[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Alan James Salmoni
Member since: 2004-12-14 09:38:36
Last Login: 2009-06-29 04:50:33
Homepage: http://www.usernumber1.com
Notes:
I am an interaction designer working for Westpac Bank in New Zealand with training in HCI and statistics. I like open source and free software so much that I released my own stuff. My programs are SalStat, a Python and wxPython based application for statistical analysis, and TrackBrowser, a web browser designed to record user behaviour. I built the latter for my professional work.
In real life, I am a usability specialist with my own firm, user:number 1 which is fun. I have a PhD in human-computer interaction from Cardiff University and a few years experience in this field since.
I am also into photography and should have my gallery website up soon. It's custom made which takes more time than a cookie-cutter CMS for pictures. The design of it is the fun thing.
Linked in page for salmoni
20 Apr 2009 (updated 20 Apr 2009 at 08:30 UTC) »
I have a linkedin profile here. Advogatoans are welcome to add me to their network.
Edit: This entry was already turning up in Google's search results less than 2 hours after writing it. I think it was spidered 15 minutes ago.
19 Apr 2009 (updated 19 Apr 2009 at 07:03 UTC) »
Life is going well in NZ. My job is enjoyable - thoroughly so - and I'm learning lots every day. Very little open source work done lately as I need to check the T&Cs of my contract to see if I'm okay. I'm sure there is no problem but I need to check first.
Our application for permanent residence here is going well. I submitted our expression of interest back on 21 March and we were successful on 6th April which is quite quick really. I was expecting it to take a few months. I'm still waiting for the ITA form to come through by post which seems to be taking some time. I'm guessing that receiving it is really the long part of the process.
I hope it comes through quickly as my wife and daughter are still in the Philippines and I'm missing them so much. We could apply for a visitors visa for her, but we have other obligations which need to be met in the immediate future (too much detail to go into here). Still, we chat every day by email and video chat. I've even managed to play games with Louise by webcam which ranks as a good achievement. It's not the same as being with her but it's the best I can do right now.
In other news, I've been exploring neural networks to predict currency markets and found a modicum of success (though nothing that translates into a prediction system that I could make money out of). Been using bpnn in Python. Python slows things down a lot but allows interactive analysis. I tried updating bpnn to use numpy but found my version to be significantly slower (eg, 1.5 seconds against over 5 seconds for the new one) which is odd. Is it worth releasing the code?
Just an idea for a new captcha system. How's about if you could access a large photographic resource (e.g., Flickr, Picasa), and a thumbnail of the picture is shown to the user. The user then has to guess one of the tags belonging to the picture. If they do, then they pass.
This cannot fight against brute force (I would imagine some tags will be quite common so some research would produce a frequency-based word list that could do this), mistakes would be expected (eg, the photo owner might put in random tags that make no sense to anyone else) and human-based captcha solving will easily get around it, but it's something to consider. Another crack would be to take the thumbnail and compare it against a DB of flickr pictures, but realistically, that's a large job. I wonder if Flickrs API can do that? To defend against this, the thumbnail could be altered somehow (eg, desaturated, change the colour balance etc) so that in machine terms, the images are different but in human terms they mean the same thing.
I'm still in the Philippines, still running an interaction design company, and having such a time that my dreams consist of writing algorithms (they are to calm me down).
The big program is still being developed and we're reconsidering UI toolkits. wxPython is wonderful and powerful, but it moves very fast and doesn't offer what I really need (embedded browser for rich interactive experiences, ie, Javascript). I understand that there are bindings to webkit and gecko, but these are not complete or reliable enough for production code. We're also considering XULrunner which does this but offers a less rich basic widget set.
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