Chromatic Aberration Is My New Enemy

For those who know me, they know that I am a beginner photographer equipped with a Nikon D50 DSLR and have bought a Sigma 18-200mm DC OS lens back in February when I visited Singapore.

Since I usually take casual photographs I have never really paid that much attention to people in my photos. My subjects are usually buildings, landscape and views that I find interesting.

Earlier this month I offered to take pictures at my niece’s wedding, and also last weekend at a friend’s engagement ceremony. I was too busy to notice that aberration has occurred to my photographs for both occasions!!!

Here are the 100% crops for both occasions. Directly converted to JPG from Nikon Capture NX without any other processing.

Do you see the almost purple glow at the border between the subject and the background? I have yet to understand this phenomenon but this must have something to do with my lens or the technique I am shooting the pictures. It became a lot worst when there is high contrast between the subject and the background as you can see in the first sample above.

Right now I am totally disappointed. Any photography expert or enthusiasts reading? Opinions are mostly welcome!

Busy August

Looks like August is another busy month for me. Earlier this month I went to Terengganu for my niece’s wedding. It took a lot of work to be the organizing party. One niece married, 2 nieces, 3 nephews, and a son to go.

I took a 3-day’s leave (thanks boss!) during the first week and spent 5 days there. It was tiring especially because I had to go to work on Monday. But it was worth the hard work and money spent. Here’s a photo from the event:

For those who are not familiar with Malay customs, this is the table where the bride and groom have their special lunch. The menu is a little different from everyone else. Accompanying the bride and groom is the groom’s family since this is the bride side of the wedding. At the groom’s side it depends on the custom of the state and family. According to our Johore custom (where we originally comes from) the groom’s party is as big as the bride’s party. But since the groom is from Terengganu it’s different.

Back to real life in Selangor I have many things to settle. The house purchase matters and EPF has just been settled on Friday. And my external client is facing some problems with their mail infrastructure. I’ve just finished a script for them to maintain Postfix aliases since they have a lot of groups. I utilized SQLite and perl to achieve something like a menu system for maintaining users and alias groups. I am also very busy at my day job, since there are a lot of release issues to attend to.

This weekend I have to go shop for baby stuff again especially I heard IKEA is having a sale. What else… oh yes I just came back from watching Wall-E. It’s cute and nice but far too simple for me but I don’t expect more. It’s fun.

If I have time tomorrow I will also do a summer cleanup before the fasting month arrives. The baby’s coming out soon and we really have to do something about the junk that is cluttering our home, and think about moving plans. That is why I was thinking of an attic earlier :-D.

That’s all as an update for now I have to wake up early tomorrow!

Pull Down Ladder @ Fold Ladder @ Attic Ladder

I have recently purchased a new house, and while waiting for it to complete next year I am looking around for best deals for home renovation and decoration.

For the first phase I am going to emphasize on safety and things that needs to be done before the house is occupied. Plaster ceiling, wooden skirting for the walls, paints (and colors) for the walls, and also an open attic since the top floor has a considerably high ceiling.

For the open attic, I am looking for samples of pull down ladder to be installed. It serves 2 purposes: to have a tidy area and to prevent the little one coming out in December from climbing it. I can’t seem to find online catalogs that offer products in Malaysia. Well, to be fair even Home Depot does not have it in the online catalog.

I found a nice picture from Wikipedia, only that the ladder is too simple and aesthetically not so nice.

Anyone knows of a website or shop that I can visit?

Aicu Kopitiam & Cafe

Earlier today I went to Wangsa Maju to pick up some things for my niece’s wedding next week. For lunch I decided to try out shops in the Wangsa Link area. My friend who owns a business there recommended a lunch at Aicu Kopitiam & Cafe.

Since it was hot we decided to sit inside where it’s cooler. The overall ambiance is nice with old music playing in the background. We ordered a Barli Lemon Ais (Iced Lemon Barley) and an Teh O Ais (Iced Tea) and there was no delay at all before the drinks were delivered. Good. However instead of lemon they used LIME. Yes, lime.

Food is a different story. We ordered a Penang Kuay Teow, Nasi Goreng Kampung (Kampung Fried Rice), Telur Mata (Fried Egg), and Cucur Ikan Bilis (Anchovy Fritters).

After about 15 minutes, the Penang Kuay Teow arrived. 10 minutes later, the Fried Rice arrived. I was too hungry and started digging immediately. The fried egg however arrived 10 minutes later, when I was about to finish so I canceled it. The fritters arrived 15 minutes after that.

So the total wait time:

  • Penang Kuay Teow – 15 minutes
  • Fried rice – 25 minutes
  • Fried egg – 35 minutes
  • Fritters – 50 minutes

The food portion is a bit small for the price, and the food taste is OK. Not great but OK. I can eat that if I have no other choice.

As a very fussy restaurant customer I always expect to get the exact menu I ordered. The first example where lemon is being substituted by lime clearly shows that there is no such thing as quality control. What you order is not what you get (WYOINWGY).

One thing to note is that they use chipped ice instead of the normal tube ice so it is constantly stuck in the straw hehe. And if you’re really hungry, don’t go to this place. It’s nice if you want to have a discussion, though.

Oh yes, as with most Malay food businesses don’t expect good hospitality. The cashier didn’t even return a smile.

Next time I may try the Cheng Ho restaurant (owned by Amy Search) next to this place.

Searching for the restaurant name, I found another disgruntled customer. Well, almost customer.

The Datuk who own this place should take a look at the business better.

OCRopus and Tesseract

A friend pointed me to an open source project called OCRopus because I am currently working on a project related to OCR. Commercial OCR solutions ain’t cheap and you can really dig a hole in your pocket trying to get a good OCR solution. It’s neither the price of the hardware nor the software that is high but the amount of work that needs to be done to make sure a correct output is obtained.

Most OCR solutions need a vast amount of time to train the software to correctly identify characters. Artificial Intelligence can help but not now, not today, not yet.

OCRopus is not the one who recognize the character itself but it relies on Tesseract. OCRopus provides layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities. Sounds really good doesn’t it? Tesseract is the OCR engine that OCRopus uses.

Most of the project is tested and developed on Ubuntu, but if your platform has binutils and build tools you’re good to go. I believe it is also possible to build using Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows and of course MingGW. I went for the easiest option since I only have 2 hours to spare and I already have Cygwin on my system.

I first installed libraries header files (libpng-devel, libtiff-devel, libjpeg-devel) and build tools (gcc, make, g++, autoconf) and then built tesseract with the normal ./configure && make && make install method. To build OCRopus there is a need for Perforce Jam. Jam is actually Just Another Make. I find it a little funny when I have to build Jam using make. Oh well. OCRopus is built with ./configure && jam && jam install and it went pretty well.

To run them don’t forget to download the language files for your target language otherwise it will complain: Unable to load unicharset file /usr/local/share/tessdata/eng.unicharset

I ran my tests with standard LUA scripts that came with OCRopus (located in /usr/local/share/ocropus/scripts/) with the command ocroscript.exe rec-tess input_image > output.html

I created a 10 line Word Document with different fonts and printed it to a PDF. Using Adobe Photoshop I saved it to a JPG image. Then I gradually resized the image to the smallest I can get some output with.

To see the tests and results, click on Continue Reading.

Continue reading OCRopus and Tesseract

MMU For Sale

Yeah, you heard it right. Multimedia University (MMU) is up for sale, and it’s valued between RM800~900 million. The plan is to raise money for the high-speed broadband (HSBB) project which will cost TM RM1~1.5 billion per year.

Here’s an article from Business Times Online.

From the line While management remains optimistic on the disposal of staff loans, the group is struggling to find a buyer for the university,” the duo noted., it’s now confirmed that MMU is for sale!

I was alerted of this news while reading Amanz.

The Most Expensive “Baju Melayu” I Ever Had

Or frankly the title should be “The Most Expensive Baju Melayu I will have” because I have just sent the fabric to the tailor a couple of hours ago at Wisma Yakin near Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman. The thing is I am unsure whether I will get a more expensive ones later in life.

For those who are wondering what it is, go here for Wikipedia page on Baju Melayu.

I am not getting this one especially for the coming Eid ul-Fitr, but for my niece’s wedding ceremony in August. And since it is pricey I will also use it for Eid.

The fabric is RM200 and the tailor charge is RM120. It maybe normal for certain people but since all of my previous Baju Melayus were tailored by my mom and using normal fabrics this is the most expensive one for me.

The reason I didn’t go for ready-made ones is that they might not fit well, and the ones I found are either too cheap (equals bad quality) or too expensive. The turquoise Baju Melayu will be ready during the last week of July, just in time for the wedding on August 8th.

MasterCard/Visa Promotion Fraud Attempt #2

Back in January I wrote about an attempt to squeeze my credit card numbers by a caller using a private number.

On July 4th, I received a call from 016 336 8916 but since I have my phone on private mode they were not able to reach me. However a couple of minutes later they sent me a text message: “Hello mr/mrs Ady Romantika. I’m Ros from Visa/master card voucher department. Because of your loyalty to us, you are entitled for complimentary vouchers. Please come to our office with your spouse to collect your vouchers. Unit 515, Level 5, Block E, Phileo Damansara 1, No. 9, Jalan 16/11, Off Jalan Damansara, 46350 Petaling Jaya Selangor. Please come anytime from Monday to Sunday between 3pm to 8pm. Please also allow us at least 45mins of your time. Thank you and see you soon.”

It was a long text message indeed. I sent them a reply that they are scammers, and they were bold enough to reply me. Their message now have been sent to the Royal Malaysian Police and the media via email. I am unsure whether any action will be taken to investigate it but I shall wait and see.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there is no logical chance that Mastercard and Visa are running a promotion together. I am pretty sure if I show up they will ask me for my credit cards and take the chance to copy the numbers, expiries, and CVV/CV2 numbers. Then they are free to use my credit cards online.

For the less cautious this might be a trap they might easily fall into. Beware!

Compressing WordPress Output

While toying around with NextGen code so that I can activate my custom image mirror, I saw the output from Firebug. I noticed that my HTML output is not compressed (by the absence of gzip content-encoding).

Some Apache servers have this module already enabled (previously mod_gzip a 3rd party module in Apache 1, and now built-in in Apache 2 as mod_deflate).

But what if you don’t have access to the Apache configuration, such as in a shared hosting environment?

I have the answer for PHP. I always include this line in the bootstrap code of the applications I build using Zend Framework:

ob_start("ob_gzhandler");

And the output will be gzipped prior to sending it to the browser. The result? Faster transfer to users.

For WordPress you can put the line in index.php:

< ?php ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); /* Short and sweet */ define('WP_USE_THEMES', true); require('./wp-blog-header.php'); ?>

Easy, isn’t it? Here are Firebug screenshots, before and after. Notice that I managed to cut the size of my front page by 1/5?

[As the screenshots are too wide please click on Continue Reading to see them]
Continue reading Compressing WordPress Output

PHP Framework Benchmark

In April I wrote about Eclipse PDT, Zend Framework, PHPUnit.

AVNet Labs have executed a comprehensive benchmark against popular PHP Frameworks.

It looks like they are also using Zend Framework for their development. I’ll stay with Zend as well, because I believe in vendor-product compatibility. I will not ask for support from Adobe if I have a problem with Microsoft Visual Studio, so it’s the same concept here.

Zend is The PHP Company.

Thanks to Rizal for the heads up.

Chitika Oh Chitika

On 10 April 2007 I tried to apply for Chitika eMiniMalls just to try out my luck even though my number of visitors is much lower back then. I received a reply which I totally understand and accepted:

In an effort to bring value to our publishers, we carefully consider each submission. During our review process we have determined that Chitika | eMiniMalls might not be a good match for your website.

On 27 June 2008 I received an email from Chitika:

Hi Ady,

Great news! There have been a lot of changes over at Chitika recently – so although our ads were not a good match for your website in the past, we believe that we may be a much better fit for you now. Why? Because the Chitika network now serves Premium ads for ALL types of site content like: Finance, Health, Travel, Family, & more. (Previously we focused mainly on product-related websites.)

We now offer a LOT more than eMiniMalls too – our new Chitika|Premium ads target your search traffic, and are showing extremely high CTRs and eCPMs for our publishers. So if you have a good amount of US search traffic, Chitika|Premium will be a great fit for your site!

Re-open your Chitika application here, to get started. (You will be able to edit your information such as website, email, and PayPal info before you submit) or head over to the “Chitika | Premium” page for more information.

And I received a reply:

Hello,

The email address you used doesn’t match the domain that you submitted, and it also does not match the email that was used to register the domain, so we cannot tell if you actually own this website.

If you do own this site, please re-open your application using the link below and supply an email address from the domain, or the email address that was used to register the domain.

If you cannot do this, then please re-open your application and tell us why in the “Comments” field. Thanks. Looking forward to your comments.

This is because I used my GMail address for the registration. If I enter my email address for this blog domain I immediately get “Invalid Email ID!”. I stated in the comment field of the registration form but I guess it was not taken into anyone’s attention. But then again, the reply did mention “If you cannot do this, then please re-open your application and tell us why in the “Comments” field. Thanks. Looking forward to your comments.” WTH?

Not that Chitika is bad or anything but as an Internet user I expect an established site updates the list of TLD frequently. I also had the email not matching problem with Nuffnang but they received my application without any problem.

Maildir Storage in Thunderbird

I am doing research before deployment of a Postfix + Dovecot HA cluster tomorrow morning, on converting existing mailboxes to Maildir format. The existing mail server is running Sendmail + Unidentified POP3 on a Fedora Core 2 box. It’s ancient and that’s why my client need it to be scrapped or turned into something else.

Maildir will certainly help a lot in improving performance and avoiding the need to think about mailbox slowness and lock-ups that is a normal problem with mbox.

As an avid Thunderbird user since the project was started years ago and since Firefox 3 have just been released, I can’t avoid wondering whether Thunderbird is considering adding an option for Maildir storage in version 3. Of course, this have no relation whatsoever with the servers mentioned above. For those who are unfamiliar with Thunderbird, it currently store mailboxes in the mbox format.

Searching high and low for an answer, I don’t see any mention of Maildir, anywhere. However Thunderbird 3 looks promising in terms of feel and usability. Mac users will be very happy that Thunderbird 3 is a native Cocoa application and integration will be better. Other platforms will have to make peace with Gecko 1.9.

I’m too lazy to become a tester this time around so I am just going to wait. What about you?

Welcome Firefox 3; Good Bye Google Browser Sync

Following from Firefox 3 download day yesterday, I was eager to try out the new, all-improved Firefox 3. As a matter of fact, I am writing this post in Firefox 3.

There is certainly a significant improvement in speed and responsiveness, and the overall feel have changed. It’s a lot more elegant now.

However it’s sad to learn that Google will no longer update its Google Browser Sync service to support Firefox 3.

I’ve now migrated to Foxmarks. So far it works very well. One thing I shall miss is the password sync option which I use for low risk sites such as private torrent trackers.

Other add-ons that are available for upgrade includes Firebug, Alexa Sparky, Google Notebook, Google Toolbar and of course, Foxmarks 🙂

Anyway, bravo to Firefox for a job well done.