Categories
Mobile phones

Android And Me

Last week I got a hold of the HTC G1 Android Developer Phone. This (how else) was preceded by a big fight with my cellular operator who insisted that I will take a data plan.
Ok, I said to myself, I bought this phone so that obviously mean I will use cellular internet. “So how much is that data plan?” I asked the representative.
“It’s 1000K” she replied. “1MB?” I asked in wonder. “No, not 1MB – 1000 KB!”
That’s when I understood she has no clue what she’s talking about. Furthermore, this “joke-data plan” was limited to WAP browsing. Oh come on!!!!
And I can’t replace it for a real data plan; I have to add money on top of it!
Well, I do not want to bore you with this specific war, because this is only a prolog for this post, but let’s just say it pays off to be stubborn. I ended up with no obligation to any data plan (which of course I took one, but now I can cancel it any time).
Now that I’ve got THAT over with, I got around to checking out this wonderful phone (and forgive me iPhone fans – I’m not saying this is BETTER than iPhone, only that it’s DIFFERENT).

Categories
graphics programming vision

Porting Rob Hess's SIFT impl. to Java

beavers_siftThis is a Java port of Rob Hess’ implementation of SIFT that I did for a project @ work.
However, I couldn’t port the actual extraction of SIFT descriptors from images as it relies very heavily on OpenCV. So actually all that I ported to native Java is the KD-Tree features matching part, and the rest is in JNI calls to Rob’s code.
I wrote this more as a tutorial to Rob’s work, with an easy JNI interface to Java.
You can find the sources here: https://www.morethantechnical.com/extupload/code/JavaSIFT.zip
Here’s how to use it:

Categories
blog

More than Technical now on Twitter

 

twitter_icon2

For those who wish to follow us on twitter, you may follow our new twit 🙂
www.twitter.com/morethantech

Categories
graphics gui programming vision work

Combining Java's BufferedImage and OpenCV's IplImage

java_opencv_imgHi
I recently did a small project combining a Java web service with a OpenCV processing. I tried to transfer the picture from Java environment (as BufferedImage) to OpenCV (IplImage) as seamlessly as possible. This proved a but tricky, especially the Java part where you need to create your own buffer for the image, but it worked out nicely.
Let me show you how I did it

Categories
graphics programming video work

iPhone camera frame grabbing and a real-time MeanShift tracker

i_can_has_meanshiftHi
Just wanted to report on a breakthrough in my iPhone-CV digging. I found a true realtime frame grabber for the iPhone preview frame (15fps of ~400×300 video), and successfully integrated this video feed with a pure C++ implementation of the MeanShift tracking algorithm. The whole setup runs at realtime, under a few constraints of course, and gives nice results.
Update: Apple officially supports camera video pixel buffers in iOS 4.x using AVFoundation, here’s sample code from Apple developer.
So lets dig in…

Categories
3d graphics programming school

Tracing wild rays

Hi
I havn’t published in a while. I was back up with work on a project for uni., work and my writing…
But the good thing with keeping busy, is that after a while – you have something to show for! So here’s what i’ve been working on for Comp. Graphics course – A Ray Tracer.

Categories
comics

My cellphone's evil plan

secrect_lives_of_cellphonesSometimes I think my cellphone holds a grudge for me, and he’s secretly trying to ruin my day. Whenever I forget to lock the keypad and put it back in my pocket it comes to life.
I catch it going online and surfing for hours, my mom calls me and tells me I sent her blank SMSs all night. Last time I caught the bugger enrolling to a dating service! – I shit you not, this phone wants bad things for me.
R.

Categories
.net Networking programming Recommended Software Solutions tips Windows scripting

The proper way to run a remote process

This is the story of my journey to find a way to run a process (or a program on a remote pc)
This wasn’t an easy thing at all…
Overall, I thought, this should be an easy thing to do.
I found this C# code on a Microsoft forums

object[] theProcessToRun = { "notepad.exe" };
ConnectionOptions theConnection = new ConnectionOptions();
theConnection.Username = "username";
theConnection.Password = "password";
ManagementScope theScope = new ManagementScope("<\\\\" + IP + "\\root\\cimv2", theConnection);
ManagementClass theClass = new ManagementClass(theScope, new ManagementPath("Win32_Process"), new ObjectGetOptions());
theClass.InvokeMethod("Create", theProcessToRun);

I tried this code, not after forgetting to disable the firewall on the remote computer – a big downside but I guess if I had gone with it I’d hunt a way to stable port to unblock in the firewall.
 
Then I found the big downside (which can be an upside to some of you):
The remote process this way will never have a GUI window opened (In this example, a process of notepad will be opened in the background).
This can be a big advantage to system admins which want to run scripts.
 
Ok, back to the quest.

Categories
graphics Recommended tips Website work

Beef up your presentations with word clouds

friendshipThere’s nothing like a good visualization to deliver your ideas over a presentation. Concise points and breakdowns can only go a certain distance before they become weary, and finally confuse your audience. It’s better to keep them on their toes by spicing up the boring slides every 5 or so page turns.
I found that Word Clouds, a kind-of new visualization concept, have a good trait of focusing the attention over a single word’s associative space. You bold your main word, center it, and scatter the associative words around it. This creates a powerful effect.
I found a nice tool to create these word coulds on-the-fly: Wordle.
The way I did was, get the Wikipedia value of my word, for example “Friendship“, and go to the Edit tab. Copy all the textarea’s contents, and paste it into Wordle’s word cloud creator. Press “GO” and the results are immediate.
You can eliminate the “outliers” – those unrelated words that appear too many times, and layout the cloud as you like to fit your slide.
The down-side with Wordle is that it has no export ability, so I had to take an Alt-PrintScreen screenshot to get my cloud as a picture.
Enjoy!
Roy.

Categories
Recommended Website

Music's ruling my world [on Kutiman's Thru-You]

Hi
If you haven’t yet tapped into the (well by now it’s a) phenomena that is Kutiman’s “Thru You” project – don’t walk, run and do it now.
I’m a long time fan of Kutiman’s work, his last CD (“Kutiman”) is playing repeatedly in my company-leased car. And I have been watching closely to hear some of his new beats.
I must say he totally surprised me. The music is awesome, but this was to be expected. He surprised me beacuse he single handedly create a new concept – Social Music. What he did was a natural development of music in the Web 2.0 spirit – use the enourmous amount of “data” laying around freely on the internet, and bring it together to create something new.
Anyway, enjoy his work, it’s truly aspiring.
R.