No free Photoshop

A long time ago I wrote "Adobe Photoshop as Free Download" which did not materialize. Adobe has not made Photoshop free. But there are many free clones around.

One of them is a .Net based painter, called Paint.Net
Written in C# language, it is only 1.5 Megabytes (without samples and documentation), because it uses the class libraries of .Net Framework version 2.

GIMP is another painter for Linux, but should work on Windows as well, although you need to install additional programs such as GTK2.

Fauxto is a recent clone. Now in beta version, it claims "Fauxto is the only full-featured, free range, image editor online. Create new images, edit existing images and manipulate layers with filters, layer effects ..."

If all the above are not to your satisfaction, there many more to choose from, visit for example Freebyte's Guide to...Free Graphics Software

If what you are trying to do is to make images for PDA, then go for PocketPainter, available from Chips magazine . PocketPainter is not free, it costs $25

Interested in Orcas and Katmai?

Orcas and Katmai are the codenames for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. They were announced at Microsoft TechEd, and their early versions are now available for download. Other releases include .Net Framework 3.5 beta and BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

Judging from their earlier versions, Orcas and Katmai will be excellent products and technologies. Indeed most Microsoft product is very good by itself, they are affordable compared to the high-end products, while provising most of the functionalities. Compare SQL Server to Oracle, and you see what I mean. Visual Studio however has now a strong competitor in free Eclipse.

The complains against Microsoft products are as follows.

They are getting bulkier all the time, needing hefty hardware resources. The same is true with Java products. This is one of reasons people turn to lightweight products such as Ruby and JavaScript.

Secondly, Microsoft products become more and more tightly-coupled with each other. I believe this is big mistake on the part of the product strategy. The industry trend is loosely coupled systems running on different platforms, which can talk to each other in a flexible way. The image of relying everything on SQL Server and BizTalk, and all development on Visual Studio is frightening. There is something to be said for writing code using good old text editors like PsPad, ConText, or even NotePad, but then there is no money gained in selling text editors.

Math Authoring for the Web

Writing Mathematics with its formulas and notations for the Web requires tools which should be as easy as possible.

The grand-daddy of all tools for type-setting Mathematics publications is Knuth's LaTeX. LaTeX is very powerful, and has become a standard in academic writing, to produce perfect looking Pdf and Postscript (Ps) documents. But LaTex is also very complicated, and requires a rather hefty software. If you work on Windows instead of Mac, you will need to install clones of LaTeX and Postscript writers.
In addition, LaTeX creates Pdf, which although can be read in a browser, is not exactly what we mean by Mathematics for the web.

Many years ago there was a popular scientific word-processor ChiWriter. I believe it is still available from some obscure web site, but it is meant for the DOS operating system only, definitely not for the web.

Then there was a great effort to define a markup language for Mathematics, called MathML. This is really Mathematics for the web, and it is quite complete. Many browsers such as FireFox can render MathML correctly, IE can do so with a plug-in. The trouble is, MathML like so many other markup languages, is quite verbose, hence tedious to write.

Of course, if you only need to insert a few common mathematical symbols, HTML allows it without using more than a Notepad. A HTML editor is preferable so that you don't have to constantly look-up special symbol codes. You can get a special symbol table for instance here: "HTML Codes for Mathematics"
For example:

Φ(α,β)d(α,β) ≥ 0 → μ ≤ 0

Now for the good news.
AsciiMath is a free tool developed by Jipsen, relying entirely on Javascript (ASCIIMathML.js), allows people to write Mathematics with minimal fuss. The Javascript is responsible for translating your codes into MathML.

For example:

`(a,b]={x in RR }` is rendered
(a,b]={x∈ℝ}

(Unfortunately I can't show more complicated examples here, I don't know how to use AsiiMath from within Blogger. If anyone knows, I would appreciate hearing. For more examples, please visit the original AsciiMath web site)

Hence you still need a MathML enabled browser (Firefox, or IE+plug-in). Sometimes some fonts are missing in your computer, and you need to ithe additional fonts from Fonts for MathML-enabled Mozilla

The same author, Jipsen has also developed AsciiSVG a Javascript based Scalable Vector Graphics to draw graphs, and SciencePad which combines AsciiMath, AsciiSVG with TiddlyWiki personal wiki.

If you are a Moodle e-learning user, you can get a filter to render AsciiMath in Moodle.

Everybody Can Have a Portable Personal Wiki

Since its introduction by Jeremy Ruston, TiddlyWiki, has grown in popularity. It has been extended with various plug-ins and adapted to many special purpose personal wikis.

What is the basic difference between a normal wiki like MediaWiki (used in Wikipedia ) and TiddlyWiki?
TiddlyWiki is lightweight, it is a single page wiki using only Javascript, HTML and CSS.
A complete TiddlyWiki can consist of a single file, if the Javascript and CSS files are embedded. Media files such as images and mutimedia are external and can be zipped together with the main file. The whole zip file can then be dropped into a server, unzip it, and you have a personal wiki ready to use. It could also be passed on to friends using USB devices.
Of course a TiddlyWiki is not meant to be bulky, although some have a filesize over 1 Megabyte, or it would be slow to load from the server.
You can always split a big TiddlyWiki into several smaller ones, but in that case the tags would not be shared. Once it is loaded, Javascript will ensure an impressive AJAX experience.

On local computers it is even easier to use, it is just a normal HTML file and we could be liberal with file sizes.
Information in a TiddlyWiki is divided into chunks called Tiddlers, each with its own urls.

Editing a TiddlyWiki does not require knowledge of HTML, but requires a little time getting use to. For example the convention of using CamelCase for automatic hyperlinks (it can be overwritten) is very convenient.

Thus the easy-to-carry and easy-to-edit features are some of the characteristics of TiddlyWiki. Jeremy Ruston calls TiddlyWiki a reusable non-linear personal web notebook.
The term non-linear here means that it can be written and read in a nonsequential mode.
Finally TiddlyWiki is open source and free.
If you are still not convinced with the benefits of TiddlyWiki, read: TiddlyWiki for the rest of us, What are the benefits of TiddlyWikis?

Now what can we do with a TiddlyWiki?

Blogging, Journals, Photo Albums, To-Do-Lists (simple project management), writing a book, knowledge encapsulation, web-based presentations without PowerPoint, Recipes, Mathematical Notebooks, and many many more.

Here are some examples of TiddlyWiki:

• MonkeyGTD GTD is Getting Things Done

• TiddlyMath and SciencePad are TiddlyWikis combined with ASCIIMATH, a system of Mathematical Notations for the Web, developed by Peter Jipsen, developed entirely using Javascript. In addition SciencePad uses a wysiwyg HTML editor called HTML Area.
  

Newton's Fourth Law discovered?

Famous physicist Newton predicted the world will end in 2060, in a letter of 1704 being shown in Jerusalem.

He is said to be working from the book of Daniel.

While this may be surprising to many, in fact it has been known that Newton had two sides, one the rational, and the other the superstitious. The first is quite well-known from his works on gravity, Principia Mathematica, etc., and he is regarded as the father of modern physics.

But his other dark side?

Read this:

"...it has long been known that the ground-breaking physicist from Grantham, England, also took a keen interest in superstitions of his day that have long since fallen foul of modern science."

"Newton spent four years in the 1670s preparing a work on alchemy, the notion that base metals can be turned into gold."

Newton's Fourth Law turns out to be another superstition

Physics of Flows Explains Human Patterns

The thesis put forward by Adrian Bejan and friends, is that "Society, with all its layers and features of organization, is a flow system". They called this the Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics, now being published by Springer Science & Business Media.

Adrian Bejan (born September 24, 1948), Ph.D. (MIT, 1975) is a Romanian-born American professor of mechanical engineering and inventor of the constructal theory of global optimization under local constraints.

Briefly, the theory states that flows, whether in physics or society, adapts themselves in shape so that "systems will always move toward faster access or easier flow". This is the global optimization under local constraints claim. It is not far from the classical "Principle of Least Resistance", but now applied to human patterns.

The Constructal Law states that :"For a flow system to persist in time (to survive) its configuration must evolve (morph) in time in such a way that it provides easier flow access."

Applications include "branching pattern at all scales, from the alveoli of the lungs, to the paths animals take to a watering hole, to the streams of a great river delta. Each of these structures has been honed by time to handle flow as efficiently as possible. Social scientists who are applying the theory to their fields suddenly see constructal patterns in everything from human migration patterns to a bowl of boiling rigatoni."

In some cases where the fractal nature has been observed before, the Constructal Theory can give a better explanation why indeed they are fractal.

References:

• Adrian Bejan's explaining Constructal Theory, includes image gallery

• Constructal Theory Web Portal

• Theory of Physics Explains Human Patterns

• Unified Physics Theory Explains Animals' Running, Flying And Swimming

• Wikipedia entry on Constructal theory

Feedburner bought by Google

Feedburner is a pioneer in the market for delivering the latest updated information to other Web sites using technology known as Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Customers include the Wall Street Journal, BBC and Amazon.com Inc (Charts, Fortune 500). More recently, retailers and travel agents have begun sending promotional offers to online customers via Feedburner.

Google also sees the technology as a way for its base of hundreds of thousands of advertisers to reach some of the most active groups of Web users - social network members who use mini-applications called widgets or the growing audience surfing the Internet over mobile phones, executives said.

Hackers Break Apple's Safari for Windows on First Day

Apple (AAPL) may live to regret its claim that Safari for Windows is "secure from day one."

It probably regrets it already. The computer security blogs this morning are lit up like Christmas trees with reports of exploits, vulnerabilities and denial of service (DoS) attacks. Thor Larhom claims that it took him only two hours to find "a fully functional command execution vulnerability." Dave Maynor provides a running commentary of his exploits:

The Dalai Lama's great green mission

Concern for the environment is an integral pasrt of Buddhism. See for example The traits of Buddhist Economy and Buddhist Economy in Practice.

Here is a report on the Dalai Lama visit to Perth from ararat.yourguide.com.au:

"TAKING care of the environment should be part of our daily lives, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama told an audience of more than 3000 people at a public forum on spirituality and sustainability in Perth last week."

"This planet is the only one we have. It is important for the whole of humanity," he said.

The Buddhist's answer to global warming is Mindfulness.

"It's the basic "be here now" or "chop wood, carry water" teaching on focused attention that confronts both the novice meditator and disciplined, sesshin-seasoned monk. How do you stop the monkey-mind from scampering after distractions?

Mindfulness involves bringing awareness back to the present moment, cutting through the continuous babble of mental chatter that constantly judges, nags, generates anxiety and generally distracts us from connecting in a meaningful way with our immediate environment."

Self-healing materials can mimic human skin, healing again and again

Scienceblog reports developement of a self-healing material which can mimic the human skin:

"The next generation of self-healing materials, invented by researchers at the University of Illinois, mimics human skin by healing itself time after time. The new materials rely upon embedded, three-dimensional microvascular networks that emulate biological circulatory systems.

“In the same manner that a cut in the skin triggers blood flow to promote healing, a crack in these new materials will trigger the flow of healing agent to repair the damage,” said Nancy Sottos, a Willett Professor of materials science and engineering, and the corresponding author of a paper accepted for publication in the journal Nature Materials, and posted on its Web site."

Have you heard of email bankruptcy?

An article titled "The secret of happiness: delete all", tells the story of how two Americans declared themselves email bankrupt:

"After earlier proclaiming that he had over 2,000 unread emails, he wrote: "I am so far behind on email that I am declaring bankruptcy."

"If you've sent me an email (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again.

"I am starting over."

The article continues: "Unlike too much credit card debt, email bankruptcy is not as dire as it may sound. Some, in fact, welcome the chance to start afresh, to wipe one's inbox clean. Never mind how many messages are unopened and unread. Starting over can be liberating.

So let's declare email bankruptcy. Wipe the slate clean. Shut down the computer. Throw the Blackberry into a drawer. Then get outside to a beach, the mountains or the woods. Take a book and a bottle of wine. And enjoy the summer before it slips away."

YouTube Trojan steals user data

ComputerWeekly reports:

"When viewed, clips on the site activate a Trojan Horse via a file called “YouTube04567”, which is then downloaded onto the user’s PC.

The payload code is an information stealing Trojan Horse which is designed to grab information from the user’s PC. It then uploads any sensitive information from the user’s PC to an undisclosed remote location."

Ability to forget is important

If we can't forget unimportant memories, we can't remember what is really important.

This was concluded by Stanford researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques: "Forgetting Helps You Remember The Important Stuff, Researchers Say"

The reason is not a simple picture of our memory as a limited number pigeon holes, with limited memory capacity. In that case, new items cannot be stored when the memory is full, and therefore necessitates erasing old memory.

The idea of competing memories as in the above competition for slots, is correct, but the mechanisms of processing inputs and rearranging memories is more complicated:
"Any act of remembering re-weights memories, tweaking them to try to be more adaptive for the next time you try to remember something. The brain is plastic—adaptive—and one feature of that is not just strengthening some memories but also suppressing or weakening others."

"Memory allows humans to be predictive about what's likely to be relevant to them as they go through life. What forgetting does is allow the act of prediction to occur much more automatically, because you've gotten rid of competing but irrelevant predictions. That's very beneficial for a neural information processing system."

New Firefox 3.0 preview goes 'Places'

Alpha 5 of Firefox 3.0, which still carries the codename Gran Paradiso, includes the bookmarks portion of Places, the feature that at one time was slated to appear in Firefox 2.0. Last year, however, Mozilla yanked the searchable bookmark-browser history from 2.0 and said it would appear in 2007's Version 3.0.

Because Places uses the open-source SQLite database engine to store and retrieve bookmarks and history entries, it's incompatible with earlier Firefox editions' bookmarks. Mozilla warned users to back up existing bookmarks before testing the alpha. "There are rough edges [to Places]; please wear your hard hat at all times," a warning urged. "Remember that the UI is still being designed, and don't be surprised to find some regressions, both functional and in performance."

Identity mining via social networks

In an article in The Sydney Morning Herald, Web social networks a gold mine for business intelligence, Bloggers are warned that their identities and relationships could be mined using technologies which are now coming into existence.

"Sydney-based technology analyst Bruce McCabe believes computer-based social networks could one day be a major gold mine for companies looking to profile job candidates, clients, competitors and takeover targets."

"While "social network analytics" (SNA) as a commercial venture is still in its infancy, a number of companies such as VisiblePath, OrgNet and Tacit are already peddling the underlying infrastructure for mapping personal and business relationships.

McCabe believes that by 2012, such resources could be used to detect conflicts of interest in legal disputes, company acquisitions and hiring.

Job candidates could find themselves confronted with interview questions about connections with "undesirable" people or organisations detected by SNA.

And advancements in technology that allow search engines to look at media beyond mere text content could one day be used to search for particular name references in video and audio recordings of internal seminars and training sessions."

Use of personal data could be for good purposes, but it could also lead to misuse of people's privacy. To make things worse, it is almost impossible to permanently erase past records.
The Way Back Machine allows people to look at web sites that are no longer in existence today. It boasts it has 85 billion pages of internet archive. Fortunately (or unfortunately) The Way Back Machine is not perfect, there are many sites which fail to be listed in their database.

'Exercise after eating' diet tip

Exercising after meals can help promote weight loss by boosting hormones that suppress appetite, say UK scientists.

Thanks to these hormones, active people feel less hungry immediately after exercise, and this carries through to their next meal, experiments suggest.

Even when their meals were bigger, sporty people gained fewer calories overall because they burned off more. The Surrey University and Imperial College London work is published in the Journal of Endocrinology.

Researcher Dr Denise Robertson said: "In the past we have been concerned that, although exercise burns energy, people subsequently ate more after working out. This would cancel out any possible weight reduction effects of exercise. "But our research shows that exercise may alter people's appetite to help them lose weight and prevent further weight gain as part of a healthy, balanced lifestyle."

Experts recommend people do at least 30 minutes of physical activity on five or more days a week.

Why Apple's iPhone Will Probably Be A Disappointment

From Scientific American Blog:

Get your broker on the phone if you own Apple stock--by mid July, you're going to want to be out.

The iPhone drops June 29, and perhaps no consumer product launch since the Xbox has been more feverishly anticipated by a breathless--and largely credulous--corps of tech journos. Millions of people who don't even own macs are going to buy these things, and that spells trouble: Anyone unfamiliar with the flaws endemic to first generation Apple devices, especially portable ones, is in for a trial by fire.

Let us count the ways first generation Apple hardware has failed its users of late

Google going after Microsoft Office

With the introduction of Google Gears Beta version, Google is planning to enable web applications operable in off-line mode. Google Reader is one of the first to be Gears enabled.

Other applications will follow, and it is obvious that people will soon be able to use Google Apps (applications) even when not connected to the internet. Google Apps include GMail, Chat, calendars, word-processing, spreadsheet, web page creator, etc.

Google Apps is aimed at small businesses, by providing communications, collaboration, and office productivity tools.
Microsoft Office Live uses a different technology, but also targets small businesses. See
Review: Microsoft Office Live Basics Vs. Google Apps For Your Domain for a comparison.

The trouble with online software is that you must be connected all the time. When Java was hype, Sun introduced a net computer without any operating system, just a browser to connect to the net. It didn't work, because it is too expensive, too slow, not convenient, not secure, and sometimes not possible (in most third world countries). The equivalent web applications interfaces are still primitive compared to the desktop versions.

Sometimes, people have approached the problem the other way round. Starting with a desktop application, convert it to a web-enabled solution. Active documents was one of the early unsuccessful attempts.

Recently Microsoft introduces SilverLight, (formerly called WPF/E). SilverLight is based on XAML to create rich internet applications (RIA) for the web using .Net technologies. It has vector graphics that would compete against Flash and SVG. The technologies used are quite advanced and not easy to use, one wonders how many developers will be persuaded to use SilverLight. The results are undoubtedly great.

Now Google's Gears is not as complicated, it is open source, installs quickly, and has a relatively small set of API's. It uses JavaScript, JSON and SQLite database. It works by switching its data layer from online to off-line and back by synchronization (see chart of its architecture). These are relatively simple to embed into your web pages. Perhaps the simplicity is what appeals here.

When Google Apps is Gears enabled, one would be able to work online and off-line seamlessly. Online work can be easily shared, off-line is for working in almost any situation, on the plane/train, in nature, or even in toilets.

Admittedly, the Google Apps Office productivity is not (yet) quite as powerful as Microsoft Office. E.g. no VBA (or otherwise) scripting for spreadsheets.
No doubt the functionalities of Google Apps will continue to be improved. At the same time Microsoft is not standing still, parrying the encroachment into what is traditionally its milking cow.


Links:

• Google catches up on Microsoft with help of new Gears

• Google brings developers offline with “Gears”; new offline Reader

• Google takes big step offline

'Quantum Keys' Sent 200 Kilometers: New Long-distance Record

Particles of light serving as "quantum keys"--the latest in encryption technology--have been sent over a record-setting 200-kilometer fiber-optic link by researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NTT Corp. in Japan, and Stanford University. The experiment, using mostly standard components and transmitting at telecommunications frequencies, offers an approach for making practical inter-city terrestrial quantum communications networks as well as long-range wireless systems using communication satellites.

The demonstration, described in Nature Photonics,* was conducted in a Stanford lab with optical fiber wrapped around a spool. In addition to setting a distance record for quantum key distribution (QKD), it also is the first gigabit-rate experiment--transmitting at 10 billion light pulses per second--to produce secure keys.