Monthly Archives: February 2013

Reconstruction and Iteration of Windows 16-Color VGA Palette

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Data Mining, Fractal Geometry, IR Tools, Programming

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With The Color Miner, we have programmatically reconstructed the classic Windows 16-color VGA palette with few basic algorithmic rules.

We also found that iterating the 16-color VGA palette, with these rules, the result converges to a 42-color palette. As given below.

Advantages?

The algorithms utilized allow one to:

  • reconstruct large palettes with a small set of seed colors.
  • store a small set of colors instead of a large palette file.
  • build basic palette generators and color tools.
  • use an initial palette to discover colors or propose new ones, then use these to expand the initial palette.

For additional information and to verify these findings, visit the The Color Miner page.

The Color Miner – A Tool for Mining Colors

21 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Data Mining, IR Tools, Marketing Research, Software

≈ 1 Comment

The Color Miner, is a tool for mining colors from Web documents.

The traditional way of presenting color palettes to users is by rendering these as static arrays of colors. This limits users to staring at color squares to make color-color comparisons instead of engaging them in data mining and critical thinking, activities that promotes discovery and learning—in a research or school setting.

When we developed The Color Miner, we did so with a fractal design strategy in mind. As a result, we developed a tool capable of generating what we call fractalettes or palettes within palettes. That is, each cell of a generated palette behaves as a smaller palette, containing color space information and relationships for the current color.

We could iterate the individual cells for ever, but in practice we found that a one-level iteration was a good start to encourage users to investigate color-color, space-space, and color-space relationships, to find basic trends and information patterns. In general, this architecture can be iterated to organize additional attributes and relational data.

Converting a two-column Excel data set into a PHP Associative Array

10 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by in Data Mining, Programming

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I was struggling with how to convert a long two-column (A and B) Excel data set into a PHP associative array format and then found out how easy is this with the CHAR() built-in function. This is what I did.

1. For the data in the A1 and B1 cells, I simply entered the following formula into the C1 cell and bingo!

=CHAR(34)&A1&CHAR(34)&CHAR(61)&CHAR(62)&CHAR(34)&B1&CHAR(34)&CHAR(44)

where the unicode numbers 34, 61, 62, and 44 are used to render the double quote, equality, greater than, and comma symbols.

2. Then I just pasted the formula in the remaining cells of column C.

3. Finally, I pasted the result into a php text file, between the parentheses of

$arr=array(  );

and removed the last comma from the last array element.

I know there is an easier way by writing a short macro, but this worked for me just fine.

I hope this saves some time to others.

Using hosts file to protect your computer

01 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Hacking, Software, Spam

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A handy resource:

1. If you are using Spybot Search & Destroy on Windows32 systems, enter

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

2. Spybot Search & Destroy will list all blocked connections; i.e. those that are redirected to the localhost.

3. You can manually add/delete entries.

4. It is a another layer of security!!

For details, check:

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spybot_%E2%80%93_Search_%26_Destroy