Crazy little planet called Earth

I’m currently in a “blogging holiday mode”. End of semesters are killing and I’m not well . So posts will be rare for some time. Hopefully in about 2-3 weeks I’ll go back to normal.

In one of my previous posts I was talking about the demise of Microsoft. In fact, more than the demise of Microsoft, it’s the demise of dektop applications. Let’s consider the 3 most important things  people do on a PC (we’ll exclude things like chat which is already web-based).

1. Office Apps.

This is i think what most people use their PC for these days – writing documents and doing exel jobs. With Google Docs, this can be done online. Yet can we completely replace Ms Word or its OpenOffice counter-part by Google Word. In 75% of cases, i’d say yes but when massive documents need to be written, having the full functionality of Word does help.

Also, i’ve still not seen the equivalent of a presentation software available in Web 2.0 for now. So there’s scope for more work.

2. Play games

This comes right next to writing documents.  Minesweeper, Solitaire,… have their counterpart on the web and there are millions more. What is not available is 3D games that people play. World of Warcraft is played on the web but still requires a quite big desktop client. So still need a good PC for that.

3. Multimedia

Despite having a lot of bandwidth these days, people still can’t watch DVD quality movies on the web whenever they feel like it. The best alternative is still to have your movies or your music stored on your hard disk. internet radios are coming but in Mauritius at least, it’s best to listen to your MP3 locally.

So it seems that the demise of the PC is not for tomorrow. Microsoft has a lot of good years ahead of it and for programmers, it also means that there are lots of Ajax applications waiting to be developped; e.g. manipulating photos online, online drawing packages and other geeky stuff that would look like Google earth. So let’s get top work n why not make some money out of them

I like watching anime and I’ve seen quite a few since the last two years. I now even know some Japanese words other than “aligoto”,”katana” and “Sayonara” (hope I got the spelling somewhat right).

But I’ve also started to notice some stereotypes; in most anime you are likely to find a clueless boy, some very cute girl,… the rest is below.

The cute Japanese girl:

• large twinkling eyes – they have large shiny eyes (u could lose yourself in there – they are so vast). Just look at Rukia’s eyes in Bleach!

• big boobs – in most if not all the anime (and I do not mean hentai here), there’s bound to be at least one girl having rather big boobs (Inoue and a Matsumoto in Bleach, Tsunade in Naruto, Seras Victoria in Hellsing, …)

• wearing mini-skirt / school uniform – this seems to be a Japanese fantasy I guess. Many anime characters will be wearing short skirts all the time (e.g. Seras Victoria in Hellsing, the girls doing sports in High school, Faye Valentine in Cowboy Bebop,… )

The nice Japanese woman:

• character – most of the women are shy and very reserved, they even tend to have a motherly appearance (landlady in chobits)

• very feminine voice – the voices are very soft and gentle,even too much at times
• dressing – compared to the teenage girl who seem to be always wearing mini-skirts, the Japanese woman is always very “properly” dressed in long skirts (Koaru in Kenshin)

The guy:

• cluless – he’s very of going to be clueless about girls, it seems that this is the first time that he has met one and he rarely notices the girl who is absolutely mad about him (Gundam, Love Hina,…)
• hair colour – very often, the colour of the hair is going to be orange rather than the traditional black Japanese hair. (Naruto, Ichigo, Kenshin, The fullmetal alchemist,…)
• the fighter : “fighting and never give up” – this is the same for Naruto and Ichigo; compared to other who use very flashy and elaborate fighting techinque, these two rely mostly on their perseverance and in the end they succeed. It’s very often like an ode to hard work. Same applies to Gatsu in Berserk. Inuyasha is not too far from that too; he’s a hanyou and compared to his brother, u’d think he’d lose but no. Perseverance gets him where he wants.

• the super cool guy – some characters seem to have a super human abilities and are always calm (or super aloof) under any circumstances. They just seem to regard all the others with a degree of “disdain”. Byakuka in Bleach is the classical exaxmple; even his technique is super classy – cherry blossoms.
• the Ugly duckling syndrome – have u noticed, a lot of the heroes have a “sad” background? Naruto is an orphan who was always alone as a kid, Yoh of Shaman King has had no friends before Manta,… – this is the classical orphan tale who was all alone as a kid and who was always looked down upon but later grows up to be a hero. However, his past is still following him and whever this is brought back u’d want to cry on hearing their story!
• the pervert (thanks al) – indeed perverts seem to be quite common in Anime. Usually it’s not like they are perverts and that’s all; they are skilled (usually very skilled) but they have one major weakness – women and they will do all sorts of stupid yet hilarious things to reach their ends. Some classical examples are: Nicky Larson (who gets his trademark hit on the head by his secretary Laura), Jiraiya from Naruto – one of the strongest ninja who writes adult books in his spare time and even Miroku in Inuyasha – he can’t resist putting his hand on Sango’s …

• the sidekicks (thx Ironfist) – they are those who you can’t even remember their name and thier only role seems to be make us laugh or take a beating. In bleach, there’s Ichigo’s classmate and some vice-captains, in Gundam – the robots that are just there to take a beating and show how other gundams are superior,…

Also they all have large eyes – this is rather strange I think coz Japanese have small eyes (I don’t mean anything bad by this but this is just quoting a fact) and all the characters have large big eyes that are shiny.

For all mentionned above, I mostky do not have any idea why this is so. Perhaps someone from Japan or someone who knows more about anime can shed some light on this.

You won’t find me writing a lot about football; I prefer playing it that watching it. Yet I think that what just happened in the Champion’s league, with 3 British clubs in the semi  finals is really awesome. So to celebrate that, the lyrics of the 3 clubs oops 3 lions:

Three Lions 98

We still believe, we still believe
We still believe, we still believe
It’s coming home, it’s coming home
It’s coming, Football’s coming home
It’s coming home, it’s coming home
It’s coming, Football’s coming home
Tears for heroes dressed in grey
No plans for final day
Stay in bed, drift away
It could have been all
Songs in the street
It was nearly complete
It was nearly so sweet
And now I’m singing
Three lions on a shirt
Jules Rimmet still gleaming
No more years of hurt
No more need for dreaming
Talk about football coming home
And then one night in Rome
We were strong, we had grown
And now I see Ince ready for war
Gazza good as before
Shearer certain to score
And Psycho screaming
Three lions on a shirt
Jules Rimmet still gleaming
No more years of hurt
No more need for dreaming
We can dance Nobby’s dance
We could dance it in France
It’s coming home, it’s coming home
It’s coming, Football’s coming home

Yet the song should be revamped a bit but I’ll leave that to the DJs.

You must have heard of it. Paul Graham recently wrote an article on microsoft entitled “Microsoft is dead“. But is it?

On the web, Microsoft is inexistant, apart from My Space (don’t remember it’s name exactly), it’s invisible and all the major breakthroughs are now done through the internet with Web 2.0. Yet, the beast is not dead yet; it rules over the kingdom of desktops and it’s not tomorrow that Linux or MAC is going to force it to retire.

The question is: Does Microsoft has an Internet strategy or is it content to rule desktops? Let’s face it, the day Microsoft decides to make the web its hunting ground, it will draw a massive amount of money and buy a few companies and it will be on the heels of its competitors.

Yet, a big difference is there if you compare Apple, Google and Microsoft. Who is in charge of these companies? For Apple and Google, it’s tech guys while Steve Ballmer is a businessman! No doubt Steve has flair for good business but is it all that’s needed in the World of IT?

“Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.” - http://www.opensource.org/

Some 20 years back, who would have thought that such a system would work. We are beyond any doubt in a Capitalist world where competiton is rife and James Bond spies for big companies. Trade secrets are worth millions and companies don’t spare anything to protect them – the survival of their companies depend on that!

Yet in the software industry, the buzzword is opensource where everything is free – it sounds more like a  some hippie movement of the 70’s advocation peace and love or communism where everything is shared. But stragely it works!

Firefox is opensource and is perhaps the best browser out there, Linux is opensource and most webservers in the world run on that (inlcuding most probably google), Midiawiki onto which Wikipedia is built is opensource. Open Office is totally free and is nearly as good as Ms Office.

All this differs a lot from what the software giant Microsoft is advocating – yet even microsoft has an open-source lab at its headquarters where it runs linux, apache,… . The main advantage of opensource is that it is developed by people who are enthusiastic about software development. They have a problem, don’t find any software that is good enough to solve their problem so they create their own – and when they do that, they have really created a software that solves a problem, not some generics which Microsoft hads to propose to suit everyone.

And all that is free, totally free and essentially you can have a complete computer system and pay nothing for the software, not a single penny to Microsoft.

Image search on the internet relies mostly on text – in other words, when you make a query in Google Image search, the engine does not know what the image is about, but it relies on caption (human tagging – manual assignment of meta-data), key words close to the image.

Up to now this is the best that we have and it is reasonably good but we must admit that it is not perfect. So as I have a keen interest in Computer Vision, the question i’m asking is how can we improve on that?

The answer to that seems to lie in the realm of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. For example, how do you know that the top image of my Blog theme is about a bridge, fog and trees and most likely the season is autumn? Can a new born know about that? Well no! You can recognise a tree because you have been told that this is a tree.

So what we need is an engine that is trained to recognise objects around it. Educating a child is fun but teaching a machine is boring so how can we automate the process of machine learning. In most Computer Vision systems, we would be stuck but with Image search engines, we might be luckier.

How? By using Internet users to train our engine.

An image engine could be made smarter so that it learns from users clicks. For example, suppose I make a Google image search on swimming I will get images of people swimming, swimming pools,… but I’m not interested in swimming pools and I will not click on these but will click on images of people swimming. That could be used to automatically train an image engine, the more clicks obtained, the more relevant the image is to the keyword and eventually it is tagged to swimming. Yet, the system is not perfect, if there’s a beautiful girl in swimsuit, what r the odds that it will be clicked on though unrelated?

The next step would be for the system to automatically recognise other images that are similar and automatically tag them to swimming. This is more complex as typically a swimming image is likely to contain water + swimmer. So the engine should eventually recognise water and swimmer as two other components in the image. Again these can be done through user-click tagging but eventually the user-click tagging weight associated to water will be less than that associated to swimming – engine will thus know that this image is more related to swimming than to water but still linked to water. Through segmentation techniques, the engine can learn that there are only 2 components in the image (water + swimmer) and through a system of synonyms water can be made equal (roughly) to sea. In the end, we might have an intelligent engine who knows about things of the world.

“Many” people seem to watch anime in Mauritius these days – at least more than i expect  -; the shops selling anime are usually very crowded. So isn’t it time to set up an anime society?

The aim of this society should not be to exchange anime – it’s not an anime exchange society I’m interested in. Rather, it should allow people who are interested in anime to meet up regularly and talk about some anime they saw (for example, if anyone has seen The Melancholy of of  Haruhi Suzumiya – I’d like to get some views on that) and also anime can be projected and members will then be invited to comment on them; the quality of the drawings, the story,…

This should be an interesting society.