Category Archives: Uncategorized

Keyboard shortcuts – the ALT trick

I just discovered a little time saving trick that I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know before. When you spend as much time behind a computer as I do, little things like this are great.

In many screens you’ll encounter buttons with one letter underlined. For example the ‘A’ is underlined on the ‘Replace All’ button in the screen below.

alt-a

Instead of lifting my hand from the keyboard and clicking the button with the mouse, I can just hit ALT+A to press the button!

Similarly I could click the ‘Replace’ button with ALT+R or even untick the ‘In selection’ with ALT+I

Trust me, that makes a big difference.

News24 balls up their graphic design

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My wife is a super graphic designer and I’ve learned a bit about the industry from her.

I can tell you for sure that she would DIE before publishing this image! It comes from the main page of a News24 website (otherwise quite a cool site).

plonker

I can’t believe that this got through to the public. Is it just me or does it look like Luke Watson has donated a lower leg to Natalie du Toit?

supersport-natalie

For those who don’t know, Natalie du Toit is one of South Africa’s greatest athletes. She lost her leg in an accident as a teenager but has gone on to be an amazingly successful Paralympic and Olympic athlete!

Defeating the News24 daily vote

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Beating the News24 poll Every day the News24 site has a user vote. I recently decided to take a closer look at their system – perhaps I could defeat the vote security. It would be fun (who says I’m a geek?) and I could learn something new.

I used a combination of Firebug and Python to watch their voting system in action. Pretty soon I realized that the security is very simple.

This is the process that News24 uses to record votes:
Flowchart showing how the News24 vote process works

Show the user the vote (question and options) and get their choice
Go to a page that checks if the user has already voted
If the user has NOT voted yet:
1. Save a file showing that the user has voted
2. Move to another page that counts the vote
Move on to the results page

It’s a pretty simple process and it works as long as nobody messes with it…

The problem is that it is very easy to derive the URL of the page that counts your vote (3b). So you can skip all the checks and go straight there as many times as you like!

So I wrote a very simple program (34 lines in Python including copious comments and whitespace) that:

Fetches the vote details
Asks which option to vote for and how many times
Hits the vote counting page X times

As simple as that!

And no, I don’t use it. That would be pretty lame. The fun part was figuring it out and defeating a well known site. Not screwing up the polls for everyone.

Amazing photo of kingfisher diving

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These are some stunning photos of a kingfisher feeding. At first I only saw the one below (best kingfisher photo I’ve ever seen) and couldn’t figure out how the photographer got it right.

Underwater shot of a Kingisher catching a fish

I managed to find the source page (check it out for high-res photos). It has some more stunning pictures which offer hints as to how the photographer could get the first shot.

Kingfisher diving towards a hole in the ice

Kingfisher emerging from a hole in the ice with a good catch

Superb visual illusions

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I just came across an interesting website – Illusion of the Year Contest. They have a competition for best visual illusion of the year and some of the entries are great.

I’ve included some of my favorites below.

This one is very interesting. When you zoom out and the faces are smaller they appear to be looking at eachother. Zoom in and they suddently appear to be looking at you.

It seems like our brains use different heuristics to figure out where a person is looking. When no other information is available the brain uses darker patch in an eye to indicate where the iris is and hence where the person is looking.

When the images are closer and more information becomes available then the border of the iris itself dominates. Awesome illusion.

I really like this one. The two images are actually of exactly the same androgynous face. The only difference is the contrast. Higher contrast seems feminine while lower contrast seems masculine. I don’t really know why that would be the case – any ideas?

It does help to explain why woman wear contract increasing mascara, eye-liner, blush and lipstick.

Facial contrast suggests sex - visual illusion

Finally, this one is also pretty cool. The dots seem to be bouncing off of eachother. In fact the inner dot traces a square and the outer dot traces a circle. Maybe our brains have a hueristic to infer a relationship between them.

More 3D Street Art

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I just came across the website of that guy who does the 3D street art. He’s got a few new pieces on there and it seems that he is tackling a whole new scale. This stuff is very clever and excellently executed.

This page that includes a few of the images (the official page is quite rubbish).

His name is Edgar Mueller and he’s from Germany. He’s been producing street art for decades. It seems there is a whole street painting community because he was awarded the maestro madonnari’ (master street painter) at the world’s largest street painting festival.

More amazing 3D street art from Edgar Mueller

National Geographic’s Infinite Photo

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National Geographic have put together this cool “infinite photograph”. They’ve used hundreds of user submitted photos to create an infinitely zoomable photo mosaic.

To see what I mean let’s go through an example. You start off with this image. Use the yellow border to choose an area to zoom into:

Example from National Geographic's Infinite Photo

The app will zoom in to show the selected area made up of hundreds of small photos:

Example from National Geographic's Infinite Photo

You can carry on zooming in forever. Eventually you’ll zoom in to a single image and the whole process starts again – hence the infinite…

Example from National Geographic's Infinite Photo

Yearbook smiles related to lower divorce rate

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The Economist has a very interesting article reporting experiments that show a relationship between smiling in a yearbook photo and divorce later in life.

The Experiment

The experimenters got hold of about 700 yearbook photos
The smiles in the photos were then rated
Smile ratings were then statistically compared with divorce in later life

The Results

Never divorced subjects had average smile ratings of 5.9
Divorced subjects had average smile ratings of 5.2 (a statistically significant difference)
Those who were least smiling were three times more likely to be divorced than those who were most smiling

It seems that statistically significant information can be gleaned from a thin “slice” of information. Smiles really do indicate personality.

The Lion King was a rip-off

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Lion King vs Kimba

Cracked.com has an article exposing “6 famous characters you didn’t know were shameless rip-offs”. One that surprised me was The Lion King which is pretty obviously a rip off from a Japanese cartoon called Kimba the White Lion.

They copied an incredible amount from the original Kimba cartoon. Several characters including the shaman ape, the hornbill advisor, the comedic hyenas, the evil uncle (it was an aunt in Kimba) were obvious copies.

Many of the scenes are also pretty obvious copies from Kimba. Disney, however, claims that all this is a coincidence. What a load…

Not convinced? Check out the examples below or take a look at this more detailed page.

Lion King vs Kimba

As the guys from Cracked say:

“Here’s a little experiment. Turn the tables, and try to create a cartoon series about a high-pitch-voiced mouse called “Mikey” and his friend “Ronald Duck.” Start selling merchandise for these characters, and see how long it takes you to hear from Disney’s lawyers.”

Free Willy was never really free

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An Orca in the wild It seems romantic to release captive animals, but I often wonder how long they last in the wild. Life for wild animals is tough enough – animals released from captivity must really struggle.

It seems that was the case with Willy (aka Keiko) the star of the movie Free Willy. New Scientist outlines the story in this article.

Summary:

The whale’s name was Keiko
He was captured in Icelandic waters in 1979 at about 2 years old
He then spent 10 years alone in a tank in Mexico
After the 1993 public pressure mounted to free Keiko and in 2000 he was transferred back to Iceland
He lived in a pen and was trained to swim out to sea with his trainers
He briefly interacted with wild orcas but stayed away from them in general
After his initial release he turned up in his pen 10 days later with an empty stomach (they tested)
He eventually migrated to Norway but started seeking out humans and soon became overwhelmed by the attention he generated
He was taken back to his pen in Iceland where he lived out his days. Even though the pen was open to the ocean he never left the bay again until his death in 2003