Sunday, June 17, 2007

 

A view from the palace

Taken, processed, and uploaded as part of Hack Day London

Flickr Tags:

Labels:


Monday, March 26, 2007

 

Improving CustomEyes

GlassesDirect offer a feature they call CustomEyes which allows you to "try on" the glasses they offer online. It works by you uploading a photo of your face, and then you can overlay an image of the glasses on top of that.

Unfortunately they don't really use the power of the computer in doing this. CustomEyes is a silly little Flash application, whereas this could all have been done in far more accessible HTML. You currently get to see a small image of your face, and then have to select the frame you want to see by name from a drop down. The Flash controls do allow you to rotate the glasses - but who wants to see glasses that are rotated off of the horizontal anyway? In addition, they also allow the glasses to be resized, which is necessary since you they don't know in advance what sized face image you have uploaded - but is doubly necessary because they don't even make all the glasses images the same size - some are twice the size of others!

I'd suggest that the application could be much improved by doing the following:

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

 

What are Zooomr up to this week?

Just setting things up so that I'm all ready to try out the new Zooomr version 3 when it's ready (which Thomas Hawk is saying is very soon now).

moonmoon Hosted on Zooomr

Labels:


Wednesday, February 14, 2007

 

YouTube blog

YouTube has millions of users.

It also has a blog at http://youtube.com/rss/global/our_blog.rss

According to Bloglines, there are just 9 subscribers to that blog via Bloglines!

I wonder, is it that YouTube users are not very blog savvy, that the YouTube blog is not very interesting, or are YouTube blog readers not doing it via Bloglines?

(By comparison, the official Google Blog reports 43,697 subscribers via Bloglines).

Sunday, January 28, 2007

 

Ask maintains a blacklist of IP addresses

Someone at Ask.com should realize that IP addresses are dynamically given out by ISPs to their clients (potentially) each time they connect - so blacklisting "clients" by IP addresses is not a very smart thing to be doing.

I recently found that the IP address I was now allocated was somehow on Ask's blacklist, and that instead of getting Ask's search engine, all I got was a page saying:

Your client does not have permission to access this site.

Please refer to the Ask.com terms of service page.(Ask.com and Syndication).

If you feel that you have received this response in error, please send an email to unauthorized@ask.com. Before sending this email, please refer to our terms of service page, accessible at the url provided above.

Please copy and paste the information below into the body of the email.
fff9480d-2fff9480dfff9480d

I'm not sure if emailing that address is an automated system to remove the IP address from the blacklist - you can probably spot that the text they ask to be included in the body of the email is simply the hex representation of the client's IP address, (repeated 3 times for some reason). (I've obscured the actual address in the example above, but kept the same format).

Having sent the email, I've certainly not gained instant access to Ask again - I rather think that it will be quicker to get a new IP address from the ISP's DHCP server than to sort out Ask's broken blacklist. If Ask wants to use a blacklist system then they should probably expire IP addresses off the blacklist say a few hours after whatever behaviour it is that triggers the inclusion on the list was last detected. That way, zombie machines that continue to do something bad via Ask will remain blacklisted and hence blocked, but legitimate users who inherit an IP address that was previously used by a zombie are not permanently banned.

Labels: ,


Sunday, January 14, 2007

 

Findory rides into the sunset

Searching is for when you know roughly what you are looking for.

An alternative way of finding information is for it to be recommended to you. One of the leaders in recommendation systems is Amazon.

Findory tries to apply some of the ideas Greg Linden learnt when building Amazon's recommendation systems (and what he's learnt since!), but unfortunately Greg has found it difficult to continue to grow Findory - and has just announced that "Findory rides into the sunset". Roughly speaking, this means that development of the site has slowed to a crawl, and that Greg is to concentrate on other things - which for the moment he explains means health and family.

I'm sorry to hear this - Greg's was one of the best blogs in the search area, backed by his ongoing research interests and development of Findory, and whilst I'm sure his interest in personalizing information will continue, without the need to attend to it on a daily basis, I suspect we will be hearing less from Greg in the future. I wish him well, and sorry he couldn't find a way to continue expanding Findory.

Labels: ,


Thursday, October 05, 2006

 

Keyhole website still up and active

When Google bought Neven Vision recently they were extremely quick in tearing down all the pages on the websites that Neven Vision had.

I was therefore rather surprised to find that although

http://www.keyhole.com

redirects to Google Earth, if you just add index.html to the url thus

http://www.keyhole.com/index.html


then the old Keyhole site is still there, and apparently fully functioning.

Labels: ,


Friday, September 29, 2006

 

OCR problems in Google Books

The accuracy of OCR is vastly increased when the words you read exist in a dictionary. In that case the OCR, when trying to decide between more than one possible interpretation, can use the dictionary to help determine which is the more likely.

As the Google Books project announces its extension to scan European books in Madrid it will have to adjust the dictionary it uses - it's no good scanning Spanish books using the same dictionary as American English books.

However, there are some "English" documents that Google has scanned already where the OCR process has gone very wrong. Consider this page of old printed English, with the "long s" symbol, which looks like a modern "f" character. Looks like the OCR was not told that this dated from 1796, so to look out for long "s" - hence it has identified lots of "fuch" and "fale" rather than "such" and "sale" on the page. A simple dictionary check would have helped here - but only if the process expects "f" and "s" to be confused.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

 

Picasa Web Albums adds email digests

There is a new feature just appeared on the Picasa Web Albums settings page. Between the existing Public Gallery URL, and the Content Controls, there is now a section that allows you to set up an Email Digest.

It looks like Google are defaulting this to a weekly digest, to get the news out to people, and then giving them an option in the email to turn it off. The 4 choices given are no digest, or at a frequency of daily, weekly, or monthly. The description alongside explains:

What is an Email Digest?

When people you have marked as favorites create new albums, upload more photos, or comment on your photos, we send you a summary of these activities to your email address at the interval you specify.

The digest email itself is an HTML formatted email as follows:

The links in the email for changing settings are generic - they just take you to the main Picasa Web page, where you can then log in if needed. This means that you can forward the email to someone else without security issues.

The images do of course link through to the album that has changed. The thumbnails shown are embedded in the email, not just links to the Picasa Web site, so they can be seen when offline, or when external images are turned off (as is the case with most email programs these days).

I didn't have any new comments for this example to notify me about, but the source of the email indicates that they would follow after the list of changed albums.

(This should have appeared on my Documenting Picasa blog, but I'm having a few publishing issues at the moment).


Update:It did eventually make it to the Documenting Picasa Blog.

Labels:


Sunday, August 13, 2006

 

Most popular tags on flickr

Whilst thinking about Searching Picasa Web Albums I did a bit of investigation into the most popular tags on flickr.

flickr provide a tag cloud, but that is just a visualization of the data, and I couldn't see that they provide the data in a direct form anywhere on the site. However, with the aid of the flickr API I was able to take all the words in the tag cloud, and feed them to the API, to get a count of how many matching tags there were for each word. In addition, I also fed those same words to the "free text" search API call, which looks for the word in more than just the tag field - considereing comments and descriptions for example.

The table below shows 3 columns - the tag I searched for, the number of tags of that word found, and the number of photos found using a free text search. The table is ordered by popularity of tags.

wedding16974552269471
party14756812350563
family11600571557739
travel11135761275557
friends10939971649955
japan10742811167494
vacation10204231162147
london9271721100791
beach8647281493985
california837012960129
birthday8296701371859
trip8173241786838
nyc774884879161
summer7323871122946
nature728059816467
italy686976776812
france669406759215
me6641112886782
paris662024786996
art6435631104574
flowers6278301439335
sanfrancisco618604620523
europe610237708284
china604334707039
flower5968911439327
newyork572049575557
water565749973599
people552582975146
music551493740282
cameraphone544369634883
australia543923611789
christmas537883834827
usa531563619628
sky527376756538
germany526931595724
new5265492723772
canada512067612492
night5104661210035
cat504840852699
holiday501819703551
park4981781820673
bw495568514618
dog486692859611
food478691684164
snow478068643189
baby463882837637
sunset462862752411
city4468661294211
chicago445639529140
spain441158491290
taiwan437633461265
july4350571033708
blue431367862404
tokyo427181505507
england425920510575
mexico406752535804
winter403827579849
portrait396759644632
green394571671410
red393719848593
fun392680688356
india386409446473
architecture383526423993
garden382303981077
macro380663428872
spring373441759260
thailand368331411644
uk362555468979
seattle357614421000
festival357137658357
concert350224471579
canon349327580369
house3474041236984
berlin343694403534
hawaii340744384573
street3395031036943
lake324783937873
zoo324442460997
florida322534387322
june321243729667
may316693903231
white313703867135
vancouver312657383569
kids312551635702
tree3125421019630
clouds307407479446
toronto304648359194
barcelona293035341533
geotagged292631294655
home291227778635
sea288469546365
day2872872136618
texas284851360478
scotland284615309559
car281730788266
light281436909673
halloween280515362042
camping279238654077
church273001535265
animals270757542946
trees2700981019628
washington266921470046
river266128668903
nikon265291393117
april262835581807
boston261935330032
girl258663857847
ireland258647305876
graffiti257081283560
amsterdam256794307304
rock256142795001
landscape254799343825
blackandwhite252987253364
cats252971852700
newyorkcity250213250430
san2477391271943
rome246027286082
roadtrip245326255484
urban244511321849
honeymoon241904271611
ocean240941359337
dc235053363788
newzealand232776233573
march231491532229
black231180708269
museum230643562979
york230193868773
hiking226067398781
island224110844505
mountains223030759360
yellow221515347290
sydney221447278644
sun218685503464
hongkong216193222298
show216155850535
graduation214681306454
color213967579521
film210509351853
mountain210046759360
animal208416542946
losangeles207932208309
school205891550486
moblog205613210954
photo2050472308835
dogs203610859613

Labels: ,