I agree to have the decoration you want everywhere in our new home. You can have all the furniture and appliances you want in the kitchen. I’m OK if all the shelves with my computer books are in the basement. OK too if you don’t want to see the file server in the living room. Agreed: I’ll put back Windows on your laptop. But …

But I absolutely want one wall painted like these:

Jean-Etienne

Photos found on Olybop.info (without original credit). Other walls with Tetris can be found on Flickr.

For your information:

• AFRO: WHO Regional Office for Africa
• AMRO: WHO Regional Office for the Americas
• EMRO: WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean
• EURO: WHO Regional Office for Europe
• SEARO: WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia
• WPRO: WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific

I didn’t really see such graph on the web but there is the excellent FluTracker by Dr. Niman and a lot of information about the swine flu on Wikipedia. If you want to start interpreting these curves, you might be interested in reading squareCircleZ’s post about the H1N1 and the Logistic Equation.

Slowly, slowly, most software on my website will be hosted on Sourceforge or Bioinformatics.net.

P.S. Obviously I chose the time where they are in the middle of a large scale site changes and upgrades so nothing is available for now (except the screenshot).

The presentation in PDF is still available from the Gemvid webpage (and in live here).

I also gave a lightning talk about Gemvid, my solution to monitor rats general activity. I tried to explain most biological information needed to understand the principles and I think people were really interested in this software, something with an application a bit different than the previous talks. I updated the Gemvid website and I uploaded the latest revision (0.6c) that was “analysing” the audience from my laptop during the talk. Finally, I also uploaded the presentation (PDF, 1.3Mb) and you can directly see it below.

See you next year, for the next version?

Following this, I had interesting discussions with my dad about sleep patterns in babies. It could also be interesting to hybridize what we did for Gemvid and this simple solution in order to be able to quantify human/baby movements during sleep. My little knowledge of OpenCV can then come in handy for the motion and pattern detection …

Some additional technical details : Video was made from 321 TV screen captures (1 every 2 minutes) and played back at 1 frame per second. It was converted with FFmpeg (LGPL) and the Flash player is JW FLV Media Player (CC by-nc-sa). Ok: Flash is not free.

Note 1: the font is not included in the script. Here, I used FreeSans which is a true free font (GNU GPL with font exception). It is available here (local copy, just the FreeSans font, 753kb).

Note 2: I chose to convert PNG images to JPG ones for 2 reasons. First, my capture script gives me PNG images (see previous posts). Second, I want to be able to copy all JPG pictures in a MJPEG movie. It shouldn’t be difficult to change the different file formats to suit your needs (ask me if you can’t do that).

Note 3: I guess this would also have been possible using a bash script and imagemagick, Perl or any other programming language

Finally, I got a working pixel lapse software under Linux It’s a bit late (and I have to work tomorrow), code is rather dirty but I’ll publish it as soon as possible (btw that’s why I needed a webcam and a library to read it yesterday). Originally,

"pixel lapse" photography is the process of creating an image one pixel at a time. Beginning in the upper left corner, pixels are captured sequentially at a set rate until the entire image is formed.

Unfortunately, their software only runs on MacOS and Windows and requires Quicktime. Here, I "only" use OpenCV which is free and available under all the OS mentioned in this post. More details soon …

The “full-size” (640×480) image is here on Flickr

Edit on November 5th, 2008: version 0.1 of the software is available here.

The Association Electronique Libre is a belgian association protecting the fundamental rights in the information society.

The Association Electronique Libre supports the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet and any electronical mediums, the right to use encryption software for private communication, the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies, the right to access and preserve public domain and free digital information.
(from an old copy of the AEL website)

Although it was based in Belgium, the information it contained as well as the actions that were supported exceeded the small Belgian borders. The wiki was a very useful and valuable source of documents, links and comments about freedom in the electronic media. “Fortunately” we still have a 2007 version of the website on archive.org and some messages from the mailing-list were kepts on the mail-archive and open subscriber (and I will preciously keep my archives!).

Following a small exchange of e-mails with one of the main guy behind AEL, the machine hosting the AEL is simply dead (the fact the machine was dying was announced a long time ago, no one apparently reacted). I guess (or rather hope) that the data is still available on the hard disk(s).

Now what? Beside the fact we are all getting “older” with other priorities in life, how come we don’t feel more concerned about our freedom in the cyberspace? Internet liberties are still in danger [1], the Electronic Frontier Foundation website has more and more issues, a paper-media publishing house is printing comics to “educate teenage youth about an array of issues ranging from privacy, free software, security and the impact of politics on personal freedom as it relates to the use of technology”, … Are we too lazy to try to understand what’s behind Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, Ning and other “social networking websites“? Maybe the technological gap between these polished websites and what indivuals can do “in their garage” radically increased since the advent of so-called Web2.0, inhibiting our will to actively participate in it [2], to make it ours? Did most of us “surrender” in front of the razzle-dazzle aspects of new communication media?

The idea behind this post title (AEL – New Generation?) is simply that something should be done to bring back to life a central, hopefully community-driven website to gather information about our freedom in cyberspace …

[1] Ironically, in this post, this reference is written by the main person behind the AEL
[2] About the “creativity” of people in Web2.0 applications, we could read with interest this article from C. Jonckheere and F. Schreuer (unfortunately in French only)

Since the original release, I also added translation of the sentence in Dutch and German (after all, Belgians are speaking 3 official languages). And I approximately centered the text on the vertical version (I personally prefer the text on the right for the horizontal version but you can easily modify this by yourself).

As usual, here is the HTML code to include this vertical version in your page, blog, etc.:

<img src= "http://www.epot.org/belgov/belgovv.php" alt="belgov counter on epot.org" />

And here is the source code (for both version): belgov-0.3.tar.gz (20kb).