- ProFORMA — software which builds a 3D model as you rotate an object in front of your webcam. Check out the video below. (via Wired)
- BiwaScheme — a Scheme interpreter written in Javascript. (via Hacker News)
- YMacs — in-browser EMACS written in Javascript. Emacs, for those of you who were left in any doubt, is the only editor ever created by software engineers worth a damn (where “worth a damn” == “has possibly already achieved sentience”) with the possible exception of teco.
- Historic Documents in Computer Science — my eye was caught by John Backus’s first FORTRAN manual, Niklaus Wirth’s original Pascal paper, the BCPL reference manual (the C programming language got its name from the C in BCPL), and Eckert and Mauchly’s ENIAC patent. (via Hacker News)
"computer vision" entries
Four short links: 27 November 2009
3D Models from Webcams, a Javascript Scheme, EMACS in Your Browser, and CS History
Four short links: 23 November 2009
Scams, Swirl, Crisis, and Coasters
- Top E-Tailers Profiting From Scams — Vertrue, Webloyalty, and Affinion generated more than $1.4 billion by “misleading” Web shoppers, said members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. […] The government says the investigation shows that [the companies] “trick” consumers into entering their e-mail address just before they complete purchases at sites such as Orbitz, Priceline.com, Buy.com, 1-800 Flowers, Continental Airlines, Fandango, and Classmates.com. A Web ad, which many consumers say appears to be from the retailer, offers them cash back or coupon if they key in their e-mail address.
- Image Swirl (Google Labs) — interesting image search result navigator. It’s fun to play with, trying to figure out why particular sets of images are grouped together.
- Create Crisis (Dan Meyer) — great call to arms for educators. It’s still astonishing to me how few “learning xyz” books follow this advice. Would-be authors, take note! If there were ever an easy way to make your computer book stand out for being better than the rest, this is it!
- Typographic Character Coasters — the single best argument for laser cutters evar. Send the patterns to Ponoko if you don’t have a laser cutter handy.
Four short links: 16 November 2009
Visualizing Adventures, Droid Deployments, Fly Vision, and Mass Meat For You
- Choose Your Own Adventure — numerical and visual analysis of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The distinguishing characteristic of My Kind Of People is that they appreciate the quantitative study of the commonplace. (via Bryan O’Sullivan)
- Tracking Droid Numbers — uLocate, the makers of the Where app for Android, have been tracking the growth of the Droid phone using the data they get from the Android app store. (via BoyGenius Report)
- Fly Eyes Makes Better Robot Vision — to make smaller flying robots, researchers would like to find a simpler way of processing motion. Inspiration has come from the lowly fly, which uses just a relative handful of neurons to maneuver with extraordinary dexterity. And for more than a decade, O’Carroll and other researchers researchers have painstakingly studied the optical flight circuits of flies, measuring their cell-by-cell activity and turning evolution’s solutions into a set of computational principles. […] Intriguingly, the algorithm doesn’t work nearly as well if any one operation is omitted. The sum is greater than the whole, and O’Carroll and Brinkworth don’t know why. Because the parameters are in constant feedback-driven flux, it produces a cascade of non-linear equations that are difficult to untangle in retrospect, and almost impossible to predict. (via Slashdot)
- Meat Band Aids and Mass Production of Living Tissue — Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration. This Gizmodo Q&A is informative.
Four short links: 6 October 2009
Birdwatching Technology, Transportation Data, Multitouch in Python, and Face Detection on the iPhone
- Bird-watching Turns To Technology (BBC) — CCTV-esque automated bird watching. Sensor networks + computer vision for an ecological purpose. In a bid to track the guillemots behaviour, Dr Dickinson is refining established work that involves modelling the visual structure of an area around a nest. The computer system will be able to use this model to identify changing elements in the scene, and determine if they correspond to movement by a guillemot. “That is the typical way of doing surveillance,” said Dr Dickinson, “work out what’s moving, that gives you an idea about what is interesting in a scene.”
- The Case for Open MTA Data — If you live in Portland, there are dozens of mobile applications that help fill gaps in transit information. You can check your phone to see when the next bus is supposed to come. You can plan a trip from one unfamiliar part of town to another. You can even have your mobile device buzz if you fall asleep before reaching your destination. For the basic stuff, there’s no iPhone necessary (although that certainly helps for information luxuries). Anyone who has a plain old cell phone with text messaging can ride the train or the bus with greater ease thanks to these apps. (via Making Light)
- PyMT — a python module for developing multi-touch enabled media rich applications. Currently the aim is to allow for quick and easy interaction design and rapid prototype development. There is also a focus on logging tasks or sessions of user interaction to quantitative data and the analysis/visualization of such data.
- Near Realtime Face Detection on the iPhone with OpenCV Port — we’re probably only one or two revisions of iPhone hardware away from being able to do some serious computer vision tasks on the handset. Proof of concept adds a tie to the face you’re pointing the camera at.
Four short links: 14 August 2009
EPub FTW, SQL Horror, Computer Vision Explained, and A Massive Dump of Twitter Stats
- Page2Pub — harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter)
- SQL Pie Chart — an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter and Simon Willison)
- How SudokuGrab Works — the computer vision techniques behind an iPhone app that solves Sudoku puzzles that you take a photo of. Well explained! These CV techniques are an essential part of the sensor web. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
- Twitter by the Numbers — massive dump of charts and stats on Twitter. I love that there’s a section devoted to social media marketers, the Internet’s head lice. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)
Four short links: 22 July 2009
Augmented Reality, A/B Psych, Open Source Heartbeat, Launchpad Launches
- ARtisan — AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson)
- How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% — A/B testing from 37Signals showed that “See Plans and Pricing” got twice the clickthroughs of “Free Trial!” and variations thereon. (via kathysierra on Twitter)
- Open Source Heart Monitor, Possible Blood Sugar Level Detector — another step forward in sensor networks and personal data: I’ve set up a quick prototype of a device that will monitor my heart rate while I sleep. It includes a BUGbase + BUGvonHippel module (from my company Bug Labs). I’m also using a custom module we put together that uses a Polar radio receiver (from Sparkfun) and a Polar strap that I wear around my chest. Lastly, we wrote a simple program that runs on the BUG to log the data. (via chr1a on Twitter)
- Launchpad Opensourced — Canonical’s code hosting and collaboration platform that was heavily lusted after in the open souce world, finally open sourced and in its entirety. GNU Affero license.
Four short links: 1 July 2009
Web Awards, Speed Thrills, Magazines in the Cloud, Augmented Reality
- The Onyas — New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from “good on ya”, the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give.
- The Year of Business Metrics: Don’t make your users run away! — wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who had a slower experience view far fewer pages. Some interesting notes on performance from a Google-Bing study: Notice that as the delays get longer the Time To Click increases at a more extreme rate (1000ms increases by 1900ms). The theory is that the user gets distracted and unengaged in the page. In other words, they’ve lost the user’s full attention and have to get it back. […] As much as five weeks later, some users, especially those who saw delays greater than 400MS, were still searching less than before. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- Printcasting — very simple content management system for print magazines that lets anyone start a magazine, add content, sign up contributors, sell ads, and go. Clever!
- Pachube Augmented Reality Hack — sexy hack that pushes all my buttons: computer vision, Arduino, sensor network, ubiquitous computing, pervasive alternate reality cyborg villians with chalk designs hellbent on world domination and the enslavement of the human race to use as meatsack AA batteries for their sex toys. Okay, four out of five ain’t bad. (via bruces on Twitter)
Four short links: 19 Feb 2009
Art, astronomy and more fun for you in today’s four short links:
- Found in Space — there’s an astronomy bot on Flickr that identifies stars in the night sky, and from the unique positions of the stars figures out what bit of the night sky is looked at and then adds notes for interesting parts of the sky visible in the shot. A brilliant use of computer vision techniques to add value to existing data. (via Stinky).
- 99 Secrets Twittered — Matt Webb is posting a secret a day from Carl Steadman’s 99 Secrets, an early piece of art on the web. Matt’s explanation is worth reading. Ze Frank really made me realize that every web app is a medium for art, for provoking human responses, and now I keenly watch for signs of art breaking out.
- Internet Ephemera — a brief muse on “if we start with the assumption that everything we put online is ephemeral, how does that change what we put online?”
- Pockets of Potential (PDF) — a 52-page PDF talking about opportunities for supporting learning with the mobile devices already in kids’ lives (via Derek Wenmoth).