I moved to content of the Springerjagd website here onto my blog. It is just simpler only have to maintain a single website. The springerjagd website stays online, of course. For one thing, there is the redirection to my blog. For another thing I will publish the online game prototypes there.
At the end of this week it was time for two important demo-days.
On Thursday the Output took place. Some kind of open house of the TU Dresden, at which scientific results and student’s works are presented to the public. Together with booths from industrial partners this mini-exhibition provides an overview of the output of the university. And this time, our demonstrators were particularly important. The junior research group VICCI, I am working in, is attached to the ResUbic lab, a cluster of multiple research groups working on the topics of Internet of things and cyber-physical systems. For many research groups within this is the last year of their funding period. Therefore, they understood output as their opportunity for a final presentation. So, they invited many important persons: industrial partners, press, and even government officials. Because of that, we put much effort into our demos, to make the best impression possible.
The best demo of VICCI, although I might be biased here, is the follower demo my colleagues Alex and André set up. It shows a combination of simple robot control and computer vision. To be more precise: the show a demo of object tracking. The robot is equiped with a camera, in our case a Kinect. With this sensor it lerns an object and then tracks this object within the camera’s image. In this photo we used a red coffee mug. The robot tries to keep a constant distant and a direct orientation towards this object. With this it is possible to remote control the robot by simply moving the mug correspondently.
Now, this demo is not that great because we can control a robot with a coffee mug. That is nice, but that is no rocket science. What is great is the object tracker. Alex uses a particle filter algorithms, based on probability distributions to assume the object position. This tracking is robust and very fast. A new object can be lerned within fractions of a second. Any object can be used, even bare hands.
On Friday the second demonstration came up directly after the Output: the long night of science (lange Nacht der Wissenschaft). We basically showed the same demonstrations as we did at the Output. Just some of the research groups of ResUbic did not want to. We did. We presented our work of VICCI to the broad public the whole evening and night, until the end of the day at 1 o’clock.
As conclusion I can say, that these two days were exhausting and that I am happy that this is finally over. Apart of that, our demonstrations were a complete success and the public liked what they saw.
I attended the EuroVis 2013 in Leipzig this week. It is the largest european conference on visualization. In my post about the annual meeting of the BZS I wrote that for scientific collaborations the small meetings are the best. An that is true. The EuroVis is nice, but is very hard to get in touch with people you don’t already know. But that is not a problem. The large conferences have other qualities.
The large conferences provide you with a good overview of the current state of the art in the corresponding field of science. They seek to select papers of high quality and, therefore, to present the most important scientific results. I don’t want to bad-mouth anyone or anything. There are always good papers and there are always paper I can only stand by, stare at and ask myself: WTF?
And that was exactly the case this year again. There were some good papers and I took some good ideas with me. Let’s see what I can make out of these.
This week I participated in the V. annual meeting of the Boltzmann Zuse Society for Computational Molecular Engineering in Kaiserslautern. For scientific collaborations the small conferences are the best! This year, again, we discussed a lot of interesting ideas and topics. I took a whole bunch of them home with me.
In addition I got news (Tuesday night) which make me unbelievably angry. I won’t write any details before I don’t know the whole extend of the consequences. Maybe next week …
Today again I want to talk about a tool I do not want to miss anymore: KeePass
It is a nice editor for encripted password data bases. Since a friend of mine told me about that tool and since I tried it, I have to memorize far less passwords now. More importantly, I now use generated, secure passwords everywhere. Thanks to KeePass these passwords are entered automatically without ever appearing on my screen and without ever being typed in on my keyboard.
Ok. The whole security-thing is sorta paranoid. However, KeePass is convenient to use. Convenient and secure! A great combination.
Drat! I wanted to write a post each sunday. Oh well. I will try to minimize these slips and I will try to catch up as quickly as possible.
The news: The TheLib project now uses a Subversion repository!
After Mercurial failed to proof its value, our eagerness for experiments had dried up. We thus switched to a system we knew it worked and how it worked.
Of course, there are countless projects happily working with Mercurial and, of course, there are countless good reasons why everything would be better using Git. To be honest: I don’t care.
Some time ago I fret about Mercurial. My opinon on that has not changed since then. The conversion tools are still ridiculously bad and the fact that no development group is interessted in SCM protocol interoperability is pathetic.
Nevertheless, I want to talk about Mercurial again. During the last weeks I worte some (scientific) texts together with several co-authors. These texts were controlled by Subversion repositories. I have to say: It did work perfectly!
Additionally I am working on a small (or maybe medium-sized) code project. There I create a library which is used by several persons by now. This is part of my working project VICCI. For reasons out of my control there is only one single subversion repository for all subprojects in VICCI and there is a globally dictated directory structure making it impossible to set up the usual “branches” and “tags” subdirectory for my project, because of external dependancies. This is … painful. I really should make some changes of the API of my project, but as it is now, I cannot do this without either not commiting unfinished code for some time or without breaking code of some of my colleagues. Of course there are solutions which only break everything for a very short time and which make everything better after that. But it is amazing how difficult it is to change something as soon as the group of people involved has a certain size. Whatever. With the current state I will not be happy.
A nice technical solution would be multi-protocol interfaces to repositories: i.e. a hg- or git-repository with interfaces for all: hg, git and svn. This is possilbe (see my conversion-tool-rant). Just, no one is doing its. *sigh*
Today I want to introduce a new Category for my website: “Tool links”. Here, I will link to tools by other people. (Small) tools which I like and which I use myself.
I will start with “Everything” (http://www.voidtools.com/). This nice program directly reads the NTFS partition table. Results for file-name-based searches are available in parts of seconds for the whole file system. There is no faster way!
It is again time for posting? … Time flies.
During the last days I kept wondering about software engineering. Somehow it is quite unsatisfying. Programming is a hard, tiresome and longsome work. I takes foreever. A program with the complexity of “Hello World” requires, if we are honest, roughly one week, I believe. No kidding. Of course, you could code this in 10 minutes, but if the programm needs to do something as absurd as processing input to generate output, then there will be countless details. Every one claiming “Whatever, I am gonna make it in an instance” makes himself/herself unbelievable and disqualifies himself/herself for working on larger projects. Sadly, this is still true for myself as well. I still tend to dramatically underestimate the time software needs.
The worst thing, however, is that you will not see the software consuming time. You will put weeks and months into a software. And looking at it from the outside you will not see any progress. Of course, at one point-in-time there will be a “click” and almost everything starts working, but it is a long way there.
So, how about RAD? My experience with RAD is that it is ok for small GUI-Programs. However, if the planned functionality is to large or to complex you quickly reach a point in RAD where it gets harder and harder to introduce the missing functions. You complete like 80% and then you have to fight for every new function to work correctly with the rest. The only way to avoid this is to produce a good foundation for your software. And there we are again: writing software which consumes a lot of time without providing early visible successes.
Well, whatever. This is the way it is, it seems.
Did I complain about software development, again?
I honestly believe that I should do less programming. Especially I should not write solutions for problems other people alread wrote solutions for.
Therefore, I decided to get rid of my self-written publication list code.
First I registered for Mendeley. My publications were found or entered quickly. Everything was fine. I installed the WP plugin. Sadly the publication list was not usable at all. Within a reasonable amount of time (some minutes) I was not able to activate copiable bibtex for the entries.
So I switched to BibSonomy. Their search did only find less of my publications and I needed to enter more myself (which, however, was also done very quickly). Then there was that WP plugin. pitty. After installation I could not activate it due to an critical error. …
Why was I not writing the code myself again?
The simplest solutions often are the best. I tested the Papercite plugin. Maintaining and uploading a simple bib file should be possible for me. The publication list was created easily and is (almost) what I want. Not rocket science but does what it promises. Event citing my papers in my blog posts or web sites work instantly.
I thus found a 90% solution for my problem, which is enough I suppose.
