Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Shadow Illuminator: From Robotics to Photography -- and to Howard. Vladimir Brajovic is a robotics researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. His goal is to give a better vision sense to robots. But in an unexpected side-effect, he developed a smart system to automatically enhance underexposed photos. The result, the Shadow Illuminator, is quite convincing. Shadow Illuminator examines the content of a photograph, estimates the illumination conditions and then brightens shadows. It also enhances details within the shadow. You can upload your pictures on the free website and see how they can be enhanced. This overview contains more details, references and an example of a picture before and after automatic processing. I tried the service with a photograph of Howard taken by BusinessWeek back in August. Here is an original picture scanned from the magazine (Credit: BusinessWeek). Now, you can see how Shadow Illuminator enhanced Howard's photo (Credit: BusinessWeek and Shadow Illuminator™). What do you think of the result? [Smart Mobs] 11:37:07 AM

My experience with Total Choice Hosting. Last month, I asked for help in evaluating a new webhost. I was paying $25/month to Verio for what I felt was sub-par service. Thanks to several recommendations in the comments (and in a few private e-mails), I ended up going with TotalChoiceHosting. First off, the price: $4/month, with a free month if you pre-pay for a year. Just like that, I’d reduced my yearly hosting costs by nearly 90% — to just $44. For a year of hosting. But it’s not just about price: by moving to TCH, I increased my disk space (from 250 megs to 300 megs), increased my bandwidth allowance, and most importantly, picked up mySQL support and PHP support. At TCH, I was able to convert Movable Type to a mySQL back-end, resulting in performance improvements of (I’m guessing here) 50-70%. (As a result of the PHP and mySQL support, I’ve also started installing some other applications, which I’ll discuss here shortly.) And there’s more: TCH includes unlimited mailing lists as part of your $4/month. TCH uses MailMan, a superb open-source mailing list application which includes web-based admin and web-based archives. TCH also gave me superior control over my domain. TCH uses cPanel, a web-based front end to server administration. In addition to easy administration, it adds the ability to run cron jobs which can automate the periodic execution of programs without any personal intervention. As if all of this weren’t enough, TCH also includes (at no additional charge) SpamAssassin — which lets me run server-side spam filtering on all e-mail coming into rklau.com. End result? 98% of all spam destined for my mailbox gets caught at the server and stored in a server-based folder that I can then use IMAP to access when I want to periodically review spam to ensure there are no false positives. To say I’m happy with my transition to TCH would be an understatement. By rick@rklau.com (Rick Klau). [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 9:40:16 AM