This weekend I decided to play around a bit with genetic programming and put evolution to the test, the test of fine art :-)

I created a small program that keeps a string of DNA for polygon rendering.
The procedure of the program is quite simple:

0) Setup a random DNA string (application start)

1) Copy the current DNA sequence and mutate it slightly
2) Use the new DNA to render polygons onto a canvas
3) Compare the canvas to the source image
4) If the new painting looks more like the source image than the previous painting did, then overwrite the current DNA with the new DNA
5) repeat from 1

Now to the interesting part :-)

Could you paint a replica of the Mona Lisa using only 50 semi transparent polygons?

Yes. Yes you can.

Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa « Roger Alsing Weblog

sudo apt-get --purge remove postgresql-8.2

If you need Ubuntu to recreate an init.d script, use --purge remove then reinstall.

[SOLVED] postgresql-8.2 package is broken - Ubuntu Forums

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness. It was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of "the uncanny" identified in a 1906 essay, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny". Jentsch's conception is famously elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay, simply entitled "The Uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche"). A similar problem exists in realistic 3D computer animation, such as with the film The Polar Express[1] and Beowulf.

Uncanny valley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When I grew up in the 1970s, the idea of the "corporate ladder" was still very much alive. The standard plan was to try to get into a good college, from which one would be drafted into some organization and then rise to positions of gradually increasing responsibility. The more ambitious merely hoped to climb the same ladder faster. [1]

But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size.

The High-Res Society

Partitioning takes this notion a step further, by allowing you to distribute portions of individual tables across a filesystem according to rules which you can set largely as needed. In effect, different portions of a table are stored as separate tables in different locations. The user-selected rule by which the division of data is accomplished is known as a partitioning function, which in MySQL can be the modulus, simple matching against a set of ranges or value lists, an internal hashing function, or a linear hashing function. The function is selected according to the partitioning type specified by the user, and takes as its parameter the value of a user-supplied expression. This expression can be either an integer column value, or a function acting on one or more column values and returning an integer. The value of this expression is passed to the partitioning function, which returns an integer value representing the number of the partition in which that particular record should be stored. This function must be non-constant and non-random. It may not contain any queries, but may use an SQL expression that is valid in MySQL, as long as that expression returns either NULL or an integer intval such that

MySQL gets table partitioning.

MySQL :: MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual :: 18.1 Overview of Partitioning in MySQL

Wednesday December 17, 2008 from 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Starbucks @ Georgia Tech Bookstore
48 Fifth St NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30308
Category: Social
Website: http://www.sanjay/atlanta-open-coffee-december-17-2008
More details at: http://www.sanjayparekh.com/atlanta-open-coffee-december-17-2008/

Atlanta Open Coffee returns to Tech Starbucks this month.

Open Coffee Club - Atlanta at Starbucks @ Georgia Tech Bookstore (Wednesday December 17, 2008) - Upcoming

Maybe the painkillers loosened something in his mind, because as Kaminsky began to think more deeply about DNS he became convinced that something wasn't right. He couldn't quite figure it out, but the feeling stuck with him even after he stopped taking the pain pills. He returned to work full time and bought a recumbent stationary bike. He got hired to test the security of Windows Vista before it was released, repeatedly punching holes in it for Microsoft. Still, in the back of his mind, he was sure that the entire DNS system was vulnerable to attack.

Then last January, on a drizzly Sunday afternoon, he flopped down on his bed, flipped open his laptop, and started playing games with DNS. He used a software program called Scapy to fire random queries at the system. He liked to see how it would respond and decided to ask for the location of a series of nonexistent Web pages at a Fortune 500 company. Then he tried to trick his DNS server in San Diego into thinking that he knew the location of the bogus pages.

Suddenly it worked. The server accepted one of the fake pages as real. But so what? He could now supply fake information for a page nobody would ever visit. Then he realized that the server was willing to accept more information from him. Since he had supplied data about one of the company's Web pages, it believed that he was an authoritative source for general information about the company's domain. The server didn't know that the Web page didn't exist—it was listening to Kaminsky now, as if it had been hypnotized.

Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends Worldwide Web

Here's a sign of how much programmers like to be able to work hard: these guys would have paid to be able to release code immediately, the way they used to. I asked them if they'd trade 10% of the acquisition price for the ability to release code immediately, and all three instantly said yes. Then I asked what was the maximum percentage of the acquisition price they'd trade for it. They said they didn't want to think about it, because they didn't want to know how high they'd go, but I got the impression it might be as much as half.

They'd have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps millions, just to be able to deliver more software to users. And you know what? It would have been perfectly safe to let them. In fact, the acquirer would have been better off; not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done. So the acquirer is in fact getting worse performance at greater cost. Just like the committee approving software purchases.

And just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won't even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work for you.

Steve Jobs's famous maxim "artists ship" works both ways. Artists aren't merely capable of shipping. They insist on it. So if you don't let people ship, you won't have any artists.

The Other Half of "Artists Ship"

Hurrah!! Thanks to everyone who nominated Regator earlier this month, we’ve made it past the primaries and are now a real, honest-to-goodness candidate for Best Social News site in Mashable’s Open Web Awards. This is absolutely awesome news for our young site.

Please vote for us and vote OFTEN (you’re allowed one vote every 24 hours) using the fancy blue widget on the right.

From here on out, it gets very David-and-Goliath. You see, our three-month-old startup is in the top ten with sites like Digg and Socialmedian. Yes, Digg. So we really need your help. We’re not only asking for your daily vote, we’re also asking (okay, begging) for you to share this great news with everyone you know who might enjoy Regator.

Atlanta startup Regator is doing battle with Dig and others in the Mashup awards. Show your support by voting for them once per day, per email address for the rest of the week. They are currently in the top 10. If they get top 3 it will rocket them to success, so be community minded and vote!

Regator Blog — News and Views from the Regator Team

KiokuDB: Persistent Object Graphs for Perl

KiokuDB is a Moose based object oriented persistence frontend for various document oriented storage backends.

KiokuDB focuses on predictability and transparency, allowing noninvasive persistence while minimising the unpleasant surprises that come with naive serialization approaches.

The project builds on Moose's metaprogramming for runtime support, Search::GIN's indexing and querying facilities, and preexisting database technologies such as Berkeley DB for high performance and robust transactional storage.

KiokuDB