Yahoo spammed me!

I was checking one of my yahoo accounts, and I got a friendly reminder from them to update to the "new, safer" version of Internet Explorer. I have been avoiding IE for many years, so I can't vouch for it being safer or newer, but here are a three things that I can think of that makes IE so much better:

1. A closed source program allows only a select few people to view the code, and find security holes in it, because obviously the rest of humanity cannot be trusted to be as 'skilled' as the programers at Microsoft, since we all know that Vista is soo much better than Linux, right?
2. IE supports a larger user base than firefox or opera. This is a good thing, as many web developers can program specificially for IE, and their sites do not work correctly on FF or Opera. I mean, how fun can the internet be, if you can't be guaranteed to run every virus off of it, or finding out that you were on a phished version of your bank?
3. IE comes FREE with the purchase of any multi hundred dollar operating system, from 95 to Vista! Even better, you can use windows update to upgrade IE, instead of having to deal with Firefox's 'fancy' built in updater.
   

I'm also slightly upset that Yahoo got paid (atleast I hope they got paid) to send us spam. Now ofcourse Yahoo decided to add a small amount of small print, ala:

"You received this advertisement from Yahoo! because the information for the account -------------- indicates that Yahoo! may contact you about using Yahoo! for research and surfing the Web."

I'm not quite sure how advertising IE8 is considered research, and I know advertising this is anything but harmful for web surfing, considering all of the safer alternatives out there.

Also, for anyone considering complaining about me calling this 'spam', heres a thought for you. According to wikipedia:

"E-mail spam, known as unsolicited bulk Email (UBE), junk mail, or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients."

This is spam because I definatly do not want it. It is advertising a product released by a company for their products so thusly of 'commercial content' and considering that I have never been on windows or IE with that screen name, I can only guess that this was indiscriminate.

Of course, I do have to admit that I was using an email adderss that was on a yahoo server. So they are, legally, allowed to send emails to their own servers.

Pic of the Email in question: (click to enlarge)

Websites that can get you free stuff.

I've been trying out some of those 'win free stuff' sites over the last few months, and it does turn out that some of them do work. Most of these are trying to establish a user base by rewarding users from using their searchengine/site. Sites are listed from best to worse.


1. Swag Bucks
Site : swagbucks.com
Time to get a reward: About 1-2 weeks for a $5 amazon gift card.
Ship time: Less than a week.

Swag bucks offers a wide variety of prizes. You earn 2-4 points a day for using their search engine. It took me about 2 weeks to get my first gift card from them, and I cashed it in to confirm that its a valid amazon card. Highly Recomended


2. PikaGames
Site : www.pikagames.com
Time to get a reward: 2-3 months for a copy of fallout 3, much longer for anything else.
Ship time: unknown.

PikaGames is a flash game host much like newgrounds, you get one point each time you play a game, with a maximimum of about 40 points a day. It also features a nice facebook/myspace like area for making friends to talk to while playing the games. There are two problems with this site, however. First, It takes a fairly long time to get anything worth while. Secondly, because the site is so new, I haven't been able to find any accounts of people getting anything yet, so I cannot confirm if this site is legit. Its still fun to play flash games, even if you don't get anything, so I'm recomending it.

3. E-rewards/ U.Talk.Back
Site: Invite only, sorry
Time to get a reward: about 3 months for a $25 gift card.
Ship time: A month

These two sites are survey sites hosted by the company that owns gamestop. Its not too bad, except alot of times the surveys will take a long time to do, only to have it say that it cannot be accepted because you don't fit who they're trying to test. Still worth while, however there are alot better sites out there.

4. Microsoft's Live Search Club
Site: club.live.com
Time to get a reward: one day to 3 months, depending on the reward / how much time put in each day
Ship time: A month to 3 months to never

This site offers alot of really nice free stuff, but you really have to work for it. It sounds really nice, but its really flawed. Shipping times are way too long, and I still haven't recieved half of the stuff I ordered back in december. Their Support E-mail does nothing but send a blanket statement about their site. Not recomended.

5. PrizeRebel
Site:prizerebel.com
Time to get a reward: Unknown
Ship time: Unknown

This site seems pretty old, it has a ton of 'free offers' that you have to give your email for, or something to that extent. This site has a huge problem in that its really up to luck on wether or not you'll actually get credited for the things you do. In the 5 months I used this site, I didn't get enough credits for one single thing!

Big problem with my thumbdrive.

A bit of a personal crisis for me. I was walking home from class and about 2 km into my 3 km walk I noticed that my thumb drive had fallen appart some way along the way home. Just the electronics fell out, a bit of an upset considering I got it only a few months ago and now its already worthless. Plus the loss of data, a few assignments I've been doing for class since january, have to redo them now, plus the map program (see 2 articles ago).

I also was going to back it up the next day =/

USB plug should be in the lower left side of the blue part.

Several Posts comming soon

Heres a list of things to expect:

1. Update on previous posts
2. Rant about PNY's thumbdrives
3. Ways to get free stuff
4. A new computer project I'm working on.
5. Soap

I hope to start posting more often, untill next time, mewcurano out.

Path Finder

I'm working on a program that will find the fastest path from one point to another (think mapquest or a Garmen gps) using a genetic algorithm. Its been a while since I've worked on genetic algorithms, and they were all used in tandem with neural networks, so I'm anxious to see what the results will be like. The program will load a map, ask the user for beginging and end points, calculate the best route, then display the path.

Genetic Algorithms work as such:

1. Generate a random set of commands. This will be one 'organism'.
2. Generate a bunch of other 'organisms' with different commands.
3. Run each set of commands through the map.
4. Record the results and score the 'organism' on its 'fitness level'.
5. Generate a new set of organisms based on how well the previous ones did.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 several times.
   

Dinosaur Skeletons

After a while, I'm finally able to add a new blog entry. Finals are over (yay) and I'm on break, so I have to find something fun to do.
Here's a book that I had when I was younger, but never got to do. This book shows how to take 3 chicken skeletons and make a fairly accurate apatosaurus. I loved reading this book when I was younger, because it has a great deal of information on bone structure to go along with the instructions.
Expect to see more entries with progress photos of the project.

Make Your Own Dinosaur
Out of Chicken Bones
by Chris McGowan
(c) 1997

A Late Night, Caffine Induced Post on Facial Recognition

Here is just a quick example of how a computer could judge the emotion of someone using facial recognition.

First the program would start with a photo of the head (fig 1.). The way that this would be acquired would vary on the project, but I'd like to see something like a web cam used to update the photo and emotion over time.

Then the face is cropped out of the rest of the image (fig 2.) Again, this dependson the situation that the program was made for.

Several points are found on the face based on physical features (fig 3.) The ones I used on this example are the two ends of the lips, cheek bones, each end of each eyebrow, the nostrils, and the eyes.

The location of the points relative to each other is calculated and this data is used to determine the emotion. In this example, the angle formed by Nostril 1, Nostril2, and Lip 2 are used. As shown in figures 4-6, the more 'sad' the face is, the smaller this angle will be.

For more emotions, the rules would have to be more complex than in this simple example.