for 1987, far ahead. It automatically resumed from where you had left off working, even if you turned off the machine in the interim; it had a screen-saver; instant on with any keystroke (and you didn’t even lose the keystroke); it would have qualified for a “green” sticker had they been invented then, it had true document-centric operation with a level of integration beyond any of today’s suites, OpenDoc, or OLE; an ease of use that has yet to be duplicated; the boot time was about seven seconds but seemed instantaneous due to a psychological trick; it featured full-text retrieval of anything, no matter in what application; had built-in communications including an auto-answer, auto-dial modem; the communications were available and integrated with all the application areas; and so on. — reference

Phones today may be more powerful than the first Mac in terms of processors and memory but I can’t help but wonder with all of Mr. Jobs talk of quality assurance for the lack of Flash, why the current mobile devices don’t equal the user experience and functionality of something from 1987?

Everyone seems to think the the power of Apple is in its user experience, but I firmly disagree. The power of Apple is in it’s industrial design – the physical shape of the object. User experience in mobile devices is bad. INDUSTRY-WIDE BAD, when measured against 23 year old computers.

I wrote and posted this blog on my laptop, connected through a Sprint mobile network, while syncing a movie to my ipod, on a commuter train headed north through New Jersey. If there was ever a time in life to multitask, mobile is the moment to do it. Putting the desktop metaphor on a mobile device is akin to saying a strategist can only be digital. (something I fight daily) Replacing my notebook with my mobile is the real argument, and so far I haven’t seen anyone come close.

Apparently someone use 2 very common, very well know open source projects to do a demo for TED and claimed responsibility for coding them.

What a fool.

Free training from Lynda.com

http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=778&utm_source=LDC&utm_medium=viral&utm_content=flash_catalyst&utm_campaign=flash_catalyst

Today you sent me 2 quotes.  The first was in an unmarked, obviously unsolicited, envelope.  It stated that based on public records you created a automated policy quote for me.  Apparently the replacement cost of my house is less than half it’s worth and my policy would cost me pennies a day!

Thanks for making me feel like my house was a bad investment.

The second letter was in a nice Allstate envelope. The quote was fairly accurate, especially compared to the last I’d opened, but it was addressed from Oyster Bay, NY.  I didn’t even know that Oyster Bay existed until today.  I live in Campbell Hall, NY 2 hours away from Oyster Bay and I’ve actually already called an Allstate office less than 10 minutes from my house, gotten a quote and not called them back because it seemed like they were cutting corners to lower the final cost.

Do a better job communicating at me, and I’ll consider communicating with you.

*unless I win something that gets me free stuff

https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/

Making money, doing good things.

Go Adobe Go.

Any bailed out auto company can now only make 3 models until they have paid back the bail-out.

1. Economy
2. Mid-Level
3. Luxury

All of the models will be ‘base’ models.  There will be no options from the factory… That is not to say that there will be no options available though.  Like the computer industry, options will be the realm of 3rd parties.

The benefits of this seem clear.

1. Lots of small businesses would be started to support the options
2. Lots of jobs would be created, and hopefully filled by laid off auto employees
3. A smaller line would allow the companies to refocus on profitability.

Maybe I’m a bit communist about this, but I just don’t see forcing the CEOs out of the companies is going to make the difference that will change these businesses.

I’ve started hacking away at this AR stuff by evaluating a whole bunch of different technical strategies. After downloading and testing different open source demos and libraries, I believe I’ve decided on one.

AR breaks down nicely into 2 main tasks: tracking and 3D rendering. The options I came up with for these was:

Tracking

• ARToolkit – The old open source standard. I’ve compiled the source, modified things a bit, figured out how to create and track my own custom glyphs, calibrated cameras, etc. It tracks pretty well, but there’s room for improvement (models sometimes flicker on and off when the tracker “loses” the glyph for a frame at a time here and there, problems with changing lighting conditions, etc).
• ARToolkitPlus – An open source revision of ARToolkit that has various performance improvements, including nice optimizations for mobile devices. It also has an auto-thresholding capability that helps deal with changing/adverse lighting conditions.
• FlarToolkit – A port of ARToolkit into Actionscript. When combined with papervision3D, this would allow the entire app to run from flash. This is a pretty cool find as it would allow an AR application to be easily distributed to the web. The big downside is that its tracking performance is really slow (running local on my kick @$$ machine is limited to 15-20 fps without much 3D thrown on top of it).
• OpenCV – Open source computer vision library. It has quite a few different tracking methods that might be more suitable for natural feature tracking and it has nice easy to use camera control and image processing functionality. I’ve used this library a lot in the past for a slew of different image processing applications.

Rendering

• OpenGL – The old standard. Perfectly functional and fast, but requires a lot of coding effort to produce a nice simple app (not many shortcuts).
• Ogre3D – An open source graphics engine (not game engine). This would take some of the pain out of producing a similar app with OpenGL directly while still achieving the same performance, but I haven’t worked with it before.
• Torque Game Engine – A cheap game engine marketed to indy developers. This is a pretty good game engine (for really cheap) that has much more built in functionality than Ogre. I’ve worked with it a little bit before, but it’s probably overkill for this sort of app.
• Papervision3D – An open source 3D engine for flash (all actionscript). This is a pretty full featured rendering engine (not game engine) that has some really nice and unique features for interactivity. Since it’s newer, it also supports some more up to date and fully functional 3D model and animation importers. (Sandy and Away3D are two other open source 3D engines for flash with similar capabilities)
• Processing – A java-based open source programming language created with designers and artists in mind. I’ve never used it before, but it seems to have similar capabilities to the flash based engines, while still providing access to improved performance of OpenGL.

The Decision
For the tracking chunk of this project, I’m going to use a combination of OpenCV and ARToolkitPlus. Wrapping all the image processing in OpenCV allows me to take advantage of my previous experience with it. I can perform all the glyph pose estimation with ARToolkitPlus functions, but can then use OpenCV to enhance the results (by either pre or post processing the video feed). This also makes things easier if we decide to try writing a different tracker later (for natural feature or color based tracking).

For rendering/interaction chunk of the project, I’ve decided to start with papervision3D because it will allow us to leverage our existing in house flash expertise (mostly for any 2D gui framework that we’ll want to tie into our 3D functionality). This has the added benefit of giving me one more excuse to get comfy with papervision so we can begin to fold it into other project work that comes down the pipe. If papervision’s performance doesn’t turn out to be up to snuff, I can still move to one of the other alternatives without losing much time.

To get all this working together, I’ll create a C++ server that performs the tracking and a Flash client that performs the rendering. A custom socket class allows Flash to pass a camera image to OpenCV/ARToolkit for processing, which then sends back the calculated 3D pose matrix to Flash so that papervision content can be thrown on top of it. Marijn Speelman did something similar with face tracking.

I think this direction gives us the best chance of success while greatly widening the value of the associated learning process.

–Trent Grover

One other library that Trent had yet to mess with is Bazar.  It is a computer vision library that allows for ‘Natural Feature Tracking’, or in layman terms, the ability for the computer to track photos rather than black and white vectors.

I was SHOCKED to see that I had been charged $4.59 / gallon!  I did the quick math, this was in fact more per gallon than buying it for your gas grill.  It turns out that it’s a full dollar more so I cold called them.  “How much is the going rate on propane?” I asked.  “What is it for?” they responded….   Rather than get into why that matters I said “hot water” and the girl said  that the current price was $3.299/gallon!

I said that my tanks had been filled not 5 minutes earlier and that the receipt showed $4.60/gallon.  She quickly took my name and said it would be corrected in the system tomorrow.  I asked how this happened, she said they have been having problems with their system or it could be driver error.  I said “then how can I ever trust you?”  Her response, “I don’t know, I’m new here.”

Coleman Propane of Washingtonville, New York are crooks.

I suspect that the drivers are entering prices based on quality of the residences they deliver to thinking they are making more for the company and will retain their jobs longer.  The next time they come to this house, it will be to pick up their tanks.