Keep tab on items you lent using borrow-err.com

On my free time, I have been working on a small but useful and interesting project. It resulted in the site http://www.borrow-err.com/

The reason for creating the site was my forgetfulness. I lend books to others and I forget about it. So, I decided to create a website where I can keep track of items I lent to others. If you would like to try it, just key in the details of the items and the name of the borrower in to the home page. The website will then send you a reminder email every month for the items you lent. If you are lucky and you get your items back, you can remove them from the list using the links provided in the email.

You can access it using any browser. The page is also light enough that it loads fine in mobile browsers as well. So whether you are at home, office or on road, you can use borrow-err.com to keep track of items that you lent. Try it and give me your feedback.

Remember: borrower's err, so you need borrow-err.com

October 5th, 2010: The previous version had the bare minimum styling. Hence I made some changes and I believe the new version is more pleasing to your eye.

Did you know that ... Part 2

1. Digital Imaging received this years Nobel Prize in Physics. Willard
Boyle and George Smith received their recognition for work on Charge
Couple Devices (CCD) used in range of scientific instruments including the telescope.

2. There have been many Nobel Prize awarded to people who used imaging as one of their tools of investigation

3. Hough Transform used in the detection of geometrical shapes was initially patented by Paul Hough in 1962

4. NASA Aerogel was used to collect the interstellar and comet particles. The aerogel slows the particles otherwise traveling at high velocity to a halt without heating. NASA collected images of these tracks along which the particle translated and requested help from public in determining the location of them.

5. Open shot is a free non-linear movie editor under Linux. You can clip, resize and trim movies, add transition between scenes, change speed of clips and even "Ken Burns effect".

Matlab alternatives

Matlab is a powerful programming language for scientific computing. The popularity of Matlab stems from the fact that it is a high level programming language focusing more on faster development and less on syntax. It also has many tool boxes that extend the functionality that is offered by basic Matlab on to other scientific and engineering domains. In spite of all these advantage, it comes with a price, the fact that we need to pay for purchasing, installing and maintaining it. Although the price we pay might be easily offset by the benefits, many Matlab like software are in existence and perform similar even if not the same set of functionality. In this blog, we will look at some of the alternatives. In all these alternatives, the program written to be run on Matlab can be run directly, within the constrains of functionality offered by that particular software.

FreeMat
FreeMat is a open source software released under GPL. It is available for most of the common OS like Windows, Linux and Mac. Installing the software on a Windows machine was a piece of cake. Its repertoire of functionality is large but does not have many of the toolboxes offered by Matlab.

Octave
Octave is another software available under GPL. The syntax of Octave commands are similar to Matlab (and not the same) and is also highly extensible using C, C++ and Fortran. Unlike FreeMat, Octave comes with many toolboxes for Image processing, Signal processing, Statistics etc. Installing the software on a Windows machine using cygwin is easy but installing from source on Linux machine requires expertise due to many dependencies.

Numpy and Scipy
Numpy and Scipy are Python modules that can be used to perform high level scientific computation like Matlab. Since these modules are based in python, their syntax is not similar to Matlab but due to its focus on high level programming, the syntax is generally simple. With installation of dependencies like python imaging library (PIL), we can perform image and signal processing. Scipy can also be used to perform optimization and statistics. Prebuilt binary packages are easy to install but installation from source is cumbersome due to its dependencies.