Al Hoang

The New Yorker has a nice article describing health care reform. But some interesting tidbits from the article is the discussion on the origins of the the modern health care systems for Britain, Switzerland and France. (Wish there were references to double check besides Wikipedia).

However, one choice quote I really like is:

The reality is that leaders are held responsible for the hazards of change as well as for the benefits.

References

I’ve migrated to the Wordpress setup here.   The manila instance that was running was getting old and decrepit.

Let’s see how this goes

via James Duncan Davidson’s blog

I just took a glance at

photosynch and

am really impressed with the applications of computer vision and image

processing techniques to create a really unique application.

The basic

idea is to take a pile of photos that are related to each other somehow

(imagine taking zillions of pictures of the Taj Mahal from tons of

different places) find similar features in all the images and try to

reconstruct a mock 3d space that shows the spacial relation between

all of your photos. This is really cool as you might be able to create

a very interesting photo tour from your photo collection in a 3d

navigatable space.

Oddly, I was trying to come up with a similar idea to link videos stills

in QuickTimeVR movies and try to use the linkable features in QuicktimeVR

to provide clickable hotspots that would take you to another photo that

was a picture of the same scene however this is far slicker and if it works

with very little intervention from the user besides pointing to a pile

of photos and letting it do its job that would be great.

However, there are still caveats. The whole process takes hours or days

to currently do and the current technology preview is only for a pre-rendered

project. The true acid test will be in my opinion the ability to

just point to a folder of pictures and have it do its job with as little

possible human intervention as possible. That is a not a trivial problem

but I’m sure we’ll see something interesting especially since it has

two (very well)

known researchers

in the computer vision field. I’m really looking forward to the results

of their labor. My last question is how many technologies behind this

are patented already. It’d be great if it an OSS implementation inspired

from this project could be made however patents are a sticky problem.

Try it yourself

( 6 or 7 REQUIRED)

This is awesome. I won’t ruin it for you by posting more than the link.

Check it out

Interesting article on trying to keep your technical architects around

as they are the ones that have the scars from war stories and have built

up experience on leading the project in the right direction

But cynically speaking, what company is ever going to see the wisdom in that.

Right? I mean keeping an old fart around on the payroll that might save

you a significant chunk of change is just too forward looking…

Read it yourself

From the article…

Seems once again Sony missed the target market by a decent amount again.

One of these days they’ll hit the right combination again. But it seems

as usual, their engineers are a little out of touch with the target market.

Read it yourself

I’m trying to get cvsync running on cygwin

and after looking at the homepage. There didn’t seem to be that many

straightforward instructions nor is there a package in the default

cygwin repository. Bummer.

So I took a shot and tried downloading the tarball and compiling it.