Sifting through my Akismet spam filter today I noticed a number of comments in Cyrillic. Clicking the associated website links led me to Russian language default themed WordPress blogs. It seems like splogs are easy to identify, even when written in another language. [Aside: Even though I'm 99% sure these are spam blogs, and so [...]
The problem with random theorizing on the web (and I include myself in the category of people subject to this critique) is that it often causal theories are presented without evidence or with only anecdotal evidence. Moreover, evidence and arguments are often used to delineate amongst classes of people whose mode of division actually has [...]
Testing out the new Firefox (3.5) with WordPress visual editing. Speedier, but does not seem quite as responsive as Opera.
Well, I just finished adding support for a Bumblebee2 camera to OpenCV. I wish I could give the code away, but it depends on Triclops, Point Grey’s proprietary library and I don’t really know how to submit a patch to OpenCV anyway. For those of you who are interested in accessing stereo vision capabilities for [...]
I got the following error when trying to compile the latest svn version of opencv: error: invalid controlling predicate A quick Google search yielded this gem of a compiler bug: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=38650. The offending loop: #ifdef _OPENMP #pragma omp for schedule(static, 1) #endif /* _OPENMP */ for( i = first; (i < first + count) && [...]
The phrase usually goes: “When in doubt, take the logarithm.” Since this appeared on Twitter recently (can you tell I’m addicted?), I’ve been thinking a little bit about the why behind this little dictum. The shortest reason I can come up with is that logarithms allow you to turn products into sums. This is incredibly [...]
I recently had some fun trying to figure out socket programming with Python. Following the example on the Python website, I wrote the following simple “server.” import os, sys import SocketServer class SerialPortHandler(SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler): def setup(self): print "Setup is called…" def handle(self): self.data = self.request.recv(4096) print "%s wrote:" % self.client_address[0] print self.data [...]
Some more on metered broadband coming to Austin: It was no accident that Time Warner Cable included Austin in its plans to roll out tiered pricing plans for Internet access. In fact, the city’s concentration of tech-savvy customers is the very thing that attracted the company’s efforts. And some worrying usage cases being considered: Austin [...]
Web users, the meter is running. In a strategy that’s likely to rankle consumers but be copied by competitors, Time Warner Cable (TWC) is pressing ahead with a plan to charge Internet customers based on how much Web data they consume. Starting next month, the company will introduce tiered pricing in several markets. I’m not [...]
I was struggling yesterday to get my research code running on my laptop. I depend on an open source library called libwebcam to enable pan and tilt control of an off-the-shelf camera. This code works on machines running Ubuntu Hardy, but not on my laptop running Ubuntu Intrepid. It seems that the uvc camera driver [...]