Internet is becoming more and more polluted with junk-mail, people selling crap, and businesses which don't know their place on the net. They're all trying to make this wonderful place (i.e.: the net) in to hell (i.e.: real world). Internet should be viewed as a place of imagination, creativity, and most of all: fun. Internet is not some really advanced tool for searching for people to rip-off. It's about searching, and finding, things which are useful, helpful, and promote the sharing of ideas. This is what this site is striving to become.

Happy 4th of July.

- Alex; Fri Jul 4 03:56:26 EDT 2008
July 4th at wikipedia...

Software as a service is here: Microsoft to rent Office, OneCare for $70 a year. Though I must say it's not bad---consider how much an average corp spends per employee on IT, this isn't bad at all. Also, with most commercial software you don't ``buy'' it (as in, own it) anyway, and you -do- have upgrade plans. So this `renting' is only making explicit what was already assumed. Not that I'd ever consider using this myself; no corp should have the power over the stuff that runs on your computer (would they take your ability to read your own files if you don't pay up?)

Intel says to prepare for `thousands of cores'. They should just build it and release it! I can think of many cool things to do with that many cores. Have 1-4 coventional cores, and a co-processor with `thousands of cores'. Even if every core is about as simple and fast as an 8088, it would still be pretty neat. Intel wins on...making everyone get the latest and greatest, as well as getting yields up (if 20% of cores don't work because of a manufacturing defect, you don't -really- care---simply price them a bit less). They also get to directly compete with graphics cards.

And in other news, European Central Bank raises benchmark rate a quarter point to 4.25%. This is the news that will make oil go to $150 in the next week or so (if not today).

- Alex; Thu Jul 3 07:33:17 EDT 2008

Billion dollar idea (for someone else): In some movies, they show the ability of the ``computer'' to be able to zoom-in into a very blury image, and magically make it crystal clear. This has always seemed impossible to me. Something that looks like a blob should be a blob, damn it!

Anyways, lately, I was thinking along these lines: whenever you take a picture (or a frame in a video), you're essentially taking a ``sample'' of a supposedly perfect (non-blury) world with your imperfect instrument---with noise added. The result is that your samples are often blury. But, the more samples you take, the more closely you should be able to reconstruct the perfect image of the world you're sampling. In other words, it -should- be possible to take maybe a few hundred 10-megapixel frames (consumer point-and-shoot camera), and combine them into a high quality 100-megapixel image---with detail that is impossible to get with a single image (as the sensor size and lens may not be upto the task).

How would this magic work in practice? You press a button, the camera starts capturing a hundred (or many more?) frames. As your hands move, the point of view changes slightly---you don't -want- all images to be identical. The camera would then upscale the images, adjust all images to ensure they `fit' (overlays them properly), and does an average. The result is a bigger image with a lot of detail (not just an upscaled single image).

Astronomers already use something similar to remove atmospheric affects---ground based telescopes generally produce blury images (air adds noise); but if you take a few hundred pics, average them together, you essentially cancel out the noise added on by the atmosphere.

This probably won't work very well with JPEG images (thus, I can't try this with a consumer point and shoot). JPEG removes the high frequencies out of an image... exactly the frequencies that would be adding this detail. This -might- work with a RAW images though. Anyone care to take a few hundred pics (with their fancy DSLR camera), upscale them (double their size), and average them together?

This is probably much easier to do with video, as you already get a quick succession of images of the same thing (hopefully with shaky hands, to change point of view just a bit frame to frame). Problem with video though is that it's already compressed, and any minor differences in subsequent frames have already been compressed out (frame by frame, mpeg doesn't change much---or rather, only changed parts of the frame are actually stored). I wonder if consumer HD cameras give you an uncompressed video tream... Will have to look into that.

In other news, Starbucks has a bitter plan. ``The current economic environment is the weakest in our companys history.'' Indeed.

- Alex; Wed Jul 2 07:49:54 EDT 2008

Microsoft Office Binary File Format Documents. Neat :-)

Hmm... Stocks: New quarter, old fears.

- Alex; Tue Jul 1 07:35:50 EDT 2008

Did a count of `identifiers' that appear in most of the files (binary included) on my computer (ie: words that start with a letter, and continue with a letter, number, or underscore). Here's ones that appear often:

a,1550061625
align,2283141231
and,1592426104
b,1264216938
bottom,2512137270
face,1306743081
font,7206477158
in,2448168510
left,1398218716
m,1920801411
margin,1902678426
nbsp,3424888621
new,1472798105
o5dj,68719477715
of,2610701283
p,3165626948
pt,3572625853
right,1351982395
roman,1393054064
size,3542803893
style,2963354319
td,8358241075
the,3835796887
times,1549080625
to,1541033827
top,1160325028
valign,2496761171
width,2045673755
zb8d,68719477834

- Alex; Mon Jun 30 07:34:27 EDT 2008

U.S. 'preparing the battlefield' in Iran. Hmm... ``They believe that their mission is to make sure that before they get out of office next year, either Iran is attacked or it stops its weapons program,'' Hmm...

- Alex; Sun Jun 29 22:27:44 EDT 2008

Went to the beach... and lost a sandal. Ended up walking home barefeet :-/

- Alex; Sat Jun 28 22:37:08 EDT 2008

Stocks set for shaky start. No kidding! With 3 percent lost yesterday...

- Alex; Fri Jun 27 07:45:17 EDT 2008

Wrote yet another applet: Perceptron Discriminator. When you click, applet starts with random weights and uses gradient descent (learning rate 0.1) to train a perceptron [sigmoid, 1/(1+exp(-a)) function] to classify the points. The applet does 10000 iterations, and doesn't always succeed, etc.

In other news, also wrote a small example on doing 2D linear regression in SQL. Many databases already come with REGR_SLOPE and REGR_INTERCEPT functions, but if for whatever reason those aren't available, then you can use this sample code to do exactly the same thing.

In yet more news, Fed leaves rates unchanged. As expected.

Interesting: Computer stuff and power requirements. Neat. Last week I started shutting off one of my computers---to balance out the always-on air conditioner.

- Alex; Thu Jun 26 02:58:30 EDT 2008

Stocks set for pre-Fed boost. What I don't get is what the heck folks are expecting the Fed to do? Yeah, the Fed will suddenly fix everything today---that's why the stocks are up, right?

- Alex; Wed Jun 25 07:36:43 EDT 2008

Imagine you're a photon of light, what does the world look like to you? For example, are you still in a universe with 3 space and 1 time dimensions?

In other news: Japan's Nikkei dips for 4th straight session... it's spreading.

- Alex; Tue Jun 24 07:22:11 EDT 2008

ASIA MARKETS: Tokyo, Hong Kong Drop For 3rd Straight Session. So does this mean we'll have a repeat of Friday here in NY? Let me make a wild prediction: the DOW will lose an additional ~10-20% before starting to recover. The sooner this happens, the better for everyone. Unfortunately, the powers (gov, banks, etc.) won't let it fall quickly to those levels, and will drag out this `recovery' until sometime in 2010 (if even that). Worst case scenario would be a repeat of what happened in Japan in late 1980's---they -still- haven't recovered from that economic bubble, mostly due to some vigilant politics (ie: for US, this means things just sorta go nowhere, not up, nor down, for two decades).

Eh... The End of the Internet.

- Alex; Mon Jun 23 07:32:06 EDT 2008

Water Ice On Mars. Yey!

- Alex; Sun Jun 22 22:01:03 EDT 2008

This is neat: Here's How YOU Can Be a Part of the Story of Space Exploration!

- Alex; Sat Jun 21 19:40:13 EDT 2008

Cap gains tax: How high can Obama go? I hope he realizes it's not just the ``rich'' who hold stocks---and that many mutual funds pay capital gains too... raising capital gains will hurt a lot a lot of folks.

Hmm... Why is Gentoo slow in setting up portage for Firefox3?

- Alex; Fri Jun 20 07:42:31 EDT 2008

Eh, Did the Fed go too far? Or not far enough? Hindsight is always 20/20, no? Though it's not hindsight yet. I thinkt this `slowdown' will start to go away sometime towards year 2012 (nothing to do with end of the world predictions). Consider the past---no slowdown has ever lasted a few months. The most mild ones lasted years. Anyone who thought this will be over soon was kidding themselves (or had some other agenda---such as leaving themselves time to get out). And this time, the situation is even more screwed up than it was in the past---there's actually real competition for resources on the glogal scale; without major changes, US can't just `buy a more expensive house' to raise gdp and get out of this recession---local solutions won't work. I think before this is over, manufacturing jobs (making physical thingies), at least in part, will return back to the US; now picture what kind of economic screwup we'll have to live through for -that- to happen. This isn't far fetched. Toyota has proven that US isn't a -bad- nor prohibitively expensive place to manufacture things. Just horribly mismanaged (short term profit shouldn't be the driving force for corporations).

- Alex; Thu Jun 19 07:12:13 EDT 2008

Tweaked one of the applets to be more 1-mouse button friendly (Apple, eh!). In other news, doing linear regression in SQL is a pain in the neck (ie: if your database doesn't provide regr_slope, regr_intercept functions)

- Alex; Wed Jun 18 07:39:22 EDT 2008

Obama will spend to revitalize economy. And how is -that- any different than what Bush is doing? I mean, spend spend spend, spend more than you have! Yes, lets spend even more!

- Alex; Tue Jun 17 07:13:25 EDT 2008

Implemented the K-Means applet; for k=4.

- Alex; Mon Jun 16 03:18:57 EDT 2008

Implemented the Nearest Neighbor applet. Well, in this case, k=1, but the idea quite easy to generalize.

- Alex; Sun Jun 15 21:13:38 EDT 2008

Went to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Still neat. As usual.

- Alex; Sat Jun 14 22:32:05 EDT 2008