holy crap

Posted on June 13th, 2007 by dandavis

So, I was doing some more Stumbling and stumbled across this talk from TED2007. The talk was given by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, creator of Seadragon, and it centered around Photosynth.

From the Photosynth site:

The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest – and, we hope, most exciting – way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

digitize books *and* fight spam all at once!

Posted on May 28th, 2007 by dandavis

Saw this at Boing Boing and then at Lifehacker. reCAPTCHA is a twist on the traditional CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) system. reCAPTCHA uses the user input to decipher words that are not recognizable by OCR software used when digitizing books.

Here's how: the reCAPTCHA system displays two different words: one the computer knows and one it doesn't know. To pass the test, a user needs to input the known word correctly. The computer then assumes that the unknown word was also entered correctly.

But, what about the accuracy on the book digitizing side? What if the user tried to fool the system and entered only one word, which just happened to be the known word, correctly? To increase the confidence that a particular unknown word was entered correctly, the reCAPTCHA system uses the unknown words numerous times.

Want to try it out? Leave a comment!

testing testing 1 2 3

Posted on October 5th, 2006 by dandavis

OK, this is pretty cool… this is WriteToMyBlog.com, a web-based (obviously) word processor for creating blog posts. It's much more robust than the builtin processor than WordPress offers… at least in the ancient version I currently have installed… it's the slickness.

ok, this is too cool…

Posted on September 27th, 2006 by dandavis

OK, just saw this over at Lifehacker… gotta say, it's very cool.

It's GrandCentral. Sign up for a free account and get a phone number. Link up to 6 phone numbers to your account. Someone calls your GrandCentral number and all of your linked numbers ring. But, of course, you can change that. You can setup all kinds of rules for friends, family, and so on… there's just way too many cool little features that I haven't even been able to play with yet… you'll need to go take a look at it. It's the slickness.

spam! Spam!! SPAM!!!

Posted on September 22nd, 2006 by dandavis

I never realized how much SPAM was being sent using my domain as the spoofed source. (Not as a relay, mind… my server is and always has been closed down to that kind of crap.) I get so many MAILER-DAEMON and SPAM filter emails, it's not funny. Seriously. I hate it.

So, if you are a mail admin here to find out why "dandavis.com" sends so much SPAM… we don't.

In an effort to help combat that, I setup SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records for all of the domains I admin. If you setup your MTA to query for these records and reject emails that fail the test, SPAM from "dandavis.com" will drop substantially… to nil… cause I don't send SPAM. All of my domains are set to hard fail. No softfail crap here. If I didn't send it, and you don't want it, you won't get it. Period.

Good day, sir!

PS: Yes, I know SPF has it's weaknesses, but it can't hurt to try. Can it?

I said "Good day, sir!"

eventful

Posted on March 14th, 2006 by dandavis

eventful.com is a cool service that… well, here, let me plagiarize Wil Wheaton:

Eventful is a service similar to Upcoming.org, which allows you to find out when an artist or event you dig is coming to a venue near you. What sets Eventful apart is a spiffy feature that allows people to let artists, authors, flaming-moe-jugglers and actors turned bloggers turned writers that there is a demand for them to appear in your hometown.

what is orkut?

Posted on March 3rd, 2006 by dandavis

I have, quite obviously, been out of it. What is orkut? I mean, what is it beyond its wikipedia entry? All I know is that it is about social networking and it is invite only. I want an invite. Send me an invite and get your site linked on the right-hand side of this site. If getting linked doesn't tempt you, I would be more than happy to pass all rights and privileges to the EasyEat Banana Handle ™ to you. Just invite me and make it quick.

tagging is cool

Posted on January 11th, 2006 by dandavis

Tags are cool. Tagging items is cool. Just take a look at the coolness that is de.icio.us, Technorati and flickr. Tags all over the place!

Now, it's time to make some money with tags… 1000tags.com is the first commercial implementation of a tag cloud. The only thing I don't like about 1000tags.com is that I didn't think of it first. Good luck guys.

did the upgrade go as planned?

Posted on December 31st, 2005 by dandavis

Only time will tell, but it seems that the upgrade to WordPress 2.0 went off without a hitch! Let me know if you find any bugs up in here.

fun with php and jpgraph

Posted on December 23rd, 2005 by dandavis

In a previous post about my weight loss (currently down 78lbs), I included a graph from the PC version of FitDay. Taking a screenshot of the graph and uploading it to the blog was enough of a pain that I didn't want to do it all that often… but I wanted something on the site that was updated fairly regularly…

And, with that weight tracker 0.1 was born! It still needs some work, but it's a good start in my opinion. One thing it still needs is a way to produce thumbnails of the graph to put in posts. I'm off from work for the next week, so stay tuned!

For those interested in specifics, I used JpGraph to do the dirty work. Pretty nice library with a buttload of flexibility. Once I get it all figured out, expect to see lots upgrades to weight tracker 0.1.

Next Page »