The Program

I just made a new webpage, called GrepArt.  It isn’t quite what I had in mind for it originally, but I like how it came out overall.  Check it out!

Here’s a preview of what my mosaic is all about!  It’s still relatively low quality, cause I only have 30% of my resources gathered (ideally I want 200%, so I have some colors twice to limit repetition).

(Again, as a technical note, I started implementing a standard deviation test at the suggestion of my room mate to allow the program to automatically discard very poor quality images, where the colors vary excessively)

Recently I’ve started collecting images online (specifically off of the flickr website owned by Yahoo!).  My goal is to collect roughly 65,000 images to build a mosaic out of them.  I’ve only collected roughly 6000 so far.. so I don’t have nearly enough to began building a mosaic.

I have done one experiment on them, however.  I’ve averaged all the pictures together (Resize them to 256×256, summed each pixel up and divided by the number of images).  I obtained this:

As awesome as that is.. it appears mostly gray.  You can see some hints of blues and reds in there, which I found interesting.  I then took this, and simply normalized the image to obtain a more apparent version of how the colors interacted (Excuse the poor jpeg quality).

This is a much better image to describe what is going on.  My [limited] explanation for what is going on is that darker colors tend to be on the bottom (floor, ground, etc), while faces and people tend to be in the middle, and sky and clouds tend to be on top.

I intend on doing more experiments with these images once I collect more of them. And once I get enough, mosaic time!

(On a more technical note, the image fetchers and processors have been programmed in python, using MySQL as a backend to keep track of the histograms of every image.. to make access time for creating a mosaic much faster).

I’ve just started a new webpage run through Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that will currently outline software development for the Formula Hybrid team’s car.

RPI Formula Hybrid is a team of students set out to create from scratch, and then race, a Hybrid car.  The car needs extensive code in order for the various components to run.  You can find my team’s blog outlining the process below:

http://formulahybrid.rpi.edu/eblog/

Well, IPv6 has been a topic talked about for years, but this is the first year that I have seen it starting to be implemented. My friend stumbled upon http://ipv6experiment.com, which is a very interesting, daring, brilliant, and humerus way to attract people to IPv6. Google also launched ipv6.google.com to cater to the IPv6 audience.

Overall, I think this year will start the push towards IPv6. With google’s support, the government’s new requirement for all branches to support IPv6, and this “grand experiment”, I think IPv6 may have a chance in the world.

I just finished writing another PHP script that I’ve entitled “MiniGallery”.  It is used to embed a small gallery right into a page with a little HTML/PHP.  Check it out at http://www.redgalaxy.net/minigallery.

Good ol’ Troy, NY.  We just had an ice storm a few days ago and the picture shown here is just an image of what the storm left.  The storm is both beautiful and terrifying.  The tree is completely covered in ice.  The storm also came with 48 hours of no power (this is after several explosions, of what I believe to be transformers).  The whole night and next day I heard falling and snapping tree limbs.  I’m just thankful no tree fell through my window.

Thankfully, I’m home in Rhode Island now.. and far away from any more damage and downed power lines.

It’s been a while since I’ve done an application review.. so here is one! Songbird.. it’s more or less just an itunes clone, so what’s the big deal?  It’s Open Source! What’s that mean?  Anyone can improve it, write extensions for it, and change its theme.  This leads things open to numerous possibilities.

There are already extensions to make songbird communicate with your ipod, download song lyrics, cover art, make mash up disks, and fancy visualization effects. Oh, and did I mention it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux?  Why not just download it and give it a try?  It’s free.

So, what’s the downside?  From what I can tell the program is currently very CPU and memory intensive.  I’ve looked at some of their bug reports and this is a problem they know about and are looking into.. so hopefully it will be fixed by version 1.1.

Overall, I think it’s a great program with a lot of features.  Tune it up a little bit and it will be perfect.  Give it a shot, you might like it!

And currently wordpress isn’t allowing me to upload images for some reason, so I’ll get a screenshot on here later.

So, I got curious today as I do with most things and I decided to experiment with my laptop.  It occurred to me that since it has two network cards (wired, and wifi), that I could potentially load balance the two and get an increased speed overall, so I gave a shot.

My first attempt was bonding the interfaces (via the linux kernel bonding module), but that turned out to fail pretty badly since not only was each interface a different IP, but on a completely different subnet.

After trying that, I focused on more routing table type things.  I knew that the routing table had default entries, so I tried to just add two.. but that broke more than it fixed.  Then I discovered there is a method to add multiple default gateways.  Here’s what I came up with:

ip route add default equalize scope global nexthop via <GATEWAY> dev eth1 weight 2 nexthop via <GATEWAY> dev wlan0 weight 3

Just with that simple code (replacing the devices with your devices, and the gateways with your own gateways), it worked.  What linux ended up doing is giving priority to wlan0 (as shown by the weight), and then once that bandwidth got used up, it switched over to eth1.  This is perfect.  I could be downloading something off a webpage on one, and still be online without any bandwidth bottlenecks on the other.

Aside: For those of you who don’t know how to figure out your gateways, simply to connect to the network and type “route” in a command line.  You’ll see a list of different routes. Look for the one that says “default” on the left, and the proper device on the right.  In that row you’ll see the listed gateway for that interface.

I doubt this is something I will use every day, but it is nifty, and could come in use eventually.. maybe.

So, I sat down and wrote a small little program on my website for cellphones.  It’s a text message based command line system.  It receives text messages, processes the command, and sends a response back to my cellphone if necessary.

Some of the commands I currently have programmed in are reading/writing to a notepad file, checking my email, checking the weather, and getting other information from my website.

It was a small project, and only took a few hours to complete.. but it’s probably one of the more useful things I’ve written recently.

In a little more detail, the whole program is based on a PHP backend which runs every few minutes that checks for new messages.  If it finds a message, it takes the first word, assumes it’s a command, and runs the PHP file associated with that command, and forms a response, and then sends the response back to the sender.

I’d give out the address for everyone to test, but I’m still working on security features