BlogNerds

This article describes techniques you can use to create new levels of usefulness in your dynamically generated charts with Perl and GD.

Many people have embraced Google’s Gmail service due to its slick interface and ample storage — but like any application, Gmail leaves a few things to be desired. To trick Gmail out to your specifications, take a look at Lifehacker’s Better Gmail, a Firefox extension that brings all sorts of extra goodness to Gmail.

CalicoPenny let us know about yet another “30 days” effort, this one to name the names of major companies infected with spam-spewing bots. Support Intelligence began the effort on March 28, out of frustration at not being able to attract the attention of anyone who could fix the problems at these companies. While they haven’t named 30 companies over the ensuing month, they did name some prominent ones, such as Thompson Financial, Bank of America, and AIG. The scary part is that if a bot can spam it can capture keystrokes or troll for interesting documents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My final year project in information design [...] the functions used, as well as additional information such as age, educational background, family status, gender and how often they are logged in. So, all demographic data which are available from every member’s profile.

Google is holding a personalization workshop at this moment, Colin Colehour is currently live-blogging from the Googleplex. Marissa Mayer spoke before, now Sep Kamvar talks.

How many developers run for the post of leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project and cite as part of their platform a desire to make Debian sexy again? None that I know of - except Sam Hocevar who won the recent election for leader of the project.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. It’s the HD-DVD processing key you can use to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux. Movie studios are going ballistic over this leak, so Digg the story up and make it reach the front page. The first time, the story got removed.

AlHunt sends us an AP story on Google’s push to help states open up their data to online searchers. Google is going about this in an evenhanded way, according to the story, and the results of its labors — initially in Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia — will be available to all search engines, not just theirs. The move is being hailed by groups such as OpenTheGovernment.org, but the Electronic Privacy Information Center expressed concerns, given what they call Google’s “checkered past” with regard to privacy on the Internet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Imagero is a Java image I/O library. Supported file types include BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNG, JNG, MNG, JPEG (including CMYK and 12-bit grey), PSD, PBM, PGM, PPM, TGA, EPS, EPSI, and EPSF, MRW, CRW, NEF, DCR, and DNG. It can read thumbnails and can read and edit metadata (IPTC, EXIF, XMP, Wang Annotations, Image Resource Blocks, Image File Directrories, JPEG Markers). An image can be read into an array, Image, BufferedImage, or tiled RenderedImage. Accurate color conversion is done with ICC profiles. TIFF tools allow you to split and merge TIFF images.

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License: Free for non-commercial use

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Changes:
Writes JPEG and BMP files. Can edit JPEGs in frequency domain. The following operations were implemented: rotate (90, 180, and 270 degrees), mirror (vertical, horizontal, and diagonal), swap channels, add/sub (constant or channel), multiply, crop, copy area, and invert (channel, color, and luminance). Low level reading and writing of JP2 and JPX boxes and markers. Bugfixes were made.

align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10">
Daylight Chart shows sunrise and sunset times in
an attractive chart for any location in the world.
The effect of daylight savings time is also
displayed. Charts can be exported to image files.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release now makes a best guess at the time zone for locations loaded in from GNS Country Files and GNIS Files. There is a new menu option to see online help, and another to see a daylight chart with local time.