sebruiz.net » random

Akademy social event

Seb — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:22:38 +0000

Last night I managed to have nearly 100 people sign Lydia’s little black notebook at the Akademy beer-event. It was fun and a perfect example of how beer can give you a reason to do practically anything.

Coming up: Amarok talk. Must write notes.

Google Treasure Hunt

Seb — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:59:49 +0000

The Google-AU blog reports that Google is going to be holding another one of it’s brain busting adventures soon. The post is ended with the following text/clue:

Arrrrrrrr you ready? Onward to the first puzzle, matey! And good luck!

aHR0cDovL3RyZWFzdXJlaHVudC5hcHBzcG90LmNvbS8=

Soon . 1210550400

Warning: links below contain spoilers.

Shouldn’t take long to figure out. The 10 digits of the final number is a dead giveaway that it’s a unix timestamp, and maps to a particular time. That’s soon.

The seemingly random string is a base64 encoding of a particular website.

Happy Star Wars Day!

Seb — Sun, 04 May 2008 00:21:53 +0000

I’d just like to wish everyone a hearty and happy star wars day.

May the fourth be with you!

Icon credit: everaldo

Google Streetview Camera Car in Sydney

Seb — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:39:02 +0000

Exciting news! I’ve spotted a Google streetview car in Sydney! Hopefully this means that Google Maps Sydney will soon get a street view so that we can play fun privacy invasion games.

It’s a little hard to tell thanks to the crappy camera on my mobile phone, but with some squinting you can see the camera mounted on a 1.5-ish metre support bracket on the hood of the car. You can also see the Google decal on the side, providing awesome aerodynamic characteristics to the car.

History Quiz

Seb — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 11:29:36 +0000

Some of you may already be familiar with the find-a-thing puzzles which I have posted on music and movie subjects. Here comes another in the sequence: a historical famous people search quiz.

Best of luck for this one.

HDR Imaging – Qtpfsgui – Surf

Seb — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:52:49 +0000

I’ve had the pleasure of owning a Nikon d80 for the last two months and have only recently started playing around with the advanced image post-processing techniques like HDR which have interested me for so long. Unsurprisingly, HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging is appealing to so many people because it can make images look larger than life and surreal with the colours and contrast which are shown.

Now that daylight savings has kicked in I can get home from work during daylight hours. A recently southerly picked up the surf swell and I got some excellent photos of a well known big wave surfer and Bra Boy, Richie Vaculik surfing a normally rather insignificant break at Lurline Bay.

Qtpfsgui is one of the finer HDR/tone-mapping pieces of software available for Linux, despite the abhorrent name choice. With a bit of tweaking I managed to get a few nice images out of my raw images. I’m looking forward to improved HDR support for KDE in Krita.

A Lesson in Common Sense

Seb — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:22:26 +0000

Today I finished up at class and I went to the computer labs to do some printing. Every now and then, left-behinds are found on, in and around the workstations. Rarely are they as interesting as the one I found today. A 1G USB flash disk the size of half of my thumb was snuggly wedged into the usb port. I always have a peek around these things to be good and try and find the owner’s email address or some contact method.

I found a whole lot more than I bargained for. Photos, videos, personal information – CV (including comprehensive information on schooling, employment and family details), financial information, insurance details and car information. To make matters worse, there is a collection of “portable” applications, such as FirefoxPortable, and MirandaPortable. Not only does Firefox contain a comprehensive history, but it might also have stored passwords (I didn’t check, and I don’t care). The multi client messenger, Miranda, contains a list of all as well as stored passwords for AIM, Yahoo! and MSN Messenger.

I detract, however. This post has nothing to do with my ethical/moral standings (everyone knows that morals boundaries are stretched in direct proportion to humour, anyway). The point is, that you should never put such a concentrated quantity of personal information in one place. Especially not if you are going to lose it. Is facebook the same? Maybe, but at least I don’t put my finances up for scrutiny.

I’ll just secretly anonymously post the USB stick back to the listed address. Maybe I’ll include an anonymous letter with all personals listed just to hope for the priceless reaction.

Anyway, don’t be stupid like this person.

Lefty-Loosy, or Righty-Tighty?

Seb — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 01:17:17 +0000

According to this article, viewing this spinning image can tell you which side of your brain dominates your cranial activity. Do you see the image spinning clockwise or anticlockwise?

I see the image spinning clockwise, but I can’t say that the “functions” which I am prone to are all so accurate for my day-to-day activities. See if you can convince your brain to view the image spinning in the opposite direction.

Left Brain Functions	Right Brain Functions
uses logic	uses feeling
detail oriented	“big picture” oriented
facts rule	imagination rules
words and language	symbols and images
present and past	present and future
maths and science	philosophy & religion
can comprehend	can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
knowing	believes
acknowledges	appreciates
order/pattern perception	spatial perception
knows object name	knows object function
reality based	fantasy based
forms strategies	presents possibilities
practical	impetuous
safe	risk taking

Image resizing using energy paths

Seb — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:54:11 +0000

It’s good to be subscribed to lots of different mailing lists, just for the absolutely wonderful pockets of air which exist around all the traffic. On the kde-imaging mailing list there was a thread about image resizing algorithms. My interest was piked and it paid off – the video explains a dynamic image resizing technique by removing paths of least enery. This is probably done by some complicated Fourier transform, and the results are phenomenal. Resize an image by removing redundant parts of the image, not by making everything smaller. Furthermore, this technique can be also used to remove particular elements of an image by applying negative energy weights to an area. Fascinating!

Planet KDE readers: The embedded video doesn’t show on p.k.o, so you can just watch the video here

Update: The original work is done by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan from the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel.

Fingers… Burning…

Seb — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:19:23 +0000

I’ve been playing way too much of Frets on Fire lately. If hacking becomes too much, just lift up your keyboard and use it as a guitar and thrash it! Infact, I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve stopped rebooting to play Bioshock. The default package comes with just three obscure songs, but you can import songs from Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II, which is great. For those of you without the game, I’m sure you are resourceful enough to get a copy of the data.

I’ve discovered that my fingers can hit the keys faster and in stranger patterns than I’ve ever thought possible. I think that I should slow down a bit on the axe-grinding since my vision becomes distorted after playing it – a frequency modulated effect as objects quickly drift up and down in front of my eyes!

Eric Clapton – I challenge you to a duel!