daBlog by goddess101

Boys Will Be Boys

If you’ve never before seen the image on the right, chances are you are a woman. I say this for a couple of reasons: 1) it is from the centerfold of Playboy Magazine ’s absolute best-selling November 1972 issue, and 2) it is the most widely used image for testing image compression algorithms.

This was totally unknown to me this morning, when Rudi found this research paper about a new compression algorithm which rivals the one used in producing jpegs. This new RKi-1 algorithm seems to compress and preserve the original image quite well, as evidenced by the side-by-side visual comparisons using this very same Playboy image. Rudi asked me if I had recognized the picture. I said no. So, he explained to me that this was one of the “standard test images”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_test_image used whenever someone comes up with a new image compression technique to test. He said, “She’s very memorable because of her funny hat.” Then I accused, “You scientists and your secrets!” Ha!

The story of this image, also known as the “Lenna” or “Lena,” is documented at http://www.lenna.org and even has a more recent photograph of this “First Lady of the Internet.” As the story goes, an assistant professor along with a grad student were frantically looking for test images to scan when someone just happened to walk win with an issue of Playboy. I wonder, if a woman had walked in, if that famous nude photo of Burt Reynolds from that same year would have been used instead!

SPAM Woes

Who doesn’t abhor getting SPAM in their mailbox?

I used to not be bothered by it, as I only got a few a day. I never could understand why people would complain about getting 3 or 4 a day, cuz that’s really peanuts since it’s just a few clicks away from banning them from your inbox. But since I started administering websites and domain names, the amount of SPAM I have to deal with on a given day was way too depressing. 5 a day, I could probably deal with. But once I started getting 200 – 300 a day, I realized that this sucked. LOL

Lord knows how many real emails I might have lost trying to mass delete these unwanted messages. A few days ago, I got a spam filter and spam training going on our server, plus I activated the 50 or so SPAM filters I had available on my Yahoo! Plus mail account. So now, collectively, my SPAM count is down to about 100, which is a lot better, but still a burden on my mouse hand.

It’s really a shame. We’re supposed to be using computers to save time, but here I am already expending a lot of energy dealing with SPAM daily, while humans and robots (written by humans) continue to constantly blast out more. Woe is us.

Looking Up

Oh my. What a horrible week. First my hard drive starts failing on Wednesday, so I had to rebuild my system from scratch. Thursday, I accidentally overwrote the database for one of my main websites. Friday, I was programming so hard, a blood vessel in my eye burst! Today, after 3 days of tired system administration, I inadvertedly deleted the the var/lib directory of our in-house server which was never backed up so it took a painful 2 hours to rebuild. To top it off, I got caught in a major rainstorm while grocery shopping, only to have the rain suddenly stop the moment I stepped through our apartment door!

So, now that I’ve hit rock bottom, I’m hoping things will start getting better. I’m starting with a little home-made sangria tonight and a tub of belgian chocolate ice cream. LOL