We got this by setting the voxel size to be about upper-torso sized and then spinning my friend around on a chair. Thanks to the duality of the problem, it doesn’t matter if it’s the camera moving or the object moving relative to the camera. While there are definite errors and the resolution isn’t as high as one might want to capture fine facial features, it is still pretty impressive!

Today I spent reviewing my journal paper and adding in some of my latest results. Alas I am now 3 pages over my 14 page limit. Tomorrow will be trimming (or probably chain-sawing is a more suitable verb ). Being that day traditionally associated with plans and resolves and similar such nonsense, I decided to break out my ill-used Google Calendar and make a schedule. My first scheduled event was to start my thesis when I get back to the frozen wasteland of Pittsburgh and my second action was to schedule a thesis writing party every day after supper – oh so much fun I tentatively set April 25th as my defense date since that would be exactly a year from my thesis proposal. w00t!

Yes, as a guy in the Christmas tree biz (every Thanksgiving I don a lumbjack outfit and chainsaw, haul, bail, and sell trees on my grandparent’s Christmas tree farm in North Carolina), I am here to tell you that in 2008, the National Christmas Tree Association (an association representing the interests of 5000 growers in the US) petitioned the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to impose a $0.15 tax on Christmas trees. (Those who are sharp should note this was during an entirely different administration, not that that has anything to do with anything).

But why would tree growers want this tax? Because sales for “lives trees” were declining due to the advertising efforts of artificial Christmas tree manufacturers, and the distributed nature of thousands of small tree growers meant they couldn’t effectively advertise their products. The same thing happened to milk, so what did they do? In 1983, the dairy farmers agreed to pay the USDA a small tax (via the Checkoff program) to advertise for them; hence, the “Got Milk” commercials were born. Ironically, this tax was…wait for it…yes, $0.15 per hundredweight of milk.

Seeing how this worked for milk and 17 other agriculture products, the Christmas tree farmers wanted a piece of the action.  The new tax would be effective for 3 years, after which all growers who paid the tax could vote to either renew or dismantle it. After a several year study, during which comments were requested from individual tree growers and regional Christmas Tree Associations (such as the North Carolina one), 70% of growers and 90% of associations agreed with the idea. Thus, the USDA drafted a $0.15 tax to raise $2 million for advertising, which tree growers are hoping will increase demand and bolster a declining live Christmas tree market.

And now you know….the rest of the story (i.e., the one where bad journalists, sensationalist media outlets, opportunistic politicians, and ignorant Americans all muddle about yelling at each other). Now to be fair, I don’t think this tax would help Christmas tree farmers such as my family that much. We primarily focus on retail where we do our own advertising and networking. That seems to be working pretty well for us. I have heard family members worry about the economy and the reusability of artificial trees, though, so I don’t know for sure. From a consumer stand-point, the tax doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. It is unlikely a monopoly is going to develop in the artificial tree business, so a decline in demand for real trees should just lowers prices for the consumer. The NCTA claims increased demand would offset the tax, meaning the effect on the consumer is negligible. Honestly, I’m not sure I believe that, but then again I’m no economist. However, the one thing I am sure of is that the government is not trying to kill Christmas or squeeze some more money into Uncle Sam’s pocket by grinching your holiday spirit. Also, if you want the thrill of choosing your own Christmas tree and having me chainsaw it down, haul it halfway up a mountain, bail it, and tie it to your car, come visit www.christmastrees4u.com.

The Need

When writing computer vision applications that process fairly high-resolution imagery in real-time, significant amounts of CPU are used and lots of data is generated. For my application in surgical robotics, I have two stereo cameras running at 1024 x 768 @ 30 Hz = 135 M/s in full RGB video, in addition to any supplementary data generated by the system. This is a lot of data to process, but worse yet: what do you do with the data once you’ve processed it? Saving results isn’t very easy because your options are pretty much limited to the following:

1. Save encoded video to disk, but this requires lots of CPU time which you are probably using for the vision system
2. Resizing the video is an option, but it is uncool(TM) to save out lower resolution videos
3. Save the raw video to disk, but you need a very fast disk or RAID array
4. Save the raw video to RAM, but that gets expensive and requires a follow-up encoding phase
5. Offshore the video to another computer/GPU, but this is tricky and can require a high-speed bus (i.e.e quad gigabit or an extra PCI-e)
6. 3rd party solutions, such as hardware encoder + backup solution, but this is generally pretty pricy and finicky to setup

The Solution

Luckily for us, Intel has provided a brand new and almost free solution to this problem of saving lots of video data very fast: Quick Sync (wiki), a hardware encoder/decoder built directly into the latest SandyBridge x86 chips.What does this give you? The ability to encode 1080p to H.264 at 100 fps with only a negligible increase in CPU. I say almost free because while the functionality is free and built directly into the latest Intel processors ($320), there is some amount of work in getting the free Intel Media SDK working.

The rest of this post is going to detail my experiences over the past three days in getting Quick Sync to encode raw RGB frames (from OpenCV) to H.264 video.

Caveats/Limitations

First, it is important to know that there are some limitations with the hardware encoding:

• You need a processor that supports Intel Quick Sync and a H67 or Z68 motherboard (at the time of writing) to enable the integrated graphics section of the chip which contains the hardware encoders/encoders.
• The integrated graphics must be plugged into a monitor/display and be actively on and showing something (ebay a super cheap small LCD if you have to).
• Only a limited number of codecs are available: H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2.
• Additionally, a maximum resolution of 1920×1200 is available for hardware encoding. I believe you can work around this issue by encoding multiple sessions simultaneously, although it looks like the code gets more complicated. I have tested running two applications that are both encoding at the same time without any difficulties so I know that works at least.
• Finally, documentation is somewhat scarce and the limited number of posts on the Intel Media SDK forum are probably your only bet for finding answers to any issues.

Setup

My current setup is an Intel i7-2600K processor (not overclocked) on a Z68 motherboard with an GTX 460 powering two monitors and a projector. I have Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate installed for C/C++ development. Originally I had the projector plugged into the integrated graphics, but it seems that didn’t work (i.e. QuickSync initialization would fail). I removed the graphics card and plugged in one of my monitors to the integrated graphics and QuickSync initialized fine, so I put the GTX 460 back in and plugged it to the other monitor and projector. Things were still happy with Quick Sync so I imagine that the integrated graphics must be not only plugged in, but actively displaying something.

To get started, Windows 7 x64 had already installed Intel’s HD Graphics drivers, so I just installed the Intel Media SDK 3.0. It comes with a reference manual, a bunch of sample in C++, and two approaches to using Quick Sync:

• Via the API: This is the official, supported way with the most amount of flexibility. Unfortunately, only elementary streams are supported, meaning the outputted files are literally the raw bitstream and cannot be played with VLC or other media players.
• Via DirectShow filters: For quick & dirty simple approaches, the SDK comes with some sample DirectShow filters for encoding/decoding. Requesting help on the forums regarding the DirectShow filters seems to always prompt a response along the lines of “well, our DirectShow filters are really just samples and aren’t really supported or well tested…” which doesn’t leave me with warm fuzzies.

The reason I’m mentioning these approaches is because when I first started out, I didn’t know any of this and just launched into approach #1 by looking at the sample_encode example provided with the SDK. Had I know the limitations of #1 and the possibility of #2, I would have probably tried going down the DirectShow route instead. I might look into #2 later, but #1 seems to be working fine for me at the moment.

Verifying Quick Sync Works

I discovered the simplest way to verify Quick Sync is working is to use GraphEdit to create a simple transcoding filter (no coding necessary). The process is described in this Intel blog post : simply download GraphEdit, then go to Graph -> Insert Filters. Select DirectShow Filters and insert “File Source (Async.)” (select a file playable with Windows Media Player) -> “AVI Splitter”, “AVI Decompressor” -> “Intel Media SDK H.264 Encoder”, “Intel Media SDK MP4 Muxer” and finally a “File Writer” (provide it with a name to save the file). Then you can run the graph and it should transcode the file for you. In my case, it converted a small ~1 minute XVID video to an H.264 video in just a few seconds. Coolnesses!

Adapting sample_encode

After reading some of the introductory material in the reference manual, browsing the sample code is usually how I best start learning something. The sample code that looked most promising was sample_encode. Unfortunately, the input to the program is a raw YUV video file (that then get shoved through the decoder and out to a *.h264 file), but who has those lying around? So I figured the best place to start was to connect that code to my program that outputs processed video frames for saving. The processing happens in OpenCV, so essentially I wanted to bridge the gap between a cv::Mat class with raw RGB pixels to the sample_encode Quick Sync encoding/saving code. First, I added a queue, mutex, and done pointer to CEncodingPipeline::Run and replaced the call to CSmplYUVReader::LoadNextFrame with a wait for next available frame in queue, a memcpy, and a check to the done pointer to see if the incoming video stream had stopped (in which case make sure to set sts = MFX_ERR_MORE_DATA). Then in the input thread, I used cv::cvtColor to convert the image to YUV (or YCrCb as referred to in the documentation) and packed it into the YV12 format (or rather the NV12 which is the same except different byte ordering). After numerous false starts, this finally spit out a video file that looked good, until I noticed something fairly subtle: the colors were a bit off.

RGB to YUV color mismatch

So apparently, among the million and one different ways to convert RGB to YUV, I got the wrong one. Well let’s go directly to the big guns: Quick Sync is an Intel product, so the Intel IPP routines should be the same right? I head over to the documentation for ippiRGBtoYUV and implement the algorithm from their docs. That works better, but the color is still slightly wrong and more saturated. So converting from  RGB to  YUV to feed into Quick Sync is a bust, although quite possibly there is a bug somewhere in my code.

RGB to H.264

OK, well, now what? If feeding YUV isn’t working, can we directly feed in RGB? The answer is sort of. Part of Quick Sync contains VPP or the hardware Video Pre-Processing pipeline. This is a set of filters, such as scaling, cropping, etc that you can run in hardware before the encoding step. One of the preprocessing steps is color conversion where we can convert RGB4 to NV12. RGB4 is really just RGBA where each pixel is represented by four bytes of red, green, blue, alpha. The trick is to get it to work. First, I convert OpenCV’s RGB to RGBA; that’s the easy part. In sample_encode, the trick to enabling their VPP code is to make sure that the input format vpp.In.FourCC is different than the output format vpp.Out.FourCC. So I set both in CEncodingPipeline::InitMfxVppParams:

m_mfxVppParams.vpp.In.FourCC = MFX_FOURCC_RGB4; // changed line

// in-between code, calculating frame rates, setting sizes and crops…

memcpy(&m_mfxVppParams.vpp.Out, &m_mfxVppParams.vpp.In, sizeof(mfxFrameInfo));

m_mfxVppParams.vpp.Out.FourCC = MFX_FOURCC_NV12; // added line

And boom, now I can memcpy my RGBA code into pSurf->Data.R and things magically work. You should set pSurf->Data.G =pSurf->Data.R+1 and pSurf->Data.B = pSurf->Data.R+2;

But what about AVIs?

So the one downside to this whole approach is that the API provided by the Intel Media SDK produce an elementary stream, not an MP4 or AVI. This is fine if you just want to get your video compressed and onto the disk, but somewhat disheartening when you want actually want to see that recorded video. There are, of course, video players that can decode elementary streams, including DGAVCDec and the Intel Media SDK’s sample_dshow_player. In fact, if you compile and run sample_dshow_player, it will actually use the DirectShow filters to not only load and play the elementary H.264 you’ve generated, but also transcode it to an AVI/MP4 file. Which is very nice, but still non-optimal. In the future, I’d like to check out the DirectShow route so I can automatically generate AVI files. Furthermore, it is possible even to mux in audio, which would be nice so I can record audio of the system instead of just video.

The End Result

So there we have it: video now comes in from the cameras, is processed by my vision system, sent to Quick Sync for encoding, and saved to disk. Encoding happens faster than I can shove frames in and barely increases my CPU load (there are some memcpy operations and various API calls to manage Quick Sync, and save the resulting stream to a file, but these are all relatively lightweight). I get an elementary H.264 stream out, which I will then batch convert using a modified version of the sample_dshow_player. It’s not completely optimal yet (I would prefer to output AVI/MP4 files), but for 3 days worth of futzing around with the Intel Media SDK, I think what I have works quite well for my needs.

IROS itself was both fun and boring in about equal measures. Maybe more on the boring side My presentations went well and CMU had two papers that were up for awards, which is always awesome. I saw some cool robots there, talked to people, and generally had a nice time. My iPod Touch came in handy when I ran into a talk that bored me; I’d just start reading my ebook until they said something interesting

The weekend I got back was the PhD Movie (you know, from the makers of the PhD Comics), which honestly I was expecting to be a bad B movie with relatively weak jokes. However, it really surprised me. While definitely a B movie with relatively stiff acting, the laughs were really quite good. At least from my perspective as a grad student, they were spot on. “And the part of the week you look forward to most is the Friday gathering where you stand around drinking and talking to the same people you’ve been talking to all week” It’s so true. Anyhow, I recommend a watch if you are (or know somebody) in grad school. I doubt it will become as iconic as the red stapler movie whose name currently eludes me, but it should be. And with that witty sentence, I shall take my leave to bed. Adieu!

Is my run done? Bah, still 300 MB left to process….sigh…Oh I sprained my ankle playing racquetball, that was quite the ordeal. I went to CMU health services who gave me crutches and sent me to the hospital to get it x-rayed. Luckily it wasn’t broken, but in the day I spent using crutches I gained a lot more appreciation for people who have to use them. Dude those things are so much harder to use than they look. With the whole right foot being rather incapacitated, I’ve been driving left-footed. It takes a bit of getting used to for the first couple of days but then it’s almost natural. A couple times I had to think which foot I was using.

Ahaha, my run is done, starting a new one and off to bed!

Vision-Based Control of a Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery

Abstract – Surgeons increasingly need to perform complex operations on extremely small anatomy. Many promising new surgeries are effective, but difficult or impossible to perform because humans lack the extraordinary control required at sub-mm scales. Using micromanipulators, surgeons gain better positioning accuracy and additional dexterity as the instrument smoothes tremor and scales hand motions. While these aids are advantageous, they do not actively consider the goals or intentions of the operator and thus cannot provide context-specific behaviors, such as motion scaling around anatomical targets, prevention of unwanted contact with pre-defined tissue areas, and other helpful task-dependent actions.

This thesis explores the fusion of visual information with micromanipulator control and builds a framework of task-specific behaviors that respond synergistically with surgeon’s intentions and motions throughout surgical procedures. By exploiting real-time microscope view observations, a-priori knowledge of surgical procedures, and pre-operative data used by the surgeon while preparing for the surgery, we hypothesize that the micromanipulator can better understand the goals of a given procedure and deploy individualized aids in addition to tremor suppression to further help the surgeon. Specifically, we propose a vision-based control framework of modular virtual fixtures for handheld micromanipulator robots. Virtual fixtures include constraints such as “maintain tip position”, “avoid these areas”, “follow a trajectory”, and “keep an orientation” whose parameters are derived from visual information, either pre-operatively or in real-time, and are enforced by the control system. Combining individual modules allows for complex task-specific behaviors that monitor the surgeon’s actions relative to the anatomy and react appropriately to cooperatively accomplish the surgical procedure.

Particular focus is given to vitreoretinal surgery as a testbed for vision-based control because several new and promising surgical techniques in the eye depend on fine manipulations of delicate retinal structures. Preliminary experiments with Micron, the micromanipulator developed in our lab, demonstrate that vision-based control can improve accuracy and increase usability for difficult retinal operations, such as laser photocoagulation and vessel cannulation. An initial framework for virtual fixtures has been developed and shown to significantly reduce error in synthetic tests if the structure of the surgeon’s motions is known. Proposed work includes formalizing the virtual fixtures framework, incorporating elements from model predictive control, improving 3D vision imaging of retinal structures, and conducting experiments with an experienced retinal surgeon. Results from experiments with ex vivo and in vivo tissue for selected retinal surgical procedures will validate our approach.

Thesis Committee Members:
Cameron N. Riviere, Chair
George A. Kantor
George D. Stetten
Gregory D. Hager, Johns Hopkins University

A copy of the thesis proposal document is available at:
http://briancbecker.com/thesis/becker_proposal.pdf

With a computer engineering background, I find that having to develop in LabVIEW fills me with dread. While I am sure LabVIEW is appropriate for something, I have yet to find it. Why is it so detestable? I thought you’d never ask.

• Wires! Everywhere! The paradigm of using wires instead of variables makes some sort of sense, except that for anything reasonably complex, you spend more time trying to arrange wires than you do actually coding. Worse, finding how data flows by tracing wires is tedious. Especially since you can’t click and highlight a wire to see where it goes – clicking only highlights the current line segment of the wire.  And since most wires aren’t completely straight, you have to click through each line segment to trace a wire to the end. [edit: A commenter pointed out double clicking a wire highlights the entire wire, which helps with the tracing problem]
• Spatial Dependencies. In normal code, it doesn’t matter how far away your variables are. In fact, in C you must declare locals at the top of functions. In LabVIEW, you need to think ahead so that your data flows don’t look like a rat’s nest. Suddenly you need a variable from half a screen away? Sure you can wire it, but then that happens a few more times and BAM! suddenly your code is a mess of spaghetti.
• Verbosity of Mathematical Expressions. You thought low-level BLAS commands were annoying? Try LabVIEW. Matricies are a nightmare. Creating them, replacing elements, accessing elements, any sort of mathematical expression takes forever. One-liners in a reasonable language like MATLAB become a whole 800×800 pixel mess of blocks and wires.
• Inflexible Real-Estate. In normal text-based code, if you need to add another condition or another calculation or two somewhere, what do you do? That’s right, hit ENTER a few times and add your lines of code. In LabVIEW, if you need to add another calculation, you have to start hunting around for space to add it. If you don’t have space near the calculation, you can add it somewhere else but then suddenly you have wires going halfway across the screen and back. So you need to program like it’s like the old-school days of BASIC where you label your lines 10, 20, 30 so you have space to go back and add 11 if you need another calculation. Can’t we all agree we left those days behind for a reason? [edit: A commenter has mentioned that holding Ctrl while drawing a box clears space]
• Unmanageable Scoping Blocks. You want to take something out of an if statement? That’s easy, just cut & paste. Oh wait no, if you do that, then all your wires disappear. I hope you remembered what they were all connected to. Now I’m not saying LabVIEW and the wire paradigm could actually handle this use case, but compare this to cut & paste of 3 lines of code from inside an if statement to outside. 3 seconds, if that compared to minutes of re-wiring.
• Unbearably Slow. Why is it when I bring up the search menu for Functions that LabVIEW 2010 will freeze for 5 seconds, then randomly shuffle around the windows, making me go back and hunt for the search box so I can search? I expect better on a quadcore machine with 8 gb of RAM. Likewise, compiles to the real-time target are 1-5 minute long operations. You say, “But C++ can take even longer” and this is true. However, C++ doesn’t make compiles blocking, so I can modify code or document code while it compiles. In LabVIEW, you get to sit there and stare at a modal progress bar.
• Breaks ALT-TAB. Unlike any other normal application, if you ALT-TAB to any window in LabVIEW, LabVIEW completely re-orders Windows Z-Buffer so that you can’t ALT-TAB back to the application you were just running. Instead, LabVIEW helpfully pushes all other LabVIEW windows to the foreground so if you have 5 subVIs open, you have to ALT-TAB 6 times just to get back to the other application you were at. This of course means that if you click on one LabVIEW window, LabVIEW will kindly bring all the other open LabVIEW windows to the foreground, even those on other monitors. This makes it a ponderous journey to swap between LabVIEW and any other open program because suddenly all 20 of your LabVIEW windows spring to life every time you click on.
• Limited Undo. Visual Studio has nearly unlimited undo. In fact, I once was able to undo nearly nearly 30 hours of work to see how the code evolved during a weekend. LabVIEW on the other hand, has incredibly poor undo handling. If a subVI runs at a high enough frequency, just displaying the front-panel is enough to cause misses in the real-time target. Why? I have no idea. Display should be much lower priority than something I set to ultra-high realtime priority, but alas LabVIEW will just totally slow down at mundane things like GUI updates. Thus, in order to test changes, subVIs that update at high frequencies must be closed prior to running any modifications. Of course, this erases the undo. So if you add in a modification, close the subVI, run it, discover it isn’t a good modification, you have to go back and remove it by hand. Or if you broke something, you have to go back and trace your modifications by hand.
• A Million Windows. Please, please, please for the love of my poor taskbar, can we not have each subVI open up two windows for the front/back panel? With 10 subVIs open, I can see maybe the first letter or two of each subVI. And I have no idea which one is the front panel and which is the back panel except by trial and error. The age of tabs was born, oh I don’t know, like 5-10 years ago? Can we get some tab love please?
• Local Variables. Sure you can create local variables inside a subVI, but these are horribly inefficient (copy by value) and the official documentation suggests you consider shift registers, which are variables associated with loops. So basically the suggested usage for local variables is to create a for loop that runs once, and then add shift registers to it. Really LabVIEW, really? That’s your advanced state-of-the-art programming?
• Copy & Paste . So you have a N x M matrix constant and want to import or export data. Unfortunately, copy and paste only works with single cells so have fun copying and pasting N*M individual numbers. Luckily if you want to export a matrix, you can copy the whole thing. So you copy the matrix, and go over to Excel and paste it in and……….suddenly you’ve got an image of the matrix. Tell me again how useful that is? Do you magically expect Excel to run OCR on your image of the matrix? Or how about this scenario: you’ve got a wire probed and it has 100+ elements. You’d like to get that data into MATLAB somehow to verify or visualize it. So you right click and do “Copy Data” and go back to MATLAB to paste it in. But there isn’t anything to paste! After 10 minutes of Googling and trial and error, it turns out that you have to right click and “Copy Data”, then open up a new VI, paste in the data, which shows up as a control, which you can then right-click and select “Export -> Export Data to Clipboard”. Seriously?!? And it doesn’t even work for complex representations, only the real part is copied! I think nearly every other program figured out how to copy and paste data in a reasonable manner, oh say, 15 years ago?
• Counter-Intuitive Parameters. Let’s say you want to modify the parameters to a subVI, i.e. add a new parameter. Easy right? Just go to the back panel with the code and tell it which variables you want passed in. Nope! You have to go to the front panel, right-click on the generic looking icon in the top right hand corner, and select Show Connector. Then you select one of those 6×6 pixel boxes (if you can click on one) and then the variable you want as a parameter. LabVIEW doesn’t exactly go out of its way to make common usage tasks easy to find.

Now granted, there are some nice things about LabVIEW. Automatic garbage collection [or rather the implicit instantiation and memory managing of the dataflow format, as one commenter pointed out], easy GUI elements for changing parameters and getting displays, and…………well I’m sure there are a few other things. But my point is, I am now reasonably proficient in LabVIEW basics and still have no idea how people manage to get things coded in LabVIEW without wanting to tear their hair out. There are people who love LabVIEW, and I wish I knew why, because then maybe I wouldn’t feel such horrorific frustration at having to develop in LabVIEW. I refuse to put it on my resume and will avoid any job that requires it. Coding in assembly language is more fun.

Anyhow, this has messed with my sleep schedule massively. I was in bed by 11 pm last night, but after an hour of not being able to sleep, I cracked open my laptop and figured I’d do work until sleep overwhelmed me. Alas that didn’t happen until 6 am so now things are all wonky. Maybe I’ll just invert my schedule. If I wake up at 4 pm, I can just drive my car to campus instead of having to take the bus. How handy would that be? Of course, finding food in the middle of the night in Pittsburgh can be a bit tough.

• Does the research fit with the topic and tone of the place it is being published? Many research papers are good, but would be more appropriate if submitted to a different venue.
• Does the research meet the quality standards of the place it is being published? Is the research thorough and are the results representative of what you would expect?
• Does the paper present the research well? Is it clearly document the steps taken such that the results can be duplicated?

Of course, you could come up with many additional criteria by which to judge papers, and that is all well and good.

However, it is the second aspect to reviewing papers that I feel many people miss out on. A reviewer should be more than just an imperialist judge. In my opinion, what makes your ye-old standard reviewer into a good reviewer is the ability to act as a confidant. A confidant is somebody who you can share something important with and expect frank, but kindly advice. Your father, sibling, close friend. Somebody who will listen to you without condescension, frustration, or the ilk and really wish the best while advising you. Similarly, a researcher submitting their work for review is them sharing with you their not-yet published research. Just as a confident is somebody who is outside the situation and can offer advice, a reviewer should offer candid, yet kindly suggestions on how to make the research better. I have seen some reviewers who view their job as judge, jury, and executor in one, shredding good work and nitpicking small ideological issues. This is not to say that a reviewer shouldn’t be completely candid – sometimes the job of a confidant is to deliver unpleasant truth. They can note missing references, bring attention to errors, point out inconsistencies, indicate parts of the paper are unclear, make editorial corrections, etc. However, they should also offer insights that the authors might benefit from, suggest new avenues of future research, list more appropriate venues to publish, detail improvements that could be made, etc. And often it is not what you say, but how you say it.

The line between acting judge and confidant is hard to decide and act upon sometimes, but for the poor researcher slaving away at difficult problems for months and years on end, it is the least you can do. Put more than a quick scan and a few sentences into your reviews, and aim to be a good reviewer.

1) Start with one soft taco burrito thingie from the store.

2) Place on brownie square in the middle of the burrito.

3) Spread Nutella on the burrito. If you can somehow make it not look like a mud pie, do so.

4) Scoop one vanilla and one chocolate ice cream ball onto the burrito.

5) Liberally sprinkle strawberries and blueberries or other fantastic fruit on your burrito.

6) No dessert is complete without drizzled chocolate syrup, so go hog wild.

7) Fold your burrito, making sure to fold the bottom in so it doesn’t leak too too much. Notice my ultra-classy paper plate.

8 ) Eat your dessert burrito! Please don’t look as scared as I am at the prospect.

So yeah there you have it. Dessert burritos. I’ve got to admit, the burrito was a bit saltier than I was expecting, so if you can procure non-salted ones, it would be in your best interest. I think I might just recommend a regular old sundae unless you are looking for something particularly unique.

My friends and I are currently working on automatic 3D world-building and localization for robots. If you slap a Kinect on a robot, can you use the depth + camera to figure out where you are, construct a 3D world, and colorize it with the cameras? The answer is of course yes, but it remains an open question how to best go about this. My guess is there will be a bunch of papers on this at the next robotics conferences such as ICRA or IROS. Personally, I think it would be really cool to be able to strap a Kinect on your head, run around indoors, build a map of your workplace, and then import it into Quake or another game so you can around killing people in your own custom map.

However, my real official research is with vision based control of a micromanipulator for surgery. So I do a lot of work with 3D reconstruction from stereo surgical microscopes. It would super amazing if the Kinect could be attached to the microscope and used to build a full 3D representation what the surgeon sees. On the OpenKinect driver forums, there were some musings that it might be possible, so I decided to investigate.

The first thing I tried was using the Kinect under a lab bench magnifying glass, and it worked quite well. Interestingly enough, increased magnification made things look farther away, so you could get objects closer to the Kinect and get 3D observations. This makes sense if you think about a magnifying glass as narrowing the spread of the IR projection. Another interesting point is that you do need both the IR projector and IR camera using the same magnification. This means you would need a  stereo microscope. Luckily, our microscope is a surgical grade one with stereo. As a crude test, I positioned the IR projector and IR camera across the eyepieces of our Zeiss OPMI 1 microscope to see if I could get depth by looking down the microscope. Unfortunately, nothing showed up on the depth image so something wasn’t right.

Using the night-vision mode on a Sony HandyCam, I was able to verify that the IR projection was showing up as a bright blurry dot on the target. My guess was that the focus was wrong, so I pulled up the ROS version of the libfreenect library where they had added the ability to get the raw IR camera data. Using the video feed from the IR camera, I was hoping I would be able to focus the dot pattern and get some depth information. Unfortunately, libfreenect on Linux had some issues where it detected bloom and reset the IR projection, which was super annoying. So after some hours of fighting with Linux vs. Windows USB driver code, I was able to port the ROS changes to the OpenKinect Windows drivers so I could view the depth map and IR camera in realtime.

Again, just by positioning the Kinect on the eyepieces of the microscope, I was able to get some interesting results. First, the crude positioning is very crude and resulted in poor alignment of the IR projection. However, at low magnifications, I was able to get some reconstruction of my rubber square (about an 1″ x 1″ x 0.1″) glued to a floppy disk. Unfortunately, higher magnifications become increasingly problematic because as the magnification increases, the perceived depth also increases – beyond the range of the Kinect. At 25X magnification, the depth was splotched dark blue and black, which is the color reserved for the furthest away depths and too far away (or no match). Another problem is illumination as specular reflections become very pronounced under a microscope. Anybody who has worked with wet or metallic items under high magnification and strong illumination can tell you that a specular reflection can completely swamp the scope. As you increase magnification, this becomes quite problematic. Because of these two problems, I was unable to get any good depth information from the highest magnification.

So what can we draw from this? For low magnifications, it seems possible to use the Kinect under a stereo microscope, although not great due to crude positioning. Higher magnifications are more problematic because of specular reflections blooming out the IR camera and the fact that higher magnification increases the perceived depth. Hopefully there are some ways around this. Perhaps some fancy positioning and/or filters might be able to reduce the specular reflections – however, I feel that would be very tricky. The depth problem is more difficult; in this case, it seems that perhaps hardware changes may be required or fancier optics. Hopefully somebody cleverer than myself is working on the problem and will come up with an awesome solution.

1) Single precision floating point math

Matlab by default uses double precision floating point math, so one quick and dirty solution is to convert everything to singles before calling GPSR. This gives a speed up of roughly 50%, which is fairly effective with a very negligible drop in accuracy (<0.5%) because of the lower precision.

2) Batch processing with matrices

The way I use GPSR is to find the sparse representation of one test face from a set of training faces. It is not unusual to have tens of thousands of training images, each with a size of 100-300 after PCA dimensionality reduction. Say we have 25,000 training images each with dimensionality of 100. Using GPSR, the bottleneck in finding the sparse representation of a test image involves multiplying a 25,000×100 matrix by a 100 vector many times until some convergence (I am of course leaving out some other things that happen for simplicities’ sake). By matrix multiplication properties, we can process multiple test images in batch by concatenating their vectors into a 100xN matrix. Although accomplishing the same thing, this single matrix multiply has the advantage of a single BLAS call where things can remain in L1 and L2 cache longer, giving us a much higher speedup. The problem here is some test images converge faster than others, but we can get around this by dynamically inserting and removing test image vectors into our concatenated “test images” matrix as needed. This yields about a 5X improvement with a batch size of 256, bringing us to about a 10X improvement over the original GPSR – for this particular application, of course.

3) GPU acceleration

A final step to optimizing the GPSR algorithm is to move to specialized hardware, such as graphic cards via a CUDA interface. Luckily, nVidia provides a CUDA implementation of BLAS called cuBLAS. How much speed ups could would we be likely to attain using this? Since matrix multiplication is still roughly 50% of my optimized GPSR algorithm, I took a look at matrix multiplication on various architectures.

I conducted two test configurations with some simplifying assumptions. First, I assumed all matrix sizes are multiples of 16 because it seems cuBLAS seems to prefer this memory configuration. So I assume our training matrix A is 24,000×96 and test images are 96×1. I consider both without batching and with batches of test images with various sizes: 16, 128, and 256. Thus, I vary the test images matrix b from sizes ranging from 96×1 to 96×256.

All tests are averaged over 10-100 matrix multiplications with single precision matrices. I tested 4 CPU configurations and 2 GPU configurations:

• AMD X4 620 1Core ($100): Low-end 2.6 GHz Athlon quadcore system without L3 cache with only 1 core used
• AMD X4 620 2Core ($100): Low-end 2.6 GHz Athlon quadcore system without L3 cache with all 4 cores used
• Intel E5520 1 Core ($375): High-end 2.26 Xeon quadcore system with only 1 core used
• Intel E5520 2 Core($750): Two high-end 2.26 Xeon quadcores with all 8 cores used
• nVidia 9400 GT ($40): Low-end GPU with only 16 CUDA cores
• nVidia 260 GTX ($200): Middle-end GPU with 216 CUDA cores

NOTE: CPU configurations used MATLAB, which in turn usually uses CPU-optimized BLAS libraries like MKL on Intel or ACML on AMD. For a quick comparison, I benchmarked the the fast GotoBLAS against Matlab with the MKL and found GotoBLAS only 2% faster. Since this performance increase is fairly negligible, I didn’t pursue testing different BLAS packages.

NOTE: Memory transfer is not included in these comparisons because I can leave the large A matrix on the GPU unmodified as I process thousands of test images. Thus my problem is floating-point bound rather than memory bound.

I also consider the same scenario except the image size is 256 instead of 96 (so more PCA dimensions).

The CPU results are not terribly surprising. More expensive CPUs outperform less expensive CPUs, but the performance gains for more expensive CPUs are not proportional to the extra cost (i.e. 4X increase in CPU cost doesn’t give you anywhere close to a 4X performance boost). Throwing more cores at the problem helps, but again the scaling is nowhere near perfect. An extra 4 cores gives you ~2X boost and 8 cores gives you ~3X boost in performance. Larger matrices see better scaling. The interesting part is the GPUs. A $40 nVidia GPU is better than the $100 AMD CPU using all 4 cores, and performs about equivalently if you factor in the memory transfer to the GPU.

In fact, the $40 GPU is only beat by my $750 dual Intel CPUs with 8 cores, which is kind of astonishing. And the middle-end $200 nVidia GPU outperforms everything by a wide margin, averaging 5-30X better. However, at these high processing speeds, data transfer becomes the overhead. Thus, the Intel 8 Core still beats the nVidia 260 GTX if we factor in memory transfer of the large A matrix for every multiplication. However, I only have to transfer the large A matrix of ~25,000 training images to the GPU once. Thus for my application, it could still be tremendously faster to use the GPU.

Although it doesn’t show well on this graph, using matrix multiplication for b=96×1 is actually 1.5X slower than b=96×16 , leading me to believe that GPUs do have some interesting side-effects when it comes to matrix sizes, block optimizations, etc. It is good to know these intricacies because you could get significant speedups just by zero-padding matrices so the dimensions are divisible by 16.

I haven’t actually coded up the GPSR algorithm in CUDA simply because my existing 10X speedups seem to be working pretty well so far. And if I run GPSR on multiple datasets simultaneously, one on each core, I should be able to get much better parallelism than distributing each matrix multiplication over many cores. However, it is interesting to know that a $40 graphics card and some CUDA programming could outperform a brand new quad-core machine.

Compiler did not align stack variables. Libavcodec has been miscompiled and may be very slow or crash. This is not a bug in libavcodec, but in the compiler. You may try recompiling using gcc >= 4.2. Do not report crashes to FFmpeg developers.

Yeah nice. Plus, OpenCV’s video support via ffmpeg doesn’t support 64-bit programs. I messed around with recompiling with different options and doing some quick web-searching, but didn’t find any easy solutions. So what to do? Well I could go directly to Microsoft’s solution of DirectShow via DirectX but that requires an insane amount of setup and often times the DirectX SDK doesn’t even compile cleanly with the latest versions of Visual Studio. I remembered I had solved this problem years ago in my time at Robotics Lab @ UCF by compiling all the DirectX stuff into a DLL so you could just include the header file and go. So I dug that up and compiled it just fine, but then it crashed because it was compiled with Visual C++ 2005 runtime DLLs. And of course you can’t mix & match. I wasn’t about to recompile from source because that meant setting up DirectX SDK.

So I had heard good things about ffmpeg and/or gstreamer as being generic video libraries with lots and lots of codes available. But unfortunately, ffmpeg developers are a big slobby about Visual C++ (with good reason since it’s not standards complaint), but it’s a super pain. So after a long arduous journey of like 5 hours, I finally arrived at using gstreamer’s Windows SDK to compile an ffmpeg sample that loaded a video and wrote out the first 5 frames to disk as ppms.

I’m thinking of creating a generic video server over sockets or shared memory so I never have to compile in the video  reading/writing stuff every again (at least until the binaries break). I don’t know, is there a good Windows Video Library that I’m missing?

// Process all but the last element in the queue

for (int i =  0; i < queue.size()-1; i++)

All we want to do here is process all the items in a queue except the last one. And since we’ve declared our counter as int, everything should be fine, right? If there is nothing in the array, queue.size()-1 will be 0-1 which evaluates to -1 and will not satisfiy the loop condition.

However, this crashes. Why? Because I discovered queue.size() returns an unsigned int. And of course with unsigned int, only positive numbers are represented so when you do 0-1, the result will not be -1 but 4294967295. Brilliant, now my loop will execute 4 billion times when the queue is empty. Ahhh! Why would people code like this? If you need more than 2 billion items (the max size of a normal int), and use unsigned int instead, chances are the max size of 4 billion won’t be sufficient anyhow.

In conclusion, if I had to re-design C or C++, I would totally leave out unsigned int. Or at least re-define the underflow/overflow behavior so that 0-1 in unsigned int land will trigger an underflow and automatically reset the result to 0. Disabling the underflow/overflow behavior by default would also prevent your treasury from becoming -32768 gold if you gain too much money in Civilization II.

Anyhow, so I got to look at this girl’s profile which added to my creepiness factor (it doesn’t help that I professionally stalk people on Facebook).  I left my profile up without any proofreading or anything as a free member and just a few days ago I got notification that I had an email from a GIRL! Gasp! Of course, my first mental image was of a sad, lonely, older tween on the heavier side desperately searching for a soulmate, which is sad. My second mental image is of two of my more prankster inclined friends hunched over a computer, filling out a fake account as a “girl” and then contacting me through the site to have some fun with me. I guess that shows how cynical I am because only did my fourth or fifth mental image feature a normal girl. Anyhow I log on and see that I have to become a subscriber (i.e. pay money) to actually see the email.

Thus began the several day debate with myself whether to pay the money. 47 people had viewed my profile and if I know anything about statistics with online dating, it’s that a hit rate of 1 out 47 people seems a little too good to be true. Reading online horror stories about Nigerian match.com scams and creepy old men didn’t make me feel much better either. But in the end I decided I’d spent money on worse things so I signed up for a few months. Right after signing up it took me to a specials offer page with magazines such as Playboy, where I immediately performed an involuntary face-palm as a gut reaction to the “oh this is already so not panning out very well.” I also wanted to turn off auto-renew, which involved actually going all the way through the cancellation process, which is weird because it makes you think you are going to lose access when in reality it just cancels auto-renew.

OK, so time to read the email right? Nope! Being the geek that I am, I wanted to blog about the experience first! So that’s where I am now…now to Alt+Tab and see what I will find? Let me guess. Overweight desperate girl (40%) or prankster friends (30%) or people who recognize me on match.com (15%) or random dude who is inactive on the site (10%) or fake profile sent by employee to get me to pay (5%) or dream girl (<0.1%)? All part of the experience I suppose. Do I have a response for each one of these scenarios? Yup. Well actually not for the dream girl scenario. OK, now I’m just blogging to procrastinate actually reading the email. Bad Brian.

Alt + Tabbing….clicking 1 New Email….VIP Email? What nonsense is this! Just take me to the email already, I’ve just paid good money for what most likely will be nothing! Aww….19 years old? I’m leaning towards fake profile…clicking on profile…hmmm profile picture looking pretty young here, with the not quite classic, but (I imagine) common lying on my back in bed with arm thrown back pose. The grab-ya-attention blurb thingie (whatever it’s officially called) seems to align with my beliefs pretty well. That reduces the probability of a fake account at least. But it introduces a possibility I hadn’t thought of yet: the “much younger than me” girl. Usually people are complaining about the other way around. Ahh! Her age is 18? What happened to 19? I’m 24…what are girls thinking nowadays??? According to the US Center for Disease and Control, I have a life expectancy of another ~51 years and she has a life expectancy of ~62 years. Me being 6 years older now on average translates to me being dead for 10+ years of her life. I suppose that may be over-analyzing it too much….as one of my Canadian friends tells me, those are the worst years of your life anyhow. So I tell myself to keep reading….and oh man she’s a “I just graduated high school” kid. I’m going into my 8th year of college (4th as a PhD) and she’s going into her first year of undergrad?

[An hour later] Well that disturbed me enough to to have to go work off my anxiety, which resulted in some pacing around the apartment and trying to concentrate enough on playing some songs on my keyboard from my meager store of memory – it’s hard when my mind keeps doing math without my permission and telling me I’m a good 1/3 older than she is. Now that I’m completely traumatized and it’s 4 am in the morning, I’m going to go break open a box of mini-wheats, curl up in my bed, read a book and try to figure out how to respond to this girl, who seems quite nice otherwise. I suppose all in all, this is far from the worst I could have experienced and in fact I’m sure there are much worse things to come, but in the mean time, I will take refuge in geekiness and thoughts of creating a program that will crawl match.com and save a dataset that I can do interesting things with later. Maybe I’ll compile a list of the top 10 adjectives people use to describe themselves on dating sites.

Actually, the OkCupid founders, who are math majors, made a blog named OkTrends that analyzes all things dating and it is super amazing! For instance, they got half a million users to rate their self-confidence and then plotted it by state. They concluded with “Generally speaking, the colder it is, the more likely you are to hate yourself.” Swell! And I just lost another hour to reading all sorts of random statistics (men lie on their height by an average of 2 inches, really short men and really tall women are 3 times less likely to get messaged, you are more likely to get a reply if you begin your message with “howdy” instead of “hey”, and probably most surprising, men get the most messages if they are not smiling and not looking at the camera for their profile pictures). And now it’s 6 AM and I think it’s time to go bed because it’s getting light outside. So there you have it: a night in the life of Brian.

Still up for another sunrise, for unusual reasons though

So now we are ready to go for breakfast and move Brina’s whole life up three floors into here apartment, including her very heavy marimba instrument. Yay!

My system has dual Flea2 PointGrey cameras that can capture at 800×600 in YUV422 @ 30Hz, which was then converted to RGB on the PC. In order to increase bandwidth, I first swapped to Format7 Raw8 mode. The custom Format7 mode has a number of advantage:

• Bayer. You get the raw values from the CCD in Bayer format. This is a more compact (and native) representation than RGB or a YUV encoding, allowing for more data to pass over Firewire to the PC. Also, fast de-Bayering algorithms exist in popular software like OpenCV’s cvtColor or in GPU.
• ROIs. You can specify a custom region of interest so you don’t have to transfer the entire frame. This allows you to choose the ideal point in the “frame size vs. frame rate” curve. If you only need part of the frame, you can increase how fast images are being transferred to the PC.
• Event notifications. Technically also available in other modes as well, event notifications allow you to process partial frames as they arrive. Each image consists of individual packets that are transferred sequentially over Firewire and the driver will let you know when each packet arrives. Theoretically, if your image processing algorithm operates on the image sequentially, you can transfer and process in tandem. For instance, at full 1032×776 resolution, it takes a Flea2 ~33 ms from the first image packet to the last image packet. Traditionally you can’t start processing the image until the last packet has arrived and the full image is available. However, if you are say doing color blob tracking where you need to test each pixel to see if it is some predefined color such as red, you can start as soon as parts of the image arrive. After 10% of the image arrives, you can image process that part while the second 10% is being transferred from the camera. This can theoretically significantly reduce overall latency because image transfer and image processing are no longer mutually exclusive.

I tried using all these tricks to reduce latency, although I wasn’t able to get event notifications properly. At first, it seems like a great idea. I was able to get up to 128 notifications per image, which is amazing! If my algorithm runs realtime, that means I could reduce my processing overhead to the time taken to process less than 1% of the image. However it seems they have a number of limitations and peculiarities that may be due to my poor programming or setup.

To test latency, I used the color detection and blob tracker code I run to find colored paint marks on my tool tip and applied to a blinking LED problem. At a random time, I turn a green LED on and I wait until my color blob detector sees the LED – the time between these two events is, by definition, the latency between when something happens and the cameras see it happening. The result is show below. Total is the time between turning the LED on and detecting it. Process time is the image processing time. Wait time is the average time a frame spends while waiting for the previous image to process. And shutter time is the average time between the LED turning on and the shutter for the next image capturing the LED.

PATH=/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin:$PATH

export PATH

matlab

That worked as I got a nice Matlab splashscreen, but then it just crashed printing out a cryptic “Opening log file: /home/usr/java.lgo.11195″ message. That log file had the error “Could not reserve enough space for object heap”, which sounded suspiciously like not enough memory. Sure enough, only 384 MB of RAM were allocated to the VMWare virtual machine. Change that and reboot.

And of course by then, my local export PATH command was invalid so I added the following line to /etc/profile:

PATH=/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin:/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin/utils/mex;
^^^ DON'T DO THIS!!!

Reboot and I can’t even log in. Ctrl + Alt + F1 to get to command console and massive amounts of errors later I found out that bleck, I overwrote all the other PATH variables too. Now I have to /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/nano /etc/profile and change the line to include the old path as well.

PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin:/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin/utils/mex

export PATH

Whew, now matlab starts up and we can execute mex. Except now matlab keeps whining about “cannot write to preference file “matlab.prf” in “/home/user/.matlab/R2008b/. A quick google search says we need to execute

sudo chown user /home/user/.matlab/R2008b/matlab.prf

sudo chmod a+w /home/user/.matlab -R

That first one might be redundant, but there are several files matlab needs to edit and the first command only solves the first problem.

Running the make file resulted in “/usr/bin/ld: cannot find-lstdc++” which is interesting. Not entirely sure what was going on, I decided to do a sanity check and wrote a nice hello_world.cpp program and tried compiling it with g++ only to discover g++ wasn’t installed. Install g++, do another sudo ldconfig for good measure, and bam it all compiles nicely. However, running make from the feature directory whined about u_int32_t in item.hpp, so a quick “typedef unsigned int u_int32_t;” in item.hpp later, g++ is complaining about not being able to link to -lvl. Turns out their Makefile needed to be pointed to ./3rd-party/vlfeat/bin/glx and then things are happy.

Whew! Finally, we can run their example script: extract_bow.sh. Alas still no luck, all sorts of complaining going on. The first is “./vldsift: error while loading shared libraries: libvl.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory” Bleck! Adding the directory that libvl.so is in to /etc/ld.so.conf seemed to work and the demo program ran.

Sigh…Linux, why are you so crazy? Or maybe the better question is: you guys who programmed Linux, why are you so crazy?

The average thesis proposal (in the RI department in the last 3 years, roughly) has a length of 48 pages, with a 17-80 page range and an average of 94 references. The average thesis dissertation has 165 pages, with a 90-364 page range and 89 references. The confusing thing here is thesis proposals have more references than dissertations. I’m not sure how that works except maybe students over cite during the proposal stage to make it look like they did a good job at their background/related works sections.

Anyhow, I know roughly the structure of a thesis proposal/dissertation – now if only I had some idea what to actually put IN my thesis…

Actually, I am quite impressed with WordPress. Nearly everything I tried to do was super easy from the admin side. Upgrading, changing permalinks to clean urls, and installing templates could all be done inside the admin GUI without having to go dig through code. This is a welcome change from other wikis/cmses I’ve used before. I did have to modify some CSS and the template code a bit (remove nested pages from showing up as buttons on the top left side of the header bar), but it was all quite painless. Importing text from Word and my old webpages was surprisingly easy. So really within a day, I have most of the relevant stuff from my old webpage and am almost ready to go live with the new site with WordPress as the backend.

But the allure of the sexy new phones, especially the EVO with it’s touted tethering capabilities and 4G (which Pittsburgh is getting this year), is so scintillating! So I did some analysis. Below is a graph of my usage of the PPC-6700 data and voice usage over the past year. Data usage is for both tethering and smartphone usage; voice is only daytime minutes.

The amazing thing to note is that I’ve been averaging 4 GB a month of tethered internet with a peak of 6.5 GB. That pretty much rules out the iPhone for me. For the same $15 a month with AT&T, I can get a paltry 200 MB. Their highest data plan for $25 a month caps the data usage at 2GB, which would only cover two months of my past year – which incidentally coincides with my international traveling where I wasn’t using my phone for weeks at a time. So how about EVO? Sprint is still unlimited data, but I have to pay $70 (well technically $69.99, but let’s round stuff off here) for 450 minutes + unlimited data. To tether, it’s another $30. So $100 a month total. That’s a lot of money, more than double what I’m currently paying ($30 for 200 minutes call time + $15 for unlimited tethering). And what I do get? 250 minutes I don’t use anyhow, faster internet speeds, and a much nicer phone with a poorer battery life. The question I ask myself is: Can I justify $100 upgrade fee + 12*$50 = $600 = $700 a year extra on a new phone like the EVO? So far…the answer has been no.

A popular solution is to use computer vision: attach some cameras to the microscope, see what the surgeon is doing, figure out what her goals are, and then provide assistance. For instance, microinjections of veins smaller than a human hair are very useful procedures that are currently too difficult to perform reliably in the operating room.  Our tool reduces surgeon tremor and uses image analysis at high magnification to guide the needle into the vein, increasing the success rate of the procedure. Unfortunately, many of the useful algorithms are difficult to perform in real-time. Furthermore, different algorithms are often required in parallel: several methods might track the tip of the instrument, another builds 3D representations of the tissue surface, and still others run analysis to detect and diagnose blood leakages or diseased areas.

Currently, I run a number of algorithms and am forced to make compromises even with powerful quadcore machines. With modest stereo 800×600 resolution cameras that run at 30 Hz, 5 gigabytes of images need to be processed every minute. This increases to upwards of 40 GB/min with high speed or high-definition cameras. Trying to analyze the sheer number of pixels coming is much like the analogy of trying to drink from a fire hose. Simply encoding and saving the video in real-time for post-op review becomes challenging. Consequently, I run tracking algorithms at lower resolutions, sacrificing precision for speed. Diagnoses are performed pre-operatively or manually on demand during pauses in the procedure. 3D representations of the tissue are built initially and updated only infrequently. This affects the level of assistance the system provides to the surgeon.

In fact, significant amounts of my time go towards optimizing C++ or even assembly level code to maximize performance. Reducing L1 cache misses, utilizing branch predictions, and rewriting code to take advantage of SIMD instructions let me run more algorithms and provide better aid to the surgeon. Even with such optimizations, I am still hitting the limits of what four cores can do. However, a most encouraging aspect of computer vision is its often embarrassingly parallelizable nature.  With a 48 core machine, I could do a significantly better job. I would move to higher definition video for much greater precision, parallelize my tracking algorithms for enhanced speed, run advanced stereo algorithms for high quality 3D reconstructions, and thus more effectively provide the surgeon with aids that make the operating room a less scary place.

My first attempt was to make some Chi-Squared distance metric Matlab scripts run faster – a friend needed to run this over gigabytes of data, which was going to take months using his simple Matlab script. Months is bad so I sat down with him and we optimized the Matlab scripts, then moved to C with a mex interface, then delved into assembly language, and then into the SSE2 optimizations. In the end we had something that was an order of a magnitude faster, so it would only take several days to run. Of course, a few days later I found a guy at Google who had done the exact same thing. And oh look now that I’m trying to find a link to his website, I’ve found somebody else with the similar code with Matlab wrappers. Sigh…that was a wasted night and a half. Coulda gone to sleep at a decent hour instead of going home at 7 am after working all night.

And the story doesn’t end there! When running some of my algorithms, I was seeing rather slow JPEG decoding speeds so I went out searching for faster implementations. I found the libjpeg-SIMD version, but it was only 32-bit and since it was coded in assembly language, porting it to 64-bit would be non-trivial (I only use 64-bit for my research work so I can access more than 3 gb of RAM). I figured somebody must have done it somewhere on the Internet, but nope, the I couldn’t find anything. I even spent an extra day just researching this to prevent the same thing that happened with the Chi-Squared code from biting me once again. The closest I could find was some discussion on tightvnc-devel about attempting to port it to 64-bit, but it didn’t seem like anything came out of it (as Internet discussions have a tendency to do, the threads degenerated into open-source vs. Microsoft and cygwin vs. Mingw). So I spent a good 4-5 nights porting the key bits of libjpeg SIMD to 64-bit one frightful file at a time, as detailed in a previous blog post. And of course it turns out I again duplicated somebody else’s work. One of the developers of TightVNC posted a comment to my blog entry announcing the completion of the port informing me that they had indeed successfully ported libjeg SIMD to 64-bit a while back and it was in their SVN. Sigh…on one hand that’s really discouraging because well that is a good 25 or so hours I could have spent doing better things (like sleeping!), but on the other hand I did get a brush up on assembly language and especially some of the new 64-bit assembly language extensions.

So moral of the story is search hard and long so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

At first glance, porting the assembly code from 32-bit to 64-bit seems intimidating, but after a while you realize that there are many versions of the same thing. Each routine is coded in MMX, 3Dnow, regular SSE, SSE2. And all these options can be applied to the slow integer, fast integer, and floating-point algorithms so you get dozens of assembly language files that you really just don’t need. The fastest combination is SSE2 and fast integer math. We can remove everything else because almost all recent processors in the past 5 years or so support SSE2 (Intel Pentium 4 and Intel Pentium M and AMD Athlon 64 and up). The fast integer math algorithms might cause a small reduction in image quality, but it’s not very noticeable and you get a solid 3% improvement in speed.  Disabling everything but SSE2 fast integer algorithms leaves you only with 10 assembly language files to modify, which isn’t too bad.

Now don’t get me wrong, as you can see from my previous post, converting from 32-bit to 64-bit assembly is a giant pain. It took me several days, putting in hours each day to carefully convert and debug each one to  make sure it was at least working with my data. I finally got it all seemingly working 64-bit (it doesn’t crash when loading some images off Facebook or from my camera), which is quite a good feeling because to my knowledge nobody else has done that.

I even mexed my port in a 64-bit Matlab mex function named readjpegfast. Unfortunately, Matlab stores its images all weird so a lot of time is wasted just re-arranging the pixel data into a column-first, RGB plane-separated format. For small images roughly 640×480, I get an impressive ~2X improvement on loading 2000 images over imread (Intel Core2 Duo 2.4 GHz T8300 laptop):

>> tic, for i = 0:2000, img = imread(sprintf(‘%0.4d.jpg’, i)); end, toc
Elapsed time is 21.120399 seconds.
>> tic, for i = 0:2000, img = readjpegfast(sprintf(‘%0.4d.jpg’, i)); end, toc
Elapsed time is 9.714863 seconds.

Larger images unfortunately don’t fair so well just because I have to do this format conversion (it would be better if I modified the library to load images into memory using the Matlab format, but that’s way too much work. The 7 megapixel pictures from my camera only saw about a 1.25X improvement:

>> tic, for i = 0:35, img = imread(sprintf(‘big\\%0.4d.jpg’, i)); end, toc
Elapsed time is 13.393228 seconds.
>> tic, for i = 0:35, img = readjpegfast(sprintf(‘big\\%0.4d.jpg’, i)); end, toc
Elapsed time is 10.068488 seconds.

Oh well, since I plan to be mostly using this in C++ where the default data-format of libjpeg is perfect for my uses, this is still a huge win. Soon I hope to be releasing a package that includes my 64-bit port of libjpeg SIMD.

First rule of business, change BITS 32 to BITS 64. It seems obvious but when you have a bunch of *.asm files and you are doing them one by one, forgetting one can cause “error: impossible combination of address sizes” which will proceed to befuddle you for the next 10 minutes. Or not as it seems I’m the only one on Google has actually gotten this error.

I also found my first use for Wolfram Alpha: taking the modulus of 16-byte hex numbers to determine if they are 16-bit aligned. Yeah, I couldn’t even find a quick way to do that in Matlab, which is surprising. But then I realized I was being really braindead because it is really simple to see if a pointer address is 16-byte aligned: the last digit should be zero! Oops…I’m being silly again.

The errror “error LNK2017: ‘ADDR32′ relocation to ‘.rdata’ invalid without /LARGEADDRESSAWARE:NO” means you forgot to add “default rel” to the top of your assembly language file.

Apparently you also have to preserve some of the new registers across function calls. None of the NASM/YASM manuals or anything I read mentioned this! Code after I ran one of my functions was crashing and through turning off bits of the code, I was able to narrow it down to mov r12,ecx to store the first parameter. Of course then the thought struck me: maybe I need to preserve r12 so I finally had to Google “preserve r12 assembly.” I found some 64-bit sample assembly code from Mark William’s blog which had some comments about preserving r12-r15 and that seemed to fix the problem.

So I decided to read the series, which I did over Christmas break. There are four books in the series , all with catchy titles: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. I was impressed that the title of each book is actually the theme – that’s some planning right there. So what’s the hype? I absolutely see what the appeal is to a teenage (or older) girl. Stephanie Meyer has done an outstanding job of delving deep into the female psyche and ripping out deep-seated fantasies. Let’s look closer.

Imagine you are Bella, a high-school girl who is repeatedly described as slightly odd and average looking, extremely clumsy, lacking interpersonal skills (especially with boys), overly given to depression, and incredibly self-depricating. Introduce Edward, an immortal being described as angelic, god-like, the image of Adonis and Michealangelo’s David – basically the most beautiful (and sparkly!) guy you can imagine. He worships the ground in a 100 mile radius of you: the only more important thing to him than your happiness is your safety because you are his life, his only reason for living. This is good because your blood is the most delicious-smelling thing he has ever encountered, and can he barely prevent himself from killing you and sucking your blood. If you were to die, he would commit suicide because you are the fire in his life – his meteor of brilliancy and beauty. He wishes he could dream of you (remember he’s immortal so no sleep needed) so much he devotes all his nights to watching you sleep and singing you lullabies. Add in a not-really-but-almost immortal described as a hulk of a guy who is your best friend, somebody who adores you. Just seeing him smile makes your whole day and you can confide in him. Both these gorgeous immortals unequivocally love you for who you are – the clumsy, painfully pale average girl. They have utter devotion, even when you have wronged them. They are the ultimate protectors, willing to lay down their lives for you. It is the star-crossed love story embedded deep in so many girl’s dreams. It works even on a non-teenage girl fantasy. People enjoy it when you can compare yourself favorably to such unremarkable main characters – it gives you hope. It is the classic underdog strategy. If such a sorry lass such as Bella can have such a great love story, then I feel better about my chances.

Even as a 20-something guy reading Twilight, I felt a connection with the story, perhaps from the other side. Of course, that is not to say I didn’t feel annoyance with the story at times. It drags at times and focuses too much on Bella’s own insecurities and problems, but again this is something that makes the underdog strategy work so well – sometimes Bella is so imperceiving and acts so silly that it’s charming. There are somewhat creepy aspects to the relationships: Edward watching her sleep at night, Bella’s almost-suicidal actions during her depression, the cloying attitudes that make you roll your eyes, the lies they tell each other, etc. I’m not sure if these are more related to the first two books or if I just started to become desensitized and tune them out in the later books, but it seemed to reduce as the series progressed.

One of the little random things about the book that really struck a chord with me was the scene where Edward sits down at a piano and begins a “composition so complex, so so luxuriant, it was impossible to believe only one set of hands played.” The melody of this song reveals itself as a lullaby and features throughout the series, sometimes hummed by Edward to sooth Bella to sleep or to symbolize the love between them. I find it really sweet. There are many versions of this song (Amazon.com MP3 lists over a 100 songs if you search for Bella’s Lullaby), many vying to get into the movie or adaptions of the one selected for the movie. My favorite is officially named The River Flows in You by Yiruma (well-done youtube video).

On a more technical note, Stephanie Meyer’s writing is fairly good. It does read more on a teen novel level, which is not a bad thing. What I was not expecting was there to be significant plot lines other than the love story but there were. In fact, I found the series to be a quite exciting fantasy/action exploration as the main character moved deeper into the supernatural. The world building was actually not bad – we get to find out vampires have special powers (you learn early on that Edward can read people’s minds – except Bella’s, which enthralls him even more). The exploration, interaction, and usage of vampire powers was very interesting and well done. It was handled much more adeptly than in Harry Potter where special powers were thrown in haphazardly as needed. There were parts of the story that were very page-turning as well. Stephanie does do suspense quite well and does not usually take the easy or expected way out of situations. You know those stories where you think “oh good grief, don’t let it turn out like so and so” because it is the blindingly obvious or cop-out solution? Stephanie does a fairly good job of avoiding most of these traps, which was a pleasant surprise because I was not expecting that level of sophistication from this genre.

Overall, I think I would recommend the books as being above average. It wasn’t “read the books all in one night” good, but if one can enjoy or at least tolerate the love story, there is enough suspense and action in the rest of the series that makes it worthwhile reading.

JPEG Decoders

In my case, I want the fastest JPEG decoder that could take a JPEG image in memory and decompress it into a RGB pixel array. I didn’t find much in the way of JPEG decoder benchmarks so I decided to evaluate some of the more promising ones I found. Here is the roundup:

• Mini JPEG Decoder: A simple C++ port of NanoJPEG that is one single file header and very easy to use.
• STBI JPEG Decompression: Another simple one C file JPEG decompression algorithm.
• Libjpeg: Probably the gold standard for JPEG encoding/decoding, but developed quite a while ago (1997) and not entirely trival to use. Libjpeg has the additional annoyance that the original source code doesn’t support decoding from memory, so I used the TerraLib wrapper class and their libjpeg extension that adds support reading/writing JPEGs directly to and from a buffer in memory.
• Matlab (commercial): While not a JPEG decoder, it does contain one and is a widely-used package for researchers, so it is useful to compare against.
• Intel IPP (commercial): Perhaps one of the most well known “optimized” libraries for the Intel platforms. It contains a UIC JPEG decoder that is highly optimized for most varieties of Intel CPUs (it has separate code that is specifically optimized for each type of Intel CPU).
• Libjpeg SIMD (page in Japanese): A port of the popular libjpeg to use modern SSE processor instructions by optimizing the core routines in assembly language. The interface is supposed to be compatible with libjpeg. Currently only in 32-bit. I used the same TerraLib libraries for using memory buffers with libjpeg as before.

Comparison of JPEG Decoding Speeds

To compare these 6 JPEG decoders, I devised an experiment: Load ~2,000 small images (each image was ~50 KB in size for ~100 MB of compressed JPEG data) and decode them. The compression was 102 MB compressed expanded out to 1526 MB uncompressed, or a ratio of 6.7%. That’s pretty good compression there. The whole 100 MB was loaded into memory to avoid harddrive slowdowns (4 GB RAM with no paging file) and each algorithm was run 3 or more times to get an average. The JPEG data was directly decoded from memory except in the case of Matlab, where the JPEG files were read off a virtual harddrive backed by memory using ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. So all results should very comparable. Below is a graph detailing the decompression speeds in MB/s on my Intel 2.4 GHz Core2 Duo laptop. I compiled everything with Visual Studio 2008 Professional with all optimizations on, including SSE2 instructions in hopes that the compiler could optimize the plain C or C++ code.

The results actually surprised me in some ways. Being focused on simplicity, STBI and NanoJPEG’s poor performance was to be expected. Also, Matlab does try to make the core routines fairly fast. However, I know Matlab uses the Intel MKL math libraries, so it surprised me that Matlab wasn’t using the Intel IPP libraries for faster JPEG decompression. Of course, I was using Matlab 2008 so perhaps newer versions have added this feature. What surprised me the most was that the libjpeg SIMD outperformed the Intel IPP. Intel has put a lot of effort into providing libraries that squeeze the most out of their processors, so it was a definite shock to see them outperformed. The results were fairly encouraging overall, especially with libjpeg SIMD performing over 3X faster than Matlab and over 4X better than the gold standard libjpeg. It is unfortunate it is only 32-bit.

Speeding Up JPEG Decompression on Multi-Core Systems

Given that the top performer’s speed in JPEG decoding is still ~2-5 X slower than what current harddrives can pump out, it makes sense on multi-core/processor systems to use multiple threads to parallelize the decoding. To test how each algorithm scales with multiple threads, I tried the same test except splitting the ~2,000 images over 1, 2, or 4 threads for decoding. I tested on a 2 core system, so realistically I should not see any improvement with the 4 thread decoding. Matlab and the Intel IPP both had built-in options to use multiple cores when performing operations so I used these options instead of splitting the files off into different threads. The results of these tests are shown below

The results in general make sense: 2 threads is roughly twice as good as using 1 thread, but using 4 threads doesn’t help and in some cases hurts performance. The two big trend-breakers were Matlab and the Intel IPP. It seems Matlab has not added any multi-threading capabilities to its JPEG decoding routines since the performance difference was negligible. However, the Intel IPP performance gets worse the more threads you add! This doesn’t make sense at all, unless you take a look under the hood. While I am splitting my 2,000 files over multiple threads (say 1,000 images for Thread 1 to decode and 1,000 for Thread 2) for the rest of the algorithms, the Intel IPP package is trying to use multiple threads to decode each image (so part of one image gets decoded by Thread 1 and the other part by Thread 2). This works well if you need to load big images, but for small images, the overhead of creating and destroying threads for each image is so much that it not only counteracts the gains but causes worse performance as additional threads are used. While I didn’t test running the Intel IPP in the same manner I did the rest of the algorithms, I suspect the results would improve: 2 threads would nearly double performance, and moving from 2 to 4 threads would have very little effect at all.

Effects of JPEG Compression Level and Image Resolution

Finally, I was curious about how the JPEG compression level (usually specified 1-100%) and the image resolution effected the decompression speed. This is important if you are looking at the storage vs. decompression speed trade off. Let’s say you have 800 MB of uncompressed images (BMP, PPM, RAW, etc) and want to save them for maximum decompression speed later. What compression is best? What size should you store them at? To analyze this, I took typical large images from my 7 megapixel camera and the smaller, web-sized images at 1/4 megapixels and compared the decompression speed as I varied the JPEG compression level. NOTE: I have changed how I measure decompression speed here from MB/s compressed JPEG to MB/s uncompressed JPEG. In another words, I am measuring how fast I can decode the 800 MB since the compressed JPEGs change size as I change the compression ratio. For these experiments, I only used the best performing JPEG decoder, libjpeg SIMD.

At first, the results caught me off guard. I was expecting lower compression percentages to take longer to decode as more work was being done for the compression. However, I suppose when you think about it, the best possible compression would be to reduce each image into one pixel with the average RGB – and to decompress that you just fill all the pixels in the image with your average RGB which would be really fast. So higher compression percentages don’t really gain you any speed increases, which is interesting. Also, it is interesting to see that the larger images decode much faster than smaller images, which is probably due to caching of images and reduction of setting up the JPEG decoder for each image (reading headers, allocating/deallocating, etc, etc).

Conclusion

From these results, we can conclude that libraries optimized for modern processors are several times faster than their simple C/C++ counterparts. Also, JPEG decoding generally scales pretty well with the number of threads as long as each image is independent of the other. Trying to use multiple threads to decode a single image is counterproductive for small JPEG images, and only somewhat useful for larger images (I tested the Intel IPP with the 7-megapixel images and found that 2 threads is only ~1.3X faster than using 1 thread compared to ~1.7 faster for using threads on separate images. When choosing a compression setting, lower is better for both conserving storage space and compression speed). Also, decompressing smaller pictures is noticeably slower than decompressing larger pictures.

So, let’s talk about the take home message. What is the best JPEG decoder for you? It depends on your needs:

• Simple, easy, leisurely decompression: NanoJPEG or STBI. I find NanoJPEG easier, just include one *.h file and you are done. It’s got a nice little class and everything.
• Fastest possible decoding of large images: Intel IPP is your friend because you can use multiple threads per image.
• Fast decoding of images, only need 32-bit: libjpeg SIMD is really amazing, but it currently is only 32-bit and takes some work to compile (the website does have precompiled binaries that I haven’t tried). For instructions on compilation, check out the post by sfranzyshen (the exact instructions are a bit down on the page, search for SIMD).
• Fairly fast, stable, 64-bit decoding: libjpeg is the gold standard and is fairly good for what it does.

So there you have it, a brief analysis of JPEG decoding. Go out and enjoy some JPEG decompression goodness!

Regardless of how many times I got lost (once! OK? No need to insult me!), I arrived the night before Thanksgiving. My grandparents have a Christmas tree farm and late every fall they cut, haul, bail, and load Christmas trees – some wholesale, some for their retail customers in Florida where my Uncle lives, and some for the Choose & Cut customers. Often the Choose & Cut customers are families who want to come up and have a good time looking around for a tree, have us cut and load it for them, and then go home with a frees tree they selected themselves. It is really quite nice to see families having fun with this – some spend hours analyzing what seems like every one of the thousands of trees to find the perfect one. However, this means the whole family works over Thanksgiving and the weekend. Which means I spend all day outside in freezing weather trying to process 6-14 foot Christmas trees. The first day it snowed on us while we were trying to bail 50 or so trees. My shoes got soaked, my jeans got soaked, everything. It was quite miserable, and worst of all it started snowing just as the sun was going down and the wind was picking up. By the next day the temperature had dropped to 15 F with winds 15-20 mph gusting up to 50 mph. It was quite bitter. But luckily my grandmother and mom were making cookies and hot apple cider for the customers who came so we could go to the barn to warm up and get some warm snacks. Fortunately, Sat and Sun warmed up significantly to 45 F or so without much wind, so I was able to work without being miserable. All and all, I think I helped cut, haul, bail, and load a few hundred trees. Wow, I’m tired just thinking back on it. We would always dread the monster ones – or sequoias as we called them – that were 12+ feet tall and weighed…well I’m not even sure other to say I couldn’t lift it myself. Which I’m embarrassed to say isn’t really saying all that much because I’m a skinny nerd. Suffice to say, I was very sore and tired and amazingly enough went to bed before midnight almost all the nights.

But it was a good time and I made some money out of it. It’s always good to help out the family biz – and I got some great meals out of it too.

Dear X,

Last week, “Luke Ravenstahl hosted the Graduate Pittsburgh Summit to increase public awareness of the dropout and college/life readiness crisis in Pittsburgh” (source: Mayor Ravenstahl’s website). How is taxing students going to alleviate this crisis and increase the graduation rate?  According to “Pittsburgh’s Dropouts: A Look at the Numbers” (source: Mayor Ravenstahl’s website), the Mayor’s Office sponsored a survey asking high-schoolers “What would keep you interested in graduating from high school?” and the highest response at 79% was “Money for College.” So further taxes on students are going to encourage them to stay in school?

As a PhD student of the Robotics Institute at CMU, I urge you to reconsider your support for the tuition tax.  I do not pay tuition as a funded graduate student. Instead I get a small stipend from the school and my advisor’s grant money covers what tuition the school charges for classes, resources, etc. Essentially, my relationship with CMU is that of a very low paying job to advance medical robotics research. I could be earning significantly more in industry yet believe that the valuable research I am doing and will be enabled to do in the future is worth a currently much leaner lifestyle than friends I know who did not pursue graduate degrees. Charging me a tax on an amount I do not currently pay is a large burden, one I feel is unwarranted.

Furthermore Pittsburgh has earned such a great reputation for promoting academic progress, and I feel this step towards taxing students is counter-productive and will lead to a lessening of Pittsburgh’s attractiveness to brilliant new students evaluating where they want to study.  Let’s be honest here, Pittsburgh is not all that an attractive of a place to the outside world compared to other basins of higher-learning such as San-Francisco, Boston, etc. Let’s not make it any less attractive by adding student taxes. While an extra $400 a year might not seem significant, it is. Many graduate students I know are funding their education through loans, some of them internationally with large interest rates.

In conclusion, I feel that students are unfairly being targeted to carry the cost of the budget deficit and charging $16 million to a population that is already making sacrifices in time and money to better not only themselves individually but society as a whole simply seems unprofessional.

Sincerely,
Brian C. Becker

One of the most annoying things was the format of this paper. They required Word and not just that, but they insisted on Word 1997 format with figures in TIFF and tables on separate pages. Annoying to say the least. Unfortunately for me, I had written the paper in Word 2007 with the new fancy equation editor they introduced. Saving the document in the old format converted all my beautiful equations into terribly rendered picture representations of my equations. It made me want to cry. I had exactly 100 equations in my paper (and no I didn’t aim for that number) so I didn’t want to retype them. So I resorted to some VBA trickery. First I increased the font of the Word 2007 document by 5-10X. Then I saved to the old format and my giant font equations got saved as giant graphics. Then I wrote a VBA script to go through the document and resize all my equation graphics to get high DPI equations. This approach met with limited success. I was successful, but the side effects were terrible. First, the vertical alignment was way off so I had to wind up cropping the graphics to pad the bottom of the equation so that it aligned with the rest of the sentence. I was all happy that this worked until I realized that this totally messed up the print to PDF function. Cropping the equations even in the slightest caused all the equations to come out with black backgrounds. Gar! Foiled! Finally, I decided I’d re-write them all by hand in the old version of MathType so they would be compatible with the old Word format. But to my surprise, I discovered the new MathType library has a function to automatically convert Word 2007 Equations to old Equation 3.0 style equations. Viola! It worked quite well although it made a few mistakes and mangled some of my paragraph formatting. But it was way better to watch it work for several minutes scrolling through my document and converting the equations by hand!

int i = 10;  printf(“%d %d %d\n”, i++, i++, ++i);

First off, this is a dumb question to ask a student who is about to graduate with a PhD in robotics. Second, this is utterly retarded code that should be avoided. Third, this question really would only apply to a compiler developer or say if you were interested in seeing how well somebody knows language specifications. Regardless of what this question was supposed to be testing, it is an interesting piece of code. For instance, a first guess might be 10, 11, 13. However, I know the C calling convention specifies arguments are passed in reverse order on the stack. So my guess on the output of this code would be: 11, 11, 13. The acid test however is to run this code. Let’s compile a test program and see what we get:

gcc on Ubuntu: 12, 11, 13

What? This answer doesn’t match up to either guess and makes no sense. Let’s try it on Visual Studio 2005:

VC++ 2005: 12, 11, 13

Well at least the result is consistent if not terribly intuitive. However, just for kicks let’s try release mode:

VC++ 2005 Release: 11, 11, 11

Whoa! What’s going on here? This answer makes even less sense! Not only is this totally unexpected, but we have just lost consistency between the same compiler. This is very very bad. Code should NOT run this differently between debug/release modes.  For a complete roundup, let’s try some other compilers:

VC++ 6.0 Debug: 11, 11, 13

VC++ 6.0 Release: 11, 11, 11

gcc on cygwin: 12, 11, 11

Wow, so this is faith shattering. The same piece of code runs totally differently depending on compiler/configuration. What is going on here? Doing some sluething on Google, it turns out the root of the problem is the C/C++ standard leaves the evaluation order of arguments passed to functions unspecified. Also, we are mixing reading and writing variables in the same expression (the ++ operator does both read/write). Again the result is undefined. However, not ONE of the compilers warns about this! In fact, let’s enable all warnings on gcc (-Wall). I now get “warning: no newline at the end of file.” Great! gcc warns about meaningless issues while totally ignoring completely unspecified behavior. So helpful!

Now it might seem this whole thing is academic. After all, who would ever write code as silly as that printf statement? Actually it’s not quite as far fetched as you might think. Let’s take a hypothetical example of saving and updating some records where both functions update and save return an integer error code indicating success/failure:

printf(“Updating records: %d\n; Saving records: %d\n”, records.update(data), records.save());

Oops, which one gets executed first? Did you save the record before or after updating it? Major oops. Moral of the story: knowing language specifications can help you avoid very subtle bugs that not even the compiler will warn you about. Also you can make a fool out of your interviewer by proving more knowledgeable than him when he asks dumb questions (this probably won’t get you hired though).

Some good references on the subject:

• http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#evaluation-order
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/621542/compilers-and-argument-order-of-evaluation-in-c
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/598148/is-it-legal-to-use-the-increment-operator-in-a-c-function-call

I am also working with the new visiting Spainish student in my lab on Kalman Filters and developing a model of Micron. The results so far are looking promising with a very basic Kalman filter with an identity A matrix and no inputs. It is able to filter stationary noise by several factors to an RMSE of 1-2 micros. Not bad, but then again we are using the Kalman filter under the most idealistic scenario. It will be interesting to see what happens when we add in a model of hand movements and the kinematics of the system. On an unrelated note, I spent some time working with Uma to get his new computer which uses PCI instead of ISA to work in the realtime operating system QNX. He is trying to interface with various electronics such as DACs mounted to PCI expansion cards. That still needs more work as we keep getting weird errors where functions compile and link just fine but then spit out “Error not implemented” when you run them. Oddnesses abound.

Simple Kalman Filtering

On a more personal note, I saw Surrogates today. I had been excited about it for a while, but recent reviews have not been kind so I went in with low expectations. I found it quite enjoyable, if predictable at times. It makes one think about life and the lies we use to reassure ourselves. But the best part was it featured Takeo Kanade, the professor at CMU/Robotics Instititue that is largely responsible for the field of robotics. Way to go Takeo! With Randy Pausch in Star Trek and now Takeo Kanade in Surrogates, perhaps being featured in a major Hollywood film is closer to me than I think

Well! A new year already. This break I was working on organizing my media collection. I’ve been playing around with minishowcase, which is a very nice little AJAX web gallery. I was looking for something pretty much like Picasa, and this is the closest I’ve found. Light, easy to install, well coded, it is quite nice. I’ve always thought gallery2 and coppermine were utterly useless when it comes to gallery managment. minishowcase doesn’t have all the admin features, but the UI is sweet! Just throw all your photos in a folder and bam, you have a nice interface to select galleries, and move between photos (with keyboard, just hit right/left arrow keys) without reloading the page (I’m looking at YOU Flickr! Grrr….). I also tried out ampache, which seems pretty nice as well. I think I’ll upload my photo and music collections to this website (after all I do have like 150GB)…

Well I had a good time in Amsterdam for the FG2008 conference and then in Barcelona and Rome a few days afterwards. The conference was useful and the time off was fun. But I have gotten behind in research and coursework unfortunately. For some reason I’ve found it hard to get back into the swing of things. I really need to crack down and get a lot of stuff done. On a related note, I’ve thrown up my Face Recognition Evaluator, which is a MATLAB package for comparing face recognition algorithms.

Wet, cold, stressed, sick, and exhausted would best desribe me today. 3 days until ICRA paper submission and my advisor has totally changed how the underlying algorithm should work. I have no idea how I’m going to get it coded, tested, and written about in 3 days. On the upside, Enrique is creating the PowerPoint presentation for FG2008 and I uploaded my Facebook Downloader program for getting face recognition data. This allows you to collect data from Facebook for research and academic purposes in the field of face recognition.

Well, I survived my first real graduate conference in Vancouver, Canada. It was pretty fun, although I did hit a new low – I actually fell asleep during a presentation! At least I still have my record of never falling asleep during class…we’ll see how long that lasts. My advisor and I took one of the more uninteresting days off, rented some bikes, and toured the town. I didn’t find out until a little bit into this that he routinely bikes 15 miles in hilly Pittsburgh. And I hadn’t been on a bike in 2 years…a recipe for disaster. If he didn’t think I was a wimp before hand, I’ve definitely cemented the impression. It was touch and go for a while as I wasn’t sure I’d actually make it. Thankfully he made frequent stops on my behalf, otherwise I wouldn’t have survived. But it was fun, we biked about 25 miles all told that day and got to see a lot of the area.

I went to go install filethingie on my new webserver after like a year (I figured it was time) and to my surprise there was a new version out! It is awesome! All nice and AJAX, with background saves for editing files. I’ve decided to use it for this site for now. I hacked it a bit so that it can build my site with txt2tags and the default operation is edit instead of view, but otherwise it’s quite nice. Well I have two weeks until the ICRA paper deadline so I better get cracking. Last week I had two nights where I only got an hour of sleep, looks like that might be a continuing trend. Sigh….

Well it’s been half a year since I last posted news and over a year since I last really changed up the website. Thus, it was time to redo the website. I ripped off a template design from Steve’s Template that I sorta liked and then modified it to suite my needs. The new theme looks a bit dated, but it is a bit cleaner and definitely more logically laid out. While I was at it, I re-wrote the PHP code that generates my website for me. The old code was terrible, literally. The new code is much cleaner and better organized. However, it is still a bit kludgy. I have a new tag-line for the website: “Arcane Robotic Incantations.” I’m not sure if I like it all that much but it’s better than my old “Escapades in Arcane Programming.” I have a hunch it is too esoteric; maybe “We’s gots robots” would be better. In any case, there is still a lot to do on the website and once again it probably won’t get done. But one can hope, right?

I’m always surpised at the long lengths of time I neglect this site (unfortunately). One day I’ll either dedicate more time or admit defeat and give up. Or just have it automatically redict to a Rick-Roll video. Speaking of which, my KDC class (Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control) team rick rolled our professor this semster. He didn’t get it, but the class laughed. Our prof thought we were going to get up and sing-a-long to this weird guy singing “I’m never gonna let you go”. In other news, CMU is definitely putting me through my paces. The KDC course is really time consuming as our assignments are to simulate a 2D walking 5-link biped. It is really intense, but at the end of it we generate some cool videos which you can find on my youtube site. I’ve also written two papers, that due to some mystical bad luck (Murphy cough cough) wound up due on basically the same day. I was able to get them both done, which is good. I also failed my 3D vision midterm (got a 51% on the exam and yes that was below the class average). So I need to do a really good project and study hard for the final. Speaking of which, is only a few weeks away. Back to work, sigh…

I have pretty much settled into “da Pitts” and CMU. It’s getting cold though. This poor Florida boy is not liking the cold sweeps of air moving down out of Canada. Tomorrow it is supposed to potentially freeze and go into the high 20s. Brrr! In Central Florida, it only freezes a few times a year max. And going into the 20s is very rare. Oh well…I tried to buy some hypnosis balls and swing them in front of my eyes and use self-hypnosis to convince myself that I liked cold weather, but it’s not working so far. Actually I didn’t buy hypnosis balls and try that, but somehow I doubt it would work. But if it gets cold enough, I might just give the crazy idea a try. So I mentioned earlier that I might try making my own CMS using the Google Web Toolkit. This is the first news item that uses the new half-baked CMS I’ve made with it. I really like how it is turning out. There are some frustrating things with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), especially with sizing and stilly tree items, but overally, it is a nice package. Sure beats doing it through straight Javascript. I really don’t have that much yet (a few hundred lines of code in Java and PHP), but I have it so it loads in my existing page/file structure in a tree that I can browse. I can double click and open up pages that load in tabbed text area boxes. Since this site is done in txt2tags, a simple text area does fine. I could do it in HTML as well by using the RichText control. There is a lot that is still ghetto (not counting the fact I don’t have creating pages or editing templates or anything) and hardcoded, but I’m proud of it so far. Of course, it’ll probably crash when I try to save this page, but… Anyhow, when I slack and make time to work on this, I’ll update it some more. I’m hoping to make it a bit more generic and release it as a very simple CMS (yes I know there is a CMS with basically that same name). Well it’s late so time for bed. Gotta get up in 4 hours and I still haven’t showered tonight. Sigh…This is going to be a very bad week for me.

So yes, an auspicious start to the whole “beginning classes at CMU tomorrow” deal. First I discover that apparently I left the lights on in my car – for an entire week. So yes, I don’t have a volt-meter handy (gasp!), but I’m guessing the battery is much, much less than 12 volts. So much for that RI picnic I was supposed to attend this afternoon. Unluckily, I don’t know anybody well enough to ask for a jump. Luckily, I now live in Pittsburgh were stores are crammed ontop of each other with absolutely no woods, lots, or any sort of green growing fields anywhere. Wait, why is that lucky again? Oh right, that’s good because I have an Advance Auto Car Parts only a half mile or so away. Thank you Google and thank you Pittsburgh. And lo and behold, according to the Advance Auto website, they have a rechargeable jumpstarter for only $40 and it is in stock. Hurrah! Of course, when I arrive I discover that they lied and the jumpstarters were all sold out. OK, so I’ll make do with a plain old car battery charger. Sure it takes 8 hours to charge, but it’ll get the job done. And if I grab another car battery and an inverter, I can make my own UPS in the future. So I buy my battery charger, great. I spend 10 minutes unscrewing things to get my car battery out of the car, but I get it out and myself dirty in the process. Oh well, I get it charging and everything will be good to go tomorrow. However, that’s not the end. I decide to have some spaghetti for supper and get a pot of water to boil and turn my gas stove to “LITE” – and nothing happens. Hmm…the range top is still pretty warm so the pilot light must still be on. How about another burner? Nope. Feel up the stove again and it’s cooler. Drat! I must have extinguished the pilot light. It is times like these that I’m glad I’m good at software because hardware stuff sure doesn’t like me. Now I have to decide, should I try to toaster oven to make some supper or will it break too? Hmmm…difficult decisions ahead…

Tonight was the Honors Banquet, which was sorta fun/sorta boring. It was fun because my sister and her boyfriend came in place of my parents (they are in Scotland living it up). It was also fun because I got to sit with Enrique, Chris, Christina, and Jason. My advisor Dr. Gonzalez was supposed to be there but he was in Jordan (see the trend!) so Dr. Georgiopoulos was my “substitute advisor” for the night. It was funny because when they called me up to get my medal (everybody got one), they didn’t say “Dr. Georgiopoulos filling in for Dr. Gonzalez.” Nope, Dr. Georgiopoulos was announced as Dr. Gonzalez. That was pretty funny. Some of the Honors in the Major undergraduate thesis titles were pretty funny too. One was about Superman and the legacy of heroes or something. It was boring because of all the speeches and the giving of the medals. I suggested they just do what the rock concerts do: just throw the medals out to the audience and let them catch them. The speeches were extremely boring except one by the student. As Jaryd (my sister’s boyfriend) said, you can totally tell she thesaurus’ed the whole thing. Half the time she was bragging about her accomplishments (without making it seem obvious…and failing) and the other half of the time she was simply making stuff up that sounded so “dressed up” that it was incredibly cheesy and laughable. I think I laughed my whole way through it as she threw out words like “indubious” and phrases “consciously committed this moment to memory.” Ahh me…at leas the cake was good; in fact, I stole a piece from the table next to us on the way out.

On the technical side, I was thinking over my pretty ghetto website and CMS that I made. I was thinking it could be so much better with a (gasp!) AJAX interface. I know, I know, AJAX is the newest buzzword. But what I want is a more “desktop-like” experience when developing my website, but from the web. For instance, auto-save anybody? Ever entered a post/website content into an edit box only for the page not to load and then when you hit back it’s all gone? Anybody else do the “copy before you submit so you don’t loose everything you typed for the past 15 minutes?” Ever wanted to edit multiple pages at the same time in tabs? So yeah, AJAX would be an awesome application of this (in my opinion). And not too many CMSes seem to have these features. So I’m investigating the Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java code to Javascript. That means you can develop your code in eclipse and then have it compiled to HTML and Java. I was initially suspicious (and still sorta am), but looking at it more, it seems not only a cool idea, but one with merit too. It would be cool to have an AJAX CMS with a PHP backend. I found this link helpful when trying to access PHP from my local machine using Google Web Toolkit http://www.drivenbycuriosity.com/mywp/?p=52#more-52. I never have enough time, so this is probably a passing fancy, but I thought I would share my initial (and favorable) impressions.

I am DONE!!! No more undergrad (unless I fail a class, which would really stink). A lot has happened in the past month and a half. I finished my thesis, defended, wrapped up our Netflix project (nope, we didn’t win a million bucks), accepted CMU’s offer for grad school, pulled my first allnighter in college (on a project that wasn’t even mine), missed an awards ceremony where the dean of Engineering/CS talked about me for 3 minutes (while I was supposed to be on stage), slept on the table in the lab, got a research job for the summer, and finished my finals (borderline A/B in one, B/C in another). So yeah, it feels really good to be finished. Now I have graduation, robotics, my job, a few papers to write, and have fun during the summer! Bring it on! But first let me sleep for a week

This past week I spent all my spare time (well, almost all my spare time) working on my thesis for the deadline today. As of 3:30 today, I had 7 chapters, 94 pages, and a very tired Brian. And all Dr. Gonzalez could say was “it feels light”…sigh….must sleep….

Fun with my thesis, at least that’s what I keep telling myself so I don’t realize what I’m actually doing and break down crying Working from 8 AM until 2 or 3 AM does not make for a terribly happy Brian. I have considered pulling a few all nighters, but I’m trying to stay on a reasonably night/day schedule, so I usually go home to sleep for at least a few hours each night. I think the worst one was when I passed out on the weekend and slept until 11 AM, then stayed in the lab until almost 7 AM. I decided to go home that night, or morning actually, to grab a few hours of sleep instead of just staying until the next day. I did get to see pre-dawn light and almost the sunrise. I guess you could almost qualify that as an all nighter. Go Mountain Dew (I don’t like coffee)! On the plus side, my adviser Dr. Gonzalez extended my deadline until March 9th. Whee! An extra 4 days, how nice. I turned in chapters 4 and 5 this afternoon, so now I have to finish the code, write the test cases, test them, and then write chapters 6 and 7. Sigh…better get going…

The crunch is on! My thesis must be finished by March 5th. I’ve got a new title now: “Automatically Determining Consequences of Unexpected Events.” Not exactly related to what I want to do, robotics, but hey, it was a paid topic so I took it. Now that my first three chapters are being reviewed, I finally started the code…let’s see…Thursday I think it was. I have the model pretty much completely designed, but I decided against writing it in case it changes while I code. I now have 800 lines of C++ code so far, thanks to forcing myself to write comments as I code and the marvels of modern IDEs and tools like Visual Assist X. I must admit, the coding is quite a bit more fun than writing the thesis. Oh, on a slightly unrelated note, Cameron and I came up with a thesis roadmap to a Lord of the Rings analogy. For a quick sample:

• Thesis topic decided: Inherit the One Ring
• Successfully defended: Dropping the One Ring
• Graduation: Boarding the boat

Yes, that does make me an official dork. On a completely unrelated note, I am saddened to hear that Jackson will not be directing the Hobbit. I hope the director who climbs on board will do as well a job as he did with Lord of the Rings. OK, enough procrastinating, back to coding my thesis.

Wow! Today my adviser Dr. Gonzalez let me know that I had been awarded the UCF Presidential Fellowship! I emailed him back and said UCF was looking more and more attractive. We’ll see if I get accepted to any of my other universities and if they can give me any financial aid (or if I get a national fellowship). But at least the “safety net” of UCF is looking pretty solid at the moment. Yesterday I handed in the first three chapters of my thesis to Dr. Gonzalez again to review. Unfortunately, those PhD and Master’s students he has all want to graduate or propose their topics, putting me in the back of the line. Actually, now that I think about it, that may be a good thing – maybe he’ll just pass my thesis off without looking at it too hard. Of course, that’s just wishful thinking…sigh…

Robotics is coming along pretty well. Our robot Gamblore is back in one piece after swapping out the motors for newer, more powerful ones. The path planning is progressing smoothly, I have A* and Potential Fields both coded up and working pretty well in the little simulation I’m using. The one thing we are still waiting on is the compass, which should be arriving any day now (or any month now, knowing how the ordering system works at IST). All in all, things are looking pretty good. Nice cool Florida winter weather doesn’t hurt either

Hurrah! My backup safety school UCF has accepted me into their Computer Engineering PhD program. Now I don’t have to be a bum under the 417 bridge. They said they would let me know if I got any financial aid later in March. I’m still waiting to hear back on all my other fellowships, etc, etc.

Tonight I went to Winter Jam with a few friends (OK, if I want to be completely honest about it, my friend Enrique dragged me to it). We went downtown Orlando to the TDWaterhouse (or whatever it is now called). It was really really loud It was 4 hours, but it seemed like half of it some sort of plug for homeless kids, various movies, etc, etc. But I think it was worth it for Steven Curtis Chapman and Jeremy Camp (the other people weren’t that great….Newsong was OK). I would recommend showing up 2 hours into it if you don’t care about Britt Nicole (pretty bad), Hawk Nelson (blast you away hard rock), Newsong (decent), or Sanctus Real (one good song), homeless kids, the new Amazing Grace movie, or the preaching. But it was worth the $10 for Steven Curtis Chapman’s Dive and Magnificent Obsession. I thought it funny that Winter Jam’s sponsor is a giant sweet potato and they show a clip of how you can use sweet potatoes as like “God’s food to man” in just about any recipe, including sweet potato pancakes. Ick!

Today began my last semester as an undergraduate (I hope!). I did not get off to a good start. I was fifteen minutes late to my first class because I thought it started at 12:30. That’s actually when it got out…I think I was remembering that because I was more focused on getting lunch after the class than remembering when to show up. Oh well…the good thing is it’s group project based and a bunch of us in there know each other and formed a group. That’s usually much better than being randomly paired. One of the guys is a real perfectionist too, much worse than I am. Enrique is also in it, so I know he knows how to program from robotics. I’ve also worked with Christina before and she’s an absolute knock down, drag out superstar at making any mumbo jumbo sound good and be grammatically correct. Newegg also replied to me saying I could still do an RMA on my RAM (hey, just noticed it’s the same letters, just jumbled up . I also got two pages done on my thesis! OK, so they are the first two pages of my introduction, but still! Finally, I got an email from CMU saying they couldn’t view my uploaded essays I wrote for my application. I emailed PDFs and DOCS to them, but that means they are actually looking at them! Whahoo! Now if they would just let me in and give me money….oh, and move to Florida or California or somewhere where there aren’t 145 days where the temperature is below 32 degrees.

Welcome to the new year everybody. I’ve had a very enjoyable time the past few weeks watching movies, reading books, generally doing nothing, and regaining the ability to eat normal food after having my wisdom teeth extracted. Alas, the semester is almost upon me. However, my computer is not doing so well. My DVD/CD drive is failing I think. It ejects randomly, and I can no longer burn at full speed; it starts making this terrible burnt rubber smell before aborting. Also, Friday night I backed up my stuff (I use SyncBack freeware, highly recommended) before leaving the ISL lab to go to Robotics @ UCF. Good for me, because my computer promptly bluescreened when I got to robotics and then Windows wouldn’t boot (error in ntfs.sys). Oh well, no biggie. I’d just boot off a Windows CD and copy the file over. Except it kept giving me errors booting off the CD. Blast! I had forgotten my CD drive was on the fritz. Hmm…So I have Ubuntu Linux installed on my computer, but not GRUB, so I can’t boot into it (thank you Windows XP for overwriting GRUB the last time you installed). Aha! Maybe I can boot from USB? I have my 512 CF card from my camera and a Sandisk card reader. With some hellp from Pen Drive Linux, I was up and running DSL Linux in no time (btw, if you give a shot, you need to download the latest syslinux if you plan on running it under Windows XP). I was back in business! I mounted my Windows partition and then tried to copy over the ntfs.sys file. Arg! DSL linux doesn’t support writing to NTFS partitions. So close yet so far. Hmm….How about grub? Yes, I can restore grub! Great, now my Ubuntu boot menu is back. Kernel Panic! No, it can’t be! Arg! Maybe one of the other Ubuntu entries? A previous kernel version? No, still kernel panic. Hmm…Ubuntu memtest86+, sure why not – can hurt. What!?! My RAM is bad. Oh please let it be my 256 stick, and not my gig stick. Bother, it’s my gig stick. Well that explains a lot, including why Ubuntu wouldn’t load either. So that’s all fine and dandy. I bought my computer about a little over a year ago and then the gig stick a few months later. Maybe it’s still under warranty and I can return it for a replacement. Newegg here I come. You have GOT to be kidding me. I bought it on 1/4/2006 and today is 1/5/2007 – one year and ONE day later. You know, I’ve heard of all the horror stories about products that fail right after the warranty is up and I’ve even heard the conspiracies that companies design products to fail after the warranty is up. But hearing about it and then experiencing it are completely different. Even more interesting is the RAM stick I bought a year ago is no longer being sold by Newegg…something smells fishy here. So I dropped Newegg an email to see if I can still return it. In the mean time, I had to take the gig stick out and put in my old 256 MB RAM stick. 512 MB of RAM is sooooo painful! It’s like I can’t do anything without waiting 5-10 seconds for memory to be swapped to/from my slow harddisk. Oh well, maybe Newegg will replace my stick. And if they don’t, maybe tomorrow will bring something cheery my way. Oh wait, I have to write an essay for a fellowship. Sigh…..

Wow, a lot has happened in the past few months. But related to this site, I got a new webhost called Bluehost and just swapped this site over. It seems to be pretty good so far. I was getting cramped on my old server and this one has plenty of space for me to put up files and photo galleries if I want. Also, it has newer software such as the latest version of cpanel and file managers and such. The other new change is I ditched my old PHP content management system and am now using a new system based off the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). GWT is really nice, but it still has some weird issues. I’m still getting used to it and my CMS app is still really ghetto, but I’ve jury rigged it to work. Anyhow, I hope everybody has been having a great holiday!

Well Merry Christmas everybody! If you are like me, you haven’t done any Christmas shopping whatsoever and it’s 15 minutes until Santa is supposed to come down the chimney (assuming he visits every house simultaneously). My plan is to jump him on his way down and get me some free Christmas gifts. I just hope Rudolf hasn’t gotten any improvements to that blinking red nose. I’d hate to be a causality of a laser nosed reindeer.

On another note, I joined posted my first YouTube video a few days ago. It’s entitled “Quest for a Grade.” I was really worried about my grade in my Senior level Electronics I course. Since it looked like I might get a B after 8 semesters of a 4.0 at UCF, my friend Johann suggested I film the whole thing so he could see my reaction if I got a B. I thought it was a good idea so that’s exactly what I did. Check it out, initial reviews include

• suspenseful…
• oh god this is so horrible to watch
• props on the suspense
• you created a heart felt expression
• i was very impressed, and amused

So watch it!

Today wasn’t too bad as things go. I was expecting to be in much worse condition after having 5 teeth pulled (4 wisdom and one molar that couldn’t be uprighted). I hurt a little bit, but the pain meds kept that under control. The worst part was the food. I had yogurt for breakfast along with some scrambled eggs that I basically swallowed. I had pudding and another yogurt for lunch. Supper consisted of a smoothie and some ice cream. So much sugar! Arg! I just want a burger or something cheesy. In an effort to satisfy my hunger for something non-sweet, I had some chicken broth. I am going to be so glad when I can eat real food again.

Yesterday night I completed all my graduate apps (all four of them, CMU, UCF, Berkeley, and of course MIT just for grins). In another hour, I’m going to be having my teeth pulled, sounds fun, huh? I have to have 4 wisdom teeth out, plus an “uprighting,” where they use a mini crow-bar to pry a tooth that’s grown in sideways to the upright position. Sounds like fun, off I go…

I traveled home today to begin the processes of getting my wisdom teeth extracted. I had a consultation today at 1:30 PM and basically the doc said it wasn’t going to be fun. They want to extract all four wisdom teeth and then try a special procedure called an “upright” to try to bend my sideways 12 year old molar into an upright position. There is a pretty good chance it will crack and they will have to remove that guy too. So in another words, I am going to be having a lot of fun after my Friday appointment with him. He says they now have drugs where you are groggy, but awake and responsive, but you don’t remember anything afterwards. I’m not sure if I should be happy or frightened about that. I think I’m a bit of both. I’m happy I don’t have to remember that, but the fact that they have drugs that make you completely forget what happened is sorta weird. Hmm…actually, now that I think about it, isn’t that exactly what copious amounts of alcohol does to you? Never mind, we’ve had this drug for a while now.

Now that I’m done with finals, it’s time to hit up the graduate school applications. I’m applying to MIT, CMU, UC Berkeley, and my undergraduate school UCF. I’m about halfway done with that; I mainly just have to write my essays. Of course, that is definitely the hardest part. On another note, my new website backend is now live. As mentioned earlier, I’m using txt2tags as the backend for the site. It is a bit slow (I try to think of it compiling my website , but it’s ability to convert (err compile) standard text into a bunch of different formats such as HTML, Latex, etc, is nice. One of the problems now-a-days seems to be the fact that data formats go obsolete so quickly. You know anybody who can open a MS Word from 12 years ago? Nope, me neither. In two decades, when I want to go look at my content, who is going to be able to read my PDFs or Word 2003 documents? Of course, that begs the question why anybody in 20 years would want to look at something I wrote now, but let’s not consider that right now. The point I’m trying to come to is the fact that text is probably going to be standard a lot longer than any other format. Hence, the ability to use a simple markup language and then convert it to any other format you want. I may even write my thesis in it

I’m halfway through with finals. My stats final was take-home (?) with “collaboration encouraged” (?!?) – oh well, at least it was easy. Electronics I was a really bear, probably the worst final I’ve ever taken. It was 14 pages long (according to the prof, I was too worried to actually finish the thing that I didn’t stop and count). I studied for about 24+ hours in the 48 hours leading up to the exam, so I was pretty much set with my double-sided four formula sheets in size 6 font. The exam was still really difficult, although several problems were very similar to homework problems. Some of it was multiple choice, but hard multiple choice, meaning stuff we were supposed to somehow get through ESP or something. The good thing is I did finish it, except the bonus problem, which had two circuits with about a dozen transistors in them each. One was a half adder, I think. I do feel pretty good about the exam, although I’m not sure if I’ll get a 98% on the final after the curve. That’s what I need to get an A in the class….eeep!

Well today I finished up my site to about the level it was before with two layers deep. I sure hope this all works on the Linux server otherwise I just wasted a lot of time. It should, I’ve tested txt2tags before. Today I spent some time working on Gamblore’s motors, but the joystick I was using to control it was pretty messed up. So Daniel is going to get another joystick to test with and I’ll resume experimentation tomorrow. Other than that, not much except the normal “end of the semester madness.” Lots of exams coming up, but I’m not too worried. I’m more worried about all my grad and fellowship apps that I’m trying to get done.

It seems I only get to do updates to my site now-a-days on holidays. Speaking of which, I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! We ate lots of chocolate chip cookies. My Mom, who is allergic to wheat, even made a separate batch out of rice flour. We also made a few cookies with only butterscotch chips for my Dad and Grandpa, who get migraines from chocolate. This Thanksgiving, I am quite thankful that I am not allergic to either chocolate or flour: bring on the cookies!

Is it just me, or do other people really dislike some aspects of PHP? The whole “if you mistype a variable, the compiler doesn’t tell you” is pretty annoying. Sure, it’s fine if PHP allows me to set a variable on the fly, but not when I’m getting it! It’s always going to be blank. Oh well, go figure… On the plus side, I re-did my website again to incorporate txt2tags. As a side note, I should really count up the number of times I’ve started this website from scratch. Maybe that’s why nothing ever gets accomplished. Anyhow, txt2tags is a pretty nifty program, although really slow because it’s written in Python. I’m also going Web 2.0 with AJAX. OK, so not really, but I’m using two IFRAMEs so I can dynamically write stuff to the server and load it back into a new IFRAME. The poor man’s way to do AJAX.

It’s the third week of school and I’m still fighting the enevitable “school schedule”, aka sleep 5-6 hours a night, do homework until 2 AM in the morning, work crazy hours, and get nothing done at robotics. I have a pile of homework in nearly every class, a pile of papers to read for my thesis/work, and an infinite amount of work I could be doing for robotics. To top it off, I have to worry about the GRE and my grad applications. Ahhh!!! Oh well…such is life.

I finally got around to updating my website. Today, while accompanying my parents on vacation going shopping in North Carolina, I reworked a lot of the scripts that manage this site. Now I can build a website two levels deep instead of just one. That means that now I can build a more complex site at least. Three levels will come later, but at the current time, I think I need to expand the site because at the moment it seems to have nearly nothing on it. Also, I got rid of the left navigation bar on pages that don’t need it. I’m not sure if I like that, I typically like consistency when I design something, but if the page doesn’t use it, it does open up some extra space. So it’s a trade off.

After 4 hours of working on it, I finally got my Ubuntu linux to load Hamachi on bootup, auto log me in, and then connect to my Synergy network. For my own benefit, I am going to document how I accomplished this:

   briancbecker@bcb-hpdino:~$ sudo nano /etc/gdm/gdm.conf-custom 

and then add the following under the daemon section:

   [daemon]   AutomaticLoginEnable=true   AutomaticLogin=briancbecker   TimedLoginEnable=true   TimedLogin=briancbecker   TimedLoginDelay=1 

Where briancbecker is the user you want to auto login. As for Hamachi, I’m assuming you got it installed, setup, connected to the network, etc. To start hamachi on bootup, you will have needed to edit your sudoer’s file like:

    briancbecker@bcb-hpdino:~$ export EDITOR=nano && sudo visudo 

and add the following line at the end of the file

   briancbecker ALL=NOPASSWD:/sbin/tuncfg 

(replacing briancbecker with your name again)

Now you can execute tuncfg (part of the Hamachi package) without having to enter your sudo password. I also assume you’ve gotten synergy set up as well. To make all this stuff start at log in, add these lines:

   # Start Hamachi and then Synergy   sudo /sbin/tuncfg   /usr/bin/hamachi stop   /usr/bin/hamachi start   /usr/bin/hamachi go-online BCBAPT   /usr/bin/synergyc 5.24.207.192 

BCBAPT is the Hamachi network you want to join on bootup and the 5.24.207.192 is the Hamachi IP (or static IP if you prefer) of the synergy server. These lines go in:

   briancbecker@bcb-hpdino:~$ sudo nano /etc/gdm/Init/Default 

before the line:

   sysmodmap=/etc/X11/Xmodmap 

and

   briancbecker@bcb-hpdino:~$ sudo nano /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default 

before the line:

   XSETROOT=`gdmwhich xsetroot` 

And there you have it. Hamachi should start up, GDM should auto log you into your Linux box, and then synergy should connect to your Hamachi server. Works for me under Xubuntu 6.06 running IceWM.

Well today I put up a Paris & Europe page. It’s my diary and picture blog dealy thingie. I’ll post new stuff as I get time to write it up and get the pictures slapped up.

Today is the big day: Christina and I leave for NCUR (National Conference for Undergraduate Research) in Asheville, N.C. (I sure hope there isn’t an Ashville, N.C. because that’s what a lot of my paperwork says on it). After running around campus between something like 6-7 departments, we finally got SGA to fund our registration, BHC to fund our hotel, OUR to fund our plane ticket, CE to processes the paperwork, and Dr. Gonzalez to pay for misc stuff. The whole getting to Asheville was somewhat of a pain. We had to buy our own tickets and I managed to get my ticket return date the first of May, which is totally wrong…Asheville is great, but not 3 weeks great. Luckily, I was able to swap it out. Max, Christina’s husband, kindly took us to the airport. We got there about 40 minutes before takeoff and the e-ticket machine refused to give us tickets because we were too late. So we called a Delta representative and apparently their new rule is if you check baggage, you have to do so 45 minutes before the flight. Since neither of us were checking any, they gave us our tickets (relief).

The plane ride was good; when we got there we got a ride to our hotel through the airport shuttles. Our van dropped a couple off at the Biltmore Inn (which was really really fancy) and then dropped us of. Of course, the first thing we check is Internet (yeah, I know, very nerdy). No internet, and no breakfast. But we did get an efficiency (I guess the Extended Stay Inn expects you to stay for an “extended” period of time ) The shuttle to take us to UNC was slotted for 7:30 AM, so we decided to go find some breakfast so we didn’t have to get up extra early to go to Waffle House or something. It was 10:30 by now, so every normal store had closed. However, the guy at the counter said that Super Walmart was only a mile down the road. About 2 miles later and a couple times getting lost, we finally spotted Walmart. Unfortunately, this was Super “Fort” Wal-mart. It had a moat…well, OK, really it was the Swananoa River, but it sure looked like a moat. And the entrance was way around the other side, so about another half mile later, we finally dragged into Walmart. We got some stuff for breakfast and some fruit and stuff. On the way out, we saw a little path and thought it might be faster than the other way. It lead through a little park and then dead ended. So around 1:30 AM in the morning, we finally got back to the hotel.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been almost 6 months since I last updated this site. This semester has been a killer. I haven’t had a lot of difficult work to do, but there has been so much of it that I don’t have much time for anything else. I finally got around to putting some a basic version of this site up. I’m now using a completely different approach. I’ve tried the straight HTML by hand, my own Content Management System (CMS), a professional CMS, doing it all via PHP, using an HTML editor, and now I’m trying something completely different. Use a set of metadata files to generate a set of HTML files for this site. This has several advantages. First, it’s all under my control, but a lot of the work is automated. All the navigation links and everything are generated automatically, which saves a ton of work. Also, I can customize the metadata with my own embelishments, further easing the pain. Finally, because I have to generate HTML files from the metadata files each time I make a change, it makes it easy to back up. Everytime I generate a new HTML file, I simply back up the old one in a zip file. Also, being a programmer, I like the concept of “Compile” and “Build.” So I log onto the admin side of this site and click the “Build” button and all updates are posted to the site.

Silly hurricanes. 8 in 14 months. Hurricane Wilma, the most intense hurricane ever recorded – in late October? Tropical Storm Alpha? You just gotta be kidding me that we ran out of names and have to start using the Greek alphabet. Those math equations will never be the same for some, I suspect. Back to Hurricane Wilma. Stats: Cat 3, moving about 20 mph, swiping across Florida 100 miles south of Orlando. So not much here except lots of rain and wind. I wake up at like 10:30 AM (hey, got the day off from school, might as well abuse it, right?), and it’s blowing like anything outside. Looking at the weather, I see that we are getting tropical force winds and the temperature outside is 63 degrees. What? Hurricanes and the first cold front of the year in the same day? What wacky weather we Floridian’s must put up with. <Sigh> At least it blew out quickly, by 1 PM the sun came out, the sky was blue, and it was a very cool blustery fall day. And no, I’m not interested in “Beta” testing any hurricane related software or hardware or anything, thank you very much!

Let’s see if this works.

It is always interesting to see how the worst hack imaginable can sometimes actually get the job done remarkably well. Last night, in a 4 hour PHP coding stint, I wrote a small script to read in a schedule text file, parse it, and display the items, timeframes, people working on tasks, notes, and percent completed to display it on the robotics website. It’s gotta be the worst PHP you’ve ever seen, but looking at the webpage, you wouldn’t guess that.

Or take my C++ plugins project. In C++, you can’t have a function pointer that takes variable arguments. So unless you resort to assembly language, you have to have one function pointer for each number of parameters. One for a function with no parameters, another for a function with one parameter, and so forth. So if you want to support up to 20 parameters, you have to have 20 different function pointers, the only difference being the number of parameters they take. But to further complicate things, there are different calling conventions. So you have 20 for the C calling convention and then another 20 for the standard calling convention. It’s got to be some of the hackiest C++ code I’ve written, but it’s the only way and it accomplishes the goals so I can’t complain too much.

Yeah, so the package that I ordered on August 2 finally came today. The funny thing is they said it shipped twice, although I only got a tracking number on the second go-around. Smelled sort of fishy to me. Anyhow, I got this letter from the president saying they were moving to a new warehouse and shipments had been delayed. No kidding! Over a month and a half is a little extreme. Oh well, good thing I didn’t need it, right?

I think I’ve got the incurable disease known as “absent minded professor” The sad part is I’m still a student! I breezed into my apartment tonight around 9 PM, changed my cloths, grabbed my PDA and keys…wait…where did my keys go? In the span of 5 minutes, I had lost my keys. Of course, I could just go out without my keys (suitemates might go out and lock the door after them), so I had to find my keys. After a couple minutes of looking around, I gave in and started cleaning my room, hoping to find my keys in the process. 15 minutes later I was starting to get worried. 30 minutes later I was getting very worried. Then I found them: in my nightstand drawer. Go figure. What a poor pathetic example for a human this Brian is!

Wow, my Computer System Design professor has got to be the laziest professor I’ve ever run across. He is supposed to teach us about this little microcontroller chip, but what he does is copy and paste stuff from the 500 page reference manual, put it on his website, and then read it to us. And since he just copy & pasted, he would have to pause ever 10 minutes and go “wait, what does that do”, and then he would look it up in the book, and read what it does from the book. Arg! We graduated from 2nd grade, we all know how to read! Teach us something!

This Labor Day weekend was our annual Tarpon Springs trip. It was a lot of fun. It started out with miles of clogged highways going 3.5 mph. However, we looked on the bright side: we were not fleeing from a hurricane. We went fishing, but didn’t really catch that much (OK, so my Dad caught a 3 inch trout, somehow I don’t think that counts). But we ate lots of Greek food and walked the sponge docks and shops, which was lots of fun. All in all, it was a great relaxing time.

First day of the fall semester. Hurrah! Unforunately, I was lazy so I didn’t check when my classes where going to be until last night. Uh, oh, the site was down. Oh well, I can check it in the morning, right? Well it was up this morning, but very, very slow. 10 minutes later I had my class schedule. First class at 12:30. OK, so I get there around 11 AM and then do some computer work until class. When I get to UCF, that plan completely failed. My suitemate described it best: UCF looked like an ant pile that had just been stomped. I spent 30 minutes trying to find a parking spot in 2 garages and 2 parking lots. Finally I went and parked in research park (hehe, didn’t realize that sort of goes together) and walked to campus. I can book about 4 mph, and I had 50 minutes to cover about 2 miles so I figured I was fine. And I was, but I arrived nearly completely soaked. Great start to the semester, huh? Anyhow, Enrique was kind enough to drive me back to my car after class.

My computer is dying. First my mouse wires came loose. I tried to epoxy them together, but it doesn’t work quite right. Then my AC adapter began to die, and my harddrive went on the fritz. Finally, my AC adapter gave up the ghost. Luckily, I was in the process of backing up my data when I discovered my harddrive, so I didn’t lose anything. I did a chkdsk and it repaired some bad sectors, so I guess we’ll see how long it lasts. Now I have a single 2:22 hour charge to last me until Thursday when my new AC adapter arrives.

Today I am testing the feasibility of swapping over from Typo3 to Nvu as the backend for this site. Typo3 is really grand, except for it is really pretty complicated and I don’t want to spend more time figuring out how to fix the things I don’t like about this site. Besides, Nvu has spell check!

Haven’t been updating my site very much lately, but I have a good reason. All of us at UCF Robotics have been cramming like mad to get our robot ready. Tuesday Tim & Daniel left for Michigan via a van, taking with them our two robots. The rest of us fly out today to join up with them. Then we spend a few days training and getting ready, and then Monday we compete. We fly home that night, and then I leave for my study abroad in France Wednesday. So I just realized that in the span of 7 days, I’m going to be on 6 different airplanes, and knowing how competition normally goes, with very very little sleep. It’ll be fun!

Oh, and over to the left is the robot I’ve been working on (not by myself, of course!). It is named Calculon (after some Futurama show or something of the sort). Apparently the verb Calcular in Spanish means to calculate, but in slang, Calculo means something along the lines of “big but” (I’m putting it nicely). We were told that by some Spanish speaking people. But this is America! We speak English (well sort of, maybe it’s Americanise). Anyhow, we hope our “big but” robot will do well. We’d be very happy if we got top 10 in all 3 sub-competitions (autonomous, navigation, and design). Wish us luck!

Whahooooooowwwwww!!!!! I am sooooo happy! In the wee hours of the morning today, I wrapped up the Calculon’s (that’s the name of our robot) vision system for UCF Robotics! And on top of that, I got a little video that shows “what” Calculon sees (3.2 MB)! We have some videos we recorded of Calculon going around on a little obstacle course (remote control). I ran that through the vision system and saved each frame to a BMP. The vision system averaged about 13 FPS on 360×240 resolution (half NTSC), which is really good. So about a thousand images were generated and then I ran them through a BMP -> AVI converter. I also ran it through Windows Media Encoder to compress it. But man, after 8 months of solid development, it is finally coming together! A good thing too, since competition is about 3 weeks away Still, I was soooo completely stoked!

Just for those who might not know, Calculon is a wheelchair based autonomous robot. That means that while we can use a wireless joystick to drive it, the goal is for it to be able to drive itself and navigate through an outdoors obstacle course. The obstacle course contains stuff like construction cones, 5 gallon white buckets, spray painted lines, and other stuff. So a vision system is crucial if Calculon is to see buckets and lines and then avoid them (like an intelligent robot). We treat the video as a bunch of frames coming in and process each one individually. Without going into too much detail (I’ll leave that for later), the vision system looks for buckets and orange cones. If it sees one, it colors it yellow so you know what it is looking at. A blue box is also drawn around it so it doesn’t interfere with the line finding. The line finding looks for lines in the rest of the image. If it finds them, it draws over them with red. Super cool, huh?

OK, so my wacky parents decided this afternoon to just hop in their car and come visit me…without letting me know in advance. The emailed me on their way saying they were coming. Unfortunately, I was down at the library picking up some new books and then went to Robotics. About 4ish I decided…well, I haven’t checked my email today yet, I might as well go delete some more spam. So I went and checked my email and was like: “Delete. Delete. Delete. Oh, Urgent – Sunday, what’s this? My parents are doing what!” So I hastily emailed them back and it turns out they were just heading back out of town after trying to track me down. So we met up and ate supper and had a good time. I got to give them a tour of the robotics lab, which was nice, too. Oh, and the aerial robotics team did their first test. It is candidate for America’s Funniest Home Videos. I’ll see if I can get a copy and post it tomorrow, it’s hilariously depressing.

Today my sister graduates with an AA from IRCC weeks before she graduates from high school. Yep, you heard right, she is graduating from a community college (or junior college as my grandparents like to call it) before high school. How does this magic work? It involves a lot of work and a good school that allows you to dual enroll (both high school and college). If you dual enroll enough, you complete your AA degree. And to top it off, the college graduation is before high school graduate, so you wind up with an AA degree before you have your high school diploma! My thought always was: why bother with high school if you already have your AA? Anyhow, I’m very proud of her, even if she sweated out those last two math courses (actually I don’t know if she sweated it out, but her family sure did!) Anyhow, congrats!

A word of warning: when learning a new language, never ever assume anything! Today for work I was trying to integrate a Flash frontend and Java backend using XMLSockets. Another coworker had been working on an XMLSocket’s server in Java and had some XMLSocket code working in Flash (basically a chat-like program). Also, the Java backend was setup to work with the XMLSocket’s program, so I was pretty much set to go. Of course, I had never worked with Flash before and had very little Java experience. So it was a frustrating experience. I had defined a communication structure between the client/server, but for some reason sections of the data was disappearing. I tracked it down to the function and then finally tracked it down to a single for loop. I almost went crazy trying to figure out why a single for loop would cause data to disappear. Then I had this realization: maybe my “i” variable was global! Sure enough, change the variable to “j” and bam, it works. Goes to show that even when you create a variable in a local function, it’s not really global. Lesson learned: never assume anything about a new langauge!

Wahoo! 3 finals down, 1 to go… Now if only that last one wasn’t the hardest. On the up side I found this really cool MIDI player called Timidity++ that uses software rendering to produce awesome sounds even if your audio card isn’t top of the line. Download it and a 100 MB SoundFont file and you’ve just updated your MIDIs a notch. Now if only singing synthesis would get far enough a long…

So how on earth do you import movies into PowerPoint? Our group is doing “The Spin in Sports” dynamics project analyzing baseball, tennis, and curling (guess which one I got . Anyhow, we have a bunch of cool video clips to import, but we couldn’t seem to get it to work. Of course, QuickTime doesn’t work (for obvious reasons). But mpeg should work, right? Nope, won’t work… Neither will AVI. We tried on multiple computers with multiple versions of PowerPoint. Some sluething on the Internet told us to embed the videos in a webpage and then embed the webpage in PowerPoint. Sound needlessly complicated? Sure sounds like it too me. So I had to create a web page, use the embed tag to embed the video, and then add a Microsoft Web Browser control to the PowerPoint slide, and then add code to the DocumentComplete event, test the current location for nothing loaded (“”), and then load the webpage with the embeded video. Ehew, what a pain. And I had this one WMV file that I needed to clip, but I couldn’t import it into VirtualDub because Microsoft asked them to take the feature out. So I tried an external utility to convert it to an AVI, but of course, the utility crashed. I tested the utility on some other WMVs and it seemed to work. So I got the bright idea of simply converting the WMV to another WMV and then converting to an AVI. So yeah, that worked (figures, right?).

UCF Software team (which includes me) took 3rd place!

This past weekend I spent at IEEE SoutheastCon 2005, an engineering conference for undergrads. I was recruited about a month ago to go as part of the programming team. I said yes and forgot about it. Until last week when they told me to be ready to go Friday at 3 PM. So I’m like OK, well that’s good. So I meet this guy named Jaime there who it turns out is also on the programming team (this was the first time I had met him). We waited for another guy named Malic and then went from UCF to Ft. Lauderdale. We got there around 7:30ish and checked in to a Marriot (a nice one near the beach) and then went to try to register and find the other 9 people from our school (none of which I knew). Unfortunately they had already shut down registration, so we wandered around talking to people. Turns out since we didn’t come by and register earlier, another team took our seat in the programming competition. So we went to find the rest of our UCF group to figure out what to do. We found out the hardware team hadn’t qualified and nobody knew where they were. Our faculty sponsor was nowhere to be found. We did get a hold of the other guy on the programming team to meet him. He was a CS major (we were CpE) named Jobby. He seemed to be a smart guy who had been a lot of programming competitions. Unfortunately we were not able to reach our chapter president back at UCF so we didn’t know what to do. So we went back up to our room and got pizza and watched TV. We got a call later that night from Justin our chapter president and he assured us we should be in the compeition and he would sort everything out.

Saturday we got up early at 6:30 AM and went downstairs to register. That took a while. We also submitted our t-shirt design for the t-shirt competition. Ours had a picture of the robots in the hardware competition running around picking up little metal balls. Underneath it read: “Do you have the balls to compete?” And yes, we did have to wear these shirts, although I felt a little bit uncomfortable with that on my t-shirt. We ate at the hotel (no contenental breakfast) for an outrageous rate of $4 a pancake. We then went and met with Jobby and the three of us went over some Linux stuff to refresh ourselves. We also went out and stocked up on subs, water, and snacks.

The software competition started at 1 PM. Basically it worked like this: a team of 3 from each university has a workstation with one computer running Linux with basic editors. You are given 8 problems to solve. Your team tries to solve as many as possible in a 5 hour period (no breaks, no nothing) using C, C++, or Java. And you could do them in any order. We got there and each took a a few problems to read. After reading through our individual problems, we came back and explained the problem to the rest of the group. We then choose the easy ones first. I decided I could do one right off, but got stuck after 20 minutes or so. During that 20 minutes, Jaime caught onto a patern in one of the problems and we wrote like 1 line of code to solve it. It turned out to be correct and that put is in first place being the first team to get a problem right. The second one we spent a bit of time, but got winthin another hour or so. That put us just barely in first place. After that, we spent the remaining 3.5 hours trying to solve the rest of the problems. We were able to solve 2 more, but only using a brute-force method. Unfortunately, the program had to run under 2 minutes, even with 50,000 inputs, so we were not able to get those. So we gradually lost position as other universities overtook us. When they froze the scores an hour before the competitionw as over (so we couldn’t see who won), we were in 3rd place. Immediately afterwards, we went up to our room and relaxed for a bit. Then we went to the awards ceremony banquet to find out who won. The banquet was really cheesy, just some wings and pizz for the students. The grownups got salads and meat and desert, which we viewed as totally unfair. The next hour and a half was boring as all as all the bigwigs talked and got awards. Then we got to the student awards. Our hardware team never even qualified (we don’t know if they even showed up!), but it was fun watching the other teams get their awards. The top two teams acutally competed right then and there to determine first place, which was really cool to watch. I was pretty surpised with the results of the software competition as we held 3rd place. I thought that was really good considering none of us 3 on the team knew each other before we got to the competition and we didn’t have a faculty coach and 2 of us had never done a programming competition before! We also won the t-shirt competition (they wouldn’t say our slogan outloud, but we have an official certificate bearing the words: “Do you have the balls to compete”, which is pretty funny).

That night back at our rooms, two guys were trying to get on the Internet. Unfortunately, you have to pay $10 per day for internet, so they plugged in their wireless cards to see if they could hop onto an unsecured wireless network. It turns out that the University of Alabama Huntsville were directly below us and had unsecured networks. So they hopped on, and then one of them couldn’t resist the temptation any longer and started to hack them. He booted into Linux and started doing packat sniffing. Before long, he had AOL screennames, instant messanger conversations, websites they were visiting, and even passwords. It was scary what they were doing. The other guy then decided to start chatting with them. He signed on and started to chat with them which totally freaked them out (as he knew their names and stuff). He told them he was on a hotel computer and the hotel kept records of all the trafic (which was a lie). Anyhow, as he was chatting with them, he would insert things that they had already said in chatting with other people, which freaked them out even more. They never told them who they were, only that we were a Florida team. After a couple hours of sniffing their traffic and chatting with them, one of them mentioned that he was going majoring in internet security. All of us in the room absolutely died laughing about that, because our guys were hacking them at that very moment. I don’t think they even caught on that we were using their internet connection to surf the web and chat with them! Anyhow, scary stuff.

Today we checked out, ate, drove by the beach, and came home. It was actually not nearly as bad as I had expected and our team did win, so I’m pretty satisfied. Now back to all the stuff I have to do this week.

Wow, what a week. Monday and Tuesday I spent 15 hours in a 24 hour time span working on a poster to present my research on. Yesterday I got the poster back from the print place only to find out they smeared the ink – in the worst possible spot: the title. So I had to so some reconstructive surgery (read “I mutiliated it more”). Today I presented it with 150 other undergraduate students. Part of the time I got to walk around and look at other people’s posters – there’s some neat stuff going on around campus. I also met with my professor to show him the completed research project and he seemed pleased, so I’m happy.

3B (Busy Beyond Belief), that’s my new motto. I have a semiconductors exam today, a IEEE Southeastern Conference 2005 this weekend, have an exam Monday, a poster to design by Tuesday to present on Friday and a bent to polish for initiation on Saturday. Oh and I have to write an abstract for a paper, do two assembly programs, do a chapter’s worth of Dynamics homework, start and finish a Dynamics project, and present my research to a professor all by the end of next week. Oh yeah, and get a completely working vision system ready by next weekend. 3B it is!

Wow, you’d think I just went on permanent spring break, huh? Well, I sure thought about it. The first Sunday I was home, I pulled out my hammock, got me some snacks, drinks, a good book, and man I was in heaven. It was a breezy sunny cool Florida day and I just relaxed and had a ball. The week was good, I honestly tried to be productive, but wasn’t terribly successful. I did some Dynamics and Semiconductor work (not much), helped my grandparents clean their house, did some work on the barn (again not much), and did some programming & commenting. But mostly I relaxed and read and stuff. Very nice, I tell you. Alas, all things had to end, and here I am back and school with an exam staring me in the face on Monday and I am nowhere near prepared. Oh well, such is life…

Halelujah! Spring Break has arrived! Need I say more?

Tonight’s cooking results was mixed. I had planned to make 3 meals: cheap frozen pizza, queche, and salmon fillets with vegetables and rice. The cheap pizza went as well as frozen pizza can go. When I went shopping for the queche, one of the ingredients was heavy whipping cream. I couldn’t seem to find it, so I though, well wouldn’t coolwhip count? Baaaadddd mistake. 2 cups of coolwhip mixed with eggs and cheese = absolutely disgusting. It smelled bad, tasted bad, it was truly nasty. That was a total flop. The salmon fillets however, whent like a charm. Some stir-fried vegetables and Uncle Ben’s rice heaped around the salmon was delicious. Unfortunately, I ruined the pan I cooked it in because when I tried to scrap off the baked fish skins, I scratched it and it rust. Oh well…

I ordered some more RAM (512 MB stick @ $80) for my laptop this weekend and am amazed that I can track it’s progress across the US via FedEx’s website. I’ve recently started to swap over from Visual C++ 6 to Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta and let me tell you, it sure is sweet. Although it takes up 15 times the RAM, it sure has a lot of nice features. Back/Forward buttons, awesome intellisense, debug break when value is modified, more optimization settings, line numbers (!!!), function folding, and list goes on. Of course, it’s not completely perfect. It whines about depreciated functions all the time and generates massive amounts of warnings (some of which are helpful, but most not). And did I mention it takes up like 60 MB of memory too? Good thing my RAM is on the way Visual Studio 2005 Express Beta is free from Microsoft (for now anyhow) so you can try it out if you want.

So my parents are going to buy the second most ugly car on the road, a Hyunde Element. Not only that, but they plan to fly from Florida to New York (yeah, that bitterly cold place up new Canada) and drive it back next weekened. And it just so happens that they’ll be trying to get through Jacksonville next Sunday – right past all the hordes of people swarming around the Super Bowl game. Good luck! Oh, yeah, and here are some pics: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Oh yeah, I also noticed my Contact page was broken, so I fixed that. I wonder why nobody told me it was broken…hmm, let me thing about that

My family came by today and my Dad fixed my car in about 2 minutes. Apparently, all that had happened was the tube that connected to my spark plug had fallen off, so I was running on 3 cylinders. I felt a bit stupid, but I’m glad it wasn’t anything serious. I then saw my sister graduate from her semester long modeling training (yeah, never thought I’d have a model for a sister). Hopefully she can get some good jobs out of it. I spent the rest of the day and evening at robotics. I’m really liking my GUI for image processing and computer vision, but I was getting a bit limited with FLTK GUI and need to do some re-organizing in order to add some new features, so I decided to swap to the nicer, more professional looking wxWidgets. While I was at it, I decided to try out Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta (what a mouthful!). It was actually really good. It has some quirks and it is a memory hog, but it is miles ahead of Visual C++ 6 in terms of features. Still, it took me a while (all night basically) to get the basics ported over and wxWidgets setup. Now I have to port the GUI, something for next week, I guess.

This past weekend, my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Of all the things they wanted to do and all the places they wanted to go, they choose Epcot! Although a bit surprising, it certainly was a nice surprise. So after being in Orlando for a year, I finally went to a theme park. The whole clan gathered Friday afternoon (although I had to turn around a lot because I kept getting lost) and we went to Downtown Disney, which was a real treat. We ate at Captain Jack’s and then went to Geradeli for dessert. Man, they sure pack it in – it was some of the best dessert I’ve ever had. The next day we went to Epcot early. Just as we were leaving on the bus, we realized that not everybody was on….oops, not even at Epcot and we were already separated. Good thing for cell phones! We met up at the gate and went in. Our first stop was Mission Space which was a really cool simulation ride. None of us really had any breakfast, so at least there wasn’t anything to get all over the shiny controls However, we did feel a bit on the wobbly side when we came out. We at breakfast, did the big Epcot golf ball ride, the aquarium, energy, and some other stuff while we were there. Then we went to the countries. The countries were really cool. We ate at Mexico and had some really good Mexican food. We visited Norway, China, Japan, Morraco, USA, Paris, which was most of the countries. We ate at Morracco and watched the belly dancer do her stuff. Afterwards we watched the fireworks, which were pretty spectacular. By the time we left, we realized what Epcot stood for: Every Person Comes Out Tired, which was certainly the case. The next day some of us went back to Downtown Disney to walk around a bit and eat more Geradeli desserts. Then we all split up and went home. On my way home, I had some car trouble – I was almost home and it started shaking quite badly. Not good at all…at least I could take the shuttle to school and back.

My first business trip went well. I flew up to Washington DC to attend an NSF I/UCRC annual meeting. The NSF building is a whole lot bigger than I had imagined. The Marriott hotel we stayed was also huge (13 stories) and the top story overlooked the Potomac river, Georgetown, and Washington DC. You could see the Washington Monument from the hotel as well. It was a grueling first couple of days trying to get presentations and demos done. Our presentation was squished quite a bit and we had to scrap the demos because the computer we were presenting on was…well…let’s just say very incapable. No internet? How am I supposed to demo my online website?!? Some of it was interesting and some of it was boring, but I took some notes and had fun. I got to ride the metro for the first time too – that contraption must have been built a long time ago, because it was rather rickety. Overall, it was a great learning experience. But now it’s time to crack down on schoolwork <sigh>…

I hope everybody is having a nice holiday shopping and doing all sorts of other fun stuff – isn’t shopping such a blessing? OK, so maybe shopping isn’t the biggest blessing in your life, but I do hope that everybody is enjoying themselves this holiday. I just got home yesterday and it’s nice to be able to sleep in and not have to do much of anything. Hopefully that means I can organize my computer and do a lot of (badly needed) updates to this site. I’ve got a lot of cool stuff that I can put up, so perhaps if I get a chance I’ll do that.

The week after finals! So nice not to have to cram for one weekend in my life! But I am staying at UCF another week to work and get some Robotics done. I’m making some real progress…well, at least with generating some cool feedback loops with the new Sony Handycam DV camcorder. Take a look at our new “Discover” application in a feedback loop.

Whahooo!!! Finals are over!!! I’m so excited…conk…zzzz……We are sorry to interrupt this message, but it appears Brian is unconcious and drooling on his keyboard…Until next time…

Finals are upon us. Run for your lives! Umm, err, well, maybe we ought to run for the library instead!

Wow, what a day. First a meeting that never happened, then a 16 page Differential Equations take home exam due, then classes, homework, and more classes. I had a class at 6:00 PM, so I couldn’t leave for home until after class around 7:00 PM. When I tried to merge onto I-95, I set a new record: I merged onto the interstate at about 20 mph becuase it was nearly total gridlock. Nice…That’s what you get for traveling home the night before Thanksgiving. Oh, well, I’m thankful that I got home!

Well, I tried to make no-bake cookies today. They are oatmeal chocolate cookies that you boil and then put on waxed paper to set. After they have set, you can eat them like a normal cookie. Unfortunately, being the engineer that I hope to be, I decided to “improve” upon the recipe. Why not add some marshmallows to the mix? And if you don’t have waxed paper to put them on, why not use aluminium foil? It turns out that if you put marshmallows in the recipe, the cookies never set and you get a gooey glob of a chocolate cookie. And it turns out if you try to put them on aluminium foil, the cookies stick to it and never come off. OK, so I guess I should stop trying to be creative.

What an insane week! Looking back, I’ve realized that I’ve spent no less than 12 hours at the UCF campus every day of the week! Monday I had a rescheduled class from 8:30 to 10:15 PM. Tuesday I had a very important work deadline to meet. Wednesday I had a massive assignment due. Thursday I had an exam I was not prepared for. Friday I had another extremely important deadline to meet. And Friday night I crashed and got me 10 hours of sleep…mmmmm….nice….

I also helped a friend hack my first attempt at an existing open source project. We added a password change option to SquirelMail using the Mercury Mail Server on Windows Server 2003. Awesome!

Oh, and yeah, my webhosting company upgraded some stuff to add some security measures and broke most of my php scripts. I had to coax my webmail and Typo3 back to life, but I think I’ve gotten it now. Whew!

Tonight was time to hit the Volusia County Fair! Every year my family gets together and we go to the Volusia County Fair for the night. We had lot of fun, watching some tigers misbehave during a show, eating all sorts of grease and sugar, and looking over the plants, animals, and farm equipment. Of course, my sister and my aunt were blowing through the rides like no tomorrow. I did notice they didn’t go on the ride that dropped you from about 50 feet in the air. Anyhow, it was lots and lots of fun!

Wow, I actually got to go to a social event tonight. Amazing! Must be a record for most engineering students. OK, so there was a reason: today is Veteran’s day and I didn’t have to go to school! Whoopie! Instead I spent 7 hours in front of my computer. Then I decided to go hit some balls around at the tennis courts. I came back for a quick change and then went to my church’s spagetti dinner and entertainment, which was a mockup of the show The Price is Right. I hadn’t heard of the show before, but if it’s anything like what I saw, it is pretty pathetic. However, it was an uproar with all the twists, enthusiastic college kids, and goofups. Anyhow, gotta be up early tomorrow (6 AM, no Mom, 5 more minutes, please?), so gotta get to bed. Oh, yeah, and in the last 23 hours, I’ve gotten 42 spams. Cool, almost 2 per hour. Awesome.

Well, I’ve spent the last few days studying (ur, um, cramming) for my second Electrical Networks exam. Yeah, and it didn’t go well…at all. I only finished 3 of the 4 problems (like I didn’t even draw the circuit on the 4th problem), so I hope he drops one. The problems weren’t too difficult, but they were really really long! So I was rushing around doing stuff as quick as I could. The other three problems I didn’t get to double check and I’m pretty sure I didn’t quite get the last couple parts. And I probably made some dumb mistakes too. All I can say is I hope he curves a lot!

Today I voted – and boy was I prepared. I had heard horror stories all around campus and from friends that they had waited 2 or 3 hours to vote. So I brought 3 books on my PDA to read while I was in line. I figured it would be a nice relaxing afternoon reading my books in the cool Florida fall weather. And boy was I wrong. I parked my car at 2:57 and walked in and got in line – a very short line since there were only 4 people in front of me. I didn’t even have time to pull out my PDA book! I waited for several minutes, then got my ballot and went to the booth. I took a while to look over the ballot and understand all the legalese before voting. The machine didn’t want to accept my vote, but after spitting it up a couple times I force it down. By the time I was pulling out of the place, it was 3:16 – I had spent grand total of 19 minutes voting. Not fair!

Because I was sick and coughing a lot, I didn’t go physically to church today, but I watched the live stream on the Internet. Last time I checked you couldn’t srpead germs via the Internet (that would be scary!). I also fooled around with some more robotics stuff, and came up with these images. Pretty nifity, even it the method I was using only works with about 1 in 100 or so.

I had a hot date tonight – litterally! I took my sister to the Melting Pot for dinner. It was our first time, and I sure was impressed. For those who don’t know, it is a fondue restaurant (for those who don’t know what fondue is, go look it up in a recipie book and make it!). We ordered mexian cheese fondue, which was slightly spicy. It came with corn chips, a mix of breads, celery, carrots, cauliflower, and granny smith apples to dip. I found the apples eaten raw helped cut the cheesyness. It was like nachoes like you’ve never had nachoes before! Then we ordered the cookies and cream chocolate pot. Man, I think I went to heaven or something when it came out. Choocolate and marshmallows mixed together with strawberries, bananas, pineapple, cheescake, marshmallows, crumb cake, and brownies to dip in. When we were done, we both just about rolled out of the place we were so full. Excellent place!

Argh!!!!! Just when I was thinking the cool weather was nice with Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, I had to be reminded of the not so nice things of this season: the cold. I’ve been battling with it for the past couple of days, and I’m losing…I’m just hoping it won’t be as bad as last year when I was flat on my back for 3 solid days – I litterly got out of bed to go lie down on the couch all day – and I got off the couch to go back to bed. Yeah, hopefully not that bad. Anyhow, I need to get more sleep to keep doing battle with it.

You know you need a haircut when: Different friends on different occasions tell you so. Your parents tell you so. You could probably make a really good mohawk if you shaved off the sides of your head. Your haircutter comments halfway through cutting your hair that she’s cut off 5 pounds and there are only 5 pounds more to go. So yeah, I broke down and got a haircut today. It feels much better, but it’s still not short enough. I’ll probably have to get another cut around Christmas.

Well, my friend Taj is writing a Linux distro (which is like way cool) and not being a great fan of Linux, I wrote some Linux experiences of mine down. See my Linux Rants page… On the subject of academics, when I went to school today, I got about 10 feet into the Engineering building before the alarm went off and a recorded voice told me that this was an emergency and to walk to the nearest exit. OK, so I did a quick 360 and was back out the door. About 30 minutes later, with multiple police and about 3 or 4 fire trucks, we were let back in. The reason for the evaucation? Somebody burned popcorn and set the fire alarm off. And these are the engineers of the future!?!? Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy!

Well, the typo3 upgrade to 3.7.0 went remarkably smoothly, aside from some FTP server & client erors I had work around (my connection inbetween uploading files timedout, so I tar.gz the files, uploaded the package, and then unziped). However, RealURL will not work no matter what I do to it. I can get it working with page IDs, but not page names. I spent like 6 hours, and I’ve thouroughly fed up with it. It’s not like it is rocket science either – I wrote some similar php code back in high school! Arg!! Oh well…homework time.

Whew, a lot of fanagaling to coax Typo3 to work. Apparently the contact form broke. Some investigating through PHP code shows a file got deleted, so I downloaded Typo3 source and replaced it. That works now. And messing around with my RTE, I managed to break it. So I had to mess around and try to get that to work again. But I managed. Now if I can get Typo3 upgraded and RealURL installed, I think I’ll be a happy guy.

Cooking went better a bit better this week – I only managed to cook my okra into a pile of slimy green goo (those who are familiar with okra will testify that it is indeed pretty slimy). I took a statics exam today and I think I did pretty well. I have a Diff Eq exam Thursday that I am totally not prepared for, so I need to do like massive studying tomorrow. Off to bed…

The start of a new week, hip hip hurrah. OK, maybe not. I tried to to cook last night and stuck in a frozen lazana in the oven. Unfortunately, I messed up the cook time and so instead of cooking for 2 hours, it just sat there. So instead of being done at 8:30 PM, I had to re-start it at 8:30 PM to be done at 10:30. I also made some banana bread, which turned out OK – it needed some real bananas to make it a lot better. Oh, I finished up the DirectX code for the DLL that allows you to capture video from any webcam/DV camcorder. It’s really cool and it can be accessed from any language – and the DLL is only like 50 KB to! I’ll have to upload it soon. I’m also installing some stuff like webmail and file managers on this site so that I can more easily check my mail anywhere and keep all my files in one place (on this site).

My parents came up to visit and showed me some pictures of our house and property after Jeanne came through. Man, it was really disappointing to see stuff you had worked hard for and built over many months and years strewn all over the place. We lost plywood sheets off our boarded up house that we never did find! They just blew off our 10 acres I guess. Anyhow, one of these days I’ll have to put together a hurricane gallery with comentatry to remember this wild and wacky hurricane season by.

I’m working on making some of our robotics stuff into a compiled DLL so that anybody with any language can use the code. This is mighty helpful when the source code depends on litterally gigabytes worth of librarys (DirectX 9, Platform SDK, PTypes, libpng, zlib, and our own libraries). My Engineering Analysis exam was a total joke. 2 questions – you could use the book and her handouts that told you step by step how to do the problems. Now watch her mark the whole problem wrong because I forgot to something stupid like not put it in the right format. Hopefully not.

Today I had my first Electrical Networks exam and I was a bit nervous because I didn’t have as much time to study as I would have liked. However, I had plenty of time on the exam (that’s a new one!) and was able to go back and double check answers and I think I might have actually pulled of a decent grade. I’ll have to wait and see.

Sunday 10-3-2004 Pics:

Pole Barn Before

Pole & Panel Barn Before

Panel Barn Before

Only another month to go! Can we do it without another hurricane? I sure hope so! With our track record, we are due for another in about another week (they seem to come in waves of ever other week). One can hope, right? For Robotics, we decided to write a cross-platform video capture library. The Windows side will use DirectX and the Linux version might use Video 4 Linux or DVlib. I’m was in charge of converting our old DirectX code from BlackKnight into the library and I finally got it working (I think). It’s really cool to be able to capture frames from any camera (USB webcam, firewire camcorder, etc) with just a couple lines of code,

Shame on me. I had meant to do homework tonight, but I foolishly decided to start a book while eating supper. Bad idea – something I realized at 9 PM, 11 PM, and 2 AM when I couldn’t put it down. And the thing was it wasn’t even that good – it was like a fantasy soap opera. Don’t know how he managed to do that, but it was sorta weird. OK, time to do homework for real.

My Engineering Analysis class is pretty useless, but I do get to learn some semi-interesting algorithms. On such one is a root finder, so I’ll upload the source code to that after I turn it in tomorrow.

OK, I’m am officially sick and tired of hurricanes. When Jeanne started making tracks towards our neck of the woods again in Vero Beach, our whole family headed across the state to our vacation spot in Tarpon Springs near Tampa. From our hotel, we watched this guy on TV in one of our shopping plazas in Vero Beach being virtual blown away (they are tied down with a rope around their foot for a reason!). Not fun to say the least. Then the hurricane didn’t do what it was expected to and came straight through where we were in Tarpon Springs. So we spent another day without electricity. Our house didn’t loose it’s roof, but we had a lot of water damage. I’m think my sister has the right of it: move to Montana and dig a whole in the ground and call it home!

I’d first like to take a moment to remember this day 3 years ago and take a moment to think about the US (and other nation’s) troops around the globe. On a less serious note, there is another hurricane headed this way! Noooooo! (goes and cries). It’s a mean one too: cat 5 with 165 mph sustained winds. That means there’s got to be over 200 mph gusts! Whew! I’m glad it’s not headed straight for us, but pray for the people in it’s path. Today our whole UCF Robotics Lab went down to the Orlando Science Center with our gears and demos and setup an exhibition. I got very little sleep last night because I was working on a sample program that would identify ping-pong balls or other stuff in real time. After fooling around, I found out that one version picked up skin in addition to ping-pongs. Make the background black, and you get this really strange looking image of your head, arms and hands! All the little kids loved the Robotic Connect 4 game, and we also had the vision demo (mine), the SICK laser demo (a plot of the nearest objects in a 180 degree sweep in realtime (think radar)), and some of our robots. Anyhow, enough, time to go to zzzzz….

What a terrible weekend! Instead of going to Tarpon Springs for vacation, I instead headed down to my home in Vero Beach Thursday. I got there at 1:30 PM, and spent the next 7 hours hauling sheets of plywood, drills, screws, stakes, panels, equipment, and all sorts of other stuff around. When working late into the night, you know you are working way too late when the sun starts to rise. Actually, it was the first time I went 24 hours without sleep. Not a fun experience at all! Anyhow, we got on the road and went to a little town in Barberville, about 50 miles north of Orlando (well inland). My grandparents were there (they have a fern farm there). Anyhow, we spent the weekend there and went two days without power (not fun!). Even 50 miles away from the hurricane, we got very high winds that knocked down power lines and trees. In fact, we couldn’t even get out of our driveway until somebody came down with chainsaws and tractors to haul away the trees. Here are some pictures: (Picture of the blocked driveway) & (Closeup). Today we came back to Orlando and we had power (and hot showers!!!!) and everything seems to be getting back to normal. Unfortunately, my home in Vero doesn’t seem like it fared to well, but we’ll see…

Well, it’s about 40 minutes until Thursday and I’m about to evacuate…TOWARDS the hurricane. I’m headed home to help my parents board up. and then we are all headed out. So much for a peaceful weekend doing robotics, re-installing my system, and doing homework.

What an unlucky week. Another category 4 hurricane headed directly for us, my computer won’t boot Windows because system files are “missing or corrupt.” Arg! Well, at least I haven’t lost any data quite yet. Linux to the rescue! I’ve moved all the data from my 5 GB partition over to my (now defunct) 20 GB Windows parition. Now I’ve installed Windows XP on that partition and hopefully can actually work until I have time to do a good job of a re-install. I guess that depends on how Hurricane Frances feels…

I survived my first week of classes! Hurrah! I’m taking Differential Equations, Engineering Analysis, Engineering Statics, Intro to Digital Circuits, and Electrical Networks. In addition, I’m auditing Expert Systems Knolwedge Engineering. Today I worked more on vision stuff for the new robot.

So tired…my 7:30 AM class is pretty early. The only reason I took it was because the professor was supposed to be really good. But unfortunately, they swapped professors on me! Arg! Would post more, but zzzz…..

Long time, no news. I survived hurricane Charley (I evacuated from the middle of the state to the coast – which just seemed wrong!). I bought all my books to start a new semester tomorrow. I upgraded my ceiling fan light from one 60 watt bulbs to four 60 watt bulbs – what a nightmare. I had to install it and take it a part 3 times before it worked – and all because I forgot to pull the little 2 inch chain. I kept flicking the light switch and wondering what was wrong. Robotics is going well, and I’m making some progress.

Up at 6:30 AM, packed by 7:30, gassing up at 8:00, on the road for 2 hours, at my new appartments at 9:30, unpacked by 11:30, a brief Chick-Fil-A lunch, at the ISL lab at 12:15 PM, working until 5:30 PM, on the road for another 2 hours home, home at 7:30, super, some programming a business time clocking system for my father, answering some emails, and now at 11:00 PM, I’m dead tired. Goodnight!

This past week I have had a fantastic time vacationing in North Carolina. I hiked probably 5 miles on the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway, shopped until I was ready to throttle my sister, ready 10 books (the stack probably comes up to my knee), constructed a new website for my grandfather (http://christmastrees4u.com), ported Simply KoolB to RapidQ basic, and the morning I left the mountains, the temperature was 38 degrees Farhenheit. Totally awesome dude!

Well, I bombed my Physics II final exam yesterday. Out of 5 questions, I missed at least one and a half. And that one was a giveme question to – I just blanked on it. I’m praying there is a nice hefty curve, but we’ll see. Hopefully I can do better on today’s Calc III final will go much better. And right after that, my family and I are headed up to North Carolina for vacation.

After church today, I spent 4 hours driving around to various public libraries tracking down some good books to read. I finally got my quota of 10 books, a collection of David Webber, L.E. Modesitt, Andre Norton, Anne McAffrey, and some others…ahh, yes…I feel good times acoming…unfortunately, I’ve got to wait until after this week as I have finals. Oh well…such is life.

The AC came back on the next day, so no more midnight cruses through the compiler. Today Dr. Gonzalez came back and started cracking the whip. Finals are next week and then I’m headed to North Carolina, where the highs will be less than the lows here in Florida (if that makes any sense).

Well, well, well….It’s 1:30 AM (so technically it is Tuesday, but I’ll let that slide) and I’m in the middle of a Florida summer with absolutely NO Air Conditioner! I can’t seelp, and I’m miiserable…so I’m updating this site….Nothing better to do. Oh and being the future engineer that I am, I’ve decided to help cool myself down by getting a small trash can, filling it with cold water and soaking my feet. It’s working some, but I want my AC back!

After months of griping (mostly to myself), I finally got a bit more serious with my spam filtering software. I REALLY don’t like annoying things, and spam most definitely qualifies! Since 20 out of the 25 emails I get is spam, I’m very annoyed. Not even SpamAssassin and SpamBayes combined work to my satisfaction! So…I’m going to write my own customized spam filter. It won’t tell my my sister’s email is spam, and it’ll archive spam in a great zip file, but never show it to me or put in a “likely spam” folder. Today I spent an hour or so figuring out how to access my mailbox from PHP (with a little help from some telneting). Spam is going down (provided I have enough time to code it).

Whew, today’s been a very busy day – non-stop activity from 7:30 AM to 9:30 PM. Now that I’ve got an hour to comp some food and upload another little project I worked out a month ago. It’s 300 line C program that shows you how to use wxWidget’s GUI library WITHOUT using the C++ interface. This means you could easily access it from assembly language, and…hold it – I saw your eyebrows go up! And yes, that means that you might see a Simply KoolB GUI compiler in the future

Extremely impressive. I’ve been gone 2 weeks from this site and I don’t have anything to show for it. Bad Brian! Hopefully I can get time to work more on the site – I do have lots of good little stuff to put up, actually. But first I have a Calc III test tomorrow to deal with.

Wow, things are busy, busy, busy. I still haven’t gotten my little report on our trip up yet (haven’t even finished writting it). Our new Calc III professor is pretty bad (we have one professor for the first half and another for the second half). I’ve got several sample programs I’ve written that I also need to get around to posting. Ahh me….hop to it Brian!

Not much new…I’ve got a sample of dynamically calling Windows API functions at runtime (a friend of mine asked me about it because he wanted to use it for his interpreter). Other than that, lots of schoolwork.

Got a 93% on Calc III test, mainly because it was multiple choice and I guessed right on one of the problems! Wahoo! I also attended the UCF Summer Research Academey, which was pretty much useless except I got free meals. Now if I can survive 2 more days of it…

My trip to Michegan was very good! I’ve got a Calc III exam tomorrow, so I’ll make this quick, but we got very little sleep, had fun, and didn’t do nearly as well as we had hoped. But we learned a lot and we’ll kick but next year. Pictures and more info comming soon!

Tomorrow is the day! I’ll be flying to Rochester, Michigan (brrr, it’ll be cold!)! The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition is only a day away. Wish our team well!

Well, that’s it. This evening we completely packed up the robot and all accompanying stuff into a mini-van to take up to Michigan. Two guys will drive the van and the rest of us are flying out Friday. The journey is begining!

I’ve studied my but off for Physics II exam comming up on Monday. Also, worked more with the robot – in a week I’ll be in Michegan! Also, did a proper port of bxbasic. You can find it @ the QDepartment group Files section. Off to bed to get a good night’s sleep before the big exam (wish me well!).

Wow! Tonight I set out to port Bxbasic (a basic interpreter written by Steve of Qdepartment) to my Pocket PC and to my utter amazement, I suceeded! After about 2 hours and hacking out features, I finally had a hello world program running on my Pocket PC. Looping 1000 times and printing “Hello World” took 26 second,s though, so it’s not fast. After I get the latest code for bxbasic and do a more proper port, I’ll upload what I have

Hmm, not a lot to report. I did well on my Calc III test, which is good. Now if I can just do well on my Physics II test next Monday…

Hurrah! The hurricane season starts today. Batter down the hatches and prepare for another round of hurricanes. On a more local note, I’m still waiting to hear back on my Calc III test…

Well, today was a pretty nice waste of time. Spending 5 hours in the middle of a Florida afternoon at a nice, comfortable temperature of 99 degrees with a comfortable humidity of nearly 100% – yeah, lots of fun. And to top it off, we never got the robot working (though we came close). So….now I’m a nice shade of red – an ouchie type of red.

Lots and lots and lots of improvements and additions. User login is back, and those who registered at my old site should be able to sign in under their old names (make sure you sign in using your username as all lowercase). I couldn’t import everything, so you might want to update your info after you sign in. Forums are back too, as is the Compiler Tutorial. Have fun!

The neural network stuff that Daniel has written for the robot looks awesome! I’m doing some last minute tweaking of the code, but for all intents and purposes, the robot is ready to do full-scale testing. I took a look at the design report and it looks first class. On a side note, I created some more Project pages. I also uploaded an FTP Chmod utility I wrote this past spring break.

I posted my old Compiler Tutorial after somebody notified me that my old site got hacked. Oh well, such is life. Speaking of life, I have my first Calc III exam tomorrow. Guess I better go study for it…

Today I did dishes, laundry, cooking, and all that other good housecleaning stuff. Then I went to robotics and cleaned up a bunch of old code. Then I did a bunch of nothings for a while. I also struggled with some wxWidget’s sizers and scrollbars and finally wound up doing it all myself manually. GUI toolkits are supposed to make things easier, not harder! Oh well…

After spending hours trying to figure out why I only got the first GPS point when the robot moved around, it turns out that a filter was on, filtering out all “bad” GPS points. However, it thought ALL the GPS points I was getting were bad. Once the filter was turned off, things started to work much better.

Today was my first day working for ISL. One thing I know: I’ll sure learn how to operate Linux a lot better! No nasty “general protection faults.” Instead, you get “segmentation faults.” Except the Windows version gives you more (often useless) information. Whatever…

Today we tried to test the robot, but the typical summer Florida weather didn’t cooperate and it rained before I got too much testing done. So while it rained, I fixed some stuff and played around with it inside. Later in the evening, it stopped halfway out the door and we couldn’t get it started agian. After an hour of the electronics guys debugging (or whatever you call it for hardware), it was a simple lever that got pushed. Oh well…better luck tomorrow after church.

Somehow our Physics II lab TA thinks that we should know everything before we perform the lab, so we had a quiz right off. I had like 30 seconds to review the lab manual to study. After getting the quiz, I guessed on the first question, made up an explanation, left half of the second question blank, and had absolutely no idea on the third question. So I made up a reasonable equation and used it. To my utter surprise, it was right! So I got a 28 out of 30!

Today I played a a set of tennis with some of my friends. Since I haven’t played since like Novemeber, I wasn’t very good, but I was surprised that I hadn’t lost everything I learned. I also attended a lecture from a professor visiting from France on Context Based Reasoning. Sort of interesting. However, the highlight was UCF Robotics. Today I coded finished tying all the lose ends together and the software for the robot is essentially done! Time to start testing!!!

Exciting stuff! I’m tying all the loose ends around the code for the robot. Hopefully this weekend we can take it out and see how it performs! Also, I got an Linux account at ISL. First thing I did was change it to make it look like Windows XP <Grin>. And my Physics II quiz was either really easy or a trick question. Hopefully really easy.

Just another day as a student. Classes to attend, meetings to go to, study groups to meet, clubs to particpate in, youth groups to visit, etc. It hasn’t even been an entire week yet (only 3 days!) and I already have my first quiz in Physics II…ah, the joys of academics.

Wow, what a day. First I locked my keys in my appartment 35 minutes before class. After deciding to hike the mile or two to school, I was picked up by a kind friend (Enrique) and made it in time. Then I discovered that my right ear got really sunburned and is flaking. Finally, UCF Robotics is kicking up as we only have another month before competition and I’m having to put in lots more time.

Today I started summer classes: Calc II and Physics II. Back in the grind of things. My teachers seem to be pretty good so far. Oh, and if you’d like to get your hands on a free copy of MS Visual BASIC.NET, you can – by watching and rating 5 short (5-10 minute) videos on using VB.NET.

Today I got back to UCF for my summer courses that start tomorrow. I had a great break and my Dad and I managed to put up about 25% of the walls for the barn. It’s sloooow going without the right tools (using metal snippers to cut sheet metal and such). Now I’ve got to prepare for the heavy mental work…<sigh>…

I don’t know about you, but barn raising is hard work. Today we drilled the concrete foundation and put tapcons in them (funny-looking blue screws). We kept hitting rocks in the concrete and slagging the drill bits.

Today the barn raising began. My dad and I are building a small barn (with an office). We cut lines in the foundation and measured & cut the channels for the walls.

With some free time, I started to put a new design together. I sort of got tired of the old one, and hopefully the new design will be a bit more simple. Also, I noticed that my old site didn’t load at all in Netscape 4.x. So no more CSS or other fancy technology.

Finally! The semester is over and I’m headed home for a couple weeks before the summer term begins. Lots of time to read, build barns, and work on my projects.

OK, boys and girls! Step right up to get the new release of Simply KoolB. Today I prettied up some code, fixed some bugs, and generally finalized things. The Windows version (now in Beta 2) now has an installer and uninstaller (in addition to the zip package). I’ve worked out some bugs on the Linux version and prepared a bit more offical tar.gz pacakge.

So somebody has told me that Page 2 on my Physics 13 work is actually a copy of Page 1. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I’ve (hopefully) corrected this so that Page 2 is really Page 2 (quite a novel idea, huh?).

Today was the big day: the Great Navel Orange Race. The whole class was to basically build a boat to race across the UCF reflection pond, retrieve a floating orange and then bring it back. Our team was the first heat to go of like 15 or 20 (with 11 teams per heat). We came in 2nd place in our heat, which was pretty good. We took 4:40 minutes (we estimated 4:05 or something). You can see some CAD drawings of our design here.

Today I paid my dues to become a Tau Beta Pi member – I get initiated on Saturday. I also went a head and did my next and FINAL (do I hear hallelujahs?) WebAssign homework 13.

OK, physics homework 12 is up. Sorry it took a bit longer, but I’ve been pretty busy. Also, don’t expect me to be online or respond to emails this next week and ahalf as I’ll be cramming physics as much as possible.

Happy Easter everybody! After a really hard week, I finally got some time this weekend to kick back and work with Simply KoolB on Linux. After spending probably 5 to 7 hours getting everything configured, I was free to spend like 3 hours actually programming. Anyhow, I’ve got a alpha version up (I don’t know if it even deserves the name alpha quite yet…) If you try it out, let me know how it goes.

My homework 11 physics work is now up (and I’m not fooling you, either!).

Hurrah! I got an 85% on my physics test! I really didn’t deserve it since I totatally bombed two questions (like ALL the numbers are wrong). I’m now committed on Sundays to UCF Robotics, so I’m afraid KoolB is sort of on hold until final exams are over.

Today I was able to really optimize and restructure a lot of code for the UCF Robotics BlackKnight robot. In fact, I was able to up the frames per second from 1.5 to almost 10! And that’s for all 4 cameras – pretty good, I think.

Yep, after 9, almost 10 straight of doing physics homework, I finally got all 8 (yes, eight) problems! Whoopee! OK, so I’m not quite that excited about it. I had hoped to do some more programming tonight, but I guess it’s time to turn in. Anyhow, you can get a copy of my physics work here on my Physics I page. Me go bed now…zzzz

So much for Linux port of Simply KoolB this weekend! After trying get my laptop touchpad mouse configured (I normally use a plug-in USB mouse) with Mandrake 9.2, I managed to break all my mice. So I decided to install Lindows to see if that would be any better. Well, yes, it supported both mice – but it installed a 1 GB swap file and ran out of room, damaged its own superblock, and wouldn’t boot right. And of course, it installed lilo over my existing bootmanager (XOSL), so I spent quite some time recovering from that. Finally, I was able to get Mandrake 9.2 installed again, and it works with my touch pad. But now my USB mouse won’t work! Arggg! There are GOOD REASONS why I use Windows!

After a really intense week that ended in a Calc 2 exam, a Chem exam, and a Physics quiz. To top it off, I’ve found out that we are restructuring the code for the camera capture and processing for the UCF Robotics KnightVision system. Well, finals are comming up in 4-5 weeks, so it’ll be all over one way or another.

Well, after a wonderful relaxing spring break, it’s back to the salt mines…On the upside, I’ve made progress with the Linux port of Simply KoolB. Stay tuned…Thursday, Mar 4, 2004 Hurrah! I am so happy because I got an 80% on my Physics test. If I keep this up, I might pass the class with an acceptable grade. To celebrate, I coded on my robotics project until 1 AM in the morning.

Thanks all who have reported bugs or commented on the beta release of Simply KoolB. Based on some bug reports, I’ve fixed a bug that causes the IDE to go into an infinite loop when you try to run a BASIC file with errors in it. So grab the latest here.

OK, so yeah, today I downloaded my Simply KoolB package at school to test it out on a Win2K machine and I belatedly realized I had somehow forgotten to package the compiler in the zip file! So dumb! So I’ve updated it and fixed a minor bug in the IDE. Grab it on my Simply KoolB page.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe I did very well on my physics test. The good part is that I understood the questions and knew how to do most of it, which is an improvement from the last test. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do all the math and probably made lots of little silly mistakes. I’ll see exactly how bad the score is Wednesday or Friday.

What a hectic week. Hours spent reading a new semiconductors book because I didn’t understand the textbook. 17 hour homework assignments. Meetings. Informal sushi dinner with coworkers. Massive studying for exams. Multiple hard dynamics problems. Work. Robotics programming. Failing exams. Sleep………

Wow, last weekend my parents came up to Orlando since my Dad had to fly to Washington for a business meeting. So we got together and they brought me a blender (mainly because I had asked if they had an extra one). I had this image of me making some smoothies every now and then. Boy was I wrong. I immediately tried out two smoothies, one with 4 whole oranges and ice and sugar and another with grapes, plums, juice and ice. Yikes they were bad. Then Ian my roomate went out and bought some stuff to make a fruit smoothie. That actually turned out pretty good. Later another roomate went out and bought some stuff to make an ice cream shake. That turned out nearly excellent. I bought more stuff too and before you know it, a week later and we’ve been making smoothies almost everyday. A week later we’ve pretty much perfected it and are branching out to freezes, malts, and floats. Our latest was an orange sherbet with vanilla and sprite. Wow, yummy. All this means the blender has unleashed a smoothie craze. Our other roomate kids us about it and tells us he is waiting for the day when he wakes up to see all 3 of us around the dining room table with cups littered everywhere, all of us with bloodshot eyes and tics, muttering “must turn on blender. must make smoothie. must make smoothie” The sad thing is he isn’t far from the truth. And while he does like some of our smoothies, he claims to have a nica-smoothie patch to help prevent him from becoming addicted. Well, it’s been … <checks time> … an hour since my last smoothie and I’m feeling the cravings come on, gotta go now!

I’ve been debating whether or not to upgrade my TI-86 calculator to a TI-89, which is nearly the top of the line as calculators go. It litterally does just about everything, including symbolic factoring, integration, and all sorts of cool stuff. Unfortunately, it has a $150 price tag. I finally decided I was going to buy it with a $10 BestBuy gift card (well, and my credit card to cover the rest , so I went down to best buy and it was $147.99. But then I saw a package that had been opened, so it was marked down to $127.99. That pretty much swayed me – so I took it up to the register and they knocked another $18 bucks off of it! So I got it for $109 – totally awesome! Now I just have to figure out how to use it.

After saying I could probably walk 15-50 miles without rest in my Engineering class, I decided to test whether I could actually do that or not. So today after church, I headed down the Seminole County Trail, a nice paved trial. The first 3 miles felt good as it was a bright, crisp, cloudless Florida day. At 5 miles, I was feeling a bit of discomfort, but not enough to slow me. At 7 miles, I was definitely developing some blisters. At 11 miles, I was seriously rethinking why I decided to do this. At 13 miles, I had multiple blisters on each foot and could barely walk. At 14 miles, every body part cried out to rest, but I was so close I just kept putting 1 foot in front of the other. That last mile was extremely difficult, but I made it! It took me a little over 4 hours, so that’s about 3.5 mph – not bad. On the flip side, I now walk like a crippled old person. People probably think I need those little walkers!

Halleluja! Yesterday I spent 2 hours in the library with classmate working on Physics homework (due today). We got a lot of it done, so we went home to finish it. However, we had no clue how to do this one problem. So after we submitted everything else online, we phoned each other and tried to work on the problem. 4 hours later at 10 PM, we gave up – not good since the problem was worth 30% of our grade! Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought of a way to maybe solve it. This morning I tried it and after an hour or so got it right! Praise be to God!

Today I coded more on the UCF Robotics system. The system is know capturing the data from one camera, displying it, classifying it, and displaying that. Of course, with my poor Celeron 2GHz laptop, I’m only getting 5 frames a second! Now add 3 cameras to the one I already have and well, you get the picture…

Because this weekend was a long weekend (today is Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday), I went home. I had a very nice and relaxing time. Now it is back to the grind. Hopefully I can catch up on all I need to do in terms of homework.

I meet with Dr. Gonzalez for my ISL project on Cased Based Reasoning. I got the impression that he thinks I should be moving a bit faster, so I’m going to have to finish up that 628 book…and I’m only on 398. Read, Brian, read! Homework, Brian, homework!

Today I worked more on my part of the UCF Robotics Team Vision System. In fact, I was up until 10:30 PM working on it. Of course, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided that the pictures comming in from the DirectX camera camera should be upside down and in the format BRG (not the standard RGB). Took me while to figure that one out! After I succeeded in hooking up the camera input to the system, I decided to turn in.

Today I was going to go to a Bible Study, but totally lost the directions. After driving around for a while trying to remember them, I finally gave up. I was not happy! On the bright side, I was able to work more on Simply KoolB. I’m getting closer to an alpha release.

I am getting over most of my cold, although I still have a nagging cough. Hopefully I’ll be 100% well by the end of the week. Anyhow, my first week at school went pretty well. I’m taking Physics, Chemistry, Calc II, and Engineering. Physics seems like it will be the hardest.

Happy New Year’s everybody! I wish everybody a much better year than last year (which for some of us in Florida wasn’t that good). Today I started school. I’m taking Intro to Computer Engineering, Semiconducting Devices, Networks and Systems, and Dynamics. Lots of fun, let me tell you. As one of my friends says: I’m ready for summer! On another note, I’m leaving Wednesday for Washington, D.C. for a conference. I actually have to present for 4 minutes – I think I’d much rather be in class!

Happy New Years everybody! A few days ago I got a bad cold, so I hope everybody is doing better than I am! I hope this new year will be productive for everybody!

Well, today I started to read my 628 page book entitled Case Based Reasoning. I have to read it by the beginning of January. Nothing quite like procrastinating, is there?

I also downloaded ObjectDock, a really cool taskbar replacement. Its just like the MacOS X dock, only cooler! You can add ‘docklets’, custom little programs that run in the dock, like weather updates and battery status. You can even download the SDK and program your own! Check it out at www.objectdock.com

It has been nice to just relax at home doing almost nothing. I’ve been playing more with KoolB & the IDE. I had to cut back on the IDE because it went over 1,000 lines, but everything is all in nice shape. Now for some documentation and an installer…

I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas and are going to have a Happy New Year!

I’m finally home from UCF. I’ve spent 8-12 hour days working on our UCF Robotics BlackKnight vision system. You can see what I’ve done at http://robotics.ucf.edu/projects.html. I wrote the app you see on the bottom, with the picture of the cone and grass. Lots of work! Anyhow, I’ll probably be wroking more on KoolB this Christmas.

Whew! Been a while since I’ve updated this site…been busy with end of the semster activities..AKA finals. I hope everybody has had a good Thanksgiving and are getting into the Christmas spirit! Just because I haven’t been doing much publicly doesn’t mean I haven’t been working. Expect some code to be released soon!

Finished my Ukraine Agriculture paper & gave the presentation. Glad to have that finished!

Whew! I got a last minute plea to give a presentation on “Exploring Your Future” to a bunch of middle schoolers. I had basically a day to write a 30 minute PowerPoint presentation describing how to prepare to be an engineering student. It went reasonably well, actually. Now I’m exahusted…bed…zzzzz.

Today I received a lovely letter from somebody who will remain anonymous that told me how great my Resources section is. Of course, at the time Resources was a blank page. However, the someobdy who will remain anonymous got his/her wish and there are some web development resources up now.

Today I completely bombed my Calc I test. I am NOT looking forward to getting the grade on that!

Arg! I dislike long, drawn out math problems. I spent 2.5 hours solving a grand total of 3 problems. I hope I can do better than that tomorrow on the test!

At the suggestion of Jared, I made the navigation menu a little shorter to accomodate visitors with small screens. Let me know if you like/dislike it.

I finally broke down and got a hair-cut. It feels much better – now I can go for another couple of months.

My family came to town and we went to see Luther in theaters. Surprisingly, it was quite good! I would recommend it to most anybody. It does an excellent job of showing how the Protestand Reformation sparked off not only religous freedom, but the beginning of modern history.

Yes! Chapter 2 is finished! Read it to get ready to start building a real compiler in the next chapter. Learn how compilers & interpreters work and set up all the tools you need (C++ compiler, assembler, etc).

Friday, Oct. 17, 2003 (Late)

Been attending the UCF Robotics team the last month or so. We are finally forming groups and I’ve decided to help with the vision system. So I’m going to be up to my ears in pixels and graphics!

Whew! I spent a solid week trying to build a pasta bridge for my engineering class competition. We used lasagna, fettuccine, and tube noodles and melted sugar to build a standard arch bridge. Although not terribly strong, it looked like a bridge…unlike most of the other contestants. We got our picture taken, actually! Anyhow, our bridge weight 371 grams and held 2,200 grams, so it held nearly 7 times its weight! Not bad…but not particularly good, either!

Today is my sister’s birthday…sweet sixteen! So I sent her an online card and a knitted penguin. That’s why there hasn’t been much activity…I’ve been up at 2 AM knitting like old grandma used to do. Anyhow, the Compiler Tutorial is comming along. Chapter 1 is in final form, just need to convert it to a couple more formats. Expect it soon!

Well, it took almost an entire day, but I managed to add a print link to the pages. This way you can swap between a page optimized for navigation and one optimized for printing. The only difference is the left navigation bar goes away on the print version.

Well, my parents and grandparents came for a visit and we had a lot of fun. On a more serious note, I started to work on the Compiler Tutorial section. Still have a lot of work to do, but you can see most of the first chapter.

Whew! I survived the first round of mid-mid term exams & quizes. Now for a relaxing weekend with my family (its family weekend at UCF). Oh, yeah, updates for the website. Right, Brian…

Official unveiling of the site. Nothing works except some of my Academic pages. Specifically, most of my Resource Geography notes are online for the test tomorrow.

Yes, I love it! They gave my group the wrong co-ordinate in my Intro to Engineering class, so we wandered around in the woods with a GPS for hours! Ahh, the joys of being an engineer!

KoolB Linux release! This is the first beta release of KoolB for Linux. With the same functionality as the Windows version, you should feel right at home. The only real difference is that some of the libraries are lacking a little. However, since neither the Linux nor the Windows versions of the libraries are complete yet, I think this is acceptable.

Interested? Download it! I need lots of beta-testers to iron out its many bugs. I also need people who want to create libraries and so forth for KoolB.

First Beta Release of KoolB! This is the first beta release of KoolB! With support for external functions and directives, you can now start creating real life programs, not just example programs. There are an abundance of new features:

• External functions (WinAPI, custom DLLs, etc)
• Directives ($AppType, $Optimize, $Compress, $Include, $Asm, $Const, $Define, $IfDef, $IfNDef)
• You can write DLLs in KoolB now!
• $Asm directive to write inline assembly language
• Optimization to remove unused functions
• Ability to $Include files
• Automatic compression of your program or DLL
• hInstance and CommandLine$ pre-set variables
• Some incomplete libraries
• Some more precise compile time
• Many bug fixes

Limitations in the KoolB: too many to list!

Interested? Download it! I need lots of beta-testers to iron out its many bugs. I also need people who want to create libraries and so forth for KoolB.

KoolB Version 12 for Linux Released! Thanks to Ryan and his persistent requests for the Linux version, I’m now releasing a Linux version. The Linux version has the same features as the Windows versions.

Limitations in the Linux KoolB (in addition to the Window’s limitations):

• Strange results with storing/retrieving numbers in UDTs
• Sleep will only sleep for whole seconds, like 1 or 2, not .5 (1/2)

Interested? Download it and check out the sample program in the Examples folder. They are the exact same ones as the Windows version, so you can compare how the two versions work.

KoolB Version 12 Released! Yippee! Yet another release – this time its version 12 (like duh, what else comes after 11?). The latest in this release is:

New features in KoolB:

• Can create subs & functions that take any number of parameters
• Can call them anywhere in the program (even recursively)
• Can use function in expressions
• Can return a value by storing it in Result
• KoolB can now (with some modifications that come with $AppType DLL), create DLLs with those subs & functions you’ve created

Limitations in KoolB:

• You can only pass parameters by value, not by reference
• You can only pass simple data types by reference – do not try to pass UDTs or arrays
• You cannot create arrays or UDTs inside functions
• Subs & Functions without any parameters must still use parenthesis (like C)

Interested? Download it and check out the Functions/funcs.bas program in the Examples folder.

Minor updates: It has been busy lately, so not much has been going on. However, I’ve gotten some minor updates on the site and also a start on the next KoolB version. Will keep everybody updated as things progress.

KoolB Version 11 Released! Yes, I agree that the best part of the development cycle is the release – and that time has come again. So what’s so exciting about this version?

New features in KoolB:

• Boolean expressions (And, Or, Not)
• Releation operators (=, <>, <, >, <=, >=)
• If statements with ElseIf as well
• While statements
• End statement to terminate program

Interested? Download it and check out the Who Are You sample program in the Examples folder.

KoolB Pages are up now! All the KoolB pages are up and running right now. That means you can now find out more about KoolB. And yes, the download links work too. Although they are not complete, they represent most of the KoolB content.

A picture is worth a 1000 navigation methods! Thanks for all the ‘easter-egg’ & ‘green has to go’ comments that helped me decide how to improve the site. I improved the navigation with some mouse-over button images. I also added an official logo for the site. Is this an improvement?

I also added a counter to the site last Saturday – and in less than a week, I have gotten 100 hits! Most of it is probably spam bots searching for my e-mail address, but it is still encouraging. If anybody is actually looking at this, this site is under construction and is not complete by a long shot, so don’t expect all (or any!) of the links to work.

Yet Another Redesign!?! I didn’t like the old design much (too dark & drab, not to mention very buggy on other browsers & platforms), so I changed the design to something more simple and cheery. If you puke when you first load the page, drop me an e-mail

Whoope! Release 10 of My Compiler: A pre-release of KoolB Version 10 is now available. Head over to the download section to check it out. Be sure to run the example programs (the popular request one is really neat . If you find any bugs, be sure to report them. Thanks.

Yep! Another Revamp of the Website: I took a Web Page Design course this semester, so part of the course is to re-design this web site and add content to it. Hence, the great adventure begins.