Bradwii

Well, I finally got my hands on a Nintendo Wii! If you aren't familiar with the system, it's cool because of its slick user interface. I've always been a fan of good UI design (go figure, I am a Mac user after all...), but Nintendo really got it right with this one. The litmus test? Mom and Al play Tennis, Bowling, and Golf on it all the time! I never thought my mom would become a gamer. Of course, I should have taken the hint when she started playing DDR with me...

Anyway, the Wii Remote, or "Wiimote," has a three-axis accelerometer built-in, as well as absolute positioning on-screen as a pointer thanks to a light bar and IR communications. The remote also speaks Bluetooth, so there's no messy wires to get in the way. That is, unless you bring in your other hand with the Nunchaku controller. Not all games use it, but it adds a D-stick, two triggers, and another gyro. Zelda makes pretty good use of it, and it's integral to Boxing.

Oh, and it has 802.11g to connect to my home network and has a decent web browser based on Opera.

Now if only we can teach Al not to charge the TV when he wants his Mii to charge the net in Tennis!

Happy Holidays!

I'd like to wish everyone safe and happy holidays, and a joyful and productive new year!

There's a lot to do in 2007. I anticipate building my first integrated circuit for my thesis project, watching Dexter's AI and sensor systems come together, and having good time in general.

Cheers!

Don't worry!

Tech support kitty is too cute.

Got my laptop back!

It was returned to me this morning along with the rest of my stuff. Oh, happy day!

In other news...

I'm in the Observer this week! (But Dexter is the real star...)

Case enters DARPA challenge

My laptop walked away

Sigh, it's been a long day. Here is the post that went out to the department, it pretty much sums it up.

-Bradley

-----

I am asking everyone to please keep watch for a black leather bag which was left in Olin 314 about 11am this morning (11/9/06). The bag contained several notebooks, a USB thumb drive, a laptop, a digitial camera, and some other things. The most important thing is the notebooks which contained all Bradley Farnsworth's research data for his Master's thesis!!!

Please keep watch for this black bag and the contents in case they have been dumped somewhere around the department or anywhere on campus. If you have any information about the location of the bag or its contents (ESPECIALLY THE LAB NOTEBOOKS!!! ) please contact Bradley Farnsworth or campus security. If anyone has the bag, it or any of its contents may be dropped off in the EECS Department's central office in Glennan 321, no questions asked!

Thanks,

Dr. M.

Dexter - DARPA Urban Challenge

Who's that sexy beast? Why, it's Dexter, the representative of Team Case in the DARPA Urban Challenge (Wiki with nice Dexter pics)! Check out some Nova footage (look for Team ENSCO). He's come all the way from Ensco in Virginia to come live in the Bingham building at Case! I'm working on Dexter's image processing and computer vision systems (along with the normal research fun...) It's a neat project and I'm glad I can get involved. If you'd like to meet Dexter up close and personal, let me know... or come to Case's Almni Week!

"Regular" Expression

Ah, I love Case. The controversy never ends! Case has erected a new "expression" wall near Thwing, without any fanfare or even much more than murmuring. (Because Cleveland doesn't have enough graffiti already, duh!) Well, now it has a "regular" expression on it. Yeah Case --errr, CWRU-- email!

But seriously. We are just ripping off CMU. Maybe it has something to do with a certain Provost who was a former Dean of Engineering there. Or maybe we just think we're being original... something like the teenager who plagiarizes an author she read in elementary school, but now thinks the ideas are her own. Who knows?

If you want even more nitty gritty, we have a Wiki entry, a Forum thread (or two), and press!

Well, I guess all there is to say is... RIP Steve Irwin!

What if Dubya's serches were leaked with the AOL DB?

This is satire... but it's FUNNY. Enjoy:

Slate Discovers Another AOL Search Record.

Thanks to fark for the link.

For real AOL searches, some of which are funnier and/or scarier... check out this Something Awful link. The ones you want are the "AOL Search Log Specials."

Some new photos posted

Check out my photos on the Case Screensaver site. I posted a few pleasant ones tonight. And if you're at Case, enjoy your first day of class tomorrow! (And I'll see you if you're taking Dr. Mohseni's EECS 600 class).

Case Crime Map

I was speaking to Brian Beck the other day and asked what he's been working on. It turns out, he's writing a web application that uses Google Maps to display locations of crime incidents on the Case campus. He parses the information on the campus security website and pulls down geocoded GPS information from the Case Wiki. It turns out that he spent the better part of a day recently logging the GPS location of the center of every parking lot on campus. Well, somebody has to do it!

What are the nitty gritties? Here's what Brian has to say:

First it tries to grab the wiki page by the location name. This is desirable over grabbing markers.php because the location is often abbreviated (the BRB, for example) and our wiki has lots of redirects for such abbreviations.

If the wiki page doesn't exist or isn't geocoded, it uses a regular expression to search for a street address (or even just a street name). If found, it queries Google's geocoder and only uses the return value if it's an exact match.

So there are a lot of locations missing coordinates from these two methods. I'm going to geocode more locations on the wiki, and probably manually do the rest (things that wouldn't be useful as wiki pages). Or let users give coordinates to the missing ones.

So, there you have it!

SoaP Fun

On Friday night, I saw Snakes on a Plane. I would call it the polar opposite of a "chick flick." My favorite line?

-Remember the first thing you told me?
-What the $#!@ does that have to do with anything?!

Yeah, can't beat that. Plus we all got free posters in exchange for them taking our picture with them. I wonder where those pictures will end up...

It's funny that it only made $13.8M in the box office this weekend. The movie had great Internet hype... but only Internet hype. It was definitely pure fanservice for the 16-30 year old male audience. It was almost as good as Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter.

Going to WWDC!

This weekend, I am heading off to San Francisco with Kara to attend the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) for the second year in a row. I've been fortunate enough to receive a scholarship from Apple to attend. I'm looking forward to unlimited geek-out moments, a glimpse of Apple's new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and hopefully some new Apple hardware (Core-derivative Xeon processors on high-end machines, and possibly Core 2 Duo (Merom) upgrades for iMac or PowerBook. I'm crossing my fingers for built-in virtualization in Leopard, but I will be at least satisfied if Apple finishes its Windows drivers and adds NTFS read/write for Mac OS.

Anyway, wish me safe travels...

Universal Binary Keyserver Available

Hello! If you use the keyserver on an Intel Mac to access Case software center programs (or other keyed applications), you might be interested in this news...

The universal binary version of Keyaccess has shipped:
http://www.sassafras.com/pr/k261ships.html

You can download the new client here:
http://www.sassafras.com/links/clientdownloads.html

Thanks to David Carlin for pointing this out!

Gamedev 2006

Last night I partied with the Case Gamedev 2006 team. I found out that in an alternate world, I am a "death protein." Go figure... anyway, we went to Aladdins for dinner and partied like the old days at Scott's apartment afterwards. We took a nice group photo too, hopefully I'll get that uploaded once I get my hands on it.

My MacBook is Sweet

I've been using my MacBook for a couple of weeks so far... here are my feelings on it. Note: I am pretty critical in this review because I am focusing on the negative aspects of the machine. Overall it is an exceptional notebook, and most of the problems have to do with running Windows on it. It is a sad Mac any day of the week when it has to run Windows... anyway:

1. Dual-Boot is very useful.
I was booted into WinXP for most of the IGVC competition (see below post) for all the robot vision work. The code was written in C++ using Visual Studio 2003 with support utilities written in MATLAB. The MacBook handled some harsh development conditions in stride, even in the WinXP environment. However there are some problems with dual-boot...

2. WinXP is not quite right on the MacBook...
Where should I start? First, Apple hasn't written a trackpad driver for the MacBook under WinXP yet. So, the trackpad is jerky and unresponsive. Wonderful! I'm sure this will get fixed in time, but for now, it is pretty annoying.

Also, the network connection seems to be flaky under Windows. When connecting to a network gateway via one of its wired connections, sometimes after waking from stand-by in Windows, I couldn't reconnect to any of the machines on the network until I not only rebooted, but rebooted into MacOS X and then back to Windows! Argh...

To get the keyboard and mouse working as expected, I highly recommend Input Remapper to get the brightness, eject, and other keys working, as well as a right-click option.

Otherwise, Windows seems to be pretty happy. Of course, the built-in camera doesn't work, but again, that's just a drivers issue.

3. Glossy screen is OK
I had my doubts when I first heard that the MacBook had a glossy (read: reflective) screen as opposed to the matte-type LCDs used on all other models. The screen is pretty nice, actually. There are only a few circumstances where I see distracting reflections in the screen, and those can usually be fixed by adjusting my seating position or changing the angle of the screen. I can also see the screen pretty well outside (probably better than on a matte screen) so that is cool too.

Overall I'm happy with my purchase and would recommend it to anyone who wants a lightweight, powerful, versitile and inexpensive laptop. Of course, if you are getting one, make sure you try out MacSaber. Thank me later.

Intellegent Ground Vehicle Competition

Last weekend, I went to Michigan with the rest of the IGVC Team from Case with our robot, Roberto. We had high hopes of bringing it all together after a month's worth of long days (and nights) trying to get all the robot's systems integrated for our first showing at the competition. We made it so far as to qualify our robot for competition, and we also won $500 for implementing their wireless robot control protocol over UDP. Unfortunately, the USB cable connected to our hub dangled into the chassis of the robot and touched the +24V terminal of the lead-acid battery, which toasted our NI DAQ's, serial-to-USB adapters, digital compass, and the hub itself. We stayed up all night rebuilding, got it to the point where we completed the wireless command challenge, but a subsequent electrical failure killed our replacement DAQ and ended our bid to compete.

Going into next year, we have a much better idea of what challenges we must overcome, as well as a lot of the work already being done. As of Sunday morning, all sensor systems were functional and data was being integrated and logged - we were just nailing down final bugs... with a year to rebuild, we will definitely have a strong showing next year.

I worked with Scott McMichael on the vision system for the robot. I was primarially responsible for integrating vision with the rest of the robot, making sure the vision data was being used properly for mapping and planning, and providing as much functionality as possible given our vision data. Also, since Scott couldn't make it to the competition, I was the resident vision "expert" in case anything went wrong (of course things went wrong!). Vision was up and running well for the competition, but we never got to run the full challenge due to the electrical problems we encountered. Hopefully this summer, we will be able to test robot vision more thoroughly.

MacBook Ordered

Well, I decided to order a new 13.3" widescreen MacBook computer. It should be in next week. Here are the specs:

Intel Core Duo 2.0 GHz

1 GB RAM

80 GB Hard Drive

SuperDrive (Slot-loading DVD Burner)

Gigabit Ethernet

802.11b/g AirPort

Bluetooth 2.0+EDR

Integrated Webcam

It will be able to drive my Apple Cinema Display as well, so that's pretty awesome. I'll post more when I get my hands on it - especially my thoughts on the new glossy screen.

Trip to Put-In-Bay

Above is a picture of me and Jamie in front of Perry's Monument, which recognizes Oliver Hazard Perry's victory over the British in a naval battle in 1813, located in Put-In-Bay, Ohio on South Bass Island in Lake Erie, west of Sandusky and north of Port Clinton. We got to experience the humming lightning rods on top of the monument (time to get off the platform!) and see an awesome view of the whole island - the monument is taller than the Statue of Liberty! The Case senior class of 2006 went en masse to Put-In-Bay on Saturday. Lots of fun! I also got to tour the Heineman's Winery which is located on the island. It was definitely a fun trip!

Mobile Autonomous Soccer-Playing Robots

Mobile Robot Team Alpha: from top center, going clockwise, is me, James, Scott, and Mark. Our robot, Robbie, is in the center. We are sitting in the middle of the autonomous robot soccer playing field. The image is taken from Gort the web-enabled camera we used to recognize the state of the soccer field during the competition. Robbie was completely autonomous and performed really well, scoring many goals on his oppnents, and even making one (intentional) save as a goalie! Robbie's brains were on a PC in the lab, which connected to a HP iPaq strapped to Robbie's back via 802.11g, which issued commands to a Lego RCX brick via a stereo-to-IR adapter and custom-generated audio command files. The class, EECS 396L: Special Topic on Mobile Robots, led by Dr. Wyatt Newman, was very interesting and a lot of fun.

Next on the agenda is to complete Case's submission to the IGVC (Intellegent Ground Vehicle Competition). We are using a lot of the image processing and object recognition code from our soccer-playing robot for this other project.