Archives of Life

Testing 3 modern face detection libraries (face.com, openCV, libccv)

As a research project months back Balthazar and I tested 3 modern face detection libraries (definitely see Balthazar’s write-up). Face.com had just been acquired by facebook, they had a great and free service which annotated not just face locations but also sex, age and emotion. We also tested OpenCV (popular and free) and the lesser […]
11 years ago

StartupChile (Round 2.1) all finished, thoughts

The odd thing is that I’ve been trying to write this post for 3 months. Having started and stopped several times (including during the flight back from Chile on Oct 15th) I figure I ought to put something out. The journey was, it turns out, somewhat of a roller-coaster ride. Early in January Kyran Dale […]
11 years ago

aMaking “from lxml import etree” work with virtualenv (Python)

Update – these steps are overly complicated and *unnecessary*! See fizyk and Marius’ comments below. I’ll leave this post just in case it helps anyone – hopefully anyone coming here will realise it isn’t hard (now) to install lxml, as long as the OS dependencies are installed I use virtualenv for all development. Recently I […]
11 years ago

Kinect depth maps and Python

I had the opportunity to play with a Kinect over the weekend, I wanted to test out depth mapping using the built in infra red cameras. Using a structured light approach is different to the stereopsis approach I was looking at with Kyran recently. Using the open source drivers for Ubuntu I quickly got the […]
12 years ago

Using ZeroFree to shrink a VirtualBox Linux Image

My development Ubuntu image inside VirtualBox was using too much space to store empty but non-zero disk blocks on its virtual drive. This sucked space from my laptop’s SSD (which is already not big enough!). Shrinking it by zeroing the blocks took a little bit of effort. Inside VirtualBox if I boot my Ubuntu 11.04 […]
12 years ago

Encouraging Online Privacy

I’ve begun to think on the increasing need for improved online privacy. Once upon a time my mum’s communications didn’t occur on the Internet, now they routinely do. Once upon a time I had a reasonable idea about how secure my communications were, now it seems that governments are doing things like intercepting our SSL […]
12 years ago

Some international flight tips

Having flown a lot recently I’ve discovered that whilst it isn’t super-fun, it is no longer terribly uncomfortable. Maybe the crutches I use are useful to someone else. Water – it turns out that if you buy water in Duty Free they will bag it and carry it onto the plane for you. This avoids […]
12 years ago

Parallel Computing with Python Tutorial at EuroSciPy (end of August)

I’ll be teaching Parallel Computing with Python (abstract to follow) at EuroSciPy on 23rd August 2012 in Brussels. Early bird tickets for the conference are available until July 22nd (even without the 50% discount the cost is still super-low). In my tutorial we’ll work through parallel processing examples on 1 machine with multiple cores and […]
12 years ago

Jailbreaking iOS 5.1.1

I thought it’d be hard but it turns out to be super-easy. In the last hour I’ve jailbroken my iOS 5.1 iPhone 4S by upgrading to iOS 5.1.1 and then running the Absinthe 2.0.4 jailbreak (via here). It seems that iOS 5.1 doesn’t have an untethered jailbreak (only a tethered one – you have to […]
12 years ago

Round 4.1 Demo Morning at StartupChile

I’m sitting here in the Demo Morning for the newly arrived Round 4.1 (4.2 turns up in a few weeks). Here’s a list of the pitches with my (probably too) short descriptions. The Round 5 applications are open, I think applications close this weekend (there’s a long and recent discussion here about the pros and […]
12 years ago