Sunday, August 9, 2009
Quick user input with Console.ReadKey()
One of the many useful applications of the Console.ReadKey() method of the .net framework is to get a quick input from the user.
By using this method the user is not required to hit the return key to submit the input.
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Friday, June 5, 2009
How to Build a 100-Million-Image Database
arXiv blog has picked our article describing the CoPhIR collection for a short review.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Google similar image search
The future is closer than I thought.
Google has recently published in its lab section a similar image search service.
No details on recipe to build such system have been released, but from the first impression my guess is that some of the ingredients are SIFT, textual context, and inverted lists (in the sense that they are used to index visual similarity properties).
Google labs site indicates Chuck/Charles Rosenberg as one of the engineers that worked on similar image search, his Google bibliography has an interesting article (by Rosenberg, Ting Liu and Henry A. Rowley), Clustering Billions of Images with Large Scale Nearest Neighbor Search, which probably describes another ingredient of the recipe (large scale image clustering).
Two other interesting, and probably related, papers from Googlers (Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing) are PageRank for Product Image Search, and VisualRank: Applying PageRank to Large-Scale Image Search.
What’s the future for MiPai? Become the ingredient of a better recipe!
Why SIFT?
Look at the following search results for the Bill Gates’ mugshot:
The last results show a number partial matches of a cropped, scaled, and moved parts of the original image. This is a kind of match that SIFT is very good at spotting it, while other typical similarity measures (e.g. MPEG-7 visual descriptor) are not able to spot because they handle the whole image as a single entity.
Why textual context?
Look at the following search results for the St. Louis Gateway of the West, which has been previously retrieved by searching for the word “arch”:
The last result show a completely non-similar image, but its source page contains the word “arch”.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
adsttnmq1/sdioyslkjs2 attack
I’ve just found the my website has been hacked.
I’ve found a new directory “guiex” (but the name can change) containing two files: “m” a text file just listing “index.php” and a php file named “mnq.php” (the code of this file is at the end of this post).
Now we have two questions to answer:
1) How the hell these files have arrived here?
2) What the f**k are these files doing here?
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Monday, February 23, 2009
Bug 4724038
Today I stumbled upon the Java bug 4724038 (although Sun considers it an RFE).
The bug is related to the fact that Java memory mapping does not provide an unmap() method, due to security/efficiency issues.
It is 6 years old and it is currently ranked third in the top 25 RFEs list.
Looking at the comments its page, this bug has upset many developers along the years.
The final words in the bug evaluation section are really disarming:
[..] We at Sun have given this problem a lot of thought, both during the original development of NIO and in the time since. We have yet to come up with a way to implement an unmap() method that’s safe, efficient, and plausibly portable across operating systems. We’ve explored several other alternatives aside from the two described above, but all of them were even more problematic. We’d be thrilled if someone could come up with a workable solution, so we’ll leave this bug open in the hope that it will attract attention from someone more clever than we are. [..]
I’m going to try some of the proposed workarounds to the problem, and the I’ll post a comment on which one as worked best for me.