Since I don't always have a Google toolbar on the computers I work on, and I often want to know the PageRank of a site, I made a little PageRank calculator tool that does just this and nothing else. To use it, fill in an url and press the button.
Have fun.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Taking Sudoku to the next level
Last week I released a puzzle on squobble.com, conveniently dubbed the "Squobble Puzzle". It's quite similar to Sudoku, so the hardcore Sudoku players might find this brain-teaser an entertaining alternative.
Basic Sudoku is played with 9 symbols, which are generally the numbers 1 till 9. Other than numbers, these can be anything from 9 letters to 9 colours (for the rules, check out Wikipedia). I combined a "number Sudoku" with a "colour Sudoku" to obtain the Squobble Puzzle. This has some interesting consequences. For instance, only certain combinations of numbers and colours are possible. Also, the classic Sudoku tricks can be applied on numbers, colours or both, and even new solution methods can be found.
I included a beginner and expert level (if you're good they should take you about 5 and 15 minutes respectively), and the standard options: reset, choosing a puzzle by number or randomly. Moreover, every puzzle has a unique solution. Finally, to guarantee your satisfaction, dear reader, all of this was molded neatly into a Flash puzzle with drag-and-drop support.
Anyway, the list of features-to-add includes a charts system for best times and other records, a classic Sudoku page, etc. Whether I implement these will depend mostly on visitor feedback and the local weather forecast (a lot of rain means more features).
Enjoy!
Basic Sudoku is played with 9 symbols, which are generally the numbers 1 till 9. Other than numbers, these can be anything from 9 letters to 9 colours (for the rules, check out Wikipedia). I combined a "number Sudoku" with a "colour Sudoku" to obtain the Squobble Puzzle. This has some interesting consequences. For instance, only certain combinations of numbers and colours are possible. Also, the classic Sudoku tricks can be applied on numbers, colours or both, and even new solution methods can be found.I included a beginner and expert level (if you're good they should take you about 5 and 15 minutes respectively), and the standard options: reset, choosing a puzzle by number or randomly. Moreover, every puzzle has a unique solution. Finally, to guarantee your satisfaction, dear reader, all of this was molded neatly into a Flash puzzle with drag-and-drop support.
Anyway, the list of features-to-add includes a charts system for best times and other records, a classic Sudoku page, etc. Whether I implement these will depend mostly on visitor feedback and the local weather forecast (a lot of rain means more features).
Enjoy!
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Plaza 63
I made a "tourist guy" appearance in this short movie (and part of the soundtrack as well). The acting was a bit too improvised to post a link to the online version, however - I have to preserve at least some cool.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Movistar Art #1
Movistar España, the leading mobile phone operator in Spain, has launched a 75 million euro campaign to promote its new logo, a stylized letter "m". Since its start one month ago, the initiative has drawn huge attention from the public, mainly because of the air of mystery it was initially surrounded by.
Nevertheless, what was once new quickly got boring, and since the new image didn't really seem to boost sales, a new approach was taken this week in an attempt to make a lasting impression on the potential customer.
As reported by the Spanish national police, street violence has dramatically risen since the new posters started appearing everywhere. Soon more on this subject.
[edit] Apparently some well known Spanish actress also participated in the campaign.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Matlab Art #2
Shazam@home
Anyone who has been using the music tagging service by Shazam might have wondered how on earth their computers are able to recognize audio that fast and under such extremely noisy conditions. The solution, as I found out after a quite short internet search, is a pretty smart algorithm developed by Dr. Avery Wang. Thanks to the hints he gave in a presentation at the ISMIR2003 conference, I was able to program the whole thing in Matlab in one evening.
First I did a test with a few songs on my pc. After the program trains itself with the songs, it takes a 5-second fragment of one of the songs, highly degrades it with noise and then tries to recognize it. It turned out to work just fine, and above all, very fast. Then I went for the heavier version, and fed 1000 different audio tracks into the training part of the program. To my surprise, it continued to recognize the music perfectly, in much cases up to noise degradation levels at which the human ear isn't capable anymore of recognizing it, which was nice.
That being written, if you want to get the Matlab code to play around a bit at home with, just contact me [updated 2016-03-21] check the GitHub repo.
First I did a test with a few songs on my pc. After the program trains itself with the songs, it takes a 5-second fragment of one of the songs, highly degrades it with noise and then tries to recognize it. It turned out to work just fine, and above all, very fast. Then I went for the heavier version, and fed 1000 different audio tracks into the training part of the program. To my surprise, it continued to recognize the music perfectly, in much cases up to noise degradation levels at which the human ear isn't capable anymore of recognizing it, which was nice.
That being written, if you want to get the Matlab code to play around a bit at home with,
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