Geekblok

More and more tools are ported to the web. It all got started with e-mail (think hotmail), being thrown into a web interface. After that, instant messengers were ported (think meebo“) and not much later we’ve seen entire webbased Office Suites (think: zoho).

Now we see rapid development in the graphics area. An eye-pleasing example is Splashup. This tool/website looks very much like GIMP/Photoshop and it works fairly well (even running it in Firefox on a Linux system). With splashup, you can open files from your own PC (upload), Flickr, Facebook, Picasa or any webserver. Then you can edit the pictures from within your browser and upload them back, or download them to your machine.

It’s awesome to see a tool that allows you to work with layers and let you open multiple files at once. The tool, of course, can be improved (make a selection, use the Paint Bucket on that selection and see that the entire layer is colored…), but it’s fairly impressing already.

Definitely worth keeping an eye on!

While I am studying for my RHCE certification I was reading about the Linux audit system. It is a real interesting subject and I am likely to write a small guide on that.

From the audit homepage there is a link to the article about audit log visualization of Steve Grubb. I was amazed of the simpleness of the code he uses for visualization of data. It apears that the code he uses is based upon the graphviz project. I didn’t know about the graphviz project, but it seems superb. I will get back on this subject in a later article. Now back to the study.

ImproveYourImages.com is a simple looking website that can improve your images (hence the domain name, I figure). The three examples tell us that you can

# Restore true original colors
# Correct color temperature

# Adjust poor lighting

Especially the last one looks interesting to a bad photographer like me, so let’s test our own images on this!

Read more »

Face recognition is a thing I always look at in awe. Usually, the demos are fairly smart and promising. But now, we can even try things ourselves!

MyHeritage offers a demo in which you can upload photos of yourself (or others). After uploading, the website will try to find a celebrity that looks like you. But, of course, the best way to test this system is to upload celebrity photos and see if they match!

I’ve uploaded a few, starting with a tricky one I thought (the website most likely belonging to a US-based company): Vladimir Putin. The result was actually right on spot!

As some of you might know, there is interesting Exif header information in most of the jpeg images. On a unixlike system this information can be extracted from the original using jhead.

bq. $ jhead dsc02985.jpg
File name : dsc02985.jpg

File size : 1546562 bytes

File date : 2006:01:18 09:49:24

Camera make : SONY

Camera model : CYBERSHOT

Date/Time : 2002:07:06 14:18:37

Resolution : 2240 × 1680

Flash used : No

Focal length : 7.1mm

Exposure time: 0.0024 s (1/410)

Aperture : f/4.0

ISO equiv. : 100

Exposure : LandscapeMode

As can be seen I took this picture with my Sony Cybershot camera. Not too interesting. Another feature of jhead is that one can also extract thumbnails from the Exif header.

Read more »