Pulled down the source for DasBlog from SourceForge and updated the site to the latest bits.  I'm kinda having fun with this blogging stuff.  I know nobody is reading it and that hardly matters since I can't seem to stay focused on anything anyway. 

5'9" <ba da bum>

I havn't posted for a few days.  I'd like to say I've been hard at work on something wonderful but the truth is I've just havn't felt like writing anything.  Now I have a build up of stuff in my head and free time on my hands so be prepared for much rambling ;-}

Playing on digg.  Found this:


Interesting.  Starts me thinking about bringing SOA to the web arena.  Imagine, instead of using tools like Dot Net Nuke or Community Server to build websites, you simply mash up a bunch of "widgets"  Sort of a website ala collage.

Here are some other things that have been keeping me busy lately:

edubuntu - This is the kind of thing that could really make a difference in the world.  Just bouncing around the concept of an open source, world wide education system has got my head spinning and juices flowing.  IF you could funnel even a small percentage of education funds into something like edubuntu and supporting products, I think you could improve education world wide in ways that small local schools will never be capable of providing.  End the voucher debate.  Level the playing field between urban and rural schools.  ahhh.  Utopia!

So I'm a dreamer, but so was John Lennon, and look what happened to him!

Ok, bad example.

SharpMap - Google maps rulz!  Some of the mash ups are just amazing. Microsoft's version is as good or better albeit with fewer mashups.  SharpMap is simply a way to use exising mapping data to generate maps.  The down side is you have to do a good deal more work to get a map similar to what you can generate with a few Google API calls.  The up side is you can control everything about your map.  Also, the assemblies can be hosted in ASP.Net as well as distributed with a desktop app. 

Dapper - This is an interesting Web 2.0 site which basically "records" how you access a website and then allows you to play it back.  What makes it special is that it converts the output to XML and makes the input available via a URL.... (wait for it, wait for it, Ding!)  This means that any site can behave like a webservice.  Sure it's just fancy screen scrapping, but still it could be helpful when dealing with legacy apps.

OpenCV - Open Computer Vision Library is a cross platform C library developed initially by Intel to help with robotics research.  There is is a C# wrapper project called SharperCV but it appears that it has been stalled.  OpenCV has some very powerful features including tracking and object recognition.  Initially I thought it would be useful for my "Butterfly faces" project (yet another in a long line of stalled projects ;-}) but soon started looking at the tracking features as interesting. 

I started thinking that it might be neat to use the feature tracking to pull out individual frames from a movie, match features across the frames, use motion tracking to locate "actors", remove the "actors" from the foreground then stitch the background frames together to create a panaramic view of the scene. (whew!)  If you saved the "actors" you could layer them back into the newly created panarama and get a fuller appreciation for the size, scope and scale.  Imagine a full view of the mountins in "The Sound of Music!"  You could also replace actors from one movie with actors from another movie (including one you make yourself) which could make for some fun mashups.

And because I have a constant need to take everything to the nth degree, given that you now have multiple frames of muliple angles of the same points, you can (relatively) easily create 3D renderings.  At the very least, the boys and girls at CMU have been busy making that possible with a single image.  Now you have resonably acceptable data to render 3D actors in a 3D environment all in post production... I'm pretty sure that's the holy grail of the Pr0n industry ;-}

And while I'm going all Jack Kerouac over here I may as well spill over into some of the other OpenCV things that were smacking around my tiny head.  How about using it to find licence plates.  Start putting together a database of license plates and relate them to vehicle types and possibly even people.  Use this information to provide 1-on-1 marketing to people as they enter the mall, update billboards on the hiway or just to provide a better service.

So much more to say, so little space ;-}

TTFN

Just a random thought.  By now everyone has heard of the Mosquito tone which can only be heard by kids.  It's a tone in the 18+ KHz range that is to high pitched for adults to hear due to age-related hearing loss.  It was first used to keep kids from hanging out in front of stores, but quickly was adapted by kids as a ring tone that adults couldn't detect.

Just wandering if you could use that same tone to try and "censor" bad language from radio and TV so that kids wouldn't be able to hear the swearing while adults wouldn't have to listen to cut-up emotionless crap.  Not sure if it would really work, but just crossed my mind.

TTFN

My cold hasn't gotten any better which means my mind is a bit "uncooperative."  In an effort to keep my self entertained and to pass the hours during the day, I decided to give myself a challange this morning.  I had to write an NT Service that would move data from one DB to another (Sybase -> SQLServer in this case)  All in all, not an extremly complex task, but there are some conditions on it. 

1. It had to be a real enterprise app.  That means logging, instrumentation, exception handling, configuration... the works.
2. I would consider it to be done only when I would be reasonably confident that it could perform in a live environment.  This does not mean it actually would, but that I would feel it functioned reasonably well enough to throw over the wall
3. As a service, it had to be multi-threaded, single instance and also have an option to run interactively.
4. I could use anything I had with me.  Since I'm not allowed to have my laptop at work (don't even get me started), that imposses a pretty nice limit.  On the plus side, I do sneak in a USB drive, so I'm not completely lost ;-}

I was pretty sure I could do it in under four hours, so I set my sites on three.

I started by first finding some good tunes (very important).  Following that, I fired up VS, SQLServer Express, FireFox, RapidSQL (for Sybase), and my USB drive.  I created the project in VS, created the tables (keep in mind, this machine is only a 1Ghz P3 with 512M... doing things like switching windows takes a considerable amount of time ;-})

At about the 45 minute mark, I felt pretty comfortable, and like all good programmers started contemplating cool new features I was sure I'd have time to add.  About then the universe decided to humble my sorry butt by some sneakily hooking the power cable to my shoe.

About 45 minutes after that, my machine was back up and running, and my working environment was again set up. 

In the end, it took me just about five hours, and reminded me that I should always expect obsticles... Now the big problem is I have nothing to do the rest of the week.

TTFN

Don't have much to say.  I've got a cold.  Just sort of mopped around weekend.  My wife keeps telling me that I need to find a friend.  I think she's right.

I have a number of friends, all different kinds.  What I seem to be missing is a really geeky friend.  Someone who I can call up and say "Dude, did you see the new version of digg?  Do you want to make a better one this weekend?" 
So, I'm going to start looking for a seriously geeky friend.  Cool thing is, with the state of the internet, it could end up being anyone from anywhere... 

TTFN