future:
'Digital Video Recorders, once considered a mortal threat by the entertainment industry, have now become its new best friend.
When the industry meets a new technology, it panics and fights it tooth-and-nail. Eventually, the industry loses this fight, often squashing innovation or arbitrarily singling out a few citizens for punishment along the way. Finally, the same technology ends up benefiting the same short-sighted industry — but rather than learn their lesson, the same corporations are usually busy repeating the same cycle all over again with something else. It happened with the VCR, the audio cassette, and even the turntable.' -
Advertisement for copyright services from 1906. Guess some things are timeless.
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Read Batul the Great comics online
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Summary of the findings of the study conducted by CRIA in 2005-06 regarding music piracy & P2P
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An older study from 2005-06 conducted by the CRIA similar to the one conducted in UK recently.
'Three out of four P2P users admitted to purchasing music after downloading it online, with 21 percent of P2P users saying that they have bought tracks they have also downloaded on more than 10 occasions. 25 percent admitted to purchasing previously-downloaded tracks only once or twice, while an additional 27 percent claimed to have done it less than 10 times, but more than twice. The end result is clear: people are buying music after downloading it on P2P, meaning that the industry has failed to recognize the marketing-like effects of P2P. Just as important, this should caution the industry against assessing each and every download to a "loss" to piracy, since the statistics clearly show that those engaging in P2P do buy music in not-insignificant numbers.' -
People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.
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The survey was conducted over the Internet, and this particular question relies on notoriously inaccurate consumer recall, so it's hard to know just how seriously to take the results. It does fit with past research, like that commissioned by the Canadian government which found a strong correlation between downloading songs from P2P networks and buying more CDs. But even that research found no such correlation between downloading and purchasing music online.
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It's called a spoiler tactic. You take your competitor's biggest cash cow and offer a free alternative. Everybody from Linux to Google has used the tactic against Microsoft. So who can fault Microsoft when it uses it against Google's advertising cash cow? The guys who benefit from this tactic today are the good folks at OpenX, the open-source alternative to ad servers from Google such as DoubleClick (for big publishers) and AdManager (for small publishers).
links for 2009-11-02 November 3, 2009
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Points from the book:
Steve Jobs does not sell computers; he sells an experience. The same holds true for his presentations that are meant to inform, educate, and entertain. An Apple presentation has all the elements of a great theatrical production—a great script, heroes and villains, stage props, breathtaking visuals, and one moment that makes the price of admission well worth it.
The 5 elements:
1. A headline
2. A villain
3. A simple slide
4. A demo
5. A holy smokes moment
One more thing…sell dreams -
A variety of movies & cartoons that have entered the public domain. Can be viewed on site or downloaded. Interestingly this is one of the sites that makes use of the <video> tag of html5.
'This library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.' -
'Kuler is a web-based color tool from Adobe that has thousands of community-generated color themes from which you can search, but the best thing about Kuler is that you can easily make your own themes. Once you register with Kuler (it's very quick), you can begin to create your own color themes or palettes and store, view, and retrieve all your saved themes in your personal Mykuler space. There are two ways to create unique color themes: either by selecting a single color on the color wheel as your base color and building off of that, or by importing an image from Flickr or your hard disk and extracting harmonious combinations from the image.'
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Options ranging from basic desktop clients to online ones
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Vocaloid is a singing synthesizer application software developed by the Yamaha Corporation that enables users to synthesize singing by typing in lyrics and melody.
More info on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid
Sample youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqdB0yspQVA -
The inspiration behind HAL singing the "Daisy" song in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
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An novel way of visually depicting movie narrations. Includes Star Wars (Original trilogy), LOTR, Jurassic Park & 12 Angry men
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The different strategies adopted by agencies to leverage upon facebook's popularity & make money.
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In case you had any doubts as to what weapons were used in a movie (or even video game), this is the site to find answers. Moreover, since it's a wiki, you can easily contribute too. It also has some Indian actors in the list.
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Quite a wide variety of top 10 lists available on site. All made by users of course.
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To scam & make money or not to scam & fall back… That is the question. A must read for all fans of Mafia wars & Farmville on facebook:
'In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won't pay cash, a wide variety of "offers" are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it's also bad for legitimate advertisers.'
links for 2009-11-01 November 2, 2009
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So how can the music industry seek to capitalize on the potential customers rather than trying to put them behind bars?
'A new British independent poll conducted by Ipsos Mori concluded that the people who do the most illegal downloading also buy the most music. This is in line with many other studies elsewhere and is easy to understand: people who are music superfans do more of everything to do with music: they see more live shows, listen to more radio, buy more CDs, buy more botlegs of live shows, buy more t-shirts, talk about music more, do more downloading — all of it.' -
Interesting round of comparisons between warriors across the world. Kind of reminds you of the special units in Age of Empires with Samurai, Vikings & all.
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So much for thick skinned politicians. A critical 3 year old blog leads to a series of resignations forcing a new election.
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Interesting way to tie it up.
'…Yes, go ahead and pinch yourself: this is unit testing described in 1986 by the Feynman we know and love. Not only unit testing, but 'step by step increase' in scope and 'adversarial testing attitude'. It's common to hear we suck at software because it's a "young discipline", as if the knowledge to do right has not yet been attained. Bollocks! We suck because we constantly ignore well-established, well-known, empirically proven practices. In this regard management is also to blame, especially when it comes to dysfunctional schedules, wrong incentives, poor hiring, and demoralizing policies.
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With respect to software, I take out four main points:
* Engineering can only be as good as its relationship with management
* Big design up front is foolish
* Software has much in common with other engineering disciplines
* Reliable systems are built by rigorously tested, incremental bottom-up engineering with an ‘attitude of highest quality’ -
Possible solution for multiple proxy authentication prompts in Firefox. The thread is for version 1, but seems to work in 3.5 too. So should work in earlier versions 2 & 3
In about:config, set:
network.automatic-ntlm-auth.allow-proxies=false
network.proxy.share_proxy_settings=false -
If you thought VLC was only for playing back content, think again.
'Cross-platform media player VLC is often referred to as the "Swiss Army knife of media applications" for good reason: Not only does VLC play nearly any file you throw at it (you even voted it the best desktop media player), but it can do so much more. From ripping DVDs to converting files to iPod-friendly formats, let's take a look at the four coolest things you can do with VLC and start you on your way to becoming a VLC ninja.' -
Includes SUPER, FormatFactory, MediaCoder, Handbrake & FFmpeg
SUPER is pretty feature rich, but the interface is a total mess without much help. Their website is not much better either with the download link being really hard to find. Easier to find it on filehippo – http://www.filehippo.com/download_super/
Handbrake is kinda slow at conversions, but has a nice interface.
I've also used Any Video Converter that uses the mplayer engine for conversions – http://www.any-video-converter.com/
links for 2009-10-31 November 1, 2009
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Computers might struggle to exhibit intelligent behaviour, but blindly performing arithmetic calculations is surely their forte. Or is it?
The calculation of where to look for confirmation of an incoming missile requires knowledge of the system time, which is stored as the number of 0.1-second ticks since the system was started up. Unfortunately, 0.1 seconds cannot be expressed accurately as a binary number, so when it's shoehorned into a 24-bit register — as used in the Patriot system — it's out by a tiny amount. But all these tiny amounts add up. At the time of the missile attack, the system had been running for about 100 hours, or 3,600,000 ticks to be more specific. Multiplying this count by the tiny error led to a total error of 0.3433 seconds, during which time the Scud missile would cover 687m. The radar looked in the wrong place to receive a confirmation and saw no target. Accordingly no missile was launched to intercept the incoming Scud — and 28 people paid with their lives.
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