Google of Shapes & Images

PixLogic Inc. has released a tool, called PiXserve that enables searching & mining for pictures, shapes, and images that, in some manner, are similar to a given images.

Its features include automatic image segmentation, image normalization so that 2 or more similar, but not identical, images can be rationally compared, and image contextualization, i.e. the ability to use context to understand what is in the image, rationalize its contents and deal with the missing or incomplete information implied by an image.

There is also a piXsearch SDK .

An application of these tools, specially the SDK, is in the PLM arena. Specifically one can envision using the SDK to perform detaining on the CAD & CAM drawings that are deposited in such PLM tools as TeamCenter Enterprise, TeamCenter Engineering or similar tools from CATIA and others.

One can perform this type of shape data mining in conjunction with data mining on BOM (E-BOM), warranty data, and plant data etc. Thus one could pose & find answers to questions such as "Which designs have caused me the most warranty costs and in which plants have they been manufactured?" Currently we cannot answer such questions.

Java Security Issues

Fortify, which markets source-code analysis technology, has access to a large database of common Java programming errors and vulnerabilities, has used FindBugs, a static analysis tool that looks for bugs in Java code, to look over code in open-source projects such as Apache, Azureus and Tomcat.

What Fortify has found is that the defect density of open-source code is quite large. For example, Net Trust (a Google project to create a security mechanism for simple single sign-on and authentication), had an estimated 12.215 errors per 1,000 lines of code.

And here is another example; an XSS vulnerability, from these lines of Sun's instructions:

try

{

firstname = request.getParameter("firstname");

}

catch (Exception e)

{

e.printStackTrace();

}

userName = firstname;
...
pw.print(" Thanks for your feedback, " + userName + "!");

The code expects that a user has entered a name like this: "Bob". An attacker could set it up so that the data looks like this:


{script}sendDataToMotherShip(){/script}


(I have replaced ">" & "<" with "}" and "{" to render the script.) Then the victim's browser would execute a function named sendDataToMotherShip().

A secure version of the server-side code, would check input to make sure that it only contains an expected set of characters and no executable scripts.

The report may be found @ http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2006/coreenterprise/TS-1660.pdf

There are 2 short recent articles on eWeek on this subject as well:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2128071,00.asp

and

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2115638,00.asp

Check them out!

The strangest monuments of the world

Kharkov , Ukraine



Melbourne , Australia



Berlin , Germany



Russia



Shanghai , China



Santa Fe , New Mexico



Brussels , Belgium



Manhattan , USA



Los Angeles , USA



Salzburg , Austria



Bratislava , Slovakia



Amsterdam , the Netherlands



Amsterdam , the Netherlands



Brussels , Belgium





Oslo , Norway



Seattle , USA




Melbourne , Australia




Paris , France





Stockholm , Sweden

Chapel Programming Language

Learn all about the new programming language for parallel programming @ http://chapel.cs.washington.edu/

Java Memoery Leaks

There are 2 articles on the topic of Java memory leaks by Gregg Sporar & A. Sundararajan in the April and May 2007 issues of the Software Test and Performance magazine which are definitely worth reading.

The authors, both with Sun Microsystems, explain the sources of possible memory leaks in Java applications and discuss a variety of tools for tracking and resolving them.

The articles are titled:

1. "Baffled By Brain Drain in Your Java Apps?" which appeared in the April 2007 issue
2. And, "It's Not Just the Younger Generations" which appeared in the May2007 issue

How to Draw Like Mondrian

This is a site that enables one to generate images that look like they could have been painted by Piet Mondrian. Check it out @ http://www.ptank.com/mondrian/

The idea behind this is to derive & extract the rules that define a painter's style and then to encode those (production) rules in a computer program. Learn more about this approach - called Shape Grammar, @ http://www.iaaa.nl/cursusAA&AI/stiny.html

2006 Visualization Images

From the Science magazine: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/313/5794/1730.pdf

Free Image Analysis Book

There is a free book titled "From Gestalt Theory to Image Analysis" @ http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/map5/publis/PUBLIS06/2006-9.pdf

HipBone Tools and HipBone Analytics

Charles Cameron has come up with a set of tools and techniques for mapping of concepts and knowledge presentation. Learn more @

http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/

and

http://www.beadgaming.com/Project.html

and

http://www.beadgaming.com/hipdocs/02mapping.pdf

and

http://www.beadgaming.com/hipdocs/07analytics.pdf

and

http://www.beadgaming.com/hipdocs/08Hawali.pdf


Although he seems to be mostly interested in conflict resolution, I am struck by his approach that invokes the "Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse.

DARPA Game World

DARPA is looking for proposals @ http://www.zyn.com/sbir/sbres/sbir/dod/darpa/darpa072-012.htm

Who's Next?

The Who guitarist and song-writer Peter Townshend has unveiled an Internet-based software program called Lifehouse Method that enables anyone, in combination with a voice recording and a rhythm input into a microphone, to create personalized digital music.

The site is @ www.lifehouse-method.com and is free for 3 months starting on 05/01/2007.

Under the Hood

If you are like me and are interested in how electronic products work, then the following site @ http://www.techonline.com/product/underthehood/ is for you.

The site takes some of today's most popular products and tears down the technologies, techniques, components, and design decisions that were made to make successful products.

Check out the video tear down of the Toyota Prius!

The World's Largest Cylindrical Aquarium

Placed at the lobby of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Berlin, the 25 meters high AquaDom is the largest cylindrical aquarium ever built. Filled with about 900,000 liters of seawater, it contains some 2600 fish of 56 species.


Combined with a vast amount of sandblasted glass, the giant AquaDom gives a transparent-like feeling to the lobby. Guests and visitors are able to travel through the aquarium in a glass-enclosed elevator to reach a sightseeing point and restaurant under the glass roof. Two full-time divers are responsible for the care and feeding of the fish and maintenance of the aquarium. Some of the interior rooms and suites look out over the atrium, offering "ocean views" of the AquaDom.


Construction


The AquaDom was opened in December 2003. It cost about 12.8 million euros. The acrylic glass cylinder was constructed by the U.S. company Reynolds Polymer Technology. The outside cylinder was manufactured on-site from four pieces; the inside cylinder for the elevator was delivered in one piece. The Aquadom is the largest acrylic glass cylinder in the world, with a diameter of over 11 meters, built on a 9 meters tall concrete foundation.

D programming Language

The "D" programming language, a derivative of C++ with the addition of automatic garbage collection, strings as classes, re-sizable arrays, delegates with closure, string-based switches, interfaces, nested and inner classes, support for all of C99 data types, and a default 80-bit floating point data type.

Its creator, Walter Bright, is the creator of Datalight compiler, Zortech C++ compiler, and Visual Café Java compiler.

After "C" and "C++", "D" is the fastest language around if you accpet the results posted @
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4.


It is available free @ http://www.digitalmars.com/.

There is also a "D" front-end to GCC which is available @ www.sourceforge.net/projects/dgcc.

Tiobe.com

Check out the Web site http://www.tiobe.com that keeps track of the relative standing of more than 150 programming languages but also indicates their relative growth or decline over the years.

Books on Database Development

Two useful books on database development:

"Refactoring Databases" by Scott Ambler & Pramod Sadlage which applies to databses the refactoring approach that has been applied to coding,

and

"Agile Database Techniques" by Scott Ambler which brings database development into the unit-tested approach of 21-th century.

PS3 for Protein Folding Simulations

Distributed computing operation http://folding.stanford.edu/, a hugely popular molecular simulation project, has developed a client version for Sony Playstation 3 console. Learn more @ http://folding.stanford.edu/news.html and
http://www.rdmag.com/ShowPR.aspx?PUBCODE=014&ACCT=1400000100&ISSUE=0704&RELTYPE=DMA&PRODCODE=00000000&PRODLETT=U