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:
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 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 
PeerNet
Well, I had some free time today I began implementing the server portion of the p2p networking system. It’s still all API and has no functionality yet. Once I get the API written up, I can hopefully write subsystems to connect to it.
Twitter Analysis
The twitter project has advanced a little bit, but not too much because of recent school work and working on my original project of the p2p system (PeerNet). The other issue is the LCD monitor to my desktop computer died, and I’m working to get that replaced. The twitter project was on my desktop.
Web Design & Development:
I also have a webpage under production, but that has come to a crawl because it is a project in which many people are working on, and we’re all busy. It can’t advance much further until I have time to sit down with my team and get some things discussed.
ANOTHER ONE?
Believe it or not, I have another project up in the air as well. I’m debating on improving my ray tracer. My original ray tracer was of poor design (I made it a good 5 years ago). The original concept was to trace point by point to a terminating ray.. so not really a ray at all but rather a line where points in the line a queried. It worked, but was slow. The new tracer I’d like to make would be a volume-ray tracer. Basically, like my old ray tracer, everything would be represented as a volume, however the volumes would be surrounded by a bounding object of sorts, so it would be extremely optimized. Because, then the bounding objects could be placed in a quad tree. I’d still get the adventure of ease to represent objects. Because everything is volumes, it’s really easy to get effects such as sub-surface scattering or layering of fogs/liquids.
THE PLAN
Right now, I think I’m going to try to focus on finishing up PeerNet – At least to the point where other people could start developing it. Intermediately, I’d like to work on the twitter analysis program.. once I get it off my desktop. After those two are finished to satisfaction, I’ll begin work on the ray tracer. Hopefully once an extended break from school comes, I can get the team together again and resume work on the website.
For those of you who don’t know, twitter is a web application that allows people to tell any other “followers” what they are doing. You can update it online, through many client applications, and by cell phone.
I’ve recently started a project (C++) that I hope will analyze twitter’s “tweets” (as they call them), and look for common positive and negative terms. Through these terms, I want to try to make some sort of graphical display which presents the world’s current mood as a whole (and by the “world”, I mean twitter users of course).
Another goal of mine to be implemented eventually is to add support to learn new words and associate them with positive or negative statements.
I won’t pretend to be perfect in the algorithms I use to analyze the statements received from Twitter’s RSS feed. Right now, the “analyzer” is fundamentally just a word search (with some fancy stuff added on that looks for derivatives of the words as well, i.e. past-present-future).
I should hopefully complete the project this week (if my school schedule doesn’t dramatically change).
Miro is an video feed aggregator. It’s main function is to take many RSS feeds, parse then, and extract any videos they might link to. This provides sort of a pseudo internet “TV”.
When I first downloaded it, I noticed it had hundreds of built in RSS feeds ready to use. It also had the ability to search for videos in all the feeds. So, I set it up to downloaded new movie trailers, some AdultSwim stuff (cartoons, such as Robot Chicken), and Linux.com video feeds.
So far I’m impressed with its design and its ease of use. There really is no downside to the program itself, I’m just not sure how useful it would be to me. I like the whole idea of automatically downloading new videos from the sources I specify, though, I’m not sure if this is a program I would use on a day to day basis.
The other downside, from a programming aspect, is I’ve found it has a tendency to crash from time to time, though it isn’t enough to convince me to stop using it for that single reason. It also gets clogged up during a massive video search sucking up CPU time to do the search.
So, if you are into a program to take all the videos in RSS feeds, download them, and then view them, then this program is for you. If you just watch some youtube videos from time to time, then check out the program, you may like it, or you may find that just hopping on youtube in firefox is easier than starting up this program.
Sumatra pdf is a free, open source, pdf viewer for windows. I suppose one of a common users first question is why use this over adobe’s pdf viewer? Simple: It’s fast. There is no loading time what so ever. You open the pdf file, and there it is, time to read it. Why waste your time staring an Adobe loading screen when you can load a pdf instantly?
It supports all common pdf features that are needed by the average user. Give it a try, you’ll be glad you did!
Well, the program we all know and love, Thunderbird, is making AOTD on my page. I found it almost too popular to consider to make AOTD, as I find it better to make more unique programs AOTD.
For those of you who don’t know what thunderbird is, it is an email client (such as Microsoft Outlook, or Evolution in Gnome suite). It’s another production of the Mozilla company, which means it’s just as good and as stable as their famous Firefox.
One of the best features for thunderbird is its ability to have plugins and themes (just like firefox). So, make it look how you want, and have it function how you want. One of its best plugins that I’ve found so far is called “Lightning”, that is a plugin to add calendar functionality to Thunderbird. So, now, I use thunderbird for all my email accounts (both IMAP and POP3), as well as a calendar to keep track of important dates and times.
If you need a program to consolidate emails, RSS feeds, newsgroups, and other method of information, then consider checking out thunderbird. I use it on both my Linux and Windows systems.