Librador

When I first got my PowerMac G5 several years ago, my first impression of the power button on it was bad. It's a clear example of form over function. It looks nice, but since the button is flat and level with the computer's front surface, it's difficult to find it by just feeling. I need to bend down to see the button to be able to find it.

But then I realized that even though it's annoying that I find it difficult to find the button, this also means that my son can't find it either and put the computer to sleep while I'm trying to use it.

Well, not any more. My hack solution was to tape a piece of plastic over the button. Ugly but effective. Function over form.




Technorati tags: apple, powermac, power button, usability

I recently discovered that Blender (the open source 3D modeler, renderer and steep learning curve kitchen sink) only uses one CPU by default. It is possible to change the number of threads that Blender should use in the render settings. I expected the optimal number of threads would be the same as the number of CPUs. My good old Mac G5 has two CPUs, but eight threads (the maximum) actually renders a little faster than two. The big difference is seen between one and two threads though. Your mileage may vary of course, but if you're a Blender user who hasn't seen this setting before, try tweaking it!

Technorati tags: blender, blender3d

So, now I have watched samples of the latest trend in the motion picture industry: three dimensional (stereoscopic) movies. The main part of the reason for this trend is probably that there currently is no affordable way to view 3D movies at home, so they are a way to lure people back into the cineplex. 3D movies have been around since the 1890's (source: Wikipedia), and there have been several waves of 3D movies since then, but 3D hasn't caught on as the standard way of doing movies, like sound and colour once did. It is still a gimmick for just a handful of films.

The current digital 3D movies have far better image quality than previous technologies. I went to a 3D screening at the "inspiration weekend for filmmakers" Drömfabriken (site in Swedish!) this week, and the talks before they actually showed the movie clips sounded very promising. One person thought that 3D movies are here to stay this time. And the clips they showed looked good. I could see no ghosting (where you see a little of the right eye image in your left eye and vice versa), and the colour reproduction was excellent. The main technical problem I saw was that the 3D effect was more or less exaggerated. The image had more depth than what it would look like in real life. This causes double vision sometimes, and looks unrealistic all the time. The reason for the exaggerated 3D effect is probably that the "eyes" of the camera they used for filming were further apart than human eyes are, so it's a problem that can be solved by just moving them closer together. But if you do not exaggerate the 3D effect, the image would look quite flat.

When you're looking at stuff in the real world, you do not actually have that much sense of depth at distances that are greater than a few meters. Stereoscopic vision is most useful at close distances. At larger distances, other parts of the brain do the work of figuring out how far away objects are. So, if you move the 3D camera's "eyes" closer together to get a realistic 3D effect, you don't get much of a 3D effect at all except for closeups. So why would the film production go through all the trouble of filming in stereo and forcing the viewers to wear those ugly glasses for such a subtle effect?

I think the glasses is the reason that 3D movies won't go mainstream this time around either. You just don't want to make out in the back of the theatre wearing alien goggles. Since one driving force behind 3D movies is to get the audience into the theatres, it's ironic that the first 3D displays that don't require glasses are suited only for home use. The technology wouldn't work in a cinema. (This has to do with the fact that these 3D displays have a small "sweet spot". They don't allow for a wide viewing angle.)

So, was I impressed by the 3D screening? No. It didn't feel very fresh or new, but it still is a cool effect, no doubt about it. It has always been. I just don't see it going mainstream any time soon. James Cameron (director of Aliens, The Terminator, Titanic and upcoming 3D feature Avatar) has a different opinion in this interesting article.

Technorati tags: stereoscopic movies, 3D movies

I went to the Web Monday event yesterday. This was the third time this was arranged in Stockholm, but it was the first time for me. This time, only a handful of people attended, probably because lots of people from Stockholm went skiing last week and spent this week at home with a broken leg. It was a nice event nevertheless. I mean: Discussing software and web development, listening to interesting short presentations, eating pizza, drinking beer, watching 256 byte demos and YouTube clips, what more can you ask for?

Peter Svensson held a presentation about Dojo. The Dojo Toolkit is a framework for making internet applications with JavaScript and Ajax. I have no experience with it, except for a quick look after which I decided that it was a bit too complex for my requirements at the time. Peter noticed me frown at one slide, which wasn't because of the presentation, or even the Dojo Toolkit itself, and I'll try to explain why.

I had a problem with this code:

dojo.declare("myclass", null,
{
  var1: "",
  var2: 17,

  constructor: function(arg)
  {
    this.var1 = foo;
  }
});

var myobj = new myclass(4711);

This is how you declare a class (named myclass) with two data members (var1 and var2) and a constructor. The funny thing is that this way of declaring a class is a part of Dojo. JavaScript is so dynamic and flexible that it's possible to implement object orientation in different ways, so Dojo has its own way of doing it. That is my problem. While it's definitely nice for a language to be dynamic and flexible, I would prefer a standard way to do such basic things as declaring a class.

The standard way to do something in a programming language can be enforced by rules in the language. For example, Java, C++, Python and probably lots of other languages have a class keyword for declaring a class. That is simply the one you use when you declare a class in those languages. (In Python it's certainly possible to create a class with other constructs if you really want to, but you practically never do.)

The standard way to do something can also be just a convention; the way you typically do it. Java has a standard way to document code, called Javadoc. Since this was part of the Java development kit from the very beginning, all Java code uses those conventions, even though they are not enforced by the language itself. Java has benefited a lot from conventions of this kind. Standards for naming is another example where Java has succeeded very well. So, even if the JavaScript language doesn't enforce a specific way to declare a class, there is much to gain by having a convention for doing it. If everyone follows the convention, you avoid a lot of confusion and interoperability problems.

Dojo's way of declaring a class looks nice. Dojo also has other features that seem to make programming easier (such as a package system using the require and provide functions). So I have no problem with that. The problem is that there is no standard way of doing these things in JavaScript so Dojo needs to implement its conventions. Perhaps the Dojo conventions deserve to be the way of doing things in JavaScript, but unfortunately there are no standard conventions yet.

Now, I haven't programmed very much in JavaScript (so far), so perhaps I have no clue of what I'm talking about here. Perhaps this is not a problem. But until I get proven wrong, I'm skeptic about a language that has no standard way of doing very basic things. It makes me think of C++, where every other project declares its own string class. It is plain silly.

Technorati tags: programming, JavaScript, Dojo, web monday

I'm so happy that so many people program in C. Old and ugly as C is, I have two main reasons to like it:

1. The C language is very portable. Since the C specification is simple, stable and (as far as I can tell) properly implemented in all compilers, you never run into compiler-specific issues with C code. Also, every operating environment on the planet has a C compiler.
2. C code has great performance. This comes naturally from the fact that C is a relatively low-level language (and to a certain extent that C programmers tend to be speed freaks).

For this reason, I like to use library code written in C (and there's a lot of C libraries out there). Also, I like the fact that I can download the source for a C project and be quite sure that it will compile and run. But I wouldn't want to program in C. The language is complicated and tedious, so it takes a lot of care to write code that works and is safe. If I want speed-critical code, I'd write it in C++. (News flash for the ignorant: C and C++ are two different languages. There is no such thing as "C/C++".) The performance of C++ code is more or less the same as for C, but C++ is a more expressive language. (Another news flash: You do not have to do object oriented programming in C++ if you don't want to, as it supports procedural programming as well.) The problem with C++ is related to bullet #1 above. C++ is far from as portable as C. Different compilers implement the standard differently, and there are lots of subtle differences and bugs in the compilers. Also, there is normally no guarantee that binary code from different compilers will work with each other.

So I enjoy the portability of C, but I wouldn't like to write in C myself. I'm just glad that there are lots of C programmers out there.

On the web side, the same goes for PHP. I don't know much about PHP, but what I've seen has been ugly. But there are lots of good products written in PHP that I can use, and there are plenty of hosts that support PHP, so I'm glad that there are PHP programmers too.

Technorati tags: C++, C, PHP, programming

I tried out Fotowoosh a while ago and came to the result that it was a cool technology, but not good enough to do anything useful with. Now a competing product called Make3D has appeared. They both basically do the same thing, which is to take a photograph as input and calculate a textured 3D model from it. Make3D has a different kind of algorithm which sounds impressive. Unfortunately as far as I can tell, the results aren't much better than those of Fotowoosh. Take a look at my test images. The results are still cool, but not good enough to be very useful.

The big difference between Fotowoosh and Make3D is the web site. Fotowoosh is implemented as a Facebook application (!) that renders a movie where the camera moves in a preset path around the 3D model. Make3D instead lets you move the camera around freely, and also allows you download the 3D model in VRML format so you can import it into a 3D application and actually do something with it. It is also possible to "fix" an image by drawing the planes by hand, helping the Make3D algorithm do its job. I wasn't able to improve the results with this functionality.

It will be interesting to follow the future development of these applications. Currently they are still a curiosity with limited use, but hopefully the algorithms will be improved and we'll get useful results.

Technorati tags: Make3D

This week the International Mobile Game Awards (IMGAwards) published the winners of the award of 2007. I'm glad to see that I have worked on two of the winning games: Digital Legends' One (on which I was the lead programmer until I had to move) and Jadestone's Dirk Dagger and the Fallen Idol (where I helped out with some programming). Both are published by Nokia and are really cool games in two very different genres.

Here's the complete list of the winners:

Best Casual Game - Treasure Arm by Tequila Mobile
Best IP-based licensed - Furby Island by LemonQuest
Best 3D - One by Digital Legends
Best Gameplay - Dirk Dagger and the Fallen Idol by Jadestone
Operators Choice - Metal Gear Solid Mobile by Ideaworks3D
Public Choice Award - WRC 3D by Firemint

Technorati tags: mobile games, imgawards

This continues my previous post Media Companies' Public Image Problem. Now I'll focus on the situation in the software industry, but I think the same reasoning can be applied to the media industries, and I'll get back to that later.

Just like in the motion picture and music industries, the software industry has problems with piracy. While digital technology for movies and music became widespread relatively recently (around 2000 and 1990 respectively), software is digital by its nature and has always been possible to copy without any quality degradation. So while software piracy is overshadowed by movies and music piracy in the public debate, software piracy is the old kid on the block and the media industries can learn from how piracy has affected the software industry.

In the previous paragraph, I said that the software industry has problems with piracy, but I didn't say what the problems are and who they affect. I'll come to that now, and - in my humble opinion - the nature of the problems and who they affect is not what most people think they are. So, here's my take on the real problem with software piracy.

Take a commercial application. Adobe Photoshop is a good example. Take a teenager. Let's call him Phil. Now, Phil wants to create some graphics for a hobby web page he's making. He browses some forums on the net and talks to friends to find out what software he needs. The answers he gets are consistent:

"You need Photoshop."
"Photoshop is the best software for working with graphics for the web."
"All the professionals use it."
"Heck, Photoshop is even a verb nowadays."

So Phil is convinced. He needs Photoshop. Happily he goes online to buy it, but when he sees the $999 price tag for the best version, he thinks again. He's a poor student. He's got plenty of time on his hands, but there's no way he'll spend that amount of money on a hobby. But he still wants to work with graphics. He needs Photoshop! What is he going to do? The natural thing now that piracy is widespread is to download a pirated copy, so that's what Phil does. Now he can create good looking graphics for his web page. At the same time he learns the industry standard for graphics editing. If he'll work with graphics professionally in the future, he'll probably buy a Photoshop licence. In the meantime, Adobe doesn't lose a sale because Phil wouldn't have been able to afford Photoshop in the first place. Nobody gets hurt.

Everyone is happy, right?

Wrong. Someone does get hurt.

In this scenario, Adobe are probably the winners. Because of piracy, they have gained a possible future sale. It's not a problem for them. But everyone isn't happy. Who gets hurt? Adobe's competitors.

Imagine that there was no such thing as piracy: that in some strange way it was impossible to run software without having paid for a license. In that weird parallel universe, what would Phil do when he realized that he couldn't afford Photoshop? He wouldn 't just forget about the idea of making graphics. He would do what people normally do when they can't afford something they need: Find a cheaper alternative. If you need a car and can't afford a Porche, go buy a Toyota or a Saab or a Fiat, whatever you can afford that suits your needs. It may not be as good as what you wanted, but it will do the job. Phil would find one of the other graphics editors out there, and there are others. Most if not all of them are cheaper than Photoshop. Some are free. They might not have all the features that Photoshop has, but perhaps you don't even need those features. (Some made-up statistics: 99% of Photoshop users never use if for anything above file format conversion and very simple editing.)

So while Adobe doesn't lose a sale from Phil running a pirated Photoshop, their competitors do. The competition can't compete with a lower price, since pirated software is even cheaper. And the competition isn't only commercial software. Free software, such as The GIMP also competes with Photoshop. But Photoshop is clearly better (if nothing else because it has a sensible user interface), and if both have a price tag of $0, which do you choose? If you're unscrupulous that is?

So the real problem with software piracy is that it stifles competition and creates monopolies. The biggest products get the biggest sales, and hence the biggest resources to continue to be developed. Competitors can't compete with a lower price, but must instead create products that are better than the market leader; something that is very difficult to do with limited resources. It's like a catch 22.

Now, don't read the above like I don't like Adobe or Photoshop. Quite the contrary. Adobe makes some great products, and Photoshop is in many ways the best graphics editor on this planet. I could have used Microsoft Windows as an example instead, but as Windows isn't clearly better than its competition (in many ways it's much worse), it would have muddled my argument. My point would still be valid though. What would happen to Microsoft's monopoly in the operating system segment if everyone that uses Windows actually had to pay for it? How many would switch to Linux instead?

In the media industries, we have a similar problem, but it's a bit different since the price ranges are different. I'll get back to that in the next post on this subject. In the meantime, I'd appreciate feedback on this post. There's no way my opinion is unique, but for some reason I never hear people think of piracy as a problem in this way.

Technorati tags: piracy, pirated software, software industry

The court of the European Union decided today that copyright holders may be allowed to force internet service providers to disclose the identity of suspected pirates. The two "serious" newspapers in Sweden (DN and SvD) report this as a neutral decision, as it is up to each member state whether it wants to allow the disclosure of the identities or not. There is still no EU-wide requirement for it. One of the "not as serious" newspapers (Aftonbladet) reports this as a big step towards allowing media corporations to get personal information from the ISPs. As such information normally is disclosed only following a court order, many people think that giving away the information indiscriminately is an integrity problem. Skewed news reporting aside, this is a valid concern.

On the other hand, if you look at it from the point of view of the copyright holders, it is easy to understand that they want to take desperate measures. If you lose (what you perceive as) a large part of your income to illegal activities, you want to be able to do something about it. There is no point in having laws if there is no way to enforce them. Unfortunately not many people care. I think this is because of the media companies' public image problem.

The media companies spent a good part of the last century promoting an image of themselves as having lots of money. For example, picture a record label executive. You'll probably think of a guy in a suit in a leather armchair behind a huge desk in a luxury office with framed gold discs on the wall. Who cares if he loses some money? No-one even knows who he is. And the people that we do know in the entertainment business - or think we know because of media's coverage of every aspect of their lives - the stars, the celebrities - make lots of money. It might not feel all good to rob someone you know by name (I mean, me and Brad Pitt are like this), but still - it doesn't hurt anyone who can't afford it. (And yeah, let's ignore the fact that most record label executives are struggling with their small companies and that most actors and musicians work for peanuts.)

Back in the 20th century, the media companies' glamorous image may have served them well. Giving someone who works for you the impression that he or she one day may become a star and make lots of money is a good way to get cheap labour. Now this image hurts them more than it serves them.

So, what can the media companies do to repair this image? Protecting their business the way they have been doing the last few years has only strengthened the impression that they are a greedy bunch. If a future law allows them to get personal information from the ISPs, they need to be very careful and selective about when they chose to use it. They should not want to come across as complete assholes.

Software companies also have problems with piracy, but they don't have the same image problem. I'll write more about software piracy in my next post, in which I'll reveal the real problem with software piracy.

Technorati tags: piracy

When is a 25 watt lightbulb not a 25 watt light bulb? When it's a 7 watt energy saving bulb! It's unfortunate that we are used to talking about how bright a light bulb glows by saying how many watts it uses. I got a pretty good sense of how bright a 25 watt, 40 watt or 60 watt light bulb is. That was fine when all light bulbs were more or less the same, but it changed when technology evolved and more power efficient bulbs hit the market. Today I bought a couple of 7 watt energy saving bulbs, and as a needed service to the consumer (me), the manufacturer had to print on the packaging that this light bulb gives the same amount of light as an ordinary 25 watt bulb. So, 7 watts = 25 watts. This will become confusing when we eventually stop using old style bulbs completely. Will we continue to think of the brightness of this bulb as 25 watts, or will we get a good sense of how bright a 7 watt energy saving bulb is (which we'll have to adopt again when never bulbs that use even less power appear)?

The problem is that watt is not a unit for the amount of light a light bulb emits. It is a unit for the amount of power it uses. For the amount of light emitted, candela would be a better unit. Wouldn't we have avoided some confusion if we had used candela instead of watt from the very beginning?

Big deal, I hear you saying, but there are other examples of this "wrong unit" problem that perhaps are more important (at least to me). I'm thinking specifically of the unit we use for measuring the focal length of a lens. You can read the technical description of what focal length is on Wikipedia, but when you're working with photography you don't think of focal length that way. As any photographer would tell you, a lens with a focal length of 50 millimeters is called a normal lens. When you take a photo with such a lens, the world would be depicted more or less like how you see it with your eyes. The perspective and depth would look normal. If you take a photo with a lens with a longer focal length, such as a 90 millimeter, perspective will change. The depth will be compressed, so things that are at different distances from the camera will not be that much different in apparent size. Such a lens is called a telephoto lens. If you go in the other direction, and put a 28 millimeter on your camera, perspective will be exaggerated. Something close to the camera will become huge, while things that are just a few meters away become tiny. Such a lens is called a wide-angle lens. Instead of using different lenses, you often use one single zoom lens that can go all the way from wide angle to telephoto, for example a 28-90 millimeter lens. In any case, the most obvious difference between the wide angle and telephoto focal length is how the perspective and depth look. These are functions of how wide the field of view that the lens catches is. A telephoto lens has a small field of view, while a wide angle has a large field of view. (The difference in depth of field is also important, but that difference is far from as obvious as the field of view.)

Now all of the above is true only if you are taking your photos with a camera that uses 35 millimeter film (also known as 135 film). It would also be true if you're using a digital camera with a light sensor with the same size as a frame on a 35 millimeter negative (36 by 24 millimeters), but all affordable digital still or video cameras have light sensors that are smaller than that. Typically, the cheaper the camera, the smaller the sensor, and the size of the sensor affects the field of view. So while a 50 millimeter lens is a normal lens (neither telephoto nor wide angle) on a 35 millimeter camera, it would be a very long telephoto lens if you put it on your mobile phone's camera that has a tiny light sensor. This is the reason that camera and lens manufacturers write in their technical specifications both the actual focal length of a lens (for example 14.5-24 mm) and the focal length that would give the same field of view on a 35 millimeter camera (for example 28-135 mm). This is a bit silly, but necessary since photographers are used to thinking of field of view in terms of focal length. Unfortunately, because we are back at the light bulb problem. We should have used a better unit to begin with. In this case, the field of view measured in degrees would make more sense.

In the above discussion, I haven't even started talking about all the negative sizes that are possible when shooting motion pictures. For example, even though movies are typically shot on the same 35 millimeter film format that analog still cameras use, the frame size is different, so the same focal length numbers do not give the same field of view. And then there is 16 and 8 millimeter film. And for some still cameras, there are also huge negative sizes, on which a 90 millimeter lens would be a wide angle.

Wouldn't it just be simpler if we had used a better unit of measurement from the beginning? Now we're probably so familiar with the "35 mm equivalent" measurement that we won't change it, even after 35 millimeter as a format is dead -- just like 25 watt light bulbs.

Technorati tags: millimeter, watt, photography, focal length, field of view, light bulbs

I read this post at Creative Cow which asked how to create the Commodore 64 look in Adobe After Effects. I got a bit inspired and tried it out a little, but for simplicity's sake I tried it on still images and used The GIMP instead.

Here are some results:





What I did was basically to convert the images to low resolution (160 pixels wide) with a 2:1 pixel aspect ratio (what the C64 had in the multicolour mode), then converted it to indexed colour using the original C64 palette (taken from the image on this page). Some manual tweaking of the levels before converting to indexed colour helped. Using more complex dithering gives better looking results, but in my opinion you lose a bit of the C64 look.

Sorry if the above description is short, but it's late. So if you want to know more about how I did this, drop me a comment. It would be cool to try this with video too.

Technorati tags: C64, Commodore 64, retro, graphics

Fotowoosh, a technology that can convert a single photograph to a 3D model is now available to use on your own photos. The company behind it has released it as a Facebook application. Earlier this year they released the demo movie (embedded below). Take a look at it if you haven't seen it.



Pretty cool, in my opinion. This tutorial from videocopilot.net is a good example of something it could be used for, although he does it by hand instead.

I suspected that the photos they used for the demo movie were chosen to be easy on the algorithm. Now that Fotowoosh is available on Facebook, I did some tests with my own photos. The results vary, as you'll see if you follow the links below.

Note that the camera movements in the following movies are made automatically by Fotowoosh. I could not record them myself, which of course limits the possible uses of the material. (I highly suspect a "Fotowoosh professional" that can export as a 3D model instead will appear soon enough.)

This one turned out best.

This one could work if the camera movements were very small.

This one too.

This one fails although it is a large outdoor panorama.

This one seems like it has a too complex depth structure for the algorithm to figure out. I guess this one has the same problem.

Perhaps the reflections in the water is what makes this one not work.

This one is a pretty flat photo and doesn't work well.

This one isn't an outdoor photo, and doesn't work at all.

This one is very simple, but still fails. Perhaps it's too dark?

On one image I got an error that said that it wasn't wooshable at all. (Yes, they invented a verb for the process.)

To wrap this up, wooshing is a cool effect, and I guess the image processing algorithms behind it took some thinking to work out. The question is whether it's possible to find a nail for this hammer. Wooshing could be used as a quick solution for adding just a little depth to a still image, by moving the camera just a little so the artifacts aren't too visible. So far, the results aren't good enough to be usable in a context where quality is important. If you want high quality you can use an algorithm that you feed with more than one photograph instead. They can work very well, at least with manual tweaking. Perhaps with further development, wooshing will be useful for something other than just a cool effect. But being a cool effect is enough for me. I like cool effects.

Technorati tags: fotowoosh, wooshing

If you read my last post, which is almost two months old, you might think that I got lost in Facebook and have had no time for blogging. Which I'm glad to say is not the whole truth. While it's certainly possible to lose lots of time on Facebook (like this guy), I've actually spent some of my spare time on more productive stuff. I've held a seminar together with a colleague which was an introduction to Python. I've also been working on a hobby project in Django, which is a very nice Python-based web application framework. And I've written an article about Django, which will be published in issue 1/2008 of the Swedish magazine Datormagazin. The article is in Swedish of course.

Speaking of languages, my eight month son recently started to say "dad". Often in long sentences like "Dad, dad, dad, dada, da, dad". Which is a bit strange. I've tried to make him say "pappa" for months, but when he starts speaking it's in English instead. I guess we made the trip to North America when he was at an impressionable age this summer.

Anyway, things are starting to calm down now. In a few weeks I will go on parental leave. I have no idea of how much time I'll have left for my hobby projects. I don't want to make the common mistake that fathers who go on parental leave do; to think that parental leave is some kind of holiday and plan lots of projects. Some people say that taking care of a child is a full time job. I guess they are right. Some people say that it wonderful. I guess they are right too.

Technorati tags: python, django, parental leave

I couln't resist it any more, but I guess I'm the last person on earth to get a Facebook profile.

I have had one of my email addresses for quite some time, so naturally it receives plenty of spam. It is often used as the apparent sender of spam too, so I often get replies from virus and spam protection systems that report that the mail was blocked. Today I have, for some unknown reason, got lots of Out of Office AutoReplies from poor spam targets. This looked so odd in my inbox, so I took a look at the message to see if they had something in common. I couldn't figure out why I got all of those today, but it was a bit fun to see the different out of office replies that people have. At least a little interesting. So as a service to anyone else that might be interested too (anyone?), here is a selection.

Grace seems to have been away for quite some time:

Hello, today is Friday, Oct 6th and I will be out of the office until further notice. Please refer to Twyla Xxxxxx for immediate assistance. Thanks:)

Karolina is late back to work too:

I will be out of the office the week of Aug.20th, returning Aug.27th. Please email yyyxxx@yyyyyyyyy.com & xxxyyy@yyyyyyyyy.com for further assistance.

Ludovic's leave from a Canadian university became longer than expected:

I will be on study/research leave from Sept 1, 2006 to Aug 31,
2007 and be away from the Ontario Veterinary College during this
period of time.

I will check my e-mails on a regular basis and reply to your
message as soon as I can.

I thought Rosh Hashanah was over for this year. (OK, I admit it, I looked it up.) Glenn knows better:

I will be out of the office this afternoon after 3:00PM for the Jewish New Year.
I will be here tomorrow, but again leaving early for the Holiday.
If you need me for any reason I will be available on my cell phone, xxx-xxx-xxxx.

I guess it's a good idea to set an automatic end date to the autoreplies. At least mention the dates you are talking about. "This afternoon" is a bit unclear. Actually, most of the autoreplies that I've received are out of date.

Freddy at a Belgian university has got it right. This is as clear as it gets. If you read Dutch that is:

Freddy Xxxxxx is afwezig tot en met maandag 17 september
Voor dringende interventies kan je een online interventieaanvraag invoeren (defectmelding Technische Diensten)

Noreen's message is short and to the point. Disregarding the odd way of writing the dates, it is perhaps even true:

I will be out of the office from MONDAY SEPT10th until MONDAYSEPT17th

That was fun wasn't it? Now let's hope I won't get more of these...

Technorati tags: e-mail, spam, autoreply, out of office