Smart Defrag
During this whole week I was trying to defrag my office's laptop, everyday at night I was trying one more time running the windows disc defragmenter but the results were poor, and the red color was still dominating the graph.
Today I decided to google a little bit about defrag tools and I found this one quite interesting
Until now these are the pros and cons about this software
- pros:
-low resource consumption
-small application
-extremelly fast
-efficient
-freeware
cons:
-Be carefull when installing it has toolbars and other stuff that asks to be installed!
The usability is simple and there are just few and precise options what turn this software very intuitive.
Smart Defrag allows us to do 3 types of defrag:
-Simple Defragmentation
-Defrag+Optimization (fast)
-Defrag+Optimization(complete)
Basically you can choose the speed of the defrag and it's eficiency. It's curious because this software analyses your files and directories in order to know which ones are must used and the optimization will move them to the fastest areas of your hard drive.
Also you have the possibility to keep the disc defragmenting in background all the time, and it will not consume too much resources on the machine and also the boot defragmentation that is an option to allow to defrag files that are usually locked by the OS!
From now on, this will be a must have on my computers!
You can download it here.
meo|kinect @ codebits 2011
SAPO Codebits 2011 was great, as always, but I found my project presentation a "little bit" compromised by some evil events
First of all I will talk about the project itself and then I'll talk about the disastrous presentation.
Meo|Kinect
Probably you don't know what "Meo" is unless you're at Portugal.
Meo is a triple play service provided by Portugal Telecom (the main telco in Portugal). It gives you IPTV, broadband ADSL from 6 to 200Mbps and Voice Service.
To watch IPTV the hardware required is a Router Thomson and a Scientific Atlanta’s KMM3000 IPTV Set or similar model!
These boxes contain a WinCE as base OS with Microsoft MediaRoom. Microsoft MediaRoom is a extremelly closed software with a lot of license policies around it. Only the service providers and special licenced developers have access to the MediaRoom SDK so basically this is a Black Box.
It is possible to send commands that are remote like keys to the box with telnet and send post via an http a request to open applications.
Now that you are more aware of what is the Meo Service I can go on and explain what was my concept:
One day before the contest on the codebits webpage there was a post mentioning that there would be a team helping to develop for this boxes and giving full support, also I saw that a microsoft team would be there too to help on Kinect based projects.
1+1= meo|Kinect
So I was interested in interfacing the kinect gestures with the meo box using a PC in the middle!
Since day one Gonçalo Basto (one of my team members) was doing some widgets for the box in order to explore the kinect use in the box with interactive widgets. We talked several times with PT Inovação, Microsoft, sapo.labs teams and our ideias should be partially changed and the presentation on the main stage seemed a "little bit" compromised. They said that it wouldn't be impossible but would require some work from the organization to do it. "Keep in touch we will try to handle that, also try to talk with the organization".
We put a lot of efford on that part reducing the development time and the solutions were getting delayed time after time.
We got the interface recognizing the gestures using hotspots on the computer screen that would send nice and clean commands to the box and time to end the project was near at the end when I finally went to test it on a test environment with all the required hardware and network configurations.
It was a success. But we were only 4 hours away from the presentation and nothing was done on stage.
We went there to test the main stage environment 1 hour before and they sent someone to put a network cable on the router and do the magic but it wasn't working at all
I talked with Celso about our issues and he said... "that's too late for such things" and I replied that we passed 3 days trying to get someone to help us. Celso grabbed his cellphone and said "I'll see what I can do for you although I can't promise you nothing it's less than a 1 hour for the presentations"...
I was desperate....the team wasn't motivated, I was thinking about giving up, and someone from the organization told me, "we will that happen"
Miguel Vicente from Microsoft, which I most send kudos to him, was always giving us good advices and telling to not give up, PT Inovação Team was really interested in make that happen too. And suddenly magic things started to happen.
The organization moved our project to the last one on the list so we could win some time, PT Inovação sent a guy to do the set up, and we where literally laid down in front of the stage configuring all the necessary component to make the presentation... even if it was untested.
We finished all the set 5 minutes before our turn on stage and our presentation guys was insecure has I have never saw him. We didn't believe that it would work on stage and IT DID WORK, but our orator was under a lot of pressure believing that it would never work and he was speechless.... all the presentation we trained, all the talk about making Interactive TV a new concept, the speech recognition features, the new market that could be possible to gain with such features... all was left behind and all we heard about it was: "As you can see I can go to the menus, and do some workout as I do it!"
The presentation was a failures dispite the demo worked after all.
I give my sincere thanks to all the Codebits organization to make the impossible happen, to PT Inovação for giving us a big help and for having one of the top techs on MediaRoom in Portugal laid on the ground in front of 800 persons just to help to configure the DNS hosts, to Miguel Vicente for all the motivation he gave us, and to my team that was under a great pressure due to all our missfortune events.
Soon I will publish more about this project including videos of it working.
It was a great codebits and a great challenge.
Codebits 2011 is comming…
The greatest geek-nerd-techy event in Portugal is about to happen!
It's only 2 days untill the codebits start!
Yes! It will have a 48 hours programming challenge
Yes! It will have a geeky quiz
Yes! It will have O'Reilly books
Yes! It will have lot's of food an beverages
Yes! It will have arduinos
Yes! It will have Nuclear Tacos
YES! CODEBITS FTW!
and NO, there shouldn't be no sleep!
Be Aware!
Shell Scripting
For the first time in 10 years of programming someone asked for a shell script to do a bunch of operations.
I had never done such thing but I tought it should be easy.
One thing that helped me a lot was this cheat sheet. Extremelly usefull for some basic operations.
Also I was faced with a problem: How to get a dump of a pg database that is on a remote machine?
Well, I found a nice approach thanks to www.stackoverflow.com website. So here is the a little sample on how to perform that:
ssh $USERNAME@$HOSTNAME "pg_dump -f /dev/stdout -t tb1 -t tb2 -t tb3 dbname" > /export/bin/dbexport.sql err=$? if [ $err -ne 0 ]; then echo "Dump failed with error code ${err}!" fiWas this usefull or what?
First Demo
Ok, so here is my first demo... Simple stuff, basically I have 2 views, one with the RGB VideoStream and another with the DepthFieldStream.
Pretty similar to the one of the Channel9 tutorial with some minor changes like I'm not using 3 diferent distance keys to draw the colors and implemented a grayscale colouring depending on the distance.... so it becomes a very smooth...
Here's a vid about it
Kinect + Emgu
Sorry about the inactivity but having and a daytime job and girlfriend sometimes leaves us without time.
using Emgu.CV; using Emgu.CV.UI; using Emgu.CV.Structure; using Emgu.Util; using Emgu.CV.CvEnum; using Microsoft.Research.Kinect.Nui; using Coding4Fun.Kinect.WinForm;
haar = new HaarCascade("haarcascade_frontalface_alt_tree.xml");
will populate the the haarCascade object with that file.
kinect.Initialize(RuntimeOptions.UseColor); kinect.VideoFrameReady += new EventHandler(kinect_VideoFrameReady); kinect.VideoStream.Open(ImageStreamType.Video, 2, ImageResolution.Resolution640x480, ImageType.Color);
public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); haar = new HaarCascade("haarcascade_frontalface_alt_tree.xml"); kinect.Initialize(RuntimeOptions.UseColor); kinect.VideoFrameReady += new EventHandler(kinect_VideoFrameReady); kinect.VideoStream.Open(ImageStreamType.Video, 2, ImageResolution.Resolution640x480, ImageType.Color); }
Image kinImage = new Image(e.ImageFrame.ToBitmap());
Image grayframe = nextFrame.Convert();
grayframe.DetectHaarCascade( haar, 1.4, 4, HAAR_DETECTION_TYPE.DO_CANNY_PRUNING, new Size(grayframe.Width / 8, grayframe.Height / 8) )[0];
foreach (var face in faces) { nextFrame.Draw(face.rect, new Bgr(0, double.MaxValue, 0), 3); }
imageBox1.Image = nextFrame;
void kinect_VideoFrameReady(object sender, ImageFrameReadyEventArgs e) { Image kinImage = new Image(e.ImageFrame.ToBitmap()); using (Image; nextFrame = kinImage) { if (nextFrame != null) { // there's only one channel (greyscale), hence the zero index Image grayframe = nextFrame.Convert(); var faces = grayframe.DetectHaarCascade( haar, 1.4, 4, HAAR_DETECTION_TYPE.DO_CANNY_PRUNING, new Size(grayframe.Width / 14, grayframe.Height / 14) )[0]; foreach (var face in faces) { nextFrame.Draw(face.rect, new Bgr(0, double.MaxValue, 0), 3); } imageBox1.Image = nextFrame; } } }
with good lightning, the detection occurs flawlessly
Kinect SDK + EmguCV
I guess that it's better to start with the basics
Today I will start creating some controls to play with kinect. The first one will be a Login Control and I thought it will be great if I create a face recognition for use, and speech recognition to insert the password.
Later on I will post some code and the control code be aware
Power Supply Adapter has arrived
Almost miss the carrier delivery but I managed to get the power supply today so it's time to start downloading the sdk and development IDE
Requirements
As I believe, if you're reading this blog probably you are interested in develop over kinect or you're already doing it.
Still Waiting
Right now I am anxiously waiting for the Kinect Power Supply Adapter to arrive and put the hand on...