Whatever its (lame) scientific significance, this will remain the very first book I’ve ever written, and, what’s more one that took me 3 years of hard work to gather its content.

After waiting 3 more years for it to come out the “confidential” closet in which it had been put, this is afterall a nice occasion to rejoice.

Hail the beast: Modelisation and prediction of the topography of flat carbon steel[fr] (abstract in english)

And while we’re at it some more details about my past crimes are also available on my former lab’s website.

For the celebration to be even more special I’ve also made available online a description of an image correction technique I’ve developed during my PhD. Half-way between research work¹ and an engineering work² this technique hardly found any place for publication in scientific reviews.

So, I decided to give it its chance by setting it free in the wild territory of reproducible research. That’s why, at the other end of the following link you’ll find not only  detailed explanations about the techniques, not only examples of its application on real life images but also and above all (Python) scripts making it possible to test it on just about any image:
Polynomial Form Correction with Autocorrelation

1. because the purpose was to find a problem that has proved difficult to solve with modern techniques and still had no solution at the time
2. because  it worked (sorry :) ) the solution consisted in a tiny piece of heuristics wrapped around some well-known and old-school mathematical tools

This week-end I went to visit the Cernuschi museum (Paris) and discovered that they offered a new way to walk through their permanent collections, suggesting visitors to pay more attentions to the representations of animals on all kind of objects coming from historical China.

That was a good way to re-discover the museum as well as some objects and painting that are usually keept in the museum’s reserve.

A recommended visit, so much so that I will surely go back there a couple of times in the weeks to come.

Now, I guess the least I can do is to thank them by pointing at them from here:

• soul / jazz with LadyVelvet
• funk / soul with Funky Delay
• choro with Brazz

I’ve decided to give flickr a go. So, I’ve uploaded a few pictures over there, and took the occasion to do things a bit differently: less photos displayed and no album but genuine titles and tags.

Here is the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27247511@N04/

Hopefully this will give a bit more visibility to some of those pictures. We shall see…

And then: De La Soul

… hard to resist.

What’s more, we had a nice Feel Good Inc. from De La Soul…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9IxLZF3mRM

and of course The Herbaliser came with their singer, Jessica Darling…

But first of all a great thanx to Miro’s developer that did a great job in tackling the two major problems I had with the software: impossibility to navigate the list of feeds, while playing a video (or audio) and performance. The only remaining thing on my whishlist would be that Miro handles image feeds (ala CoolIris for instance).

Now for the list of podcasts I listen to, most of them are in french, so here is a quick selection among the english speaking ones:

• ESOCast some info on the southern observatory in Chile
• Martin Bailey Photography Podcast: nice podcast about Martin’s work

• Jeff Curto’s Camera Position : about the “creative side” of photography

• TED Theme: Tales of Invention : high-tech fancy conferences

For a more exhaustive list see my OPML subscription file: miro_subscriptions

Processing on Ubuntu Intrepid 64

A few features impressed me right “out of the box”:

• the IDE is well designed I think:
  • straightforward: only the necessary elements are displayed: run/stop buttons and the usual saving ones
  • elegant with nice shapes and colors (even the syntactic highlighting matches the colors from the rest of the GUI)
  • the documentation is easily accessible by right-clicking on a keyword¹
• the packaging has been made carefully, though it’s probably been made easier with the use of Java and an open source license, some stuff is really meaningful to me:
  • it installed without a glitch on my Ubuntu64
  • the IDE offers an export function that make it possible to turn a simple script in a standalone application (to do some demos, and/or to put it on the web)
  • there are a lot of sample scripts available that are really helpful to find out about the library’s various features and the way to use them.

I haven’t looked at the scriting language in detail, yet, but from what I saw in the sample scripts and also from the good reputation of the library on the net, I guess I should not be deceived.

1. I’d certainly like to put this in my MathBench project

The girl effect: as if Muhammad Yunus had fallen asleep on his keyboard, and we saw his thoughts as a slideshow… (via PresentationZen it’s also interesting from a design point of view)