OpenCV, the open-source computer vision library originally sponsored by Intel and now by Willow Garage, has been adding functionality at an amazing pace for the past 18 months or so. Much of the new functionality plugs holes that are particularly interesting for robotics, e.g. the new stereo pipeline, or adressing developer usabillity (e.g. the C++ and Python APIs).

Manche Themen kommen immer wieder, wirken aber nicht immer gleich. Aktuell: Women in Computing. Losgetreten hat es anscheinend dieses mal Clay Shirky, ich habs bei Tim Bray gelesen und, wie häufig, empfinde ich Tim's Meinung als ganz treffend.

While doing some diagrams, and checking out tools to do so, I am reminded of a saying attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from".

Really, there are some diagramming standards I now encounter that I have never even remotely heard of before, and probably rightly so. A small selection, to date:

On Tuesday I finally put up the talk slides from the EBS-RO09 workshop. This has taken a while, as upon returning from the IROS, I immediately buried myself in the preparations for our final project demo in early November. And now, of course, its writing time ;-)

Durch Zufall bin ich letztens über den "Shotwell"-Photomanager gestolpert und der sah sehr schlank und leicht aus, was mich interessiert hat. Heute war dann die Gelegenheit zum Test und das bisherige Fazit ist: Super, nehm ich, selbst schon in der aktuellen 0.3er Version ;-)

Von Brian kam gerade ein Link zu dieser Analyse der Probleme von Starbucks. Kurz gesagt: Die Leute sind genervt, dass ihre Einkaufsstraßen alle gleich aussehen, sowie besorgt, dass sie nicht "individuell" genug sind und wollen jetzt wieder lokale Läden. Starbucks versucht dem zu begegnen indem sie ihre Läden individuell einrichten und nach dem Ort an dem sie stehen benennen, aber das ist halt nicht "echt" und entsprechend funktioniert es nicht.

I normally shy away from fearful "what if" scenarios, but this time, I could not resist. This post in short: On the one hand, vehicle monitoring for government toll collection is vehemently opposed. On the other hand, people are enthusiastically picking up Google's free turn-by-turn navigation, which just happens to be online and GPS-based all the time. Anyone see a connection?

These guys obviously had fun doing their paper. I am usually sceptical about the real-world applicability of computer vision algorithms, but I can immediately see the value their algorithm has for geeks who regularly tele-conference or work from home. Check it out and you'll see what I mean ;-)

Last week was spent at the IROS 2009 conference in St. Louis, MO. When starting this conference report, I realized that IROS has been a conference of repetitions for me:

Tim Bray has started (another) interesting concurrency discussion over at his blog. While, to me, he was originally "that XML guy", I soon learned that cares a lot about concurrency. One of the big things he started was the "Wide Finder Project", a language comparison with submission by lots of people.