Pito’s Blog

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Yeah I know all the reviews have been raving - “Best movie this year” - “Will change your life” - and so on. I saw this new animated film last night. It did have really wonderful “Star Wars”-class visuals but as an overall story and movie experience, well, it was fine. Not even as good as Toy Story. Sorry.

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If you haven’t seen this and you shoot a lot of digital photos, you will love this product; also seems like a great gift: “Upload photos automatically from your digital camera to your computer and favorite photo site with the world’s first wireless memory card.” See Eye-Fi web site.

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The other day I came across this article in the Boston Globe about one of the greats of Computer Science, Seymour Papert, inventor of the seminal Logo programming language and many other important accomplishments.

“He was long a jewel of the MIT faculty. Now, after a devastating brain injury, mathematician Seymour Papert is struggling bravely to learn again how to think like, speak like, be like the man of genius he was.” (from In Search of a Beautiful Mind, The Boston Globe)

Hard to believe that I hadn’t heard of it before. So Sad. Read the whole article, it’s worthwhile.

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I saw this somewhere and I thought I would share as it seems very useful, yet obscure:

Helpful Tip: To quickly reset your iPhone without wiping anything off it or retethering it to iTunes, hold the volume up button, the home button, and the lock button at the same time. Keep holding it even after the “Slide to Power Off” appears, eventually it will flash totally off and then you’ll get the Apple logo. Let go then.

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The true measure of code quality: WTF’s per minute.

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“The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth — BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next.”

Check it out and watch the BostonDynamics video. Pretty cool and surprising. Your tax dollars at work!

p.s. But a gasoline engine?

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Check out “Forget Photoshop: 15 Online Graphics Generators“:

“Shiny edges, reflections, neat 3D effects - you love them and can’t get enough of them. Well, there’s no reason to spend any time in Photoshop creating them since there are so many tools out there that will do the dirty work for you. Without further ado, here’s a roundup of 15 online Web 2.0 graphics generators.” (from “Forget Photoshop: 15 Online Graphics Generators“)

Read the whole thing!

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I recently saw a Nova episode about Hany Farid about so called “Digital Forensics”, that is how to detect and discover photos manipulated digitally. Here are some useful links if you are interested:

www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/

www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0802/digital-forensics-an-interview-with-dr-hany-farid.html

www.wired.com/gadgets/digitalcameras/news/2007/03/72883

Check out this photo which appeared in all the papers yesterday.

When I saw it, I didn’t think Photoshop, but I did wonder how we knew that this photo had actually been taken in Iran and recently.

It looked like any number of missile launch photos.

But check this out:

“As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo appeared on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.” (from New York Times Blog)

Ouch. Egg on their face.

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How lame and do-nothing can you get when the best you can do is to set a goal to be met in 2050, when probably most of the signatories will be dead and gone? Do you think it has any effect on anything real?

“RUSUTSU, Japan - The Group of Eight leading industrial nations on Tuesday endorsed halving world emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, edging forward in the battle against global warming but stopping short of tough, nearer-term targets.” (from Associated Press)

Lame-o?

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Have you noticed? How frequently I’ve been posting?

I am using WordPress’s ‘post in the future’ feature so in one sitting I can rattle off 6 or 7 posts  and schedule them for publication in the coming days.

Very efficient

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