I’ve been interested in processing images off of a web cam for a while but I haven’t had the ability to do it until now.  I have been banging my head against the wall trying to install openCV for too long but was never able to figure out how to compile even the most basic app because all of the documentation was out of date.  That changed when I found a You Tube video to guide me through the process.

Once I did that, and remembered how to program in C++ (I’ve been using C# for over a year now – I’m a bit rusty) it only took me a couple hours of reading documentation to write a basic app that does edge detection of a web cam image in real time.  It’s still not perfect and it’s night time so the low light is throwing it off, but it worked out well.  I just have to find out how to reduce the background noise and I’ll be able to do more with it.

It seems to be pretty good at tracking eyes. I just need to figure out how to tell which edges are the eyes and which are the outside of the head.

I borrowed a power meter from the Library the other day and tested my new computer with it. It used less power then I thought it did. The box draw a max of 260W, but it was the monitor that really stumped me. Standby mode does absolutely nothing to the power usage when the computer is on.  Has anyone else out there had a similar experience?

I managed to complete Dirty Split yesterday. It’s a short game, but it’s fun and the voice acting is really well done. The puzzles got a little frustrating in parts, but they were all solvable without looking up the answer in an online walkthrough. Some times game developers seem to throw in puzzles which require a lot of random clicking if you don’t think exactly the same way as them. One thing I would have liked to have seen was at least the appearance of choices if not actual choices. You run through all the options until there are no more and then you move on to talking to the next person. It would have been nice to see some side quests of some sort. Maybe in their next game.

On a side note, on April 1st Microids announced that Syberia 3 is on its way. While it was an April Fools joke, I hope they’re working on it. I’d love to see another part to the story. If you get a chance to play the first two they’re a little slow, but well worth playing.

I’ve been on the look out for an Adventure game engine which will enable me to just focus on a story and graphics without messing around with a programming language and I just happened across one while searching for something unrelated.

Wintermute looks promising.

The interface leaves a little to be desired, but it appears as if it is capable of creating a 2D or 2.5D adventure game.  I haven’t tried importing the raincoat girl yet, but the 2D portion of it looks like it works.  I was able to create a simple room in which the default character could walk around and as it walked into the screen, it automatically scaled in size.

Try out Dirty Split. Its built using Wintermute and it’s pretty good. The art in it is much better then the default stuff that comes with the engine.

Here is V1.0 of my Deviant Art RSS feed gadget.  It doesn’t have that many features, but it gets the job done.

[Download the Gadget]

Simply find a collection on Deviant Art which you like, take the RSS page URL and paste it into the settings dialog box. You can set the time that you would like each image to show up in milliseconds and if you want any adult images to show up or not. Click OK and it should just start with the latest images first. When it hits the end, it will cycle back to the start.

I visited the AGO today to check out the building now that the new renovation is done and I noticed that they have these little touch screens beside some of the paintings which have a half phone attached to them so that you can listen to audio describing the works. You can also dial a 1-888 number and then enter a three digit code to listen to the same audio on your phone.

As it turns out, with my luck, I came across one that crashed. It dropped out of the audio application and back into Windows Mobile. Internet Explorer showed that it was running some sort of Asus hardware with GPS ability.  I tried, but it didn’t have a net connection.  My guess is it was something along the lines of this or this in landscape mode.

Followup:  Just in case you feel like hearing about a random work of art, the phone number is 1-888-244-4184.  Enter 210# if you want to hear about St. Johns Head or any other random 3 digit number followed by a number sign.

I ran into a snag the other day with my Gadget and was forced to look into using a debugger.  Unfortunately, I was unable to figure out how to do it with Visual Studio Express for Web Developers.  If anyone knows how please let me know.

I did however find another way to write out messages and it’s a lot cleaner then the VBScript from JavaScript method.  The trick is to follow the instructions here and install a small application from Sysinternals which shows debug messages.  After thats done you can write to the window by typing System.Debug.outputString(msg); in your script. It’s no debugger, but it’s useful none the less.

I feel dirty.

Vista Gadgets have disabled Alert and Confirm dialog boxes to avoid annoying end users, but when they did this it also made it hard to quickly debug the gadgets as there is no easy way to output exactly what is going on.  Yes, I could install Visual Studio and use its debugger, but I’m lazy right now and just want to know the value of a string.  I tried writing to a <div> but it was problematic because I didn’t know if the issue was I just couldn’t see the <div>, it wasn’t writing to it, or the data was an empty string.

The solution was to call Visual Basic from JavaScript.  Icky, but it worked.  While Microsoft stopped JavaScript alerts from working on the desktop, apparently they forgot to stop Visual Basic from loading MsgBox dialogs in the same instance.  It’s not a bug.  It’s a feature!

I’m working on a custom Gadget for Vista which reads in RSS feeds from Deviantart.com and displays images in the sidebar.  It’s an Automatic image browser.  Just watch it and it hunts down new images to look at.

I decided to use jQuery to get to know it better and ran into an annoying snag.  DA stores its image information in a custom media namespace and jQuery was ignoring it.  I made some progress with Withering Tree’s solution which was:
$(this).find("[@nodeName=zc:location]").text()

But it stopped working at some point.  In the end this is the code that worked:
var content = this.getElementsByTagName("media:content");

It didn’t even use jQuery, just standard DOM calls.  I have a couple more features I have to get right before I can show off version 1.0, but it should hopefully be coming along soon.

A couple days ago I noticed that the fans on my case weren’t shutting off when the computer was put to sleep at night and it got very annoying after about 10 minutes of listening to them.  I traced back through what I had installed on the computer in the last day, printer drivers appeared to be the culprit, so I uninstalled them and shut down again.  Nothing changed.

After some searching on Google I found out that people were having issues with Windows Media Player.  Apparently it wants to be able to play a video even if the machine is in sleep mode, so it keeps the fans running.  And it just so happened that I saved an image to the Pictures folder.  I guess I triggered something by storing a photo there.

To stop the fans in this case, this is what you do.  Go to the control panel.  System and Maitanence.  Power Options.  Change Plan Settings for the setting that you are currently using.  Change advanced power settings.  Multimedia settings -> When sharing media -> Setting: Allow the computer to sleep.

Put your machine into sleep mode and your fans should stop.