The Program

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/

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.

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted much of anything.  This reason, simply put, is that I have returned to RPI, and am busy with work, class, and organizing my life.  As time goes on and I get settled back into the rhythm of school again I’ll try to start writing AOTD’s again, as well as get back to work on my programs.

I haven’t had much free time to even program!  I haven’t written a single line of code since returning here (well.. I have written code for class, but not on my own free time).

Hopefully it will all return to normal soon.

So, I just got home from a lovely day at work at the deli, sit down in my nice computer chair, and hop on google.  I have the nice iGoogle homepage, and I see that Intel’s next CPU is set to release at the end of this year, so I look at it.  Guess what it’s name is? Core i7.  Seriously, what’s with that name?  I understand the ‘Core’, the “Flagship” name for their new multicore products (See Source Article).

What’s with the i7? To me, it seems like that everyone is stealing the name from the iMac, or the iPod, or maybe even the iRack (Youtube Video), but why iGoogle, or i7?  It’s almost like everything is going ‘i’.  Doesn’t make much sense to me.

On top of that, i7 has nothing to do with the actual product.  It’s a quad core!  Maybe it would make more sense if they called it the Core i4 or the Core 3 Quad. That way their name actually has some relevance in the design.  Maybe they have yet to announce why it’s called the i7, something about more official specifications maybe.  But for now, to me, it is a ridiculous name.  The way this is going, this decade will be the ‘i’ decade, and will be remembered as such.

All I can say is that I hope the processor specs outways the stupidity of the name.  If it’s anything like their previous processors, it will be a decent CPU.

Happy 4th of July!  Enjoy your holiday.