Fruitbox

I know I haven’t blogged much, but I decided to at least share what is going on. I am currently finishing up a course report to obtain my degree, and meanwhile I am employed as a research engineer at EISLAB working on the seeing wheelchair project.

When I get a new computer, one of the tools I consider essential is R. It is lightweight and free, and when doing small numerical calculations which come up now and then, it is much more effective than the standard calculator program. Not only can you easily do long chains of calculations, but you can name your results (numeric variables) and if you need to, you have access to powerful statistical functions. It is also relatively easy to write small custom functions in the R programming language, and thus it is more than enough for simple numerics. When working with pure numbers, the basic data visualisation functions are also excellent (histograms, plots, etc), and additional packages can easily be downloaded to R.
R can also do many things out of the box that Excel can’t, BUT I recently found out when to use Excel. When it comes to data visualisation that is beyond the scope of R’s predefined functions, things get really cumbersome in R. If you want a diagram with dates, and want multiple lines in the same plot, or want to customise labels, Excel is by far easier to work with. These things are certainly doable in R, but you often have to dig deep to achieve the exact presentation you want. This is because you will have to override the nice automatic helpers that R gives you with its standard plotting functions. If, however, you want to do some normality tests, time-series analyses, regression analysis or neural network modelling, R is excellent.

By the way, other tools I quickly install on a new PC include MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter. The only time I fire up Word is if I want to do some quick and out-of-conventional-style (read: dirty) design work (a greeting card maybe). Oh wait, WordPad might suffice for that purpose.

In this blog post I’d like to talk about a particular book I’ve finished reading. I read a lot (a huge lot), mostly sci-fi or fantasy, and some non-fiction.
I just finished reading the 13th and next-to-last book in the Wheel of Time series, Towers of Midnight, by Robert Jordan with Brandon Sanderson. This series is so enormous, and has been written over multiple decades. In a couple of years the last book will be out, and this huge series will come to an end.
After Robert Jordan’s death, the future of the series was uncertain, but Brandon Sanderson was chosen to finish it, and he has done a great job so far. I do like Brandon’s other works as well, particularily the Mistborn series of fantasy books.
This book, Towers of Midnight, started out a bit slow I thought, but in the end a lot of things happened that needed to happen, and now we’re ready for the last book. One thing that’s interesting about this series is the huge amount (almost 2000 I believe) named characters. The plot is told in turn from a lot of different character’s point of view, even from the “bad guys” point of view, which is quite interesting. However, this also makes the books quite slow, however, when something big happens, it’s really big!
Also, this book actually has a movie trailer (see below).

As can be seen from the dates on my posts, I blog very little. I do however like to write, so why aren’t I blogging more? The answer is probably that I don’t have much to blog about. Sure, I could blog about all sorts of strange things going on in my head, but I don’t know about that. I don’t want the blog to be like a diary either. I actually don’t write a diary, but sometimes when going back in the blog archives I think that it would be fun to have a diary. So what I am trying to do now is gathering all the information in one place. I have a lot of photos, movies and sound clips stores for several years, I have articles and such I have written for courses, and I have my many sites (blogs, twitter, etc). I would like to be able to go to one place and look at, say, april 2009, what happened then?

The first thing I need is a real homepage, with ONE blog having multiple categories. I need to look into that some day…

If you use a high DPI setting, and you experience a problem where fullscreen applications / games still display the taskbar at the bottom, I have found a solution. I had initially thought this to be the new desktop window manager’s fault, and so I usually went into the compatibility tab of the application in question and ticked all the boxes. It turns out though that this problem is caused by the DPI setting, and so ticking the box to disable high DPI scaling for this application is enough to hide the taskbar. Strange, but it works.

If you have a Microsoft mouse and want to use the IntelliPoint software, you should know that it is at the moment not working with the Windows 7 magnifier. If you right-click on the desktop or left-click on the start button for instance, the magnifier closes. If you need the driver but can go without the software, you can just disable the ipoint process from starting with Windows. This can be done with msconfig. Never go into the mouse settings dialog though, because ipoint will start and the magnifier will quit. If this happens, closing ipoint in task manager helps.

Instead of clicking on the items you have pinned to the taskbar, you can run/switch to them using their application number. The one on the left gets number 1, the next 2 and so on. Press Win+1 to launch or switch to the first, and so on. Handy!

In only a couple of months time I will be finishing my undergraduate studies. It is time to look back on some of the various projects I have been involved with both in my studies and on my “free” time.

I have not found my favourite field of computer science yet. All I know is what I don’t like, and that I like theoretical computer science and some applied fields. When it comes to programming, I enjoy trying out clever algorithms. On the more useful note, I have created ClipSpeak, which is definitely the most well known project of mine.

At the university I have done a lot of small projects as part of the various courses. I have simulated some routing algorithms, and written an essay on data packet classification algorithms. I also wrote a paper about how to build a scalable heterogeneous e-conferencing system. When it comes to programming I usually go with the minimum requirements, although one larger project I was involved in was to create a mathematics puzzle site for kids. There have also been numerous lab assignments including working with a WLAN positioning system, writing a compiler and writing an OS kernel. Recently I have done presentations on speech synthesis, mobile human-compuer interfaces and energy-efficient deadline CPU scheduling. In one of my favourite courses, formal languages and theory of computation, I dug into context-free grammars and Turing machine variants.

I will certainly find some of this useful pretty soon when I continue working with the multimodal navigation system. There are actually many things that catches my interest with such a system; Making it pervasive is a challenge involving many theoretical aspects as well as human-computer interaction. If a system is gathering data from various sources there has to be good algorithms to interpet, fuse and present that data in a good way. All this is also immediately useful in practice, which is a nice bonus! I would also like to explore machine learning a bit more.

Oh, and I have also learnt R and LaTeX, tools that I now MUST have access to.

I have set up a project blog for my work on multimodal navigation. Currently I am doing my master’s thesis in this field.

See Multimodal Navigation.

Aardvark (at vark.com) has a very interesting idea: You ask a question about anything, and Aardvark will try to find the right person to answer it. It is great for some answers that are hard to get out of a regular search engine. I recently received an e-mail stating that Google has acquired Aardvark. This is very interesting; Yet a new kind of “search” for Google!

High DPI enables applications to look bigger despite the high screen resolutions of today’s monitors. Applications that are declared “DPI-aware” will be enlarged according to the settings in the DPI dialog. Applications that are not DPI-aware can be enlarged if you disable “Use Windows XP style scaling” in the advanced DPI settings dialog. This works great in most cases.
There is a major problem though, which is that when you have a program set to start automatically with Windows, it can happen that the application is launched before the DPI settings are enabled, thus you end up with a small application, which can only be enlarged again if you exit and start the program again.

Yes, exciting news! Check out this article on S60 Betalabs:
http://nokia-betalabs.blogspot.com/2010/01/nokia-makes-walk-drive-navigation-free.html

Is your computer taking a very long time to boot, in particular does it stay loading at the welcome screen after you’ve selected the user? This can, oddly enough, be caused by the desktop wallpaper. If you have selected a solid color instead of a background image this can (will always?) happen. The solution: Use a wallpaper. If you’d like to have a solid color background, you can create an image in Paint containing just that. A stupid workaround, but it works.

The magnifier in Windows 7 is much more useful than that found in previous versions of Windows. You can simply press Win_+ to zoom in and Win_- to zoom out. There are also less known shortcut keys that are nevertheless very handy, like Ctrl_Alt_i for inverting colors and Ctrl_Alt_Space to peek at the desktop. Now what is rarely mentioned is that you can use the AltGr key instead of the Ctrl_Alt combo, which is much more comfortable if you for instance want to invert colors with one hand.

I just finished uploading ClipSpeak 1.5 to various places. Check it out on CodePlex!