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I got a new notebook computer a couple of days ago. Here are some specs (details):

Processor: AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile TL-52 at 1.60 GHz
Memory: 1 GB DDR2
Video: integrated ATI Mobility Radeon X1200 on PCI-E x16
Display: 1280 X 800
WiFi: Atheros AR5006EG/AR5006X
Software: 32-bit Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium

Now, all this is delicious stuff, except for the Microsoft Windows Vista part. Naturally, I proceeded to wipe Windows off the disk. I popped in my Kubuntu 7.04 Live CD, pressed [Enter] at the graphical menu, and waited for the system to start and load KDE.

It didn’t.

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Maintaining a trustable Online presence is important. While signing all your messages using RSA is a good way to assure others that these messages come from the same source, it could still be difficult to convince people that you are who you say you are.

Certificate authorities (CA’s) are trusted organizations that link digital signatures to physical entities. After you register with a certificate authority, your identity could be verified. Of course, you’d need to pay the CA so that it could run all sorts of background checks on you. The last time I checked, it costed a couple of hundred dollars a year for a certificate from companies like VeriSign and Thawte. Since I’m developing a free application, this is a cost that I’m not willing to pay.

Thawte has an alternative program, Thawte Freemail, that distributes free certificates with which you can verify your digital signatures. As the name implies, it’s designed to be used for securing emails. Really, though, these certificates can be used for anything else. Richard Dallaway outlines his process for obtaining and using a Thawte Freemail certificate.

Well what do you know? I can start signing Imagine soon, and y’all can rest assured that you’re getting a quality app from a trusted source. (Well, maybe I’ll hold off on that for a bit; I want it to be able to run without special privileges.)

After a day of intense coding, I’ve made my calendar generator better than ever! Alright, I might just be bragging, but really, there’re some features that make this program stand out even more. If you’re a Columbia student and you’ve ever found this program useful, you’d be glad to know that I haven’t abandoned the project. Read more about it at its project page. Or, if you’re impatient to use the program, go here: http://www.scheduler.uni.cc/.

Finally, Discover Worlds has been moved onto a different server with more resources. Currently, it’s at www.discoverworlds.org, running on a Network Solutions standard UNIX hosting package. The last couple of days had been spent on getting various hosting details right, but everything seems to be in order. From what I can see, Network Solutions offers pretty good hosting with excellent customer service too, but the price tag is a bit hefty. Let’s hope for the best.

(Oh yeah. You can make a donation to Discover Worlds if you want =p)

What operation allows you to translate, scale, shear, and rotate your picture all at once? You guessed it… it’s the affine transformation.

What’s an affine transformation? Also known as an affinity, an affine transformation maps points (x,y) to (x’,y’) such that collinearity and distance ratios are preserved. This means that all points lying on a line before transformation still lie on a line after transformation, and proportion and betweenness are preserved along lines. An affinity does not preserve angles or lengths.

But we know that graphic designers can’t be bothered with all this math stuff, so we’ve put all the juicy affine goodies into a neat little package called… well, the Affine Transformation. At the core of this package is a matrix operator that does all sorts of things to your image, but all you have to know is that your picture comes out looking nice and pretty. Now, how exactly do you use this tool?

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