My News

Maybe you noticed, maybe not... my site wasn't accessible over the past couple of days since there was apparently a process in my gallery that ran wild and consumed too much processing power. Instead of shutting it down, the clever guys from cyon just decided they would block the whole domain, and since they also blocked my mail server they could not tell me by mail that they shut it down. So far I've been quite happy with them, hope that this was just a glitch. Now I updated the gallery and also installed a new theme, but it is still suboptimal and well organized... Any suggestions?

I loved reading this story!

I learned my lesson. Never touch a running system. That's why I was still running Tiger on my good old MacBook... Then I was intrigued by the new features of iPhoto, since so far I've been lacking a user-friendly picture browser on the Mac. Well the damn thing would only run on Leopard, so I had to install it last weekend, which could be a whole post of its own, but I want to spare you some frustrated hacking. Well the next problem was to get my pictures into the iPhoto database. For the average photographer, this would probably not be so much of a challenge, however try getting some 95'000 pictures (450GB, and NO this is a collection of undecent pictures I "found" on the internet but my personal work) from my PC to my MacBook. Well I planned on placing the IPhoto library on an external hard drive anyways, however this would not solve my problem as iPhoto encodes and integrates them into its very own database, occupying more space than the individual files, and as my external drive had only 750GB, I could not fit both the original pictures and the pictures in the database. First I planned importing them over the network, which after a wasted Sunday afternoon failed because of a Leopard bug that is making a stable smb connection to Windows XP impossible (at least in my hands). I tried making a firewire network which failed due to the same reasons. I could connect from Windows to Mac just fine, but not vice-versa... Anyways, my semi-broken 1TB Iomega drive (dubbed Terabetz by some unforgiving lab collegues) had to come to a rescue. Well kind off, since he tends to crash every couple of minutes due to a power cable issue, robbing me of my last nerve.
After a couple of 24h shifts (for my laptop that is) I have most of the pictures imported, however a greater number seems to be missing and many seem to have gotten copied multiple times, and the lack of a remove duplicates feature makes this another big pain. There seem to be a couple of third-party apps that do this, I might have to consider those. Then I finally tried out the much discussed face detection feature. First of all I have to say that that it has some serious flaws. It works in several steps. First, during importing, the app scans every picture for faces. Then later you have to name the people in these pictures, and he offers you similar pictures, refining the process more and more. The big issue for now is that the software scans every picture only once for face detection, and for one reason or another it fails to scan quite a significant number of albums and their respective contents, without giving you the option to run it again. Obviously this will be fixed in a patch, hopefully soon.
Now to the face detection itself. It is truly awesome. There's room for improvement, of course, but it really can do a lot! After the first couple of annoying manual confirmations it gets better and better. An interesting sidenote is that it will also show you very often interesting results. For example, it picked up on several occasions my girl-friends siblings when I was tagging her pictures. This screams for an automated family tree feature... Or it can detect blurry pictures far in the background with shocking accuracy. Of course it can also fail on many occasions, depending on the faces you are tagging. People are reporting that it's quite good in keeping cats apart, but I had problems with my dog so far. Well I guess more fun to come, hope they can address some of these issues.

You probably know what I'm getting at just by reading the title. And by now you also realized that I keep complaining about things that aren't really that important. Still I still have problems understanding the becoming fan of function in facebook. Don't get me wrong, I see why one would become fan of A&S Luxembourg or something like that, something that probably most people you know have no idea about, something you like to promote. I also see where one would select something that's really important to oneself, let's say tea, or chocolate etc. But then there are things like No Smoking; Arthur Spooner and  Pour tout ceux qui en ont marre de se lever le matin trop tôt... WTF? This reminds me about this mindless craze for all these facebook groups everybody invites you to with illuminating titles such as: Let's find out how many facebook users there are; Feed a child with one click (I'm sure it's that simple) and so on and so forth. I wonder how many people use facebook purely as a socializing tool (what it was supposed to be) instead of only trying to profile themselves by sourrounding them with phoney attributes they would never care about in real life... Well you see you got me going again... And I'm sure I'm doing all the exact same mistakes than I'm complaining about...

I welcomed this idea from the Luxembourgish government: Everybody should be able to do his official paperwork like filing taxes etc in a safe and confident way over the internet. The initiative is in my eyes a step in the right direction, and since I take advantage of the student loans, I had the possibility to test these out. It's basically a signing stick and a personal chip you'll receive after a lot of paper work (hence paperasse killer?). This stick also allows you to digitally sign emails and documents with various encryption formats. There is only one major issue with this: They don't have any drivers for Mac OS yet. Which I find very upsetting, seeing that MacBooks nowadays are quite popular among students. They even managed to have Linux drivers, but all other people either have to do it the old painfull way, or use Parallels etc. They claim the drivers should be out by xmas though... 

I discovered this highly useful freeware a while ago when I had to backup my Mac OS X formatted external HDD using a Windows machine. I had trouble finding such an app because I had no idea what to look for. Well anyway, in case you ever need it, here's a link to HFS Explorer.

Freeware, HFS, Mac Partition

Hi all, made it back fine from the Seychelles, wonderfull place as you might have imagined. My Macbook broke though, and as I'm moving from Luxembourg to Berbourg and shortly after to Basel, updates will probably take some time to show up. Just thought I'd let you know...

Sometimes, slow connections for filesharing can really break your neck. In theory, all seems quite fair and straightforward, however, you sometimes end up with a whopping 15kB download rate even after some hours of seeding. A computer geek told me once that this is just the way it is, and that no matter which client you use (most people use azureus), there's no big difference in the end. Well I'm just giving BitTyrant my first shot. It is a modified Azureus client that certainly shows a strong download rate increase as compared to anything else I tried so far. Anyhow, thought you might wanna know...

It may seem odd that somebody who prefers editing a letter in LaTeX prefers a WYSIWYG editor for blogging, but hey, sometimes even I have to right of being lazy. And especially for pictures,color text, special characters, links, youtube stuff etc, I find it just more comfortable that way. The interface in B2evolution is very basic, offering even less buttons for lazy people than wordpress et co. So far, I circumvented this by using the TinyMCE plugin for B2evo. However, since the recent Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3 update, the plugin won't load, and I have better things than to port a newer TinyMCE version to B2. So I decided I'd give Scribefire a try, which is a Firefox (buhhh) plugin that offers a pretty nice and intuitive interface and functionality. It connects via the API to your blog (most blogs are supported rather nicely). The only bug that bugs me so far is that by one way or another, the interface doesn't work as tab (it won't upload pics or posts) but it works just fine in split-screen or new window. Well then, happy blogging to me!

Technorati Tags: WYSIWYG, Scribefire, B2evolution

We all know about these social network / email account spidering adsense programs that controls the ads on a certain webpage toward what it thinks would be appropriate to you. Facebook and Gmail are to well-known examples. However, this can go wrong at times, and today I had to laugh when I saw what my Gmail acount thinks of me.  Man, I must be getting a lot of weird emails. I especially like the ad saying I should treat myself with highly concentrated lentiviruses (HIV is an example of a lentivirus...). Anyone wanna order some mutant mice with "lasers" attached to their heads.

As there are a couple of Mac users among you, you'll most certainly be aware of iWorks Keynote, the Apple counterpoint to Powerpoint. It is a fantastic program, does magic presentations, is user friendly and just very Mac. You probably know these amazing swooshy transitions, 3D effects, reflections, gradients and all that Web 2.0 stuff. I love those bang boom bang presentations by Steve Jobs just as much as the next guy, but people, don't use them in scientific presentations! Usually, the stuff you're presentation is complicated enough without all that blending, cubing and glittering. It doesn't have to be black on white, but don't overdo it! I still use Keynote for my presentations, but I leave out all that fancy stuff, because there is no need to (except maybe on your last slide or something). One of our professors used to say: If you have bad results, show them in color! It's the same thing here. You want to convey your findings to the audience, not your computer skills and rendering power. It may be different if you give something like a computer tech talk, but certainly not complicated figures with westerns, curves and fluorescent images!

When you're on a big network, chances are some guy somewhere has his iTunes sharing enabled, often unknowingly. You can then listen to his whole library, but after iTunes 4 or so, you can't copy those files to your own library. Well if you now happen to own the original CD's of these song and are to lazy to rip them off the CDs and imagine also that guy agrees that you can rip the music from his stream, there is actually an application that allows you to do that, that I found after a long and desperate search (because there are many outdated applications or Windows only ones). So here's the link, it a nice piece once you figured out how to use it. Save OurTunes

For all the people interested in the (legal ehem) sharing of torrents, the good news is that one of the best sites hosting thoses files is back online after a long pause (and some migrations to Ukrania due to unknown ehem reasons). Demonoid is back

... and why is he reading my hard drive??? Well I was not really amused trying to get my external HDD (referred to as terabetz by collegues) to work while it crashed. When you worked for a couple of years with computers, you get a feeling for what is a good or a bad sound when the har drive tries to reboot, and it certainly did not sound too good! After removing a million screws, I did the usual magic to the cables and connectors, nada... Great! Then I thought: did I plug it in the right power cord? I have two HDDs, and I usually use the power plug from the Iomega (which crashed) on both drives, as I seldomly use them simultaneously, and as the specifications seem to be the same... Well I just found out that while the cord from the Iomega works on Lacie too, the Lacie doesn't work on the Iomega... Sounds like jibbersih... I know, it's been a slow news day... After all, I'm just happy my precious files are back (of which I do have a backup, but that's situated somewhere in Luxembourg...

If you're not familiar with RSS, it's a syndication service that allows you to more or less instantly receive an article from a given blog or website that you bookmarked. There are a couple of different standarts but they all more or less do the same: they spare you the pain each morning to go out, open your 20 favorite websites and see if they have published anything new. Now while initially I find this a good thing, somehow I have the feeling that I tend to accumulate a whole bunch of feeds over the time, that are each and everyone quite intersting, but over time tend to overfload you with information, and I keep cathing myself ignoring some articles that would in fact be highly interesting. It's worse if you bookmark aggregating feeds such as the Scienceblogs, where some 30 bloggers or so each publish a couple of articles a day. I try to set some priorities, but I can't say it works every time, but I guess that's still better than not reading those blogs at all. So how many feeds have you bookmarked, and which clients do you prefer?