Oh Christ's sake, sometimes I am as puzzled about Britons as I am about Noggies! Why this infernal panic about ID cards? Or Eurosceptisism for that matter (but that's another issue). Trying to get any service running in the UK is a nightmare, opening up bank accounts, setting up broadband connections with ISPs and the blasted BT landline, its all made THAT MUCH more complicated because of the lack of a proper ID system. Not having compulsory ID cards is the same as not having them at all! British? Norwegian? I think I am from another planet afterall...
Skela 01/07/2009
There are some horrific bugs in Ubuntu 8.04, especially in the PolicyKit. If you find yourself unable to unlock certain admin tasks, you have to use ck-sessions. In my case, I was unable to modify group and user settings in the gnome gui because the "unlock" button was grayed out (This is of course related to admin tasks over ssh or remote administration, not local stuff!!). With $ck-launch-session users-admin, it worked!! I'm not sure this retarded bug is in the newer versions of Ubuntu, I should hope not!!!
Skela 24/06/2009
The sickening screams of Apple fanboys can be heard from far away. Linux, this was your time to shine, what on earth happened?!
Skela 08/06/2009
I just added a routine in my thesis project to perform OCR serverside on images sent from my phone. Tesseract sucks, but sometimes you get some good results. Check this out:
Skela 28/05/2009
I've got bad feelings about NKorea/SKorea atm. Someone new is definitely in charge and insane to top it off!! There's a good chance we will see the third nuclear explosion used in warfare within the next 10 years.
Skela 28/05/2009
I just spent 20 min on a quiz regarding random knowledge. Got 10 CHF for it, with a 1/30 chance of winning another 100 CHF. Switzerland isn't too bad :P
Skela 26/05/2009
OMG... That's just not right. It's garbage... utter rubbish. WTF?!
Skela 17/05/2009
Please, please, please, don't let the noggies win, please... The resulting smugness would envelop the world. We already have enough to deal with, global warming, terrorism and all. Nog smugness would be the final drop!
Skela 15/05/2009
If you are as frustrated as me by sluggish SSH when you log into your iPhone, I came up with a suprisingly simple hack, check it out here.
Skela 14/05/2009
Noticed something interesting whilst copying files from the iPhone over SSH. Issuing SSH commands simultaneously seems MUCH faster? A possible hack to speed things up therefore would be to copy continously from the iPhone when you need to issue loads of commands to the Phone :D Heh, you can make a bash script that keeps copying in a loop some file from the phone.
Pseudo-Code: while(1) scp root@iPhone:/somebigfile /dev/null end Skela 14/05/2009
I tried Windows7 RC and I have to admit, it looks good. Alas, the start menu is still worthless, they really ought to look at Gnome for some inspiration!!
Skela 13/05/2009
I just noticed that I have 240,000 KLM travel miles, LOL. Meaning I could, in theory, get 3 free return trips to Tokyo, from London. Flying to Houston as often as I did when I was younger has its benefits I guess ;D
Skela 11/05/2009
Just thought I'd mention something regarding what's going on in South Korea, mainly because western media is keeping this quiet. South Korean rights are being eroded and it seems we are finally going to get a unified Korea, just not the Korea one expected. The new government of South Korea has changed many laws, the most dangerous one has made it illegal to post criticism of government and governmental policies. You may have heard how Google and YouTube refused to accommodate these kinds of changes in their services with regard to South Koreans. Bleh, I hate politics!
Skela 08/05/2009
Did you ever wonder why the Lena picture was used in so many image processing projects? If you check out the original version things start to make more sense. Apparently the iconic Lena picture was scanned and cropped from a Playboy magazine :D
Skela 05/05/2009
Note to self -> Interesting song: Imogen Heap - Speeding Cars.
Skela 05/05/2009
OMG, there are so many good movies coming out. Saw the trailer of another one just now called District 9. It's fantastic, if you watch this trailer you will understand what I mean. Just so unexpected! :D :D
Skela 03/05/2009
Movies I want to see right now: Star Trek 11 and Year One :D
Skela 01/05/2009
I am now able to run vlc or media player from a USB drive in a linux install where I do not have admin or root access :D Was straightforward enough, but had to resort to using wine and portableapps + some shell scripts I wrote myself. If you are interested email me and I will post a solution.
Skela 25/04/2009
Finally! I've managed to find a suitable and easy to use password safe that works across operating system boundaries. Have a look at Password Gorilla. Download the .kit file for use with linux and the .exe file for use with windows. The linux .kit file also needs tclkit, which you can download in binary form enabling portable usage for USB flash drives. If you encounter some difficulties running the tclkit off the flashdrive in linux (if you are on say a college computer or something like that) make a shellscript that automatically copies the tclkit file to the /tmp/ folder and then runs the tlckit from /tmp with /media/disk/gorilla.kit or whatever as the input. :D
Skela 24/04/2009
i hate switzerland!!!
Skela 22/03/2009
My message to the ZVV after they charged me 80CHF for an invalid tram ticket:
"I have been a loyal customer with you ever since I came to Zuerich from the UK. I have paid every ticket, purchased the monthly tram pass every month with diligence. Today that has changed, today you have lost one customer. I consider the fact that all messages, all machines and all guidelines being in German, a racist policy. The mere fact that if you don't know German, and you happen to be on the tram when it passes one of these invisible bloody zone barriers, and you are not aware that the particular destination may be in a different zone, you are done for, even if you have a bloody tram pass!! This is an openly racist declaration, you are actively trying to target foreigners! Now I think you should re-evaluate your policies before you get into deep water, some might not take such a light stance on things. I find it pathetic that you cannot even display messages in English. Even in Beijing can you find adequate English translations of matters relating to public transport. In London, every tube machine can operate in most of the major languages, including German! (Even though its not a major language). Take the tram? I don't support racists, I would rather walk." Skela 16/03/2009
OMG OMG OMG! Found two amazing things today, Nim's Remote and Synergy. With Nim's remote you can use the iPhone as a controller for your computer, be it windows, mac or linux! Synergy on the other hand enables you to seamlessly move from one machine to another, regardless of OS boundaries !! AWESOMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Skela 10/03/2009
Finally! I am now able to intercept the camera stream and get hold of the raw byte stream. I will post a howto and some other iPhone programming guides here once I've the time. Got to really focus on my project to be able to finish on time, so that's why I have to wait a bit with posting this info. If you need this urgently, just email me and I'll send you the relevant information :)
On another note, the upcoming Star Trek movie is looking AMAZING. Every single trailer so far has given me the goose bumps. Check it out! Skela 08/03/2009
I've been struggling with the iphone camera controller for the LONGEST time now. Apple should be dismantled and destroyed, why make it so difficult to do the most basic things?! PPL need to stop taking the bs sprouting from Apple, there is no need for it. Open Source is the ONLY way to go now, trying to cling to the old paradigm is pointless and will only cause you grief in the long run. If I can manage to get this infernal frame streaming working from cam to display, I'll write a tutorial/howto + post code here! I'll also post some instructions on how to include private frameworks once you have class-dumped the headers. I worked on it till 3am yesterday (today) to understand how!! :(
Skela 26/02/2009
Just a little note to myself: Studying for all these exams, writing my little summaries, would be interesting to post this stuff to davincium.com. So, yet another thing to add to my todo list. Going to scan them first, see what that looks like. Alas, even I have trouble reading my handwriting, I'm sure other people will find it impossible, so I will have to rewrite them into an electronic format, OCR is out of the question for this due to the mix of symbols, letters and diagrams. Anyways, back to my computer graphics exam studies.
Skela 06/02/2009
Managed to install Mac OSX 10.5.5 on my XPS m1210 yesterday. Finally have a working linux / mac os x dual boot laptop. It even boots using GRUB, which means when I boot up my laptop, I can choose between Mac or Linux (Had some problems before, where I had to have the Mac dvd inside the computer for it to boot up into mac). Should now be able to program for the iPhone on my own laptop :D
Skela 17/12/2008
YES!! The reign of the PDF format is over! Finally I figured out a fool-proof way of editing PDF files. Instead of faffing around with pdfedit (I used to use that before, but in my opinion it is really buggy). There's also a free online pdf editor tool, which works reasonably well for most cases, but falls apart if you want to add images or any form of graphics more advanced than the usual primitives.
So, if you want to add some nice images to for example page 5 of your PDF document you can do this: pdf2svg yourpdffile.pdf extracted_page.svg 5 You can then edit the svg using programs like for example inkscape. When you are done, you can print the svg file into a PDF by selecting print in inkscape, choosing print to file and checking PDF (this applies to Gnome users, if you are using something different you may have to customize things abit). You will then have to delete page 5 from yourpdffile.pdf and insert the new pdf page into this. I used pdftk to do this for me. Another example is if you want to merge 3 PDF files into 1 pdf document. Try this: pdftk p1.pdf p2.pdf p3.pdf cat output merged.pdf. :) Skela 01/12/2008
Hmm... Could someone please tell me what on earth this creature is? At first I thought llamma, but is it really?
Skela 12/11/2008
Ubuntu 8.10 is out! Download and install it or upgrade now! :D
Skela 30/10/2008
My server was down this weekend due to me trying to solve a pretty hefty equation. If any of you need to solve massive equations, don't use MATLAB to do it. I think it got stuck in a loop or something, and it never got out. Tried the same equation in something called Sage (version 3.1.1) and it worked beautifully. After 30 minutes I had my answer!
Skela 21/10/2008
Found another use for ffmpeg today. If you want to extract all the frames in a video file and store them as png images then you can use this command:
ffmpeg -i inputvideo.avi -f image2 %4d.png This will give you 0001.png up to 0999.png, assuming of course that the video file has 999 frames in it. If you want jpg instead of png you just replace the "%4d.png" with "%4d.jpg" :D Skela 11/10/2008
Fantastic... I just went to a talk by Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading. He is the professor who implanted a silicon chip into the median nerves of his left arm, the world's first cyborg, thus enabling him to interface bidirectionally with electronic devices. It is most defintely worth having a look at his webpage where you can read more about the various experiments they tried with this man/machine biological interface. :D
Skela 30/09/2008
Trying to get acquainted with LaTex, got me stumped for a while. I really wanted to have a style file I can reload with some constant commands like addresses, emails, phone numbers, signatures etc. Turns out that this is not particularly difficult. For example, if you want to be able to print the same address in a couple of letters without having to retype it again and again store \address{1 ThisStreet \\ ThisCity \\ ThisCountry} in a .sty file that has \ProvidesPackage{packname} at the top. You then have to make sure this .sty file is in the same folder as your .tex document. And add \usepackage{packname} in the preamble of the .tex file you want to be able to call \address. You can do this for a lot of things, like telephone number etc. BUT if you want to create a new command, like say \email, and want it to be a clickable link in case of electronic submissions. Put \newcommand{\email}{\href{mailto:my\_address@davincium.com}{my\_address@davincium.com}}. Notice that the underscores have a \ infront of them. This is to avoid LaTex assuming MathMode which will create problems when trying to compile it into a .PDF later.
Skela 28/09/2008
My project this year is going to revolve around Computer Vision on the iPhone, more specifically object recognition and tracking. I've already come across some papers that have a lot of concepts that touch upon elements from my UROP project this summer. It seems tracking and optical flow calculations, to some extent at least, go hand in hand. Initial feeling is the iPhone SDK is MUCH better documented than Symbian S60, but they will never tell you in all this amazing documentation what is NOT possible, which at least you got with the Symbian documentation. Apple.. they will only tell you the truth if it is positive, if something is not supported or not working, they keep quiet ;)
Skela 24/09/2008
Welcome to Davincium.
This website is to serve as my little corner of cyberspace. A blog, in a way. You will find information about matters that interest me, projects I have done in the past, code for MATLAB, C and BASH, tips and tricks, Science Fiction and Science, and perhaps one day, if I dare, matters of a religious nature. Since I am studying computer vision, image processing, programming and other matters of bioimaging you may find tidbits of information regarding these fields as well. Just for the record, I know that my website (more specifically the navigation menu) does not render correctly under Internet Explorer. What a pity.. Since it works in all other browsers besides the magnificent Micro$shite browser Internet Explorer I advise you to download either Chrome or Firefox. Not to sound like a google fanatic, but Chrome is actually a fantastic browser, a complete paradigm shift from all other browsers. If I could I would use it, alas they have yet to release a proper working version for Linux users.. Skela 22/09/2008 |
