I was inspired by Ohmpie’s post, “Encoding an image to sound” about sound in gray scale images. One extension of his work is steganography. Steganography aims to send a message in an image without others’ knowledge that an encrypted message is attached. I started with the following image, upon which I could add data.
The following image has hidden audio data encoded in the colors used in the image.
The audio encoded in the image was extracted from this image. You can listen to it. Audio after decryption
A closer look at the image shows some of the dithering caused by the extra data.
How does it work?
For this project, I worked with X-Pixmap (XPM) files, which are trivial to manipulate in Gimp and Perl. I sorted the colors using a 3-D Hilbert curve. It had to be 3-D curve to account for red, green and blue. The Hilbert curve guarantees that not one color will differ from the next significantly. I sorted the entire spectrum into one dimension. I only used one out of every 16 colors in the palette. This leaves me with 4 bits per pixel. For this image size, this allows me to embed 34kB of data of any type. For embedding the hidden data, I sorted the colors based on the scheme described above, then dithered the color slightly to add the 4 bits. To decode, I sorted the color palette, computed the length along the Hilbert curve, modulo 16, then took the remainder, which I concatenated to re-create the data.
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:03 am by David Kellogg
Grace Hopper sat in the back of my head for years. I remember someone from long ago telling a crowd that everyone could receive a nanosecond of wire. The wire is about a foot long. Then she brought out a millisecond. That was impressive. Ms. Hopper held a resume of impossibilities. She was a college professor who joined the Navy at age 37, wrote the manual for the Mark I, became the mother of COBOL and all programming languages, became a Rear Admiral and DEC scientist. I found her again on David Letterman’s show in the early Eighties.
In the old days of physics grad school, Terry and I would hang out at TIS and talk about books. The conversation would go like this.
Terry: Did you ever buy one of those Dover books? Me: No. It’s like looking at a subject like solid state physics from the eyes of the ’60s. They never revised the thing. Terry: Well if you ever find extra change in your car seat and you want all of the equations in one place, you can blow $9.95 on the Dover version.
Dover is a publishing house that sells Pulp Physics and Pulp Linear Algebra. The paper and the printing are sub-pron, and they seem never to revise their books. We grad students never stooped to the Dover level, and would rather pay $200 for a real book.
My life came full circle as this ex-physicist who sold all of his physics and math texts suddenly found a need for linear algebra. Ironically, now that I make several times my stipend, I hunted for the cheapest linear algebra that could explain what I once knew. I came across this one,
Matrices and Transformations by Anthony Pettofrezzo. I blew all of 7 bucks on the thing. It’s my first Dover book. And it’s a good one. I’m inverting matrices like a high school genius. Eigenvectors are my gimp. Now, if only I can get back to my grad-school form.
After Twitter’s falling apart during Mac World Expo, I though about Ted Stevens.
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:16 am by David Kellogg
I think Silicon Valley needs a folk song. Somehow, the crazy life here needs to be summed up by a disconnected pony-tail-sporting non-blue-shirt-wearing folk singer. In lieu of that, we have “Here Comes Another Bubble” by the Richter Scales. Thanks, TechCrunch.
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:03 am by David Kellogg
People say the Semantic Web produces nothing. I counter that it produces many useful panel discussions to entertain many MIT graduates.
Panel discussions in the web world are omni-important in producing great technology. Terry Chay has a rundown of our Web Version History. For those too lazy to click, here they are.
Notes:
Web 4.0. Potato Farming
The semantic web will relay all human knowledge between computers, leaving you and me and all of California with nothing to do but eat at McDonald’s. The resulting need for ginormous fries will lead the best and brightest into Potato Farming.
Web 5.0. The Singularity. After The Singularity the Machine is Us.
Web 6.0. ????. The whole of humanity, having been downloaded to the computer, gets caught in a honeypot.
Web 7.0. Profit!
Panel discussions predate all leaps in electronic technology. Here are a few examples.
1945 Trinity detonation — Panel discussion
1947 Bardeen and Brattain transistor — Panel discussion
1962 Nick Holonyak LED — Panel discussion
2007 Facebook Apps — Panel discussion
As you can see, all great technology comes from like-minded individuals discussing current topics to move science forward. Innovation does not come from a small set of smart and creative individuals, but rather, from talking endlessly about the fine points of maxcardinality vs. mincardinality and encouraging others to do the same.
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:06 am by David Kellogg
Terry Chay seems like he’s holding back with his criticism of OpenSocial. What can I add about a Google project that is neither open nor social?
First, the list of exclusions. Yahoo was not invited because Google thought of it. Tagged is missing because Plaxo was invited. Facebook was excluded because Myspace was invited. Ebay was excluded because Google wants to destroy Paypal.
We need a moratorium on non-open self-proclaimed open projects. If you see “Open” in CaMeLCaps, it’s not open, it’s just Web 2.0. The terms of service do not appear “open.”
Google’s version of open is that you are open, and they benefit. Google wanted access to Myspace’s users to complement tiny Orkut, and Myspace complied. Google’s terms of service reads like a closed document. It starts out
“you may use the API as part of a commercial or non-commercial enterprise.”
But then it gets out of hand.
“Google may, from time to time and at its sole and absolute discretion …”
That’s not open, and and in what way does it include Plaxo and the others?
In the end, OpenSocial is just Google’s releasing their broken, easily-hackable Orkut code to the non-embargoed companies.
With these terms of service, can I, can you, add to their API? I really doubt it.
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:10 pm by David Kellogg
Terry Chay has a running joke if he does not remember an Asian girl’s name, he just admits he’s a banana, and that to him, all Asians look alike. I think if you are a Ruby developer you can tell these sites apart but really, why do all Ruby sites look alike?
The Rails sites here appear to be templates for many other ugly sites. I will start with the worst, then I will get to the RoRing Rules.
Ruby sites gone not-so-wild
Big Patents has Big Text. Not surprisingly, they use CamelCaps. The site brags about some wonderful patent graph. Why don’t they show it instead of huge text?
This breaks every rule of good style. It is the anti-site. So ugly, it is almost charming. It follows the first RoR Rule, Big.
1. Big text
2. Colors that hurt
3. Grids rule!
4. White space overdone
Jobster. Find your dream job. It has many large words. Jobster uses colors that hurt. This image does not do it justice. Click on the link and visit the eye pain.
LoanBack is a boring grid.
Perfect grid. Mechanical grid. I would love to look at eye tracking data for this. I have to read really hard and concentrate to see what the site is about. If I reached this through Stumble Upon, I would skip it, since I give most web sites 3 seconds before I try to leave.
This is another colors-that-hurt site, Economy in Crisis. Red white and blue never looked so bad. I like the stats on the left, though.
Now for something completely different. Some sites take time to boil their message down to a few meaningful words and graphics. They make the point right away. They are not, of course, written in Rails.
LinkedIn promotes professional and college connections.
In some ways I dislike the page, but it gets the job done with a non-grid triangle. The eye is drawn to singing up.
Facebook is about your social connections. Notice the blue, blue, blue, blue, green signup. It also gets the job done. It is also a non-RoR site.
If you look at enough Ruby on Rails sites, they begin to look alike. There is no reason for the large text or gaudy colors, yet they proliferate. I begin to wonder if the framework that is Rails removes all hope for a creatively refreshing and different looking site.
Imagine you are an analyst, you know, those financial types with the predictions. You have a 4 pm deadline to produce a report, but you failed to do any work. What do you do? Just wing it.
Social-networking sites will enlist 230 million active members by the end of the year and will keep attracting new users until at least 2009, according to an analyst report. But investors are still wary–and for good reason, as long-term growth is by no means certain.
But it already is the end of the year! What a prediction. This takes an analyst to predict? And now directly from the report.
This value chain will continue crystallizing, until each element required to design, build, maintain, operate and exist in a social network can be supplied separately.
Global social networking will grow and then plateau by 2012.
It is not clear how these geniuses happen upon these numbers. So I sought to find out.
Datamonitor Europe
Charles House
108-110 Finchley Road
London
Dear Sir or Madam,
I recently read an article in CNET describing your research about social networks. Do you simply make up your predictions, or is it from painstaking research? How many hours did Ri Pierce-Grove Technology spend on research?
a) 100
b) 1
c) 0
Can you enlighten me on his research methods? Are there any predictions that you made in the past that surprisingly came true? Please hurry back, because I do not have time for serious research for my blog.
Sincerely,
David Kellogg
I have not yet seen a response. Those doing serious journalism certainly do not have time to check facts or question authority. Instead, they shuffle stories from business press releases in order to sell reports (It’s $1895. Buy Now.). I for one call them on it. It would be far more interesting if an analyst pointed out in 2003 that social networking sites had potential to attract a large audience. Instead, they opt for making predictions in late October about what will happen in two months. Good work, Mr. Ri Pierce-Grove Technology.
Business 2.0 bites the dust after the current issue. The real culprit, strangely enough is the web. I’m a subscriber, and I can barely open this issue, I’m so disappointed. This reminds me of when I received my Virginia Magazine, I did not touch it for weeks because of the black ribbon on the front. How depressing. I knew it was a memorial issue for the Hokies. I’m witnessing the death of a cool magazine, and I killed it.
I killed it because I am an unpaid, unskilled writer attracting readers. And what’s my salary for this? Free!
It’s a shame because Business 2.0 had the guts to cover tiny companies that Fortune ignores.
It seems that after the AOL debacle, Time wants to distance itself from all things tech, including Netscape, online music sales, and Business 2.0. The Time execs never had the balls to get it right. Business 2.0 was all about those who chose to take a high risk to start their business, everything Time and Fortune deplore. That risk was written up so casually, it made you feel like everyone was doing it. Time did not want to take the risk of building this magazine during such a steep decline in print ad sales.
At least some magazines are taking some risks. The normally stodgy Virginia Magazine had an article about streaking the Lawn at the University of Virginia. Every student by tradition is supposed to streak the most hallowed patch of grass, the stepped quadrangle enclosed by Mr. Jefferson’s original, inspiring grounds. The magazine pointed out the first record of streaking, from 1937.
“A couple of them forsook their pajamas and rushed pell-mell, Adam and Eve fashion up to their rooms. And to think that a nudist colony is in the making at Virginia. That’s Jeffersonian Democracy for you.”
Fortune is a train wreck of writing lately. My last Fortune issue boasts “The greatest economic boom ever” and “Gates conquers China.” Oh, don’t hold back the hyperbole. I just don’t care. I wonder if there are any trends Fortune picks up on before they become mainstream. At some point Fortune lost its way by stopping reporting on how companies became great and started talking about the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
I declined to renew my subscription to this Fortune crap. And just to make matters worse, Time decided to send me several free Fortune issues, as if I wanted more garbage to take out.
All of this is being replaced by guys like me. I am part of the cult of amateurs, sucking advertising dollars from dead tree versions at a formerly high margin business, to a series of focused amateurs.
I wish the staff of Business 2.0 well. I hope it is replaced in some medium by a publication with a similar outlook of forward-looking businesses.
