Author Archives: Marco Barnig

Open Data

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Opte Project

A hall of fame of data visualization projects is presented at the digital-art section of Leslie’s Artgallery.

50 great examples of data visualization are presented by the Mass Media Group.

New Zealander Richard MacManus published the contribution “Where to Find Open Data on the Web” on his blog ReadWriteWeb, one of the most popular technology blogs in the world, known for offering insightful analysis about each day’s Internet industry news.

A list of useful links to open source data sets is given below:

HEXBUG® Micro Robotic Creatures

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Last update : May 24, 2013

Hexbug Original

HEXBUG® is a product line developed by Innovation First Inc. The company was founded on the belief that innovation very early in the design process is necessary to produce simple and elegant product designs. Innovation First began developing electronics for unmanned mobile ground robots and is now an industry leader in research and development for the hobby, competition, education and toy markets.

The following hexbug’s are available:

  • Original (the robotic creature that reacts to touch and sound)
  • Inchworm (the robotic creature that you control with a remote unit)
  • Crab (the robotic creature that reacts to light and sound)
  • Ant (the high-speed robotic creature that reacts to touch)
  • Nano (the robotic creature that behaves like a real  bug)

Find images that contain a certain color

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Imagekind Artshop

The Multicolr Search Lab tool created by Idée Inc. allows to find images that share specified colours. There are others who offer this option.

Jim Bumgardner (alias krazydad) developed in 2006 a widget to search flickr photos by color (Colr Pickr). Color Hunter offers a similar service.

Google Image Search  lets you restrict the results based on color. For now, the option is not available in the user interface, but you can tweak the search results URL to try it. More informations are available at the Google Operating System Blog which is not affiliated with Google.

The Imagekind artshop lets you choose artworks by specifying a dominant and four other colors.

Etsy, an online shop of handmade products, has developed color search for their own product database.

PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.

A COLOURlovers community, made up of people from around the world and from all walks of life, are gathering together under the common love of color.

Matt Mueller based the final project for his Computational Photography class on the Idée Labs tool Piximilar.

Daniel Flück posted his tool Color Name & Hue on his website colblindor. He was inspired by the tool Name that color created by Chirag Mehta.

A server version (isk-daemon) and a desktop version (imgSeek) of an image database management system have been developed by  Ricardo Niederberger Cabral as open-source project (licensed under the GPL). Color analysis is also a topic in the ImageMagick discussion forum.

Thoughts on Flash by Steve Jobs : go to HTML5

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Recently, Steve Jobs published his thoughts on Flash on the Apple website.

Steve Jobs explains why Apple does not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

  1. open standards : Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary
  2. full web : most videos are available in a modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads
  3. reliability, security and performance
  4. battery life
  5. touch : Flash was created for PCs and mice, not for mobile devices with touch interface
  6. Apple wants to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to the developers

Steve Jobs recommends to use the open standards HTML5, CSS and JavaScript for mobile devices.

One on the first to follow this idea is the developer of the JW video player, Jeroen Wijering. Even if he thinks that there is still a lot of work to be done before HTML5 reaches the maturity level that Flash has for delivering video content to the users, he released the beta version of the HTML5 JW player two weeks ago.

Improve site page speed faster to load by removing extra loaded scripts

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The Google websearch team just announced that they will now consider the speed it takes for a website to load when ranking it in Google search results on google.com.

”Site speed is just one of over 200 signals Google uses to determine search ranking, and because it’s a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. In fact, less than 1% of all search queries on google.com are affected by the site speed signal”.

This factor may not play a major role now, but in future web consider this factor is going to have a great impact on web search results as it seems, so now it’s the time for all the webmasters our their to start thinking about their site page speed.

Google indicates the page performance in webmasters.google.com and recommends the open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on Page Speed. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

14 rules for faster-loading web sites are described on the companion website of Steve Souders. These rules hev been tested on some of the most popular sites on the Internet and have successfully reduced the response times of those pages by 25-50%.

Recording, edit and embed WMV/ASF video streams

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Last update : January 30, 2013
Several methods are available to record WMF/ASF video streams:

  • VLC Media Player : To record WMF video streams with VLC Media Player, use the following procedure – Select File->Open Network Stream – Select HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/MMS and paste the URL/Link – Select Stream/Save under Advanced Options and click on Settings – Select Outputs and Play locally and File – Select ASF as Encapsulationd Method – OK and VLC should start play and also capture the video to the file
  • VM Recorder : WM Recorder uses a unique Stream Capture Technology to give perfect bit-for-bit reproductions of the original video stream.
  • Net Transport download manager

A full list is available at the Videohelp website.

To cut the video streams, I use the Video Cutter V1.0 software. To embed the video streams in a webpage, I use the licensed version of the JW Player – Silverlight Player 1.1.

Net Transport : a fast and powerful downloading manager

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Last update : February 27, 2012
“Net Transport” (also called NetTransport or NetXfer) is a fast, exciting and  powerful downloading manager.

It supports the most pop Internet protocols, including: HTTP / HTTPS, FTP / over SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) / over SSH (Secure Shell), MMS (Microsoft Media Services), RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol), BitTorrent, eMule, RTMP, RTMPE, RTMPT (Real Time Messaging Protocol).

The current version is 2.96c issued on August 4, 2011. Net Transport is shareware, the price is 29,95 US$, a 30 day trial version is available.