Pat Cullen

Recently I installed Fedora 10 and ran into some difficulty trying to install the correct drivers for my graphics card - a GeForce 6800. After much searching, and re-installing a couple times, I found these simple steps to be my answer.

Firstly from http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1114769&postcount=1:

su
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i386 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64
reboot

Then of course I wanted the CompizFusion desktop effects.
From http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?title=Main_Page#Applications

su -c 'yum -y install compiz-fusion-extras libcompizconfig ccsm compiz-manager libcompizconfig'
su -c 'yum -y install compiz-fusion-extras-gnome fusion-icon-gtk'
compiz-manager

This took my Fedora 10 out the box, from being pretty good to looking flippen great!

Recently I installed Fedora 10 and ran into some difficulty trying to install the correct drivers for my graphics card - a GeForce 6800. After much searching, and re-installing a couple times, I found these simple steps to be my answer.

Firstly from http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1114769&postcount=1:

su
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i386 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64
reboot

Then of course I wanted the CompizFusion desktop effects.
From http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?title=Main_Page#Applications

su -c 'yum -y install compiz-fusion-extras libcompizconfig ccsm compiz-manager libcompizconfig'
su -c 'yum -y install compiz-fusion-extras-gnome fusion-icon-gtk'
compiz-manager

This took my Fedora 10 out the box, from being pretty good to looking flippen great!

Yesterday I bought my first digital photo frame. It's a Kodak W1020. It has its ups and downs (imho), and I've been stirring up some ideas for this new gizmo of mine.

The major ups:

• It's wireless
• It reads from media rss streams

Without too much hassle I plugged in the power, latched into my home wireless network, and had connected to my Flickr account. Soon after I connected to the open net the frame asked if I wanted to upgrade my firmware - I did so and it was painless and easy; I would reccomend doing this.

My major downs:

• My second button on the vertical menu does not work. Darnit!! Most of the time it is used as a play button and I can get around not having it... but its just damned annoying.
• Minimum change time of 3 seconds... would like it to be smaller (I'll explain why later).
• I cannot get my (vertical) images to 'Fill screen'? (Image's can either leave space either side or get cropped in order to fill display real estate.. I prefer fill screen)

So I'm happy with the purchase but I think they've got a couple things to fix for the firmware upgrades.

Congrats and crits aside.. Here's my latest idea: Since the frame can read and display images from a properly formatted media-RSS feed, host such an RSS service on a machine on the same local network as the frame.

This RSS feed could/would be the aggregation of interesting media sources such as my Flickr stream, my contacts photos, youtube videos, etc. Further more I would like to be able to plugin RSS feeds that provide small amounts of textual info, like microblogging feeds or news headlines. The textual info should be rendered to an image, which is then cached on the stream server, and can then be picked up by the digital frame.

This is all a means to an end. The main idea here is that now I can write a small app that polls my email accounts. Then when I get an email I can push an alert to a text rss stream, which will feed into my RSS engine thingy, render the relevant picture, and ultimately get displayed on my digital picture frame sitting in front of me on my desk.

Further down the line I thought it would be great to hook the frame up to my VOIP client. So as I get a call, the frame should display who's calling me with a pretty picture of them. The problem here is latency of the picture change on the frame. 3 second changes for something more realtime as this is not practical. One last idea,.. Winamp plugin: on song change - display song details?..

The more I develop this idea in my head the faster it grows - cant wait to make this (or for someone else to make it first).

It seems the web is awaking to the concept of interoperability between service providers. I read somewhere, and so true it is, that it's ironic how, in a sense service provision is returning to the 'mainframe'. The web as a platform offers so many advantages over the desktop platform, but in many regards the desktop is still the home to the user. So; how can we get the web up to speed - not to replace the desktop, but to be as comfortable, secure and integrated as the desktop? What do we need? What does the user want? What do I want?
Here's a couple of ideas... It's not an exhaustive list; It's just some ideas.
The web in the future:

• Everything is open
• Everything is decentralized
  
• User space is shared and accessible
  
• The user has control of their own information
  

So How do we decentralize our systems in an open manner?
Security and data integrity is a critical issue shaping the web. Decentralization and openness always comes coupled with policies and procedures. So how do we share personal and business intelligence in a fair and controlled manner? If a user has permission to view or mash information on one system, how can we securely let him reference that information from another system? (I realize this is a paragraph of questions,...)
It is becoming more frequent to perform more of our daily work functions online; The trend of remote storage and processing is undeniable. The internet computing cloud is storming. I myself do not store email, pictures, video or music on my local computer; All of these are provided by -free- online services. In my work environment 4 out of the 6 regular applications I use all reside on the intranet.
Another interesting thing to watch is the commercial adoption of social engineering (or more generally any 'Web2.0') platforms. Work environments, at least the ones I've worked in, either embrace the evolving web, or try and firewall it out. I always enjoy hearing of success stories from organisations that have embraced the evolving web; One of the examples that spring to mind is that of the micromessaging arena. Many companies now use Twitter et al to communicate within their organisation - and find it very effective. There are now many comercial micromessaging platforms that offer packages to willing corporates that want the paid support. So what - Why am I mentioning this?

I believe the web is the dominant application domain now - and if your industry doens't fit into this rather swooping statement then, I beg to argue, that it most likely will in the future. Now I can either be in the company that waits to see what happens with the web and design my business around accordingly, or I can storm ahead and be on the forefront of the evolving web platform. Gotto admit - I prefer setting trends rather than following them.
What do I want my web platform to be? As a starting point I'm just going to throw together another list. This will be a few things that I would like to see out of a web framework, and the web in general. [Some are slightly redundant, but I thought it coloured in the picture nicely]

• I, as a user, want control.
• As a user, when I open my browser (or log on to the internet per say), I want to have access to all my information, all the time.
  
• I need a clear entry point or a mechanism to manage my online life.
  
• I want a platform that will abstract (hence simplify) the communication between different flavours of the same product type.
  Example: Which Instant Messenger do you use? AIM, Gtalk, Skype, SIP, Gizmo, XMPP? What about your friends? This issue has been cordially addressed with the applicaiton of XMPP and multi-protocol clients, but this is an example of the open web and the need to find common ground between service providers.
  
• I want to be able to choose where I store my personal data and for that data to be seemlessly accessible from everywhere else I go.
  Exmaple: If I'm at work, I do infact want to set my web-desktop background to that picture of my wife and kids. Sure some business policies will prohibit personal data accessability, but for those work environments that aren't so, dare I say 'old-school', as to lock down everything, I want this accessability.
  
• I want clear ownership of some of my information.
  Example: I want to store my financials and budgets on my FTP server at home, but these should be as readily available to myself, as my online photo album. [And no,.. I don't want to carry around a portable FTP client on USB.] I want a web-desktop that seemlessly integrates with my online data, and my personal data at home.
  
• Some people are technical,... some are not. This is a fact of life. If the system does fit a decentralized model, the take-home installer should be simple to setup.
  I want to addon to my web desktop system and code new plugins - My sister does not; She just wants to click once and install - Furthermore, my mother doesn't understand what installing is, she just wants to logon to a hosted solution.
  
• My web-desktop system I host at home, the one I subscribe to online, and the one we use at work should in some manner communicate and synchronize.
  
• I want to access my web-desktop from a plethora of different devices; Such as my computer, mobile phone, UMPC, or any other capable computing device.

Well some might say that these things are highly improbable. How will the world accept such infusion between all of a persons online life?

Will business's ever let me have access to my personal desktop (or portions thereof) at work?

How many end users actually understand the concept of decentralization? (Few would be my guess.) I tried to explain OpenID's to my wife once and she could not see the purpose of it.Worst case scenario,.. lets just wait for my generation to pass. I would put money on it that in ten years every site will be OpenID enabled. The problem with most users in this 'internet generation', is that even though we all know how to use a computer , unless there's a need to know, we don't want to. It seems the best time to teach a generation of users new concepts, is in their infancy. In some ways this makes me sad that the digital-experience I yearn to have will only really become a reality for the next generation.

So what do I want?
I want a desktop for the web. A platform for integrating all my online escapades into a web platform. My very own personal web desktop.

So this is what I've managed to do with some simple image comparison thus far... I've repackaged it all to try make some sense of it; The sample apps reside in com.b22222.app.webcam; The most informative app probably being WebCamState.java

I've simply zipped my source folder. I use eclipse at this present time and have left my project settings file in the archive. The sample apps require java's JMF to be installed on the system.


What are my goals?
I want to design some kind of (physical) contact free input system; This system should be as functional as, or more than the standard keyboard and mouse. Now that's the main goal... A bunch of other possibilities have come alive since I've been tinkering around. I can now set my camera facing the front door and get email alerts at work (with pictures of the culprit) when motion is detected at home. I've also got plans in the pipe to design a kinetic sculpture that reacts to motion in front of it. The list continues.

Where am I now?
I can continually read from a live stream of webcam video and dismantle the picture into more pliable data. With this data I can pick up motion hotspots, primitive edge detection (particularly bad on blunt edges), and some noise reduction. All this is demo'ed in the attached library of code. Please keep this in mind that I develop in spare time by myself who has never studied image or video in large depth - I mostly only design as much I need to progress onto my next goal.

Most general application settings end up in my settings.ini file. This might be a good place to start tinkering with values if you want to poke and prod my library. I had tried to use a neural network to interpret webcam input but it never really worked. I have left my code there in case I revisit that idea. The neural net library I used is called Joone and is freely downloadable.

Details of how I dismantle an image:
Although I have copied the code in several places throughout, the best piece of code to reference this process is probably com.b22222.routine.ImageHelper.
A BufferedImage (Raw Image pixel data) is drawn from the webcam source. This image is converted into what I called a State object. A State is simply a 2d array of integers. At the moment this array represents the brightness on the pixels from the image. (I plan to somehow incorporate hue difference into this as well in the future.) From here you should partly forget that you are working with images, but rather arrays of numbers. I did this so that from here our code could be used for any map of numbers - Say cloud patterns, or temperature maps. (Not that I ever intend to go down this road myself)

A Comparison is an object drawn from the difference of two States. If I remember correctly I just subtracted one array from the other. We now have a new array of numbers representing the difference between to images. This may help two fold; a) I'm obviously searching for motion, and b) if 70% of an image rarely changes then we want to consciously ignore it.

Next a primitive EdgeDetector object can process the change map to emphasize the edges of island and lines. This is not an essential stage and could quite likely be taken out if it is silencing too much useful data.

After that I found two statistics of the data in the array: The average, and the *standard-deviation. Then using these multiplied by factors specified in the settings file, if the value in the array is not greater than the average + std-dev, then it is set to zero. This helps clean up small noise generated through subtle light differences, etc.

The array that is now left contains data that is somewhat usefull to me. And hopefully you :-)

*Ps: I always mixed up standard deviantion and variance. It's one of the two. I think.

This can all be seen in action in the com.b22222.app.webcam.WebCamState class.
Instructions for use: Run the app. Wait for the video feed to register in the left window. (Mine usually takes a few seconds). Then click the left button titled 'Capture Base Image'. This will set the image to compare against for motion detection. Now click the right button titled 'Start Compare...'.

Here is a demo of when I tuned my settings to pick up my black pen against a white wall. (The red circles are rendered onto the image in areas of interest. The double green circle is the center of gravity of the points of interest)


What do I plan on doing next?
Creating a more 'opaque' input interface. This interface would expose some events and hide all of the workings by the libraries described above. This interface will most likely provide some kind of coordinate information. I would also like to provide, but have no idea how, a polygon best representing the image input.

Long term?
I'm thinking of a menu/list based input system. A user would navigate from menu to menu choosing options which would either automate keyboard input or mouse input. This is in part a resignation because I don't think getting pixel perfect mouse positioning will be viable with webcam input; but storing keyboard/mouse inputs in templates, sequences and menus could reduce work for repetitive actions normally done on these devices.