About Me

I am a physicist by training, financial risk management consultant by day, father by night, and a geek of several kinds.

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Art and design

GumGum

Techcrunch today covered an image licensing platform called GumGum.  I think the idea of per-impression licensing is interesting enough, and it is good someone has step up with a (half) working delivery platform. While this might not suit everybody, it’s great to have the choice. What it will create is a niche area where publishers or content users with specific needs can prosper. For example, if I want to use many randomly rotating images, licensing all of them at the usual flat fee could make it prohibitly expensive, but with GumGum’s fee structure it should costs me similar to showing a single image repeatedly.

GumGum requires content user to embed images as Flash, to enable the system to track their usage. It is not hard to see implementation problems; two came to mind: 

  • Users only able to use images as published, without modification. This is hardly ever the case for me.
  • Performance — The 2 examples in the above TechCrunch articles are already not showing, probably due to the amount of traffic it is getting. As the company only starts with 125k in funding, they will need more soon to keep up level of service.

There will always be a place for conventional players like, iStockPhoto,  which I love. But I hope GumGum can create new economics of image (and other types of content) licensing, which I’m sure innovative peoples can capitalize.

by chris read more

Death and Taxes

Where does US tax dollars go to

Deviant "mibi":http://mibi.deviantart.com/ created this in 2004. (link to original work)

It depicts how the 2004 US federal budget was distributed, with pictures and node size giving visual cues to the size of the pie. This's a brilliant piece of communication. I wish someone would do the same for this country's budget, however distorted the data might be.

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Crocodile's Fiancee

บ่ายวันนี้แวะไป "100 ต้นสน Gallery":http://www.100tonsongallery.com ดูงานแสดงภาพชุด "กลอยใจจระเข้":http://www.100tonsongallery.com/exhibitionsAndActivitiesDetail.asp?exhib... (Crocodile's Fiancée) โดย "ธเนศ อ่าวสินธุ์ศิริ":http://www.100tonsongallery.com/artistsDetail.asp?artistID=46 เป็นภาพสี acrylic บนผ้าใบทั้งชุด

Crocodile's Fiancée

สื่อสารกับภาพไม่ได้เท่าไหร่ แต่ชอบรูปนึงชื่อทิพย์วิมาน (Ambrosia) สูจิบัตรเขียนอธิบายงานไว้ว่า

Crocodile's Fiancée is the worldview which is about human being and his environment, about woman and womanhood embedded in things around us, that have shifted from the world flooded with objects towards the world of balance, serenity, lightness and peace.

กลอยใจจระเข้ เป็นโลกทัศน์ที่อ้างอิงถึง โลก ผู้หญิงและความเป็นเพศหญิง ในสิ่งต่างๆ ที่ขยับจากโลกอันแวดล้อมไปด้วยซากวัตถุ เข้าสู่โลกแห่งความสมดุลที่สะอาด สงบ โปร่งเบา เปี่ยมสันติ

อ่านแล้วนึกย้อนกลับไปก็เข้าใจขึ้นอีกนิดนึง

ป.ล. งานที่แสดงมีอยู่ในห้องห้องเดียว เกือบสิบภาพ ถ้าเป็นห้องนึงในพิพิธภัณฑ์ก็โอเค แต่ขับรถไปเพื่อภาพชุดนี้ชุดเดียวรู้สึกไม่คุ้ม

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Elements of Jobs's Keynotes

Garr Reynolds at "Presentation Zen":http://presentationzen.blogs.com likes Steve Job's keynotes, and highlights what he think are "positive lessons":http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/01/kawasaki_on_ste... we can learn from it. I'm sure most of it are basics for art and design peoples, but still an eye opener for this scientist.

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K2 Port for Drupal

On the last of the 4-day New Year holiday, I got a bit productive and port K2 to Drupal. This work is based on Drupal 4.7 Beta2 codes and was tested only with that version. K2 is nicer than Kubrick in several ways. It's pure CSS and doesn't use any image, its typography more suitable to Drupal's text-rich administative pages, and I like that metadata are moved up to under post titles.

 

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Another Look at 'Fair Use'

[textile]

An uneasy feeling lingers in my mind after posting the 'Entrepreneurism' post. Am I infringing copyrighted work when I post the image? The site clearly states 'All Rights Reserved'. I think the nature of the post is to comment on the site's business, and thus an exercise of fair use. But is it really?

After reading 3 good articles about it, I am still only 80% certain that it was ok. Help?

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Inside Cartoon Characters

[textile]

...and I meant .. literally.

Inside cartoon characters

Just one more irrelevant stuffs before going to bed. :P Of course nobody thinks cartoon characters are anatomically correct, but having the skeletal drawn out certainly creeps me out. I could never look at _Bubbles_ the same way again.

See inside other characters here at Michael Paulus's "gallery.":http://michaelpaulus.com/gallery/character-Skeletons

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A Piece of History

[textile]

The headline on SpreadFirefox.com today is "'10,000 Firefox enthusiasts make history',":http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/8769 and quite rightly. This surely is the biggest gesture to date from the Open Source world. The story has been told so many times and I will not repeat it here. The full-spread ad looks like this

Full spread Firefox advertisement in NYT

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Detecting porn

[textile]

US Patent number "6,751,348 B2":http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6751348 titled "Automated detection of pornographic images" was granted in June this year. I was looking to see if there is a working implementation to try out, but there seems to be none right now. Anyway, if it works as advertised, automatic network monitoring and parental control programs should work much better than now (blocking by domains).

illustration from the patent

Steps to determine if an image is porn:

# Compare each pixel's color with library of skin colours (white/black/etc.)
# If it's single pixel, it's ok. If it's an area of skin color, it's probably skin.
# Using some algorithm to determine if it's a face or not. If it's just face, it's probably portrait, which is ok.
# Determine from the shape which body part(s) is exposed.
# Determine if the post is erotic.

The picture above illustrate the calculation to determine if an area has the texture of skin, or just happen to be in that colour. Basically, if it's _too smooth,_ it probably is _not_ skin.

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The joy of autumn

[textile]

Sensitive Light's "The joy of autumn":http://www.sensitivelight.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_joy_of_autu.php 3-photo set is amazing! Thanks to "Bloglines":http://bloglines.com I am now reading my list of photoblogs again.

(brown)

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