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site admin | May 31st, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for May 30th through May 31st:
- Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster | High Scalability – Collection of links to presentations and interviews regarding Twitter's architecture, implementation plans, and performance issues, from spring 2009.
- The Last Psychiatrist: The Difference Between An Amateur, A Scientist, And A Genius – An amateur is full of wonder and speculation, tinkering towards the truth but suffering from a lack of knowledge and idleness; he's not even sure if someone else has already made these discoveries. "Is this a worthwhile pursuit?"
A scientist performs experiments to confirm or disprove a hypothesis, and in that way he grinds out the truth.
A genius has three abilities, which are actually the union of amateur and scientist: 1. to know the state of the art, what is known and what is not known. 2. To be able to think "out of the box". 3. To be disciplined enough to concentrate on the tedium of a formal investigation of his wondrous speculations.
- PatchMatch: A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing – Research paper on sort of "super healing brush" for manipulating digital images, allows splicing together different sections of the image and automatically selecting similar textures to make the seam transitions work better.
- Light Blue Touchpaper » Blog Archive » Attack of the Zombie Photos – Social networking and sharing sites have challenges implementing and managing access control policies at large scale, and content delivery networks add another wrinkle.
- Map of all Google data center locations | Royal Pingdom – Where in the world is your search being served from? An attempt to assemble a list of known Google data centers worldwide.
site admin | April 27th, 2009 | Comments are closed
These are my links for April 24th through April 27th:
Ho John Lee | January 21st, 2009 | 2 comments
Me at Barack Obama’s inauguration, via FotoFlexer’s MyInauguralPhoto service. Just call me Zelig. (via TechCrunch)
Ho John Lee | September 8th, 2006 | 2 comments
I seemed to have missed this feature when the most recent line of Photosmart cameras came out a few months ago:
They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!
Just the thing for making your own Katie Couric-style portraits…
Another fun softball season ended this Saturday.
Tagnautica is a fun and interesting Flash user interface for exploring and navigating among tags, in this case on Flickr. After keying in an initial tag, related tags are displayed in a circle, with a sample image from each tag category displayed in a representative size.
When you move the cursor over a tag bubble, it temporarily becomes larger so you can get a look at it. The other bubbles keep resizing as well, giving the interface a very fluid appearance. When you find something you like, you can click on the Tagnautica bubble to view the tag page over at Flickr.
I always enjoy these sorts of user interfaces for semi-random exploration. I’ve noticed that I don’t really use any of the cool visualization tools when I actually want to find something, though. Not sure if that’s because they don’t represent a useful set of questions as implemented yet, or simply because my brain doesn’t work that way.
I find I experience these interfaces more as pleasant interactive art than as useful data navigation tools. One of these days I’m sure something is going to click, though.
Ho John Lee | January 9th, 2006 | 1 comment
The moving finger writes; and having writ, Moves on…
–The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam
We’re having a nice quiet New Year’s Day here, with traditional Korean duk mandu gook, a beef broth soup with dumplings and sliced rice cake. The custom is that you are one year older when you have duk mandu gook on New Year’s Day. I’m not totally sure about that part, but in any case we usually have soup on New Year’s Day.
I also have some more recent New Year’s traditions, such as cleaning out my e-mail inbox and archiving the previous year’s data, although I’ve mostly managed to take a break from computers during vacation. Outside it’s been wet and windy, making it a good day to stay indoors.
In contrast, my friend Andy has had a more exciting weekend, in which the latest round of storms here in the Bay Area managed to uproot a huge tree onto his house. Fortunately no one was hurt, and he has an amazing set of photos.
Wow!
Happy New Year!
Ho John Lee | December 4th, 2005 | 2 comments
Today’s (Sunday) San Jose Mercury News features a cover story on Bangalore, India, and draws some parallels with the Bay Area. The headline reads “The tech boom didn’t die. It just moved to India.” I find that I unexpectedly run into people from the Bay Area quite often during trips out there, and there has been amazing growth in salaries and real estate prices which reminds me of late ‘99 here. At the same time they seem to be hitting resource limits of various sorts. The water and power supplies can be spotty, the storm drains routinely flood the streets during monsoon season, the roads are overloaded, there’s often a shortage of hotel rooms, and the airport is remarkably bad, considering that so much of the local economy depends on foreign business travel.
Bangalore, the tech center of India, is booming as the Bay Area once did, becoming a world-class hub for tech jobs, economic activity and, increasingly, innovation. While Silicon Valley still retains a hold on high-end tech jobs, countless lower-level positions, particularly in software — and now some sophisticated research and development work — are shifting to this city of 6.5 million in southern India. The emergence of Bangalore — and of India — as a tech power signals a new world economic order that is both opportunity and threat to Silicon Valley.
The article also mentions the traffic (and the fact that it can take an hour to go a few miles). Reminded me to go dig up some video clips I’ve been meaning to do something with. Nothing spectacular, but as I travel, I find the differentness of the mundane aspects of daily life interesting, and there are lots of little things to see in these. (WM9 only, no Quicktime, I don’t have an encoder handy at the moment.)
See also:
I wonder if the Mercury News found the same cow that hangs out on Hosur Road. There are a few that are always wandering around along the side of the road, they must live nearby somewhere.
Ho John Lee | November 22nd, 2005 | 2 comments
I dropped my subscription to the ACM Graphics SIG some time back, so this is the first I’ve heard of this project, which is very cool. Take your photos now, and decide what to focus on later.
From Wired News, via A Venture Forth:
A computer science Ph.D. student at Stanford University has outfitted a 16-megapixel camera with a bevy of micro lenses that allows users to take photos and later refocus them on a computer using software he wrote.
The system works by capturing information about the direction of the incoming light, as well as the intensity. This is then used to compute the image that would have been formed if the sensor was in a slightly different plane, effectively changing the focal length. The paper published by Ren Ng and team observes:
As an aside from the biological perspective, it is interesting to note that our optical design can be thought of as taking a human
eye (camera) and replacing its retina with an insect eye (microlens / photosensor array). No animal has been discovered that possesses such a hybrid eye [Land and Nilsson 2001], but this paper (and the work of Adelson and Wang) shows that such a design posseses unique and compelling capabilities when coupled with sufficient processing power (a computer).
The system works best with more data, 16 megapixels appears to work pretty well. They indicate that 8 megapixels would still work but with a narrower computed focus range. As shown in the schematic, the effective output resolution is limited by the microarray lens, not the sensor resolution, but it needs the high resolution sensor data to determine the direction of incoming light. The prototype is built in a medium format (Contex) body to make it easier to build the sensor assembly.
It doesn’t look like this is going to turn up in consumer devices any time soon, but I’m sure there are some interesting applications that can afford the cost and physical bulk of the system already.
Links:
It’s Veterans Day in the United States. When I was a kid growing up in Maine, every little town had a parade or other observance for Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and it seemed as though every family had at least one member that had served in the military.
In contrast, here in Palo Alto (and probably elsewhere) today, it’s mostly notable for the schools, post offices, and banks being closed. My daughter’s elementary school had one of the teachers’ spouses come in to talk to the 4th graders about being a submariner in the US Navy, and I suspect it may have been the first time many of the kids had actually met someone who’d been in the service. I think that there are actually more veterans around, but it’s not something that makes for great conversation in many social circles in the Bay Area.
Providing for a national defense is one of the core functions of government. Here in Silicon Valley, sometimes I feel like we’ve effectively “outsourced” it to the “professional military” tribe, who mostly don’t live around here, or at least not in my corner of the tech/business crowd. It can’t be a good thing when the institutions providing that service become so culturally and socially remote, regardless of your opinion on current foreign policy.
Suggested reading:
During trips to China, I’m always intrigued by the departure boards in the Beijing airport showing flights to places like Pyongyang, Ullan Battor, and other parts of the world that are hard to get to from here. I’ve been to the South Korean side of the DMZ but the only way to get to the North is through China, and it’s not like you can just hop over for a weekend to take a look around.
In the meantime, here’s a fascinating series of posts with photos and video from Dan Schorr (not the reporter), who recently spent several days on a tour to North Korea, where he attended the Arirang Festival.
…we went to an event unlike anything I’ve ever seen: Mass Games. A tremendous, socialist mass art form in which thousands and thousands of people move in ultra-choreographed performances – gymnasts, soldiers, schoolkids, acrobats, and dancers with lights and music, with thousands more holding large cards that are flipped from color to color to create words and images as a backdrop. The last Mass Games was in 2002 – the next is supposed to be in 2008. They are planned to celebrate major events – in this case, the 60th anniversary of the liberation from Japan.
He also makes a trip to Panmunjon from the North Korean side, visits Kim Jong Il’s mausoleum, and checks out the casino for foreign tourists:
Definitely a weird place – chips were only in U.S. dollars, which I purchased with Chinese RMB. The dealers spoke Mandarin, and since casinos are illegal on Mainland China it was the first time I heard a casino dealer running a game in Chinese – and I had to come to North Korea for it. The playing cards said “Pyongyang” on them and I really wanted to buy a deck – perfect for my home game – but unfortunately they wouldn’t sell them. However, I was able to walk out with a few chips that say “PY” on them.
Dan’s lengthy posts also include many observations on the North Korean version of history and current politics, and on the members of his tour group:
Our guide also commented on George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” statement – she wasn’t too fond of it. But she did say that “normal American people are friendly.”
She also said that “North Korean people hate Bush,” to which one woman in our American tour group quickly replied, “We do too.”
As I mentioned earlier, in general I have no problem with people hating the President and saying so. Furthermore, showing the North Koreans that we can dislike our own leaders and freely talk about them in a negative way can be healthy because it is a stark contrast to their world in which their leadership must be revered and can not be questioned.
…
I had heard other similar statements on the trip, but this comment stood out and infuriated me even more because of the use of the word “we” – she was appearing to represent the whole group, including me. I didn’t want to get into an argument, but I had to speak up.
“Not all of us,” I said, and left it at that.
via BoingBoing
previous BoingBoing article on North Korea vacation promo (flash movie)
Ho John Lee | August 25th, 2005 | 7 comments
Ojos is the working name for a startup that’s building a photo site with automatic tagging through face and text recognition. Here’s a sample photo of a Treo, annotated with the words their technology can recognize.
From Rob Hof on his blog at Business Week:
Munjal Shah, onetime cofounder of the auction services firm Andale, finally let slip on his new blog what he’s been working on since leaving last year. As he writes: “I am co-founding a company because I found I had 31,246 photos all named DSC0009.jpg.” In other words, his startup, tentatively named Ojos (Spanish for “eyes”), is creating a new way to search and organize photos.
Over at Munjal Shah’s new blog, he elaborates further:
I think Flickr’s tag based system is just super (in fact I love it), but I wanted all of my photos on there, I wanted them all tagged, and I didn’t want to spend hundreds of hours doing it. So being the lazy engineers that we are, we thought maybe we can at least auto-tag some of the faces and names. Folks can fix mistakes we make but it will still be less than than tagging in the first place and in the end you will have a tagged library of photos.
Looks like they’re going to be applying face and/or scene similarity and text recognition to help organize the rapidly growing collections of digital photos being generated through the mass consumer adoption of digital cameras and online photo services such as Flickr.
I don’t think there’s room in the market for another freestanding web site, even one based on better face and text tagging. At the same time, the autotagging capability can’t be tested, demonstrated, or evolved without a live data set and community of users.
This feels like it should become or at least expose a web service at some point down the road. It could then be used with any photo hosting service or web site to reach a wider set of users than just one site. It might also help distribute the computational load of calculating the regions of interest, feature vectors, and resizing, by pushing the task out to the clients in many cases as part of the upload process. Computing resources continue to become cheaper and faster, but there are a few bandwidth bottlenecks along the way, so why not let the desktop chew on it a while and send up the precomputed metadata, along with the (possibly smaller) image.
Auto tagging, combined with a community of users that helps “clean up” the relevancy of the applied tags, might also work well for labeling photos of celebrities and well known places.
I’ve wished for something like this a few times in the past, so I’m hopeful that this team will come up with a useful service and look forward to trying it out when they make something available.
Update 08-28-2005 23:28 – Posted some additional comments at Munjal’s site. Briefly – I think it’s becoming interesting to do image content-based retrieval in conjunction with tagging and other user behavior. I should write up some notes on group search and tagging.
This object turned up at the corner of Page Mill and El Camino this weekend. It’s in the empty lot which belongs to Stanford, but which is being turned into playing fields for soccer.
At first glance I thought they might be building a sundial, but it’s pointed roughly west, which wouldn’t make the most sense.
Update 2005-08-05 14:50:26 – Article in the Palo Alto Weekly – it’s a prototype of a sculpture being built by Fletcher Benton.
Benton, 74, starts with three simple design elements, such as a broken circle, a ball and a base plate. Then he plays with the small pieces like a kid playing with Legos — moving them around, adding new ones, taking ones away.
Benton is frequently trying to create a dynamic image, often placing the largest shape at a severe angle. But just as important to him is the “empty space” around the images.
“The hole in the donut,” he said, “is just as important as the donut.”
Today I saw a demo of Andy Fitzhugh’s Virgil software. He is combining GPS trackpoint logs with digital photos to generate metadata which can be used to group photos together by date/time, physical proximity, and also to prepare queries to various search engines based on location.
He uses a Garmin Geko clipped to his camera bag to generate a track log, and then uses the EXIF time stamp to match photos to locations. He also has a method for tagging existing photos with a location. The mapping display is generated by queries to the Microsoft MapPoint service, which also returns a vicinity-based list of points of interest.
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