The 1st US-Asian Demonstration and Assessment of Micro-Aerial and Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology was recently held in Agra, India.
There was a competition for micro-aerial unmanned systems involving 12
teams that got the required flight and security clearances. The test missions required flying and ground vehicles to work together to accomplish simulated mine detection and hostage finding, as well as other tasks.
There was a tie for first place between the teams from
MIT, Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile, University of Arizona, and Martin Mueller Engineering. The MIT team led by Professor Nick Roy came in first in two categories including Best Mission Performance, and Best Rotorcraft Performance.
Their vehicle, which I happened to see a while ago, uses eight propellors arranged in a circular upward-facing design.
The event was organized jointly by National Aerospace Laboratories (CSIR), India, Aerial Delivery Research and Development Establishment (DRDO), India and US Army RDECOM (International Technology Center - Pacific).
2008
2008
Python includes a uudecode and uuencode module (accessible via "import uu"), but the module only supports base32 uudecoding, and not base64. I needed base64. Although I have posted an official patch to the python2.4 library, python had already moved on to a later version. Here is my patch for python2.5 uu.py to make it able to decode and intrepret base64 data. Encoding in base64 is probably pretty easy too, but I don't need it and have not bothers. I encourage somebody to add it.
One problem in applying this patch, especially from a web page, is that the white space versus tabs might not match. The - l flag (that's a lower case L) tells patch to ignore white space, but since python is senseitve to white space, you might have to adjust things manually.
Also note that on OS X, the uu.py module can be found at
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/uu.py
The patch file (input for patch -l) is as follows:
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There's more. Read the whole story on "base64 uudecoding for python uu.py"
2008
April 26, 2008 is World IP day. Some lay people are still unaware of the term "Intellectual Property" (IP) which refers to the fact that non-tangible things, like music, inventions and ideas, can be legally protected. My colleague Luc Devroye has a provocative piece on his web site about Intellectual Property, and why the implementation is today's society seems to diverge significantly from the principles or ideals that justify it. Luc is a brilliant and very famous academic whose diverse contributions includes fundamental work on probability theory. (He's also got a lot of zest for life, and is thus a lot of fun to be around.)
See the page regarding RIP day
One disturbing aspect of the IP landscape today is that many governments have become members of WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization), and WIPO is fairly aggressive about pushing a very protective IP policy. One of the WIPO statues is that members countries give WIPO ... "such legal capacity as may be necessary for the fulfilment of the Organization's objectives and for the exercise of its functions" [wipo convention].
WIPO has declared World IP Day on April 26. WIPO will focus on "celebrating innovation and promoting respect for intellectual property". It's would be a good day to put something, a song, a photo, or a computer program into the public domain. You can also consider using a Creative Commons license which assures you of still getting some credit, it that matters (by just saying that on the work you release).
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There's more. Read the whole story on "Intellectual Property Protection as a bad thing? Speak out on World IP Day."
2008
It seems redundant to comment on the dishonest and misleading new film Expelled on this blog. On the other hand, the creationist agenda represents a dangerous element of decay in our society. As such, it needs to be exposed for the insane idiocy that it is. One of the ongoing risks to our civilization is that of a gradual descent back into the mind set of the middle ages. It may sound exaggerated, but it happened before (in ancient Greece) and it took one thousand years to climb back out of the morass.
In general, I don't want to fall into the trap of just reposting other material from the internet, but in this case I believe it's worthwhile.
The YouTube clip producted by "Thunderf00t" does a good job of debunking the film and the disinformation that it promotes.
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There's more. Read the whole story on "Evolution and the foolishness of the Expelled movie"
2008
April 26th, 2008 is the holiday to celebrate the free exchange of ideas, written words, artworks, and other intellectual content. (This is a repost of the RIP day announcement.)
The exchange and retention of complex ideas is one of the key things that distinguishes human behavior. The exchange of written ideas is the basis of our civilization. Today, the free exchange of ideas is being threatened.
Are these things, ideas, writings, art, and music "property"? Not really. Should content creators be rewarded for their efforts? Of course. Is that happening today? No. The system today is broken: most artists, poets, musicians, and novelists do not make significant money from generating creative work.The concept of intellectual property today, and the mechanisms used to reward its creation, are badly broken. No protection at all would be better for society as a whole than what is in place today. Today's system is an excuse to concentrate control (and revenue) in the hands of a few companies and people, and the expense of social good, intellectual growth, quality or cultural enhancement.
Do something about it!On April 26th, put something you have created into the public domain. Copy something you own (in most places you can make completely legal copies of your own media for your own use). Do something even more outrageous to state your position. Give out a CD to somebody on the street.
Do you read stuff on the internet all the time? Put up some information on something you know, for other people to use. Put the page in the public domain, or put a CC license on it.
Background
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There's more. Read the whole story on "RIP Day"
2008
My iPhone has been syncing to the wrong calendar in iCal. Here is a simple procedure for merging two calendars together using iCal on OS X. This allows you delete one of the calendars after combining it with another.
1) Use the Export option in the File menu to export the calendar (A) data from the calendar that is to be removed. Export to a file.
2) Select the calendar (B) into which you want to merge the data.
3) Use the Import menu to import the file saved in step 1. This should bring all the events from the calendar A into calendar B.
3.5) Verify that the events in the to-be-deleted calendar is now appearing twice (once for each of the two calendars (A and B) it is now in).
4) Delete the now-redundant calendar B.
2008
I recently had a look at the new Canon Powershot SD890 IS digital camera. It is part of Canon's ELPH line, and also known as the IXUS SD890.
It has one impressive feature: a 5x optical zoom. This is a higher zoom factor than any prior camera in the ELPH line, which I favor due to their small size and generally good quality. It has image stabilization as well, which is nice, but isn't really that significant in practice, I find (see below). I also use them for some sensing projects, and they can be partially computer controlled, which is a benefit.
The SD890, however, seems to suffer from a noisy CCD. In comparison with the slightly older SD900 (superseded by the SD950), I found the 890 to be disappointing. A series of comparisons photos is provided below.
In all the image pairs, the results from the SD890 are given on the left side, the SD900 on the right.
I often take pictures of documents, using my camera as a hand-help
quickie scanner, a selected such a scene as a good test. Shown below
is a photo of a paper document. No flash was used (in general, a flash produces far too much glare in such cases anyhow). Notice how blurred
the image from the sd890 (on the left) is, but worse yet, observe the color speckles on the white surface. I this is a case of "Bayer noise".
SD890 looks much worse than the older SD900
S
Here is my son's face in a not-well-lit room. Notice the awful color
variations due to thermal noise on the CCD array (on the left). I almost wrapped the SD890 up and returned it to the box then and there, when I saw this.
SD890 looks much worse than the older SD900
Here is a case where the SD890 shines. A well-lit scene that I zoomed in on to an extreme degree, and then digitally zoomed as well. With the SD890 you can almost read the writing on the cables, which are just a blur for the SD900.
SD890 lets us really zoom in.
The SD890 does seems to do nicely with respect to color balance and
sharpness. It's a tie between the two cameras, who knows which set of colors is correct? Here's a whole image, shrunken to fit.
How about a couple more examples, before we conclude?
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There's more. Read the whole story on "Canon SD890 noise comparison: flaws, few advantages"
2008
