Cibermouse @ RTSS 2008

Right now I’m still sleep deprived having only slept 3h30 – something that happened by accident. I’m also a bit angry because my entry got arbitrarily bumped out of 3rd place by the competition judges. That sucks. Not just for the cash (100 eur) but mostly because it feels like a slap to face. I worked for 1 week non-stop (close to 20h/day for 5 days) and came all the way to Barcelona. I watched with excitement as my agent did better than most in the competition even if it was partially luck (as was for the 2 teams with better scores). And after all the sacrifice, tears and joy I don’t get to go to the final because of an arbitrary decision of a group of people. FUCK THAT. That’s why I dislike the existence of judges in a competition such as this. “Fixing” scores is cheating – regardless of weather it’s done behind the scenes or in plain view. Sigh. I guess it was too much for the final round to be 2 Portuguese teams, 1 Italian and none from the USA.

And worse, both of the entries from FEUP were from undergrads who only had 1 week to work on this while many of the other teams were from people who had masters and phds and the italian guy that got 2nd place was an associate professor and had 1 month to work on it (and said he thought it wasn’t enough in his presentation).

Oh well. At least the team that won was from FEUP (Team SpeedyGonzales) and I’m happy for them (congratulations again Alvaro, Fabio and Sara). The other team from FEUP (NetSqueak) sorta gave up so they got merged into my team and presented their results during the first part of my team’s presentation even though their agent wasn’t running in the competition.

My presentation sucked! I fell a sleep and didn’t wake up till 5 min after the competition officially started. I managed to arrive on time and do a few slides but I was way too tired to make a decent presentation.

Since I only had one week to prepare for this (from scratch) that meant 1 day to write the paper, 5 days to write code and 1 day to travel. Unfortunately my initial approach which consisted of using neural networks for motor control was a huge fail and I wasted a day with it. Still, in 4 days I managed to get probabilistic mapping, basic communication, and a bunch of behaviors (though many buggy) written. Apart from what I learned about cibermouse and robotics there’s also the experience of having an even more insane deadline than usual. It’s very much like a real time system: if you cant do it in this amount of time, it’s a fail. You have to give up on certain solutions if they don’t work because you can’t predict how much time it’s going to take you to get it to work while it’s a lot easier to estimate how long it’s going to take to implement a different solution (if you’ve done something similar before).

Honestly, a few minutes before the competition I thought I was going to be the worst entry there. There were so many bugs that remained unfixed that I had to disable a lot of my mouse’s intelligence – hell, during the first run, 2 of my agents crashed and I had to further cripple it by disabling the comunication system for the second run or risk losing points again (crashed agents collide with walls). Most of the entries had no intelligence anyway – at least not in practice. I was expecting to see some really intelligent agents but instead, the ones that did better where the ones closer to plain simple reactive. In fact, the robot that won the thing for SpeedyGonzales was a purely reactive agent (they had two wall followers, two explores and 1 simple reactive agent). Building intelligence into robots is a lot more complicated than I believed it to be. Also why the hell did so few of the entries bother to actually use the damn sensors properly to avoid collisions? Makes no sense.

I spent the past few hours at the hardrock cafe which is pretty much next door (like 30s walk) to the hotel I’m staying at. I liked it, the only other I had been to was the one in Oslo and that one was a HUGE FAIL – when I went there, it didn’t have Rock (they were wacthing football) or “Cafe” (coffee), the machine was broken or something. I was told the one in Lisbon was Bigger & Better (TM) than this one so I’ll have to check it out next time I’m in Lisbon. In the meantime I’m tempted to purchase a tshirt or something.

For the next 2 days I’ll get to see Barcelona (so far I’ve been stuck at the hotel working). So I

Codebits 2008

After the awesomeness that was codebits 07 I actually expeect 08 to be a lot better. It wasn’t imo. It still ranks as Legendary on the my personal scale. Food was a major let down tough

The talks I went too were a disappointment. Even Jack Motif’s XMPP talk was way too introductory for the audience (at least for me). More code less talk? Seriously looking at XML I could read in the damn specification was not fun. But I did get to ask a few questions and talk to Jack Motif and Pedro Melo a bit after the talk which made it worth it. Jack Motif told me to look at Wokkel and said he had written a lot of example code for it. I’ll definitivelly look at it sometime in the near future. And this was the best talk I went. Sadly on the second day I chose to sleep late so I missed Pedro Melo’s and Celso Pinto’s presentations. Both of which I’m told were “teh awesome 4tw” or something like that.

What was suprising is that this year, even though the talks @MAIN looked great on paper, most people went to the talks on the other stages. And judging from my experience they did the right thing – however I have no interest whatsoever in server-side js or web cartooning which seem to have been among the most popular).

Another fail was the super loud Rock Band playing while some of us were trying to code but people seem to have enjoyed it.

82 projects? Holly….! Sadly things run late (fail!) and I had to leave before people finished showing their projects – I’ll have to look at the videos later. A lot of people were doing some pretty cool stuff but sadly didn’t finish in time. As for my stuff, I’ll put it online sometime in the near future when I don’t have better things to do (like study for tomorrow’s exam – pratical code thingy whatever you want to call it… crap by any other name would smell just as bad)

I got to talk a bit with the usual suspects from Lisboa (ended up with an handivi sticker on my macbook) and Porto and also met a bunch of new people from all around (Lisboa, Porto, Aveiro, Coimbra, Faro, …) – some from FEUP! And ofc I learned a few things. I regret not having ended up joining some team and working on some project with more people but I did get to play (literally) with pygame and with django. Both of which I’ve been meaning to actually play with (more than just doing tutorial examples) for like 1yr.

Btw think putting the RFID stuff@codebits for everyone to hack was a brilliant idea. Congrats @ whoever had it. And congrats to the sapo.pt team behind this event. It’s the only one of its kind (and level of quality) here in Portugal. Granted that may not mean a lot but it is a great-omg-you-really-cant-miss-it event imho.

Oh! Got to play around with an EeePC 1000H (or something) and I liked it (thanks dude, whoever you were, I forgot cuz my memory is bad and it works worse without sleep). On coming back, word from relax is that everything (or close enough) on his 901 is now supported by Ubuntu. I dunno if I want one because I really need it or just because it’s a cool gadget and I’m rationalizing my lust. Whatever. I can’t afford it anyway. Not with the ginormous ammounts of money I’m wasting travelling around… this semester I’ll actually spend more time outside Porto than @ the uni… hell yeah! Which brings me to my need to work on my cibermouse stuff both for the Robotics course and for the competition at RTSS08 in Barcelona (yay).

I’m sure I left out a lot of stuff but I’m short on time and patience and this is better than nothing imo.

Twitter – What Would It Take To Migrate

It amazes me that a service that has this much downtime and is so incredibly limited compared to its competition manages to be number 1. I honestly wonder what the competition would have to do to get users to move.

That’s social network lock-in for you.

Sapo Codebits 2008: First Project – irnotify

The first project I’ve made (well technically second since it’s a support lib for another project) is now available (via SVN) at google code – irnotify.

A python library for making notifications. Currently implements notifications via XMPP (Jabber), SMTP (Mail) and Twitter direct messages.

Here’s the example code:

Twitter DM

from twitternotify import TwitterNotify
n = TwitterNotify("twitter.conf")
n.notify("lrei", "How do you feel, Rei?")

XMPP message

from xmppnotify import XMPPNotify
n = XMPPNotify("xmpp.conf")
n.notify("luis.rei@gmail.com", "How do you feel, Rei?")

Alan Kay at TED – A powerful idea about teaching ideas

Alan Kay (wikipedia) – A powerful idea about teaching ideas (TED Talks)

With all the intensity and brilliance for which he is known, Alan Kay envisions better techniques for teaching kids by using computers to illustrate experience in ways -– mathematically and scientifically — that only computers can.

My Future Netbook Or Something

If I ever buy a netbook it needs to have a proper OS. Windows is even more of a joke on a netbook than it is on a normal laptop and since I don’t foresee apple coming up with a netbook in the near future, linux is all that’s left. And no, that crap Asus ships and calls linux is not an option. Windows wannabe Xandros with a lame interface – no thank you. Ubuntu is currently the (only) way to go. And I mean normal Ubuntu not Ubuntu with weird interface (DJ Silly Remix). Sure you can install something like Ubuntu EEE if you have an eee pc or similar but that still might not get all your hardware runing properly plus why did you have to do it yourself? That should’ve been done by the manufacturer imo.

I also find some of the hadware on the current generation of netbooks lacking. There’s nothing that can be done about the SSDs at the moment. They are all slow, low-capacity energy-vampires. One could go with the traditional mechanic drives but that’s soooo last century. The memory is a different story. 512MB is definitively not enough. 1GB is usable but 2GB would be nice. But the biggest let down in my opinion is the battery life. Assuming you don’t stick with windows or the windows wannabe that comes pre-installed, you won’t get past 5h of battery life. And knowing the reviewers and my own careless use of computer resources, that probably translates into 3h in my hands

Granted some may say I’ve missed the point of netbooks. That all netbooks are for is browsing the web, reading email and instant messaging. Nope. That’s just all you can do with the current hardware. Ok the truth is you can do a lot more but you’ll soon run into limitations. Say I want to fire up eclipse and work on my JADE powered project for the Distributed Intelligent Agents course. It’s painfull enough on my macbook I can’t imagine it being bearable on the current crop (read crap) of netbooks.

But that’s not what netbooks are for right? And if it’s just browsing and reading email, an iPhone will do. But work still needs to get done and while my macbook is great for that, I’d still like a more portable option. One I wouldn’t be too afraid to drop/lose. A more task-oriented option (e.g. work on proj A for 2h at a random place with wireless) without the hundreds of applications I keep conveniently open on my macbook would also be nice.

Obviously there are already many options in the market and more to come. But I’m not paying more than 350 eur for one. That’s the price of an eee pc 901. So all I have to do now is wait for another 12 months for it (or rather its sucessor(s)) to reach the kind of hw specs I want and for them to either drop the pseudo-linux or for ubuntu’s netbook support to improve a bit.

Got Handivi

I got my handivi invite yesterday, registered today but I’ll wait until november to start using it. I’ll be out of the country (from the 24th of October to the 3rd of November) and that way I can try it for 1 month by subscribing to TMNs internet service for 1 month (which isn’t exactly cheap at 7.5 eur/mo).

The New Macbooks – October 14 2008

The MB13″ lost it’s firewire and didn’t even get a new USB. Apple hates perfipherals… or more likely Jobs hates cables and mac users pay tthe price for this irrationality. FFS Asus crams 3 USBs into its eeepcs but apple can’t put 3 on a damn 13″ laptop?

Oh and the MBP now has 2 graphics cards but users currently need to logoff to switch between them. Logging off? That’s almost as bad as rebooting… you don’t reboot a mac… the uptime on my MB is usually around 30d, closing applications and opening them again is boring. This is seriously un-appleish.

I’m not a fan of glossy displays but wth I’ll see how these new ones deal with direct sunlight.

Now for the good part: thank god (well, probably just Steve Jobs) they got rid of the extremely bad intel graphics. The new keyboard is a huge improvement for the MBPs and overall the new body looks cooler.

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination Of Jesse James

The last months of Jesse James’s life, from meeting Robert Ford, a 19-year-old who idolizes Jesse, to the day Ford shoots him. Jesse’s a wanted man, living under a pseudonym, carrying out a train robbery, disappearing to Kentucky, and reappearing to plan a bank holdup with Robert and Robert’s brother as his team. The rest of the gang is dead, arrested, or gone from Missouri. Whenever Jesse’s around, there’s tension: he’s murderous, quixotic, depressed, and cautious. Ford wants to be somebody and wants the reward. On April 3, 1882, things come to a head: Jesse is 34, Robert 20. Ford becomes famous, reenacting the shooting on stage, facing down the label “coward,” shot dead in 1892. Written by {jhailey@hotmail.com}

From imdb.

My Rating: 8/10

Amazing soundtrack, beautiful picture. The movie has style and substance. Sadly it is a bit slow and long (160min). I really liked the introduction made by the narrator. Favorite narrator phrase:

Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rains fell straighter, clocks slowed, sounds were amplified.

(“he” being Jesse James)

Sunshine (2007)

A team of astronauts are sent to re-ignite the dying sun 50 years into the future.

imdb.com

My rating: 5/10