So you still use a screensaver? You know, those unforgettable flying toasters were invented to prevent burn-in, a permanent shadow branded into the phosphors of your monitor by a static image of, say, a spreadsheet that you left on your screen all weekend?
Well, Don Willmott, a Forecast Earth Correspondent write interesting subject about this. Below was his original posts.

You don’t still use a screen saver, do you?

By Don Willmott , Forecast Earth Correspondent Posted Wed Jun 11, 2008 6:36pm PDT

I’m happy that at this stage in my career I often find myself writing articles about energy-efficient ways to use computers, peripherals, gadgets, and consumer electronics. It makes me feel so, you know, virtuous.

Whenever I crank out a list of helpful hints, one of the first items I include is this obvious but often overlooked gem of advice: Kill your stupid screen saver. In the good old days of tube monitors, screen savers such as those unforgettable flying toasters were invented to prevent burn-in, a permanent shadow branded into the phosphors of your monitor by a static image of, say, a spreadsheet that you left on your screen all weekend.

Well, flat-screen LCD monitors don’t burn in, so if you still have flying toasters or an endlessly looping slide show of your adorable niece and nephew, you’re behind the times. When you’re not sitting in front of your monitor it should be off off off.

It warmed my heart to read at Green Daily that Telstra, the biggest phone company in Australia, has removed all the corporate screen savers from the 36,000 computers in its offices. What will happen? The change will cut tons of CO2, which they claim will be the equivalent of taking 140 cars off the road for a year. Good on ya, mate. Follow Telstra’s example. Let your flying toasters crash and burn.

Don Willmott’s blog posts are provided by LifeWire, a part of The New York Times Company.

This girl is one stunning actress this country have. With just quiet few appearance in one bigscreen and some TV movies, she became one of the most lovable celebrity in Indonesia. I ‘m talkin about Sandra Dewi. One innocent pretty face that boost her carrier since her first debut in Indonesian movies Quickie Express, 2007.
Enough of the bio stuff, let’s get to the subject of this topic.

Sandra Dewi ‘s Nude Photos are Fabricated?

That’s for sure, a big Yes. They’re all faked. Every graphic artists in this planet could conclude that in just one blink of an eye. There ‘re many discussion whether it’s faked or real, the press conference were officially gathered, and it was a bit crowded back then. Let’s take a look at how these Sandra Dewi’s nude photos created, from the graphic point of view.

5 Main Points We should take a look

1. Mismatched Background
Look at the sky, look at the ground, look at everything behind the subject(s) of the photo in question. If the blue hues of a clear day don’t match up or if the grass is actually greener on the other side of a celebrity’s body in a photo, it could be a misrepresentation of the truth.

2. Erratic Light Sources and Shadows
Notice how light affects the subject(s) of the picture. Does the light source(s) create even, uniform shadows or do shaded areas seem to have a mind of their own? If the shadows of celebrities cast in a picture don’t seem consistent, there’s a good chance that it’s a fake.

3. Mismatched Skin tones
This one could be the work of a bad make-up artist or tanning experience, but regardless, mismatched skin tones of a photo’s subject are usually the biggest clue that a celebrity’s head has been put on the body of another model.

4. Disproportionate Body Shape
If you put Tom Cruise’s head on Brad Pitt’s body nothing adds up to the truth. Pay attention to they way a celebrity’s body appears in a photo and compare it to confirmed real photos of that star. Do they look the same? If not, chances are that the photo under scrutiny isn’t genuine.

5. Unnatural Body Position
There are only so many ways the human body can bend. When Paris Hilton’s head is tilted one way, her body can’t go the other and if her arms are out to her sides, her torso will appear differently than it would if her arms were above her head. Look at the way a star is posing and if the pose is impossible to mimic the photo has probably been altered.

Some Dumb Questions about These Fabricated Photos

Is Sandra Dewi nude / bugil picture real? No.
Is Sandra Dewi posing nude / bugil for real? No, and never will be. ( I assume )
Where we can I get Sandra Dewi nude pictures? They ‘re all spreaded around the net, and are all fake. Why would you need one of those fake Sandra Dewi’s Nude photos anyway?

The conclusion? It was officially announced that all Sandra Dewi’s Nude pictures are fabricated.

Interesting, eh? Thanks Jason!

Graphing in PHP has always been an annoyance for me – while it would be cool feature to have, the need doesn’t come up nearly enough to warrant paying the exorbitant fees associated with most commercial graphing libraries. Besides, commercial PHP libraries always bring out the miser in me – it just doesn’t seem to fit with the open source model. Enter Elliot Brueggeman’s Lightweight PHP Graphing Library – with it I’ve finally found a PHP graphing library that’s simple to operate, generates image-based graphs, and is free to boot.

This is a graph of future email client requests on xobni.com. It tells us what clients other than Outlook people are using to manage their email, and thus helps us plan out future directions for Xobni Insight.

Elliot’s graphing library supports bar, line, and pie charts. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t yet support multiple lines per graph, and the graphs are not anti-aliased (yuck!). But for admin-only graphs, its simplicity is its best asset.

The dynamic graph produced by this code below :

include("lib/phpgraphlib.php");
include("lib/phpgraphlib_pie.php");
$title = "Future Requests by Client";
$dataArray=array();
$sql = "SELECT client,COUNT(id) as counter FROM Users GROUP BY client";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
$counter = $row["counter"];
$dataArray[$row["which_client"]]=$counter;
}
$graph=new PHPGraphLibPie(265,265);
$graph->addData($dataArray);
$graph->setTitle($title);
$graph->setLabelTextColor("50,50,50");
$graph->setLegendTextColor("50,50,50");
$graph->createGraph();

That’s all there is to creating an image-based graph with Elliot’s library. In some ways, I prefer this over the flash charting library I’ve used in the past – while the flash animation is beautiful, it’s nice that you can just right click and save these image-based graphs for use in powerpoint presentations, etc. Besides, while it took me a good 5 hours to set up the flash library, I had this set up in less than an hour of experimentation.

Download needed files here

There are a few other svg+css+javascript graphing libraries that I plan to check out soon; but for now, the Lightweight PHP graphing library did the trick by producing simple graphs with relatively little effort.

Our first case study about graphic alteration and photos manipulation is the Angelina Jolie’s Nude Photos. I made a google a bit and found some good example about this very topic. The basic I used is my own knowledge about graphic and the recent guidelines I read and re-write : “5 Ways to Spot a Fake Celebrity Photo“.

Disproportionate Body Shape

This case study will take the Disproportionate Body Shape topic. “Pay attention to they way a celebrity’s body appears in a photo and compare it to confirmed real photos of that star. Do they look the same? If not, chances are that the photo under scrutiny isn’t genuine.”

Well, I actually saved only 15 fake Angelina Jolie’s Nude photos, but I ‘ll use 4 perfect samples for this messy un-proportionate body faking. The manipulation using the very basic technique, putting Angelina Jolie’s head to somebody else’s body, in some position. You may take a look at the large version of these pictures below:

Click to open the large picture.

Some Notes

From their so called work of art final released pictures it seems this forgery artists don’t know exactly what is the word body proportion means. As you may recognize in a quick sight, all the heads always a bit tinier, or we must say too tiny for the body they put into.

The large pictures, I increased the highlight/shadow level into 57%, and see what’s goin on. The original tone of hairs and shading showed. They might not even notice that! What a graphic artist, eh?

The worst work ever is the picture 3. It still leave the original background of the head. And the neck!! Man..!! That’s what people called putting the head off?

Alrite, see you with the next Celebrity Nude photos case study.

This evening I just browse around, and got into this interesting writing about ways to recognize whether the our favorite celebrity photo real or phony.

Don’t be duped by another doctored photo! More often than not, fake celebrity pics are produced to generate publicity for whatever publication is printing the image. Recognizing what is real and fake in a photo requires a little attention to subtle details. Below are 5 tell-tale signs that a photo has been altered.

1. Mismatched Background.
   Look at the sky, look at the ground, look at everything behind the subject(s) of the photo in question. If the blue hues of a clear day don’t match up or if the grass is actually greener on the other side of a celebrity’s body in a photo, it could be a misrepresentation of the truth.
2. Erratic Light Sources and Shadows.
   Notice how light affects the subject(s) of the picture. Does the light source(s) create even, uniform shadows or do shaded areas seem to have a mind of their own? If the shadows of celebrities cast in a picture don’t seem consistent, there’s a good chance that it’s a fake.
3. Mismatched Skin tones.
   This one could be the work of a bad make-up artist or tanning experience, but regardless, mismatched skin tones of a photo’s subject are usually the biggest clue that a celebrity’s head has been put on the body of another model.
4. Disproportionate Body Shape.
   If you put Tom Cruise’s head on Brad Pitt’s body nothing adds up to the truth. Pay attention to they way a celebrity’s body appears in a photo and compare it to confirmed real photos of that star. Do they look the same? If not, chances are that the photo under scrutiny isn’t genuine.
5. Unnatural Body Position.
   There are only so many ways the human body can bend. When Paris Hilton’s head is tilted one way, her body can’t go the other and if her arms are out to her sides, her torso will appear differently than it would if her arms were above her head. Look at the way a star is posing and if the pose is impossible to mimic the photo has probably been altered.

Phony photos have probably been around since the camera was invented, but in the digital world of photo-editing, photo forgeries are fairly common, especially online, but can also appear in magazines, newspapers and even in print ads. If you’re thinking tabloids hold the monopoly on faking celebrity pics, well.. you are mistaken.

How to convert strings to numbers in JavaScript? To convert a string to a number, use the JavaScript function parseFloat (for conversion to a floating-point number) or parseInt (for conversion to an integer).

Syntax:

parseFloat(''string'')
parseInt( ''string'' [, base] )

parseFloat

The argument of parseFloat must be a string or a string expression. The result of parseFloat is the number whose decimal representation was contained in that string (or the number found in the beginning of the string). If the string argument cannot be parsed as a decimal number, the results will be different in different browsers (either 0 or NaN).

parseInt

The first argument of parseInt must be a string or a string expression. The result returned by parseInt is an integer whose representation was contained in that string (or the integer found in the beginning of the string).

The second argument (base), if present, specifies the base (radix) of the number whose string representation is contained in the string. The base argument can be any integer from 2 to 36. If there is only one argument, the number base is detected according to the general JavaScript syntax for numbers. Strings that begin with 0x or -0x are parsed as hexadecimals; strings that begin with 0 or -0 are parsed as octal numbers. All other strings are parsed as decimal numbers. If the string argument cannot be parsed as an integer, the results will be different in different browsers (either 0 or NaN).

Examples

Comments in each line give the conversion results.

parseFloat(’2.72lb’) // 2.72
parseFloat('45.7') // 45.7
parseFloat('045.7') // 45.7
parseFloat('0×45.7') // 0
parseFloat('.8') // 0.8
parseFloat('0.1e4') // 1000
parseInt('987.27') // 987
parseInt('23') // 23
parseInt('023',10) // 23
parseInt('77',8) // 63 (= 7 + 7*8)
parseInt('077') // 63 (= 7 + 7*8)
parseInt('77',16) // 119 (= 7 + 7*16)
parseInt('0×77') // 119 (= 7 + 7*16)
parseInt('099') // 0 (9 is not an octal digit)
parseInt('99',8) // 0 or NaN, depending on the platform
parseInt('0.1e6') // 0
parseInt(’ZZ’,36) // 1295 (= 35 + 35*36)

Important Notes

If you prompt the user for a number, using the prompt function, what you actually get is a string that contains the “number”. This is also the case, if you look at the value of a text field on a form. This means that before you can use the number, you must convert it to a “real” number.
JavaScript will convert a string to a number for you automatically,however it may not handle it properly, especially if there is a ‘+’ operator involved. Remember the ‘+’ operator adds numbers and cpmcatenates strings.

Convert a Float or Interger value to String

So you have a float or interger value, and need it to convert ‘em to string. How to convert a float or interger value to string using javascript? The simplest way to convert any variable to a string is to add an empty string to that variable, for example:

a = a+'' // This converts a to string
b += '' // This converts b to string

Or you can use toString() function.

var a = 6.23;
a.toString();

This will return the string “6.23?.

The resultant string will hold the decimal representation of the original number.

Standard Method Number.toString

For converting numbers to binary, octal, or hexadecimal strings (or to any other base) you can use, in JavaScript 1.1, the standard method Number.toString(radix) for converting a number to a string representing that number in a non-decimal number system (e.g. to a string of binary, octal or hexadecimal digits). For example:

a = (50274).toString(16) // this gives "c462"
b = (76).toString(8) // this gives "114"
c = (7623).toString(36) // this gives "5vr"
d = (100).toString(2) // this gives "1100100"

Alright, goodluck!