The headline does say facedetection - but what does this mean? Easy said, this article focus on how to find faces on images with PHP. Faces have a certain form and so it is possible to search for it. At the end of the search you will say how many human faces are on the image or better: Where are human faces on my image. This article is not intended to be mathematically.

The OpenCV library is a pattern-detection tool that can, based on the "experience" it has trained on with sample files, do its best to find similar structures in any given image. He's come up with a wrapper that handles most of the details for you. You can define the xml file type (frontalface, lowerbody, upperbody, etc) that you want it to try to match to.

He gives some examples of the output from each on one of the sample images included in the training group as well as a random photo grab from flickr that dynamically tries to apply one of the face filters.

Hot off the press, Kuassi points out that Oracle Instant Client for Apple Mac OS X (Intel x86) is now available from the Instant Client page on OTN. It's the latest 10.2.0.4 patchset.

The 10.2.0.4 release of Instant Client for Windows 32bit and Linux x86 have also been released.

The Oracle Instant Client is a lightweight version of the standard Oracle functionality that's not only smaller but allows installation of an Oracle client without having to do the full Oracle install.

Now I have gotten the new soon to be released Intel C++ compiler version 10 from the guys at Intel and things are working much better now. I used the same machine and same setup as in my last post just with the new Intel compiler installed.

The installation itself is quite simple just click through the wizard and when you are done you need to export some environment variables and set the CC compiler variable [...] then you compile Apache, PHP and APC as normal

He includes some stats as well, showing about a 2 request per second jump with the new compile (21% difference for template processing too).

Running PHP and eZ publish on PowerPC based Macs have been extreemly slow and now that I have eZ publish running on the Intel based Mac I tried to tune it to get maximum performance out of it when running eZ publish as I was not satistied with my previous tests.

He tries three things - patching the eZ publish intsallation with the latest update, installing a patch for the PHP installation on a FreeBSD machine, and finally trying out the ICC compiler for OS X and see if it helped (it didn't). Unfortunately, he's still looking for a cure for his Mac/PHP woes and would love some input from anyone out there noticing the same issue.

Xampp makes things easy - as easy as:

• Download/install
• change the httpd.conf
• sudo into the root account
• start up the application with a single command

You can get complete details for this package (as well as packages for other platforms) from the Xampp website.