I paid my last credit card bill on the due date using HSBC EasyPay[1] machine at Moratuwa Branch. I got a receipt having the date (which is the due date), time, and the amount I paid. However when I got the next bill, I realized I was charged Late Fee and Interest. Altogether it was around Rs 5000/-. I called the customer “service” and the response was that I have to pay before 3pm to credit on the same day. Yeah, it is fair enough, only if it is mentioned somewhere clearly. But HSBC clearly wants the customer to be mislead!

Reason #1
If the machine says that I have paid it on a given day, why can’t HSBC accept the fact, even though they open those envelopes in the following day?

Reason #2
In tiny letters the machine carries the message “The payments received before 3pm will be credited after 7:30pm in the same day.”. Okay!, does this only mean, “payments received after 3pm will be credited in the following day”? Can’t I assume, the payments received between 3pm and 5pm will be credited after 10pm? My question is, why do they only just “imply” the message? They could have just said, “The payments received after 3pm will be credited in the next working day”

Even the EasyPay site[1] boasts about “24 X 7 availability”. Why can’t they say the above in a line or two?

They asked me to send a Fax. The rep “advised” me not to use the term “mislead”. Instead, asked me to “plea” for a refund. Then they’ll consider to refund atleast a fraction of it. My answer was “Go to hell!”.

[1] http://www.hsbc.lk/1/2/personal/services/hsbc-easy-pay

• President of socialist republic of Sri Lanka – Hon. Mahinda Rajapakse (Nalandian)
• Prime Minister of Sri Lanka – Hon. Ratnasiri Wikramanayake (Anandian)
• Secretary of Defence – Gotabaya Rajapakse (Anandian)
• Army Commander – Lt General Sarath Fonseka (Anandian)
• Navy Commander – Vice Admiral Wasantha karannagoda (Anandian)
• 57 Division Commander of SLA – Major General Jagath Dias (Anandian)
• Civil Defence Force Director – Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekara (Anandian)
• 53 Division Commander of SLA – Major General Kamal Gunarathna (Anandian)
• 55 Division Commander of SLA – Brigadier Prassana Silva (Anandian)
• Commander for 2nd Commondo Battalion of SLA – Brigadier Chagee Gallage (Anandian)
• Commander for Naval East – Rear Admiral Ananda Peiris (Anandian)
• and Ministers like Mr. Basil Rajapakshe (Anandian) Mr. Dallas Alahapperuma (Anandian), Mr. Rohitha Bogollagama (Anandian), Mr. P. Dayarathna (Anandian)

Furthermore, check this song by Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekera (Anandian)

Ananda College Students Sending Stuff to War IDPs
http://www.defence.lk/new.asp?fname=20090430_12

Of course, I am proud to be an Anandian!

Ananda Geethaya

The Lenna (or Lena) picture is one of the most widely used standard test images used for compression algorithms. The comp.compression FAQ says the following:

For the curious: ‘lena’ or ‘lenna’ is a digitized Playboy centerfold, from November 1972. (Lenna is the spelling in Playboy, Lena is the Swedish spelling of the name.) Lena Soderberg (ne Sjööblom) was last reported living in her native Sweden, happily married with three kids and a job with the state liquor monopoly. In 1988, she was interviewed by some Swedish computer related publication, and she was pleasantly amused by what had happened to her picture. That was the first she knew of the use of that picture in the computer business.

for more information please visit http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/

‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant like wearable device, ‘SixthSense’ sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects we are interacting with. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and physical objects around us, and lets us interact with the projected information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or our interaction with the object itself. ‘SixthSense’ attempts to free information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.

References
[1] http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects.php?action=details&id=68

The newest computer vision technology can’t literally see through your sweater and slacks, but it can determine the shape of your unclad body.

Brown University computer scientists have developed software that takes ordinary images of people dressed in street clothes and digitally peels away the layers to determine their 3-D body shape.

In a partnership with Rhode Island State Police, Brown computer scientist Michael Black developed tools to figure out a person’s basic physical attributes from a grainy surveillance video.

[1] Boston News, Science Article.

http://robotics.youngester.com/2008/11/robotics-software.html

In this “Sneakey” Computer Vision project, features of the key is extracted from the photograph and accordingly a duplicate of the key is produced. Most importantly, photos can be taken even 200 feet away from keys without the owners knowledge.

So it is time to blur out the your keys in the photograph, like you did for number plates, credit card numbers before publishing to facebook, flickr etc. )

For more information have a look at here

The book includes:

• A thorough introduction to OpenCV
• Getting input from cameras
• Transforming images
• Shape matching
• Pattern recognition, including face detection
• Segmenting images
• Tracking and motion in 2 and 3 dimensions
• Machine learning algorithms

[1] Learning OpenCV Book at Safari
[2] OpenCV Library

Artificial Eyeball

Extracted from the Article:
Mimicking the curves of a human retina has enabled a digital image sensor to take wide-angle pictures without distortion. This is possible thanks to an improved method of transferring silicon sensors onto a curved surface.

They built their hemispherical electronic eye by first using conventional photolithography to build silicon photodiodes 500 micrometers square and 1 micrometer thick. These were then wired into a flexible 16-by-16 array using chromium and gold.

Separately, they created a 1-cm-wide hemisphere out of a stretchy plastic, and stretched it into a flat surface. That stretched surface, or “drumhead”, was then pressed against the photodiode array.

The silicon squares stuck to the stretched plastic thanks to van der Waals forces, which was then allowed to spring back to its original hemispherical shape. As the array took its new form, the photodiodes packed together tightly and the connecting wires arced away from the surface, but the array was undamaged.

The reformed array was then glued to a curved glass surface, and a conventional lens attached. It now resembled a human eye in construction, with light entering the lens from the front, and passing to the curved “retina” containing the matrix of photodiodes behind.

[1] http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14477