Paul's Blog

It's already January of 2007, and I have yet to see someone who has created a "Chapter Tool" for Podcasts (basically, for iTunes/iPod users) that runs on Windows. I'm truly confused by this. I mean, a company comes up with a thread of some thought of an idea, and in three days some code-junkie has this thing written, running, and selling it; only to have it cracked in another two hours! So, what's the hold up on the Chapter Tool for Windows?

I haven't done my own Podcast in a while, but I host a site for kids to do their own Podcasts. I would love to be able to tell them how to have their Podcasts produced like a pro, but unless you have a Mac (which most of them don't), they can't do this cool thing to their 'casts.

Now, of all of the great podcasting (and total tech-junkies) out there, Kevin and James should have stumbled on this by now. ;) I've seen specs on Wikipedia for how the format looks, but seriously, I'm not going to painfully hand-code XML and sliding through my audio files to find index times for each chapter. Even MAKE magazine hasn't gotten this worked out in a software form.

By now, I would have thought that the great Sony would have managed to include this simple feature into their ACID 6.0 product as an update. I just downloaded the latest version (6.0d) and it doesn't seem to support it, yet. Maybe they're a little behind with this, or maybe they're coming up with their own BetaMax version of it, or something... I don't know. The truth is, this should be a simple, free, tool for people to use to create their Podcasts with chapter indexes. Like an add-on for Audacity or something.

I've been following this issue for something like 15 months and I haven't seen anything, yet. Maybe I'm just not that good at "the Google," or I'm too impatient to sift through the five-hundred-million results, but I'm coming up empty.

So, if anyone is out there reading this... Clue me in!

As if you weren't being bombarded enough during the holidays. Spammers have invented even more interesting ways to find their way into your mailbox. It's not enough to just send you an email message anymore, now they've got SPAM with images in them. Sure, they even look like other messages you've received and even you can't figure out why your SPAM Protection didn't pick it up.

The reason why nothing caught it was because image spam is a technique where the spam message consists of an image and a small amount of text that looks like a text-based message. While all image spam messages may look the same to your eyes, spammers employ techniques to automatically create each image to have slightly different coloration, speckle patterns, or fonts. This causes messages to appear unique when received and processed by spam filters.

So, what do we do about image spam? Well, you can check out BorderWare's MXtreme! They have a neat little solution to help solve your image spam problems. They've developed a product called Intercept Image Analysis.

Intercept Image Analysis inspects over thirty attributes about each image, including positions and relationships to other message characteristics. It's designed to adapt and learn about new image spam campaigns and to defeat known and emerging spam threats including:

• Word salads used to defeat content filters


• Randomization and speckling used to evade bulk detection and fingerprinting


• Tiling and splicing and animated GIF images used to confuse OCR

Here's an interesting idea: You make a logo for your company. OK, maybe that's not that interesting. How about you make that logo changes based on the state of your company? Now THAT'S interesting!

That's exactly what Michael Schmitz' thesis and presentation theorized at the UDK digital media class. See, this guy has a history of mashing up different kinds of technology, biology, graphics design and all kinds of cool stuff; like he did for his example fonts called "GenoTyp." But this time he took the idea farther (or maybe just in a different direction).


Looking for a suitable design solution, Mika soon learned cellular automata, especially Conway's famous Game of Life, subject of many art pieces. His software basically follows the same rules in creating a dynamic logo for MPI-CBG in time, but the parameters are coupled to certain factors: number of employees = density, funding = speed, number of publications = activity. Different logos are being "bred" and then picked by fitness in relation to the parameters or voted for by the employees. Thus, everytime the logo is displayed on a website as an animated icon or printed out on a letter, it reflects the current state of the lab as a living organism.


How cool is that? Imagine if you used your face as the starting point for the drawing? Either way, I think this particular piece of technology meets art meets Geo-life will be inspiring to other ideas, going forward. in and of itself, I don't imagine this idea will "stick" but I believe the thinking behind it will someday prove benficial in some way.

[Via: WMMNA]

There are so many fun things out there on the web. There are those great MeMes that everyone does, there are phone blogs, text blogs, and journals that teens love. Why not spice up your pages with a little fun? Who doesn't like to hear the sound of their own voice, right?

Well, if you want to say something witty, stupid, or just silly, you can make a recording with something and post it. But what if you want to actually change the sound of your voice and add some neat effects? Maybe you're like me and don't actually LIKE the sound of your spoken voice. ... or maybe I'm a liar and do my own podcast and don't mind hearing myself talk? Either way, why not check out this fun little toy for that MySpace generation: The RAZZ Mixer.

Jia Li, a mathematician at Pennsylvania State University, in State College, who created a piece of software with colleague James Wang, a member of the College of Information Sciences and Technology, have started to find a way for pictures to be tagged by computers.

The new software, called ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures), uses a combination of statistical techniques to process an image and assign it a batch of 15 words, arranged in order of perceived relevance. These words may refer to a specific object within the picture, such as a "person" or "car," or to a more general theme, such as "outdoors" or "manmade."

"Recognizing what an image is about semantically is one of the most difficult problems in AI," says Jia Li. "Objects in the real world are 3-D," Li explains. "When showing up in an image, they can vary vastly in color, shape, gesture, size, and position, and a computer usually has no prior knowledge about the variations."

ALIPR analyses an image pixel by pixel and applies a novel statistical method to calculate the probability that a particular word may describe its content. This involves examining the distribution of color and texture within the image and comparing these features with a stored database of words and images. Li and Wang trained their program using a commercial database containing around 50,000 images that had already been tagged.

Recently, they tested ALIPR on 5,411 previously unseen images available on the popular picture-sharing site Flickr. For 51 percent of these images, the first word generated by ALIPR appeared in users' tags. The program also produced at least one accurate word 98 percent of the time. The researchers employed images made publicly accessible by Flickr users, which were also openly accessible through Flickr's own Application Programming Interface.

[Via: Technology Review]

If you have Windows Media Center Edition, and you still have an iTunes library 'cause you like your iPod, and don't have one of those fancy PlaysForSure devices, wouldn't you like to be able to hear your DRM'd material through WMCE? Of course you would! Enter MCETunes!

So, what is this MCE Tunes, of which you speak? Well, MCE Tunes is a special plug-in developed exclusively for Microsoft Windows Media center which enables it to play iTunes music (m4a and m4p) files right from the easy-to-use Media Center music navigation interface. Now you're asking: is this legal? Absolutely! MCE Tunes does not "decrypt" any iTunes music and is 100% legal. Your PC must be authorized to play all protected music before you can use MCE Tunes.

Over the years, there have been a number of amazing improvements to the gaming genre of commercial game play. I am constantly astounded by the quality of graphics, sound, and manuverability of the characters and their functions. Sometimes, however, the gameplay itself isn't all that interesting, but the rest of the package makes the game amusing.

Most recently, I've become interested in games that were out of the genre that I had orginally enjoyed so many years ago. Prior to the past six to eight months, I often preferred first-person-shooters, flying, or driving games. This would range anywhere from playing GT3/4 on the PS/2 to playing Doom or CounterStrike (both of which I stunk at) on my PC. In the days of yore, I would play Galaxian, Galaga, and Missle Command.... or even F3 (an early Microsoft action flying/shoot-em-up game for Windows).

My more recent attentions have been turned towards Role Playing games. I was never a fan of these Fantasy play games before this year, really. I didn't mind "adventure" games (can you say "Zork?"), but MMORPG games didn't really get my attention until recently. I am now, sadly, hooked. I had gotten a demo of "Guild Wars" a while back and started playing it and thought it was great fun. Then, the Factions add-on, now... I'm fooling with the latest Nightfall "preview" this weekend. Other than that I made the horrible mistake of trying out Warcraft, and have decided that it should - indeed - be called "WarCrack." I'm hooked on this game, even though I've only played a few actual hours and am only a level 9 undead Warrior (I know, all the kids are laughing at me).

Truth be told, these games are fantastic transportations of imagination and finely crafted worlds with economy, community, and friendships. I'm totally amazed at how vast these worlds are and how much there is to do and learn. The beauty of the graphics and the soundtracks are definitely something which immerse you and make the game expand around you. If you're lucky enough to have a Surround Sound System set up with your game PC, you'll likely feel like you're in the middle of the action, for sure.

I guess what I'm saying is, take if from someone who never got into these types of games, you'll love them and you should check them out. They're something that can make you feel like doing something with your brain and not just staring at your TV or wasting time surfing blogs on the web. ;)

As of late, there has been so much talk of cellphones, mp3 players, betas of software for which we will be charged insane amounts of money when they are released, and (of course) the constant speculation of what Apple and Google are going to do next.

Well, it's refreshing to see that sometimes something new shows up. I've seen some similar ideas, but these techies at MIT really pulled it off. Check out the coolness at YouOS. Basically, you have a pretty full Operating System environment that runs completely in a browser. Whoa! After you start using tools like Google's online spreadsheet (in a "sub-browser" browser window) you'll be on your way! ... now if only Microsoft would cleanly create "Office Live" so it doesn't try to install 400MB of stuff to my harddisk and still call it a browser based version of Office. ;)

Via: [ UberGizmo]