Pixel-counting can un-redact government
docs

hey found the number of pixels that had been blacked out in the sentence: "An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an xxxxxxxx service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike." They then used a computer to determine the pixel length of words in the dictionary when written in the Arial font.

The program rejected all of the words that were not within three pixels of the length of the word that was probably under the blacked-out area in the document.

The software then reduced the number of possible words to just seven from 1,530 by using semantic guidelines, including the grammatical context. The researchers selected the word "Egyptian" from the seven possible words...

Mmmm, torrents!

Textbooks Hit The Torrents

Not all web piracy is the sexy stuff, like games and movies. Julis Schorzman notes that one of his college textbooks recently showed up as a BitTorrent.

The book the UW uses to teach Calculus showed up on Suprnova the other day. Here's the link. (Wish we had Bit Torrent around when I was a freshman in college. We had to pay all $140.00 for the [tome]! Spoiled kids!

You'd think someone would have to put a lot of work into pirating a calc book, since they contain so many symbols that an OCR system would have problems with.

Interesting side note: Julis' blog contains a tag (I think) he made up, <liblink>. Firefox reads that as <liblink>, resurrecting that Internet horror of ages past, the blink tag. Odd that such a progressive browser is so eager to enable useless old tags that it even does it where it isn't supposed to.

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Baen ebooks CDs as .torrents

Daily Show torrents

• Crimes Tom DeLay Hasn't Committed
• Stephen Colbert on Deep Throat
• Bush-Cheney on Amnesty International (we know a gulag when we see one)
• Will Arlen Specter live long enough to see Bush veto his stem cell research legislation?
• Jon Stewart interviews Gerald Posner author of Secrets of the Kingdom
• Rob Cordry on Gas Prices
• Sunday Justice with Stephen Colbert
• Jon Stewart interviews Floyd Abrams author of Speak Freely

Doctor Who And Rose Meet The Evil
Internet Bit Torrents

Amateur video footage of tsunami on
bl0gs, torrents

Chris Holland says,

I've used prodigem to create torrents for the South Asia tsunami videos. The more people use this torrent, the faster everyone else will be able to download the videos. See also this page to make it easy for people to put an amazon donation badge on their sites.

Copyfight debate of the century video
and audio torrents

Unfortunately and inexplicably, this was only available as a crappy, dropout-prone Real stream from Cornell, which meant you couldn't load the audio onto your iPod or download the video to show your friends later.

Now someone's converted the video to something else (not sure what) and posted a .torrent, packaged with soemthing called "Matroska" that seems like a good way to add bookmarks and such to video (I'd be interested in knowing whether this packaging presents any barrier to someone who simply wants to download the video and watch it in her player of choice). There's also an Ogg of the audio available (I'd love to see this converted to MP3 for iPod users and posted as a Torrent!). Video Torrent Link, Ogg Torrent Link

Tsunami update: Microsoft responds,
bl0ggers organize, video torrents

*Following up on a previous BoingBoing post, an anonymous Microsoft employee says:

Responding to this: "Reader J. Hahn says, "I am particularly impressed with Amazon.com's Red Cross donation counter that proves Americans are not 'stingy.' Also, as a Mac user, I was proud to go to the apple.com site and see not one product ad on their front page - just links to aid and donation sites, and Microsoft had not one mention of the disaster."

Most of Microsoft's efforts regarding Tsunami relief is focused internally. MS offers a dollar for dollar charitable donation match to all FTE, and is doing everything it can to expidite the process of trying to get the money to where it will do the most good.

* Tsunami Outreach: Bloggers Without Borders' first international project launched last night. Link (Thanks, Sean)

* BoingBoing reader Nicholas Bentley says,

"Hello Xeni, We thought you might be interested in passing on the news of one person's great efforts for tsunami relief. We wanted to donate to a tsunami relief effort with our funds in a PayPal account but had difficulty finding an agency that took PayPal. Eventually we found Kevin McDonald's site where he is doing a fantastic job of collecting PayPal contributions and passing them on to AmeriCares (AmeriCares disaster relief has a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator.) Kevin has even persuaded AmeriCare's webmaster to see about accepting PayPal transfers direct in the near future."

*BoingBoing reader Chris Cummer says,

Family members of a close personal friend of mine are still missing in Thailand. Her father and brother have flown there to try and find them, as this Globe and Mail article details, but the help of the blog community would also be greatly appreciated. I've posted a request for help on my blog at Mi ssing in Khao Lak, Thailand. Hopefully someone might have some information for a Canadian family that's been living on the edge of grief for five days now.

* Reader Roberto says, "Every year at this time, I empty my jar full of loose change. But this year I discovered I could donate to the Red Cross (among other charities including UNICEF) from a Coinstar machine at my drugstore. And big kid that I am, I had fun playing with the machine." Link.

* Reader Chris Holland says,

I stumbled upon Austin's Blog who's done a fine job of gathering more videos. So earthlink homepage servers don't get creamed, I've created this torrent gathering 5 of the videos from his blog that weren't already covered in the previous torrent which is still available here. Remember, the more people click those torrent links, the easier and faster it is for everybody else to download them too. And try to keep the torrent opened for as long as possible even after you're done downloading. Big Kudos to prodigem's very easy-to-use torrent service. Link

* Andy Carvin says,

I've just set up a tsunami news digest using the news aggregator Kinja.com. The page contains latest news feeds and first-person blogs related to the tsunami disaster from around the globe. I'd like to see others add their own tsunami-related feeds to the site. If you have a news feed or blog that's focusing on the tsunami, or are reading one that you'd like to add to the digest, please visit the website and log on with the following info: login: tsunami-info / password: southasia. Once you've logged in, you can add a news source to the digest by pasting it into the "Add a Favorite" form field in the right column. Or, you can follow this shortcut.

* Jesse Krembs, President of The Hacker Foundation, tells BoingBoing:

Some of the folks here at the hacker foundation are assembling some code to build a big PHP/MYSQL database for locating survivors and doing tracing. It's not up yet but it will be soon. SurvivorLocationAssis tance.org & suvivors.hackerfoundation. org will be the address. You can see a preview as we build it here. It's still very rough but functional even at very low bandwidth."

Boing Boing: Tsunami update: Microsoft
responds, bl0ggers organize, video
torrents

boingboing.net/2004/12/30/tsunami_update_micro.html
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It's all about the docs

Natural Docs

Natural Docs 1.15

Everyone Wants to Lock Docs

Natural Docs 1.14

Natural Docs 1.2

Builder.com: API Docs with phpDocumentor

Deployment Server 5.5 Docs

Blosxom Plug-in Docs

Despite expecting it to be in flux for a while, I wanted the first version of the Blosxom Plugins API to be good enough to provide a nice starting point for discussion and further development.

I've some mild cleanup to do on the beta release and anticipate finishing up and putting out a package Thursday evening.

I spent this evening massaging the zen of Blosxom plug-ins into some decent documentation rather than simply leaving interested parties to muddle through the source. I believe I've done a rather decent job on them, but if you notice anything confusing, missing, or just plain odd, please do let me know. You'll find the docs here.

Generating API docs with phpDocumentor

CGI-Prototype-Docs-Resources-0.01

Intel posts IA-32e docs

PHP-style docs for Perl

onegoodmove.org/1gm - Love Docs

homepage.mac.com/njenson/movies/lovedocs.html
track this site | 3 links

"onegoodmove.org/1gm - Love Docs"

Roller docs in Chinese and Japanese

Thanks to two very generous contributors, we now have translations of the Roller user guide, installation guide, and FAQ. Take a look:

• Japanese: Noniko translated the User Guide, Installation Guide, and the wiki front page.
• Chinese: Nan Chang translated the  User Guide,  Installation Guide, and FAQ.

Community News: Some SimpleXML Docs

'Fear and Loathing at HP' - say internal
docs

U.K. Docs Suggest Tax Breaks for
Exercise (AP)

Free File: Kill Docs

Women docs 'weaken medicine'

Notes and Tips: GarageBand, Other Docs

Professional Network does dynamic docs

Docs y vídeos del I congreso Javahispano

Docs Say Schiavo Tapes Don't Tell Story
(AP)

Vintage computer docs under the hammer

Xbox 2: Xenon Docs Leaked?

Trader Automates Docs with DocuShare
After 9/11

Government docs torrents