Paul O'Flaherty

Computer sees rubiks cube and solves it

Check out this cool video of CV Rubik a computer app written in C++ as “looks” at a Rubiks cube using a webcam and then proceeds to solve it.

CV Rubik is a C++ application that solves a 3×3 Rubik’s cube. It uses a webcam to “look” at a Rubik’s cube and generate a step by step solution in 3D graphics. CV Rubik draws on knowledge from different fields of computer science such as Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence and 3D Graphics. The following steps are performed by the program at runtime:
1. The user holds a scrambled 3×3 Rubik’s Cube in front of the webcam.
2. Using the OpenCV library, the live video feed is processed to locate the cube in the input image and determine the 9 colors of the frontal face.
3. The user rotates the cube 5 times for the software to capture all the other faces.
4. Using OpenGL, a 3D cube that matches the original one is created and displayed on the screen.
5. The cube is solved one step at a time using the solution published in 1981 in the DER SPIEGEL magazine.
Note: If no webcam or cube are available, the software gives the option to generate a random cube.

Effects of crack programs and keygens on a PC

This video show the effect of using a crack or keygen to activate pirate software on your Windows machine!

You’ll be surprised by how many files get modified on your computer and where the viruses / trojans are installed.

The video also shows you how to see these changed for yourself, but you are recommended not to try, unless you intend to reformat your machine immediately afterwards as your machine will be infected.

Yahoo Ad 404′d at the stadium

I found this on jkennings Flickr photostream. It’s a rather unfortunately placed Yahoo advert. 

Funny for the geeks!

Away for the day

I won’t be around much today so I don’t expect to be able to blog much, if at all.

I do however have 3 mini posts (mostly YouTube videos) set up to post automatically later, so I’m not leaving you all without something cool to check out.

See you tomorrow.

Paul

I know what the Link Whores need!

Yesterday I called my friend Andy Beard and a large sway of the blogosphere “Link Whores”! Well you are! We all are. I’ve confessed that I am one on more than one occasion.

Being a “Link Whore” is a fundamental part of the blogger/podcaster/vlogger psyche. If you aren’t one, if you don’t want more people to read or view your opinion or work then you have no business being a blogger.

If you’re not putting yourself out there, link baiting, commenting on other blogs and trying new things to drive traffic to your site then you’ve got no business calling yourself a blogger.

If you don’t intend your posts to be read, then that’s fine, but I have to ask why you don’t just keep a diary instead or make your blog private so that it’s not clogging up the SERP’s.

If you are serious about blogging then you need to be promoting your site in every way possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging for money or just for the ego trip (even the best ideals of simply wanting to inform / educate people have a fair sway of ego involved) you need to be pulling in the readers.

If nobody is reading then your efforts are being wasted.

To Hell with the “A-list”

That’s why I love reading Andy’s blog – Niche Marketing. He’s always on the edge experimenting with how to be more productive online and draw in new readers.

I still don’t agree with how the Technorati favorites was being used for self promotion. If the service was meant to be used in the manner it was being used by the “Technorati Favorites Exchange” it would have be named something different like “Back Scratchers Vote Exchange” or something.

Also to those folk who try to justify the raping of the system by the “Technorati Favorites Exchange” meme by saying that many folks weren’t using it to begin with or that many of the top bloggers weren’t using it, I say: So what! I don’t care if just 2,000 people were using it. You guys just raped the service and destroyed it for the people that did use it

This blogger used it!

Now, obviously I’m no Jason Calacanis, Steve Rubel or Michael Arrington, but why should that matter? Why should the A-listers (I can almost hear Calacanis screaming that the “A-list doesn’t exist“) using a tool be held up as benchmark to gauge whether or not a service is used?

Stop belittling yourselves! A lot of people spend so much time complaining that they can’t break into the A-list. To hell with the “A-List” (no offence to the bloggers on it), but if you keep worrying about them, you’re wasting valuable energy which could be used improving your own blog and gathering readership.

If you’re only using tools “endorsed” by the A-list then you’re missing out. The A-list is (to steal Andy’s metaphor) much like a tumbleweed. The slightest breeze blows them from one service to another in search of the next “cool” service to hype and write about.

Yet, even though I’m pissed off at the fact that the top 100 favorites now hold little to no meaning for me, I’ve got to applaud the link whores for trying something different in order to fill the gap of an obvious and necessary, yet as yet poorly represented, blogging tool: the personal memetracker! (This came to light when discussing a reciprocal favorites policy with Andy – the real important stuff is in the comments).

The Personal Memetracker

Don’t get me wrong, personal memetracker’s do exist. You’ve got Megite, BlogRovr , Tailranks MyTail feature and if you feel like parting with some cash, I believe FeedDemon has a built in personal memetracker for your desktop.

I’ll admit to not having tried these services personally, but reports from other bloggers have yet to be convince me that any of these services are up to par yet.

I’m waiting for Megite to introduce a web UI for setting up the memetracker, Andy couldn’t get good results with Tailrank and unless I hear some excellent reviews of FeedDemon’s built in memetracker I’m unlikely to part with the $30 as I prefer online aggregators (Google Reader rocks btw).

I only signed up for BlogRovr today, so as yet, have no idea how good the results will be but the reviews I’ve read so far are not encouraging. Andy called it “elitist” but didn’t qualify his statement. 

Chris Gilmer of DownloadSquad was not impressed by the idea of Blogrovr:

Why would someone really want to use this application? Are we missing something? Would you want to read your favorite bloggers commentary on every site you visit? It seem like it could get a little distracting. It is however good for a little cross referencing when doing research, and gathering links to same topic posts from a familiar voice.

Chris has a good point, even though I NEED a good personal memetracker, I really want one that gives me a Google Reader style river of news for the results, as opposed to results being show based only on the site I’m currently visiting.

Even so, I’m still going to give it a try and see if it fits some of my needs.

The Killer App of Blogging?

I know it takes a lot of resources to power memetrackers but if some company were to release one, with a good easy to use UI and plenty of flexibility then it would instantly become the killer app for anybody serious about blogging.

So the big question is who’s going to bite first? Will Google, Yahoo, or the sleeping behemoth that is Microsoft, be the first to produce such a tool?

They all have the resources and the money to make this happen and happen fast.

Releasing a great personal memetracker would be a great opportunity for to Microsoft claw back some ground against Google and win some valuable brownie points with the blogosphere and tech influencers.

Or will it come from a startup? After all, it’s not a stretch to imagine that if a startup developed a good personal memetracker, it wouldn’t take long for one of the big 3 to snap them up!

Domino PCs

I nearly cried at the though of the potential hardware damage. Still looks cool…

Hey guys, how about next time you want to get rid of some PC’s you just send them to me?

Smart Digg Button for Firefox

Derek van Vliet of Neothoughts has released the Smart Digg Buttton for Firefox.

This extension sits in the status bar of Firefox and makes it really easy to see how many Diggs a particular page has received and if it’s got none then you can click the button and Digg it yourself.

If the page you are viewing has been submitted to Digg, it displays the current number of Diggs the page has. Pressing the button takes you to the submission.

If the page you are viewing has not been submitted, pressing it takes you to Digg’s submission form where you can submit the page to Digg.

The only problem I have with this extension is that I can’t see the button because I use the Vista Black theme for Firefox and the text on the button becomes completely unreadable!

That means the button is unusable for anybody suing a dark Firefox theme.

Hopefully Derek will fix that and we can all enjoy using this cool extension.

How the Link Whores killed Technorati Favorites!

It’s well known that I’m against adding people as favorites on any service simply because they added me first (reciprocal favorites), and ever since I read “Technorati Favorites – Is This Evil, Lazy or Just Smart?” by Andy Beard, I’ve been meaning to write a piece about the “Technorati Favorites Exchange” meme.

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve added a “nofollow” tag to the link to Andy’s post but not to his blog. The reason for this is that I can not and will not support a meme who’s use destroys a service.

The “Technorati Favorites Exchange”meme may garner some Google juice for the blogs involved and it may give them a little temporary exposure on the top 100 Technorati favorites list, but it rapes Technorati favorites of any value for the rest of us.

Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration wrote a piece called “Technorati favorites: Not worth it anymore” which spurred me to put finger to keyboard and finally type this entry which has been gnawing at the back of my mind waiting to come out. 

It takes almost 150 votes to get on Technorati Favorites list and that number is easy to achieve once you participate in any these Technorati link exchange programs.
By swapping Technorati votes, you not only get to displace the legitimate members of the Technorati list (like the ones mentioned above) but your site even derives some Google Juice (read, backlinks) similar to the 2000 Bloggers project. That makes this Technorati Exchange meme all the more popular.

Amit makes a call for the Dave Sifry and the guys at Technorati to do something about this:

To prevent users from gaming Technorati, what David Sifry and his team needs is a Digg like system – if the same set of users are mass favoriting similar blogs, step in. Else the list will soon lose credibility.

But I think that’s not enough. The people involved in using the “Technorati Favorites Exchange” meme have collectively shown what a greedy, selfish and self obsessed bunch of link whores bloggers can be.

While all of these bloggers were on their crusade for that one extra hit, that tiny bit of Google juice and that one handed self indulgent pleasure of seeing their blog temporarily crack the Technorati top 100 favorites, NOBODY, none of them stopped to think that gaming the service like this ruins it for the masses of other bloggers who actually see a value in the service.

They were either too stupid or ignorant to think about the potential to damage the service, or, if they did stop and think about it, then they obviously decided that their ego was more important than the value of a service which many netizens use.

As it stands I’ve marked 155 sites as favorites on Technorati. I read ALL of them. 60 people have added me as a favorite.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

I want Technorati Favorites to be what it was meant to be, a reflection of a blogs popularity as voted for by the community, not a meaningless list of who can favorite the most blogs and in turn get the most reciprocal favorites.

To all the bloggers who participated in the “Technorati Favorites Exchange” meme:

Shame on you, for ruining a service I actually liked and valued!

Revisiting WidgetBox and YourMinis

Yesterday I wrote about my experiences trying out WidgetBox and YourMinis, and I even talked a little about it with Alec in O’Flaherty #10. (Visit the podcast page to listen to the O’Flaherty Podcast in our SplashCast player without having to download the shows.)

I wasn’t very happy with WidgetBox because I couldn’t get the widget I created for O’Flaherty to embed easily into my MySpace profile.

The fault was not all at the feet of WidgetBox and it appears that MySpace had rolled out a new image verification feature, for when you attempt to modify your profile, which broke WidgetBox’s system.

Omar Megdadi from WidgetBox Support was kind enough to email me explaining what was going wrong and to grant me permission to republish his email:

Hi Paul,
Thanks for trying out Widgetbox and for adding your Blidget to our gallery!
The night prior to your post, MySpace released a new feature that requires users to enter a visual code when updating their profiles.  This feature was the cause for our system not being able to add your widget to your profile.  We’ve pushed a fix for this.  Our no-code install to MySpace is working again.

You also mention that the widget on MySpace is wrapped with 2 buttons that were not present on the preview on Widgetbox.  These only appear in MySpace.  They enable Widgetbox widgets to link out of MySpace — something that only Widgetbox widgets can do, as far as we know.  Please check out this post in our blog about it: http://blog.widgetbox.com/2007/02/widgetbox_enabl.html.  You’ll notice that your YourMinis Blidget does not link out of MySpace and actually greys out the articles as you click on them.

As far as ease of installing a widget, we have been hard at work and will soon release an improved installation process that both simplifies the steps and adds no-code installs to even more popular web destinations.
Again, thanks for your comments and time; and for using Widgetbox!

Omar Megdadi

Widgetbox Support
www.widgetbox.com

Thanks for clearing that up Omar.

I look forward to trying out WidgetBox again now that the MySpace issue has been resolved.

Omar also pointed out something which I didn’t notice, and that is, if you install the RSS widget (like the O’Flaherty one) from YourMinis on your MySpace profile then the links don’t work.

Since Omar pointed it out I’ve tried the YourMinis O’Flaherty widget on MySpace and can verify that it doesn’t work.

In the meantime I’ve left a message on the YourMinis forums about the issue and sent a message to Jeremy Suriel.

Hopefully the guys at YourMinis will sort that out ASAP.

Thanks again to Omar from WidgetBox for clearing up why things weren’t working!

For those of you who want to try out the two widgets I’ve been mentioning:

If you use WidgetBox you can follow this link to download the WidgetBox O’Flaherty Widget.

If you’re a YourMinis fan the follow this link to get the YourMinis O’Flaherty Widget.

OFlaherty Episode #10 – My Mini is YourMinis

My Mini is YourMinis

Apologies for the late posting. This episode was recorded last night, the 26th of April but I only got around to posting it today.

This episode features a recorded Gizmo call with O’Flaherty regular Alec Palomo. We have a but of a laugh as well as cover some MMORPG stuff and widgets!

Podsafe Music from Kevin Reeves

Links

• Lord of the Rings Online
• World Of Warcraft
• Firefly
• WidgetBox
• YourMinis
• Technorati
• Yahoo Widgets
• Google Desktop

Music

• “Throw Me a Line” by Kevin Reves
• Kevin Reeves on Podsafe Music Network.

Credit

• Podcast Theme: Derek K. Miller
• Alec Palomo
• Audacity

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O’Flaherty Widgets! WidgetBox and YourMinis

All this talk of Technorati possibly entering the widgets game got me looking at WidgetBox and YourMinis today.

WidgetBox

First off let me say that both sites are great and both offer a vast array of widgets but, for my money, YourMinis has the edge as WidgetBox makes it too much of a chore to get your widget off of the service and on to your site of choice.

The problem with WidgetBox is the need to install a panel on the site you wish to install widgets on before you can actually install any widgets.

I tried to install a widget I created for this blog on my MySpace profile. After creating the widget I thought it would be a simple matter of simply copying and pasting the code into my profile.

Unfortunately this was not the case. I tried to use their system to automatically add the widget to my profile but it didn’t work.

So next I tried to add the code manually. That code did not work on MySpace.

I then tried creating a static page in Dreamweaver, embedding the code and previewing it in Firefox.

This worked, but the widget was not the same as the one I could see on the WidgetBox site. The widget had two extra buttons on the bottom and the borders were far wider and not as elegant as they appeared on the WidgetBox site.

I eventually did get the widget installed on my MySpace profile by installing a panel.

This is essentially a button that opens up another frame on the page containing the widgets.

I don’t like this approach because you first have to get the user to open the panel by clicking a button, and second, I couldn’t get the widget to display in its entirety on the panel. Even after setting sizes for the panel that are much larger than the widget, it still failed to display properly.

If you want to see what I mean simply follow this link which will take you to my MySpace profile with the panel opened. You can also see the “Open My Widget Sidebar” button on the left hand side of the screen. It’s the stupid looking robot with the lasers coming out of his eyes.

Now I don’t want to slate WidgetBox! Maybe I was missing something glaringly obvious that makes this service easy to use.  But you can bet that if I missed it then a heck of a lot of other people will to.

I was much happier with YourMinis!

YourMinis

The widget in the top corner of this post is was made using the YourMinis service and it was a breeze to do. It was also a piece of cake to get the code out and embed it directly into this blog.

YourMinis makes it really simple to get the code out. You simply select the widget you want and click a button to copy it to your Desktop (if you’re using Apollo), to your YourMinis Startpage (an Ajax desktop) or to the web.

Clicking to “to web” is really cool and provides a lot of options for embedding the widget in various services such as Blogger, Friendster, Typepad, Xanga and others.

In fact it’s so easy that all you have to do is mouse over the top right of the widget above and click the “copy me” button that appears. You’ll be able to copy the code from directly within the widget and put it on your own site or blog.

That’s how easy things should be.

The only thing lacking from YourMinis is the ability to get these widgets into services such as the Vista Sidebar, Google Desktop and Yahoo widgets.

Still, I wouldn’t expect it to take long before YourMinis offer that ability. Actually Jeremy Suriel said as much in the comments on my post about Technorati entering the widget space today.

one of the questions you raised is being able to run widgets on any platform (os, startpage, etc…) this is exactly our goal for the consumer. today, our widgets run on the web, our startpage, and the desktop (mac and pc). our api allows developers to leverage this ubiquity. In the next few weeks, we plan to release support for easy publishing to other startpage environments and desktop widget engines…

One unrelated thing, I have to mention in this post, is that I give 10 out of 10 top YourMinis for their original and amusing “Welcome” email which you receive after signing up.

Thank you for registering for an account at yourminis.com. A team of 33 highly resepected individuals analyzed your data and performed a thorough background check to ensure that you meet the proper requirements for becoming a member of yourminis.

We then held an anonymous vote in which, 31 of the 33 aforementioned individuals voted to accept your application (the other two were out to lunch). We had a big celebration in your honor and toasted you as our newest member.

You are now an official yourminian! Congratulations!

You now have the ability to access your personalized start page from any computer, publish your pages into the community, rate and leave comments for pages, widgets, blogs and people. You can even create your own widgets and blogs and upload them to the community.

We hope you have a wonderful experience using yourminis.com and tell all your friends and family to try us out. Thanks for your support – have fun!

- yourminis team

If you use WidgetBox you can follow this link to download the WidgetBox O’Flaherty Widget.

If you’re a YourMinis fan the follow this link to get the YourMinis O’Flaherty Widget.