The Null Device
2001/10/31
Sick of pop-up ads and other nastiness? Well, if you use Mozilla, here's how to switch off JavaScript "features" on a site-by-site basis. This is not in the UI yet, either because they haven't gotten around to doing it, or because they've snuck it in under AOL's nose.
Now this is doovy: Image Analogies. In short, some researchers have found a way of generating an image that differs from another image in the same way as two other images differ. This can be used for synthesising additional detail in low-resolution images, applying image-processing effects by example (i.e., turning photographs into drawings or oil paintings), or even making pseudo-realistic scenes from simple drawings. In fact, someone has even used it for turning maps into "aerial photographs" for flight simulation. (via Satisfaction Refunded)
Upcoming live music: on Monday (Cup Eve), singer-songwriter Sally Russell aka New Buffalo will be launching her gorgeous recent EP About Last Night at Revolver, alongside labelmates' Cut Copy's I Thought Of Numbers. It should be well worth seeing.
I've been getting into MacOS X programming a little lately (Cocoa is a really nice toolkit, and ProjectBuilder/InterfaceBuilder are also excellent to work with), and to hone my skills, have written a toy drum machine program. Note: it's fairly basic, not particularly useful, and probably only of interest to MacOS X hackers (not least because there are no pre-compiled binaries).
A reasonably interesting piece about Linux kernel improvements, some of the changes in recent kernels and some of the spats and personality politics on the insanely high-volume linux-kernel mailing list. If you've ever wondered how exactly the latest kernel you just shlepped home on a ZIP disk and compiled up differed from the one you had before it, this could be interesting. Anyway, it's good to know that, at least in Linux kernels, there is such a thing as progress.
We Have Control of the Mind: Given that the USA is about to harness its advertising industry to the Middle Eastern war effort, and some months ago, some pundit suggested that developing behaviour-modifying nanobots may be the most effective way to get rid of the Middle East's resentment of America, I have been thinking about how such schemes could possibly work, and have come up with some ideas for possible nanotechnological solutions to anti-American sentiment.