Wow! It's been years since I last posted an update on this blog. If you're wondering what I've been up to, then I suggest you check out my company's website: keasigmadelta.com. Anyway, I've been working on something new. It's something completely left field for me; not tech. related at all. The idea popped into my head as I was out for a walk, and was so compelling that I had to make it happen.

If you're interested in doing postgraduate (a.k.a., graduate for North Americans) or postdoctoral research in aerospace engineering, then you may want to check out my brother's research group at Ryerson University (Toronto, Canada):
Ryerson Aerospace Control Systems Research Group

By now you should probably have heard about the “heartbleed” bug in OpenSSL. Well, this website is hosted on a server running OpenSSL. Fortunately, the web hosting provider is very quick with responding to such issues When I tested this website for the bug, I was pleased to see that it was immune.

There hasn't been much activity on this blog or website lately. In fact, this is the first post to this blog in almost six months! This is just a quick post to let you know that I'm still here, but just incredibly busy. 

In my previous blog post I mentioned that mining Bitcoins alone probably wasn't worth it, and suggested investing Bitcoins in a contract mining service such as Pyramining as an alternative. Pyramining is an organisation that has a very efficient Bitcoin mining infrastructure, that you can pay Bitcoins to use. Basically, you invest money and effectively borrow some of their mining hardware. Over time, that hardware earns Bitcoins via mining, and you recover your initial investment, plus a bonus. 

Bitcoin is a digital currency that is designed to work like cash. I first heard about it in the June 2012 edition of the IEEE Spectrum magazine. The idea of a digital currency that was not centrally controlled and worked like cash intrigued me, and the fact that it appeared in the primary magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers added credibility. So, I decided to check it out.

Back in February, I announced that I had founded a company, and was looking for beta testers for its first product. I've been hard at work since then, I am pleased to say that this first product is now available. Called Relight, the software is designed to fix the lighting/colour issues in photos quickly and easily. It specialises in this one task, making the user interface easy to understand and learn (unlike heavyweight image processing applications with their myriads of controls). For example, the photo on the right was taken indoors, and ended up looking rather red. Using Relight, this was corrected to produce the enhanced photo below it, and it only took a few seconds to do. As you can see, the colours have been corrected, and now look the way that they should.

I have a small confession to make: I had an ulterior motive when creating this website. Back then, I knew that I wanted to start and run my own company one day, and that the company's website would be a very important part of the overall system. In order to prepare for this, I wanted to learn how to run a website with online services; both the technical and human aspects (websites are, after all designed to be used by humans). So, this website served as the platform by which I could learn and experiment with building and running a website.

It is now possible to log in to this website and post on the forums using your Facebook account. This was added so that people don't have to create and remember yet another user and password combination. Like many people, I have an increasing number of accounts on multiple websites, and remembering all of those usernames and passwords gets harder and harder (particularly with websites that have "special" rules regarding what a password should have). Special thanks to Will Rossiter for developing the Silverstripe Facebook Connect module.

I haven't posted to this blog in a long while, so I thought that I would share some interesting traffic data related to the newest section of the website. Just over a month ago I released GfxBench2D, a 2D benchmarking tool and web-application. This tool measures 2D graphics performance and can (optionally) upload results to this website for display. Well, this triggered the biggest traffic spike that this website has ever seen. Take a look a graph of the number of daily visits that have occurred since this website was first created (up to 10 July 2011):