Maybe I just missed it all, but everyone seems to be failing to go mad about a key new feature in Google’s Picasa. Namely facial recognition.

At a basic level, it’s fairly old hat. My digital camera can recognise faces, and puts little boxes around them on the preview screen in real time. Picasa is a little more ingenious, and can recognise the faces of individuals, as opposed to just a generic face shape.

It starts scanning your photo library, and throws up a few faces. “Who’s this?” it asks. “Why, that’s Mike” I reply, and attach him to a contact in my Google Contacts. I do that for a few more people. Then, it starts to get clever: “What about these five guys? Are these also Mike?”. “Uh, yes, they are”. “Okay… I’ve found 20 more face I think are Mike’s, are there right?”. And so on.

It doesn’t catch every face, and still produces a heck of a lot of “I just don’t know how these people are” responses. Even then, if you attach the unknowns to an existing contact, it immediately adds in a few more saying “Ah, then I guess these ones are that person too?”

This is why I love the software that Google makes. As a programmer, I firmly believe in making the software do as much basic reasoning as possible to avoid clicks for the user. Google believes that too, but they have an army of geniuses (or the cash to buy an army of geniuses) to take that to the next level. Remember how Facebook lets you identify contacts by putting a box around them in photos? This is the autopilot version of that, and exactly the kind of thing computers should be doing for us: we give them the information, they sort it for us.

I know the idea of full facial recognition isn’t brand new, but this is the first time I’ve seen it used in a piece of consumer software, as opposed to being used to misidentify terrorist suspects in technology trails for airports.

Google may have become basically the same as Microsoft these days, but there’s a key difference: Google make free software that I want to use. Microsoft’s Live bundle doesn’t hold a candle to Google’s Software Pack.

Thank. Christ.

http://mashable.com/2009/04/23/geocities-shutdown/

I always wondered how the site had survived all these years. When I found it in ‘96, it was a pretty interesting idea, but for almost this entire millennium it has seemed like an astoundingly irrelevant place.

Back then, the internet was all optimism and animated GIFs. News portals and RSS feeds weren’t leaking from every server, so even rubbish fan sites had a modicum of value. Personally, I’m glad to see my own rubbish science fiction fansite finally disappear with GeoCities, since I lost access to the account years ago and was unable to delete it myself. This is, of course, in contrast to my current rubbish science fiction fansite.

You’ll be remembered, GeoCities, as the place where I learned HTML. But not JavaScript, PHP, SQL, or any of that really interesting stuff, because all you could do was HTML.

That was meant to be a dignified sign-off for GeoCities, but, like the service itself, it sorta went sour fast.

I just don’t get it. I can appreciate a good, crisp, meaty sound system like anyone. What’s the deal with surround sound, though? All the action is happening in front of me. Everything. And yet, for some reason, it’s apparently a good thing for me to get constantly distracted by noises that seem to be coming from behind me. There’s nothing there.

I can live with that, though. Each to their own. What I really, really can’t be arsed with is spending what must have amounted to days of my life watching Dolby idents. Fuck off Dolby. I’ve seen that goddamned starfield with the CG aurora borealis hundreds of times, and I still hate it as much as the first time. We’re here for the film, I couldn’t give a shit who did the sound as long as I can hear it. Why does Dolby think it’s so important that it gets the longest, most grandiose ident out of all of them at the beginning of films? More than the film studio.

On the topic of idents, being a big CG nerd leaves me very divided. Since the rise of cheap CG, every studio that put more than a dollar into the making of a film gets a ten-second ident at the start of a film. It’s now pretty standard to see four or five of them before the credits roll. And then…

THEN.

We see all their names again at the beginning of the credits. I have no idea why these film companies feel their brand is suddenly so important at this stage when all their marketing up to that point has concentrated on everything else: “From the writer of…”, “From the director that brought you…”, “Starring…”. No one ever goes to see a film based on what studio made it, and they know that because we never hear “From the studio that brought you…” in a trailer. So why do they think we care enough to want to sit through a parade of their unimaginative logos?

I’m done.

Look, I’m all for springing boners for the odd bit of nice gadgetry now and again, but why the bejesus is the Digg technology category always flooded with stories about anything that Apple does? When the iPhone came out, every man and his blog seemed to have an opinion on it, which Digg readers seem to lap up. Bloggers would write rubbish articles with nothing relevant in them. Even yesterday we had an alarmist article about how iPhone caches your screen so it can zoom it back in quickly when you switch apps, and if someone stole your phone and had the necessary skills they could browse some deleted cache files see what apps you’ve been looking at. Quite how someone looking at pictures of your apps is a bigger deal than someone actually having your phone in the first place (and thus access to all the apps on it) is a little beyond me. Not to mention Safari’s internet cache wasn’t brought up. Not to mention that every internet browser ever made has been caching users’ pages on laptops and desktops for over a decade. Let’s all merrily fill our pants about the iPhone.

Last month, it was iTunes. OOOH WHAT’S APPLE GOT IN STORE FOR ITUNES 8? Kevin Rose made a few hot predictions, and good for him. Personally, I had a suspicion we were in for more slate-grey, and a mostly unchanged user experience. Amazingly I was correct. Not to worry, now we can talk about what Apple should do for iTunes 9.

Or let’s talk about the new iPods. Yes, let’s. Actually, let’s not, because they’re exactly the same as before, but with a slightly altered shape. I bought an iPod Touch recently myself because, as I mentioned before, boners and technology. Somehow, Digg was able to tell me before time that the new iPod Touch had an internal speaker and, brace yourselves, a slightly curved back. When I heard this news, I immediately binned my existing iPod Touch, because there was simply no point in owning one that didn’t have a curved back. The one on mine is all flat and boring, and not at all useful. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, internet.

And here we are today. Apple is doing something else, everyone! Look! Computer nerds like myself are often pigeonholed for being obsessive about technology. Honestly, it’s the Apple folk who are giving us a bad name these days. Computer Hobbiest clubs of the 80s are long gone, the beardy long-haired socially-inept stereotype has been receding, replaced with professionals who treat technology as an industry tool. Except the Apple folk who, for some reason, whenever a new piece of Apple technology is announced, hinted at or even speculated on, immediately digg every related article they see while nursing uncontrollable boners and weeping with joy. Not cool, guys. Relax. It’s just another overpriced laptop.

Oh yeah, here’s the link, if you can afford to regularly spooge money on new MacBooks:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/09/sources_latest_macbook_pro_photo_is_the_real_deal.html