May 16th, 2008
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I noticed that even my favourite news aggregator startup has their own blog. At some point one must accept the tolling of the bells, and so, I too, will no longer withhold my many priceless nuggets of wisdom from the world.
Welcome to my blog.
It’s time to elect local municipality members in about two weeks here in The Netherlands. Traditionally, dutch people tend not to give a rats ass about it, instead focussing on the national elections.
Strange - local politicians tend to have a far larger effect on your daily affairs, and your slice of the decision making pie on the local level is far, far larger compared to national elections.
As has been going on for years now, there’s bunches of tax-euros-sponsered advertising on TV, in papers, and in the roll of ads preceding movies in theatres, urging you to vote. They all have the same message: “Vote, just vote”. That’s it.
This entire idea of ‘just vote’ is very common in the netherlands, and in my experience, in every other democracy. Why, though? An uninformed vote can only be harmful - influenced by populism, pretty faces, or press opinion instead of actual past track record or intention.
Why aren’t there advertisements urging people to actually go read some sites about what each party is planning? Perhaps even advertisements which first explain some sort of relevant issue, then briefly shows the opinion on the issue by all major local players. Now that would be useful expenditure of my tax money.
Managed to talk my way into letting a slightly smaller practical count as replacement for an old one that is no longer available: Numerical Mathematics. I like mathematics, it just tends to be so very very difficult sometimes 
Anyway, now that that’s done: Thesis Defense Presentation, Advanced English, Written English, Dealing with Conflict, and sorting out one particular old old course that I may or may not have passed a long time ago… and then I should get my degree.
That’s a really really good thing because everytime I engage in anything university related I get deeply depressed about the absolute pointlessness of the things I learn there.
I stumbled onto a book called Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. It’s all about how relatively uninformed masses can collectively reach pretty amazing results anyway*.
A particular excerpt that caught my attention is about letting an entire audience play pong by giving everyone a big red bat and using a camera to recognize them. Raise your bat if you think the paddle should be going up, lower it if you think it should be going down. There is no intermediate choice for a single audience member.
Interesting, because I need to explain agent technology to a mixed audience of A.I. gurus and complete newbies who don’t even know how a computer works (i.e: my parents), for my thesis defense this wednesday. I could use something like this to make one of the points of agent technology clearly, and in a new way to those who’ve heard it all before, and as a plus, something like is a pretty sweet wake-up call, as well.
So, I have created my own version (looked and looked, but can’t find anything. If you did find something, or know of how I can get a hold of software to do this, let me know!) and it works without a hitch… except QT4J (A quicktime library set for java, constructed by apple) has an inexplicable 600 millisecond delay between the captured image and handing it off to my code. Imagine playing pong where all your actions are delayed by over half a second.
Not good.
I’m now trying to figure out a way to make it instant, by looking into QT4J on windows and JMF on windows and hoping the delays aren’t as bad there, but if this keeps up, I’ll have to come up with far less interesting games instead, or drop this plan altogether.
I’m testing whatever I end up having tuesday afternoon, I’ll record it (just to have a backup in case it blows up on wednesday) and I’ll post the results then.
*) Alper has reviewed a similar book, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki on his blog, here.
Some very hard realities in this article from the british Times. This isn’t the first article I’ve seen that basically suggests Africa is still poor because of foreign aid - here is another one, from the german Spiegel magazine.
These articles contain some compelling arguments.
Yet, anytime aid happens to come up in discussion, and I mention these articles, people vehemently disagree, usually springing to the defense of their particular favourite third world aid organization. Ayn Rand at work?
Alper has managed to break his cell by storing it in his pockets. According to t-mobile, that’s not proper use and thus voids the warranty. Nevermind that the phone is about a month old.
Understandably, he is rather pissed about it.
In his efforts to cook up a media hype a la price rite photo, I’m helping him engender some awareness amongst my, uh.. hmm.. 5? readers.
Anyhow, there you go. Don’t buy t-mobile if you like transporting your cell in your pockets.
I just finished it.
The solution (works only on windows):
A combination of the JMF and DSJ, an extremely handy but windows-only plugin for quickly grabbing DV was fast enough.
barely noticable delay and instead of the roughly 5 FPS I was getting on the mac, I can push this as far as 20.
I’ll be testing it out with a big audience tomorrow. (if you feel like coming, either after 5th or after 6th period somewhere at EWI (Mekelweg 4). I’ll post more details in a comment tomorrow. I’ll be taping it as well, I’ll put it online if it ends up looking good.
55 euros expenses already (for red and green paper and laminate covers) but a fun experiment is worth it I think.
… apple is really trying to help developers along.
For example, I don’t see microsoft pimping rails on MSDN.
Not that I particularly like rails, but I’m impressed nonetheless. This is useful and very readable developer documentation. Even for non-os x stuff, the ADC might have what you’re looking for.
Tried it today, and it actually works. I’ve taped the event. I think the video requires quicktime 7. I really didn’t expect it would work this well. The only significant change I’ve made between this tape and my thesis defense tomorrow is that I’ve laminated the coloured paper. Hopefully the glossy nature won’t interfere.
Audience Pong (45 second fragment, QT7, 3MB).