dimator | head

Say what you want about Microsoft, but if you just watch a few videos from Channel9 (despite the douche bag filming them), you can’t help but respect the developers and staff making products happen. Take a look at Julie Larson-Green showing off Office 12. Smart, smart people, with good ideas. When I watch something like this, it makes it clear that Office is light years ahead of any other office suite. OSS might be able to catch up with browser software, server software, etc., but Office is untouchable and looks to remain that way.

Incidentally, if you have ever asked yourself “I wonder who is the hottest person in the world that knows what a buffer overrun is?”, I think I have your answer.

What are we supposed to do with all of these aging consoles? With the next next generation around the corner, I’m stuck with a GameCube and a PS2. The PS2 still has some life, but the GC has been mostly untouched for 6 months. I don’t think ditching them on eBay is good, because they won’t get much money. I can’t picture throwing them out, either.

There is some decent horsepower in each of these, so maybe Linux is the answer. There is this for the GC, and I own the PS2 Linux kit, released a few years ago. But other than having two more machines on my network, I really don’t see a point. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to actually develop games for these platforms. But doing so would take time, and with the extreme shortage of time I already deal with, realistically, these old machines will end up in a closet for years.

I reckon my comment spam problems are done. SecureImage is a WordPress plugin that presents the would-be commenter with a Captcha before they are allowed the post.

I had to tweak the settings a little bit, because out of the box, it was swirling and distorting the image way too much. (Why do Captcha authors go all out with their image effects? Is it to fool OCR programs? Are the OCR programs really that sophisticated? Are spammers really going through any effort at all to programmatically read or decipher these images?)

I’m no privacy freak, but when it comes to the workplace, I think it’s best to assume all of my internet interactions are being monitored. Well, that sucks. To think that one of my buddies could say something on AIM that would get me fired is ridiculous. Luckily, I found this guide to tunneling AIM traffic over SSH. Now I can chat with confidence and renewed vulgarity.

Wired pointed me to a new online photo service called Riya. It claims to use artificial intelligence to recognize your friends, locations, and signs in pictures, and automatically tags them with the right metadata. I was envisioning such a service just a few days ago.

I understand the pain of tagging. In iPhoto, I started tagging all of my close to 7000 images one day, only to give up after a couple hundred. I’d love to be able to pull up every picture of a sesh, or every picture of a hot girl, but the time it takes to apply the right metadata to 7000 pictures makes it impossible.

I’m not sure how well the Riya client works (the alpha is for Windows+IE6 only, as though this is 2001 or something) but I doubt it could find everything I would want it to find. According to this, it can get pretty much any text in a picture. It would be awesome if you could train it to recognize objects, such as a beer mug, or a hookah.