• VLFeat

    This computer vision library has a couple nice, readable implementations of features. It seems to have a C library component and a MATLAB component, but a number of the useful functions are only available from MATLAB. This would be useful to test out a MATLAB source-to-source compiler.

  • iOnRoad is a phone application that watches the road ahead of a driver and gives warnings. In the future, this is the sort of stuff that should probably be integrated into the cars themselves.

    Interesting use of computer vision. However, having it running for long periods of time might cause the phone to overheat and quickly drain the battery. Some sort of embedded FGPA coprocessor would be wonderful for dashcams.

  • I've been listening some more to Get 'Em Out by Friday by Genesis. Interesting comment in the Wikipedia article:

    The song uses elements of reality and science fiction as a means of social criticism on the corporate greed and oppression of the UK's private landlords in the 1960s and 1970s,

  • The recent GoldieBlox ad in the SuperBowl led me to thinking about other STEM toys and I was reminded of the build-it-yourself kits from companies like Heathkit. Apparently Heathkit is returning to making kits and ran this IAmA on reddit in December: IamA member of the Heath Company ("Heathkit") Board of Directors. AMA! : IAmA.

  • Fun set of images imagining a Bruce Lee action figure making breakfast.

  • Neat podcast about d3.js: Data Stories #22: NYT Graphics and D3 with Mike Bostock and Shan Carter - Data Stories

  • This morning I woke up to a resolved bug report that I filed not too long ago. Apparently the URI::Title package has a new maintainer. Awesome!

  • Mathematical Expression Recognition is a demonstration of a tool for recognising handwritten mathematical formulae online. Even though I'm using a mouse to draw things out, it's really good at picking up things such as fractions, summations, and integrals, but it can't do partial derivatives and matrices yet.

  • My friend Michael pointed me to a cool online game called ROBLOX that uses Lua to program an open-world. This reminds me of Second Life (which uses its own scripting language) which is interesting because one of the people at ROBLOX, Dylan Bromley, used to work at Linden Lab.

  • Pixel Shakers is an aggregator of several blogs on computer vision.