Face Detection & Mandelbrot
A few weeks ago now Kevin was asking me how to do face detection.
This brought my old image filter script back to mind, as it was initially meant for the first part of a face detection script that used a mean filter to smudge up faces and make colour matching a lot easier. I never really got that far however, so my script remained just for filtering images.
Kevin had found an article on a much simpler method that just used plain colour detection methods but was having an awkward time implementing the concept into working PHP code that could cut out everything but skin tones. After asking me to take a look, and me putting it off for a day or two, I sat down and worked out a small and simple implementation of it.
I'd like to add better features, like using the result of this script to find individual faces, border them and then run feature detection on the original image to cut out false positives, try to get the whole face instead of cutting out eyes/mouths, and to get orientations and such, but that would require more free time than even I have!

The simple implementation is: http://sandbox.palmnet.me.uk/fd.php?face=http://www.centocor.com/centocor/images/people-1.jpg

I did have enough free time however to help Kevin with another PHP/image thing he wanted to try but couldn't get quite right.
He wanted to draw the Mandelbrot set with PHP/GD and so when it didn't quite work out and the maths got sticky he aske ..]]> http://blog.palmnet.me.uk/post/index/180/PHP-projects-Arduino-and-work Man, captchas suck.

I think we all agree that captchas are fairly useless and more often than not cause more annoyance than good.
Most captchas are easily broken if someone sets their mind to it. Especially the one that came with this blog script! And even if they do stop bots they also stop blind or visually impaired people from using your system too.

But they are an unfortunate necessity, especially on the high traffic parts of my site like the mini polls where there's currently a captcha I hand coded especially for the mini polls. And so far I'm shocked to say I've not had any spam on there except the usual human spam.
However, today I have constructed an uber-captcha, which I quite like. It is slightly hard to read though.

This new one uses just PHP, no separate app (not possible on this server) or anything like that, and it generates an animated GIF file where every frame is totally unreadable, but when animated together it becomes readable to the human eye.
That's the idea anyway. I might have gone a bit overboard with methods to try and stop people using image filters on layers to get readable text again and it's now fairly hard to read: (hit esc in Firefox to stop it looping and see how messed up a single frame is)

Anyway, feedback would be great on this. Any ideas on what I could do to make it more readable, yet still being awkward to crack.
Also, anyone who cracks it with their own code (no script kiddies) wins a free sandwich Fancy code or code in an esoteric language gets you a coke to go with your sandwich!

To play around with it and see what percentage of them you get right go to http://sandbox.palmnet.me.uk/gifcaptcha/, let me know what scores you get in the comments.

• 23, 332 uniques
• 1, 317, 979 Hits
• 908.78 MB Bandwidth used

Though that only sounds like a small amount of bandwidth, roughly 85% of hits were to the bar images from the mini polls, and they're only 200 bytes.
So to get over 900MB from that is fairly impressive!

I don't think I'll ever get stats as good as that again so I'll have to thank Rob Manuel, co founder of B3ta, who got me 99% of those stats for using my poll script and for crediting me on e4 where he used the results gathered by the mini polls.

If anyone else uses them for something interesting do let me know

Polls
Like I said before, if anyone uses them for random or cool things please let me know. And don't be shy to suggest a feature, let me know of a bug or even propose a whole new project to do if you think it'll help you or others.

I did do some updates to the mini polls since I last blogged about them, so don't forget to wander over and take a look at what's new. I really need to come up with more creator options, like specific colours and such. Also the create page won't let you add new options without javascript which is a pain. But as they aren't overly important I'm putting them off for now.

Other Projects
I've been carrying on with work for a new version of Palmnet. So far I've re-done all the work I ..]]> http://blog.palmnet.me.uk/post/index/178/Stats-Polls-and-other-projects
Happy 1,000,000 hits day!

For the first time in Palmnet history I've gotten over 1,000,000 hits per month.
Way back when I think I somehow managed 14k or 15k in uniques, but since I forgot the exact number the new record number of uniques is currently just past 15,000.

At the end of the month I'll have to blog again and see what those numbers have climbed to. But considering we're only 60% through the month I'll cross my fingers and hope for more lovely webernet surfers to come and visit.

Loughborough University Computing Services are idiots. They blocked ports for remote access to SQL server and FTP for the server we need to access remotely over the Easter break.
&guot;But that won't take long to fix!" I hear you say, but according to inside sources it could be over a week to open two ports, and then over a day for settings to propagate across their various firewalls

Oh, and T-SQL for SQL server 2005 is really, really, inefficient and backwards.
Joys of university projects!

It was only my second time in London, so fearing the worst I got trains and the London Underground so that I'd have an hour to spare for delays and getting lost. Thankfully I got there quicker than the train should have, I found the underground really easily and got to the building I was meant to be at about one and a quarter hours early!

With my spare time I thought I'd be a bit touristy and check out some of the sights that were within walking distance of my interview. I took photos on my lame camera phone of things like Big Ben, Palmer Street and a few mangled shots of Westminster Abbey.

Then on Flickr earlier this month I got a message asking if some company could use my (frankly pretty poor) photo of Westminster Abbey for use in some tourist map thing I'd never heard of. Being the kind fellow I am I agreed.

Today I've been told that if you go Here you can see my little photo and a credit to me! Apparently it also works on the iPhone and some other phones too, so you can tour round London and find out all the history, information and maps.

Thought I'd let you all know about them as they were nice enough to include my photo, and to ask permission too

This is actually the first post in 2009, over 2 months since my last post. Since then much has happened to me and my plans and unfortunately not all for the best.

General project plans have been delayed by faffing about with placements, new university semester and year long project deadlines. Some projects, like the shoutboxes are currently on hold while other, like the new version of Palmnet, are still in the pipeline and have jumped the queue.
That isn't to say that shoutboxes will never be finished, just as it stands my future seems fairly busy and I'm not sure where to squeeze them in. But as it's a fairly popular project I dare say I'll squeeze it in soon enough and hopefully get the damned thing done and available for download soon so that the 3 of you, you know who you are, can get off my back and bask in the glory of fresh code.

I've also been tweaking some of the current Palmnet scripts lately, updating things like the raycaster (which still refuses to work) to show a debug view which is pretty handy and should make fixing it properly fairly easy when I have chance to sit down with a pencil and paper and sort it out.
The minipolls also got a bit of an update today with a few new features requested by none other than Rob Manuel, co-founder of the renowned B3ta.com, who then made 2 polls of massive proportions and almost killed my server with the load put on it. Interesting server statistics would be the 309.3% load it was reporting on the intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5130 @ 2.00GHz processor and the 9.4 requests/sec, which though it doesn't sound like much it caused enough lag on that server for database connections to time out and for me to receive 54 emails letting me know about it!

As for Palmnet v3 I'm st ..]]> http://blog.palmnet.me.uk/post/index/175/Polls-Projects-and-real-jobs It's Christmas! (Almost)

Anyway, as the season is upon us I get a nice break from university, from the 12^th of December to the 12^th of January. This gives me a bit of time to actually do something instead of talking about things I'd like to do.

Jobs / Site plans
At university these past few months I've been hunting for a placement job.
For those not in the know, an industrial placement is basically just a year out working in the industry you hope to end up in. My university is extra nice and gives us a whole extra diploma for taking a placement, which is always handy.
So I updated my CV, customised it for each employer, put it in multiple formats and so on. Sent it off to 4 companies, had 3 replies so far, 2 interviews and one job offer so far. The one thing I noticed was that most applications wanted a link to a personal website, if you had one. Or it would at least be brought up in interviews because of the work I've done and the places I applied to.
So I've actually started to have important people looking at my site and judging me based on it...not a good thing when the site is as poor as this one currently is.

My solution is to start working on Palmnet version 3 (Pv3), and to actually start working on it this time because I have a good reason to re-code it all.
Plans are as have been mentioned a few times before, but hopefully with more finesse that would make potential employers swoon at the simplicities of the design and intricacies of the code. As I have two weeks after Christmas that were planned for revision time (5 exams coming up at the end of Jan/start of Feb) I shall no doubt start coding then to help me relax while revising.

Kevin, the skilled photoshop ninja he is, has been cranking out some rather fancy pants designs and an awesome logo too. So expect the site to actually look good when compared to the past fou ..]]> http://blog.palmnet.me.uk/post/index/174/Christmas-news When I joined uni over a year ago I knew it would take up lots of my free time with work and socialising, and last year it did just that. But this year is even more manic than before!

So far I seem to have more lectures this time round, or at least more 9am ones. Which drains my energy before I've even had lunch.
Then we have exams looming on the far side of the Christmas break which is starting to be in the back of my mind now with revision starting to make a mention in lectures too.
We have two group course works and both are pretty dull. One is using SPSS to do some analytics stuff and the other is a tiny bit of code and lots of write-up for a timetabling system. It's nice to have group courseworks to spread the load, but they're just so dull this semester! However the main reason I'm posting this at this time is because I just finished some code and editing the writeup at +3am >.<
Not to mention job hunting too. Next year I'll hopefully be taking a year out in industry to gain an extra diploma and another 3 letters after my name. But job hunting takes more time than I thought. On the up side I do have lots of cool freebies from the careers fairs.
Oh, and I'm a member of two societies again which though fun they do take up time

Anyway, this mostly boils down to my excuses for not posting for ages and when I have been posting lately, not having much to talk about.

So I'll do a short list of random things instead:
Shoutboxes
Not been working on them too much but whenever I open Notepad++ I have it set to open about 12 shoutbox files with the To-Do list at the front to remind me.
I do hope to take some time off over Christmas to revise for January exams, so I might use the shoutboxes to have a break and keep my mind sharp and hopefully have it ready for some sort of ..]]> http://blog.palmnet.me.uk/post/index/173/University-Grr Usual long time no blog and larger catching up post however this time I have a genuine reason why I might appear to have been dead for a while.

I started my second year of university here at Loughborough (Sunday Times University of the Year ) recently and moved out of halls and got a house. Which though awesome it did mean I had to set certain things up. Gas, water, electric and all the less important things were easy. But the most important thing of all, the internet, took about 2 weeks just to get installed!
So it’s not out of choice that I haven’t been replying to emails, checking forums and being on MSN.
However, in my time offline I have done a little work on the much anticipated (ha shoutboxes.
So much work that it's almost in a stable and usable state, see here for a demo:

As you can see, it's still nowhere near feature complete, let alone finalised. But it is at least working based on the underlying code I've done. So hopefully things left to do on my 100+ item ToDo list will be easier to code and everything should go a bit smoother now.

Other than shoutboxes I haven’t got much to report, general first week of university activities kept me busy.
I do plan on doing either some fancier image things or perhaps update the CPU emulator if I get chance soon. And I’ll hopefully be starting the new Palmnet soon because the current version with it's masses of non-centralised and segregated projects is starting to get in the way of progression. So updates are badly needed.

But uni work this year is far ..]]> http://blog.palmnet.me.uk/post/index/172/Uni-life-and-shoutbox-news