Like many others, I have noticed that Facebook increased its photo size from 604 to 720 pixels. At the same time, I noticed that the commands in my last post weren’t perfect. I have tried to write an improved script:

• facebook.sh

Simply run it in your photos folder and it will make a ‘facebook’ directory to which it copies your processed photos. By default, it only handles the photos in the current directory. To make it recursive (it will skip the ‘facebook’ dir), just remove or edit “-maxdepth 1″.

As before, I can recommend ImageMagick and Cygwin if you are a Windows user.

Shouldn’t have to mention it, but: Use at your own risk.

Jeg skrev et shell-script som sender fra denne siden uten at du trenger å bruke nettleseren. Dette er bl.a. nyttig hvis du ønsker å varsles av datamaskinen din ved ulike hendelser. Jeg synes også det forenkler manuell sending.

Last ned sms.sh og kjør f.eks.:

./sms.sh 98765432 Hei! Skal vi treffes i dag?

Lag en tekstfil, smsnums.txt, med ‘nummer,kallenavn’ per linje for å slippe å huske telefonnummer.

Jeg bruker Ubuntu Linux, men hvis du vil kjøre scriptet i Windows, er det bare å laste ned Cygwin og wget.

All of these developments are really exciting, but I am not totally satisfied. For one thing, you have to choose and stick to one particular browser. Also, they do not sync everything that I would like (e.g. Greasemonkey scripts). A blog post about alternatives to Mozilla’s Ubiquity introduced me to some great projects, and inspired me to start using Quix. Quix lets you access your bookmarks, custom searches, and other tools, from one place. It works across all browsers and doesn’t need to be installed!

Not long after, however, I decided to not depend on Quix at all, and write a free, open version. While Quix lets you write your own command file, I also let you modify and store the code. This way, you don’t have to worry about Quix crashing, going bankrupt, or eavesdropping on your traffic. You just have to host one JavaScript file (or use mine) and remember its address.

Clicking the following image invokes the script: 

Drag it to your browser’s toolbar for convenience. Alter the web address in the link if you want to use your own copy or modified version. The file: WebOsCmd.js

LinkSave.net provides a text box where you can paste the URL and generate a link you can right click and “Save As…”. But do you want LinkSave to know all the links you save?

I created a similar link generator where your URLs are not logged. The link is created on the client side using JavaScript, and you can view the source code to be sure. Easier than writing a new HTML file with the URL every time you want to save a file. Of course, wget is an alternative.

Page 49 from The First Part of King Henry the Fourth. The acrostics BOWTIS and FBACO(An) are described in Amundsen’s book. The line was not discovered though. It passes through the page’s only two “Lord”s, intersects the upper left corner, and has a 37 degrees angle. The probability of FBACO in the margin (assuming uniform distribution of letters, case insensitivity and two directions) is 2*2939*4117*11216*1819*3349/77311^5 which is less than 1:1,600,000. Of course, this doesn’t prove anything by itself as there probably are many meaningless improbable strings (more improbable the longer they are).

Page 122, in The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, has the following beautiful cross (X). There is one “Rose” on the page, and the line crosses through it. Notice how the lines tangent certain letters and words, for example the line ending in “France”, the w of owne, between A and w of Away, the N of Nay, and the A of Aboue. See also that opposite the R in Rose, the line passes a C (in Chaire).

Page 110, from The First Part of Henry the Sixth has a lot of “Lord”s. Many of these can be aligned, three or four on a line. Most lines intersect in a “Lord”, but two lines cross just to the left of the page’s only occurence of “Rose”. I read this as “X Rose”, or “Rose Cross“. Two lines above, a bit to the left, one can also find the page’s only occurence of “Cross(ing the Sea)”. Another sign is that one of the lines has a 53 degree angle. Maybe there is more to this page, perhaps something to do with Lord Francis Verulam Bacon, Noble birth, Crowne, Honourable Order, or Swaine?

A possible 3-4-5 (with 37, 53, and 90 degree angles) triangle. Is the one “Rose” relevant? (37th last word on the page.)

Another interesting page is page 346 of The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. There is a very clear “BOwTHS” (=Bootes), a “TWO” and a “FBACa”.

Page 143 of Comedies, Loue’s Labour’s lost, has a “BAeON” ~= “BAcON”, or “BA[three]ON” => “BACON”. This was found by Jørgen Friberg. I also drew some lines between “Loue” words.

How unlikely is three words on a straight line? Page 143 of Comedies has 66 lines and approximately 78 positions per line (word of length 4). If a page has exactly three instances of word X and we assume that the words are randomly placed, we get p=65/66*64/66*1/78~=1.2% probability that they are on a (non-horizontal) line. The real number should be lower because many lines will not pass all of the 66 text lines. On the other hand, 78 might be too detailed. The probability of at least one three-word-line, if the word in question appears 7 times, would be 1-(1-0.012)^C(7,3) = 1-0.988^35 = 35%. I also did a manual test with other words, in which 5 of 6 tests had few lines. These calculations are very rough, and I should investigate more.

Other finds that could be nothing:

Ansiktet nede til høyre er lagt til av skriptet. Dette skjer når man beveger musepekeren over tabellen.

Jeg gjetter at dette skriptet ikke kommer til å bli brukt av mange…

Uansett, jeg har lagt det ut på userscripts.org og her. Det begynner å bli noen nå.

Ser jo greit ut, kalenderen er best. Eller er den det? På kalenderen kan du vinne maksimum kr 500 000, mens du kan vinne opptil kr 1 000 000 på “Flax million”. Dessuten er kalenderen dyrere. I tillegg kalkulerer Norsk Tipping selv de minste premier som “win”. Altså, hvis du skraper frem 20 kroner på et lodd som kostet 50, så har du “vunnet”. Følgende sannsynligheter kan være interessante:

Som vi ser er forskjellige typer lodd best på forskjellige målsetninger. Vi kan beregne forventningsverdien for å finne ut hvor mye loddene faktisk koster oss (i snitt):

Hvis du kun er interessert i å tape minst mulig penger bør du altså velge Flax million. Hvis en er interessert i sannsynligheten for premier av en viss størrelsesorden kan man se på denne oversikten:

Julekalenderen ser ut til å ligge høyest hele veien, bortsett fra på >= 250, hvor Flax million gjør det litt bedre (men husk at loddene ikke koster like mye). Også på >= 1 000 000 vinner selvsagt Flax million.

Hvis man snevrer seg inn mot store premier, kan man også følge med på kunngjøringer om gevinster og oppdatere sannsynligheten deretter.

Beregningene finner du i dette regnearket.

Reklamekampanjer må være tilgjengelige på internett!

Denne gangen har tannpleierforeningen gjort en svært mye bedre jobb. De har skrevet et innlegg om kampanjen på hjemmesiden sin hvor de bruker samme bilde (med riktig alternativ tekst, “smiley”!) og de legger til og med ut selve plakaten som PDF-fil! Meget bra. Dessverre blokkerer de indeksering av denne slik at hvis man søker på f.eks. “Hva kan en tannpleier gjøre” så finner man ikke kampanjen.

I motsetning til enkelte ble jeg ikke irritert over plakatens utseende, men synes de formidler budskapet helt greit. Kanskje “www.tannpleier.no” kunne vært litt større.

Dette er forøvrig litt likt Anders Brennas tanker om at forsidene til papiravisene burde være reklamer for å få oss til å sjekke saken på nett. Hans motto er også “Står det ikke på nett så har det ikke skjedd”.

For more technical information, visit Google code, where the code is hosted.

To use, download IMGMosaicGenerator.jar, and run something like:

java -jar IMGMosaicGenerator.jar bigpicture.jpg 100 75 mytilesdirectory

This will look for image files in mytilesdirectory. Every image file is then resized to resolution 100×75 and matched against every position of bigpicture.jpg:

The preview window is updated every time a tile is a “best match so far”. Window can be resized:

Two versions are created (one normal and one “optimally dithered”):

The second version can be obtained when aborting the process by clicking in the window and invoking the following dialog box:

Output is in HTML. To save as image, Firefox add-on, Abduction! can be used.

På samme måte som jeg laget et Greasemonkey-skript for NRK Nett-TV, har jeg nå laget ett for NRK Skole: nrk-skole.user.js (også hos userscripts.org).

Slik kan man se videoene på flere plattformer og med flere programmer, f.eks. MPlayer.

Ellers håper jeg elevene får muligheten til å bruke klippene til å lage egne mashups.