Interview with TrendPOV

A few weeks ago I received an email from Dr. Amy Vanderbilt with an invitation to appear on the TrendPOV show and chat about Augmented Reality (AR). At that time I was not familiar with TrendPOV, and I learned that this is a one hour web streaming show about certain topics for businesses.

This sounded quite interesting, and so I agreed to participate in this. I prepared a CV and sent my picture. Then I decided that it would be good to update my website. Unfortunately, weeks passed by, and I still had not found the time to prepare a new version of my web presence. So on this Monday I finally began to set up a new Google Site for a new portal to my site(s). Not much time to put any content in, so I placed a link to my site at LeedsMet which contains the most relevant Augmented Reality work.

Then I prepared for the recording of the show, which would take place today, Wednesday, 26.October. I had taken the day off because of our friends from India were here on a visit, and I joined them for a few activities during the day. But then in the evening I went back to my office at LeedsMet and set up everything for the Skype session. I was supposed to call in at 6:50pm. There was still some time, so I some other work. Suddenly I noticed that the EDUROAM WIFI started to fail around 5:50pm. The signal dropped from 5 to 1 - what was going on? It looked as if an access point was powering down... So I tried to use another laptop computer which did have the credentials for the wired Ethernet. A pity, because this meant that I would not be able to use the built-in camera of the first laptop computer. When trying to setup the second laptop computer, I was not able to get the internet going. WIFI was out, and the Ethernet connection kept giving problems regarding the proxi server. I am sure that the credentials were correct - that all had worked fine a few months ago. But now it did not... and so I had to resort to the third option: using the office PC with its two monitors. I rarely use that PC, since most of my work is on the laptop(s). But at least there I got a reasonable internet connection. So the picture here with the four monitors does really not reflect technical sophistication, but actually shows the sad state of an emergency solution.

Then another problem: how to affix the camera on top of the monitor, so that I could look right into it and see the screen at the same time? This webcam did not have a suitable base, so I had to stick it with tape onto the top of the screen. It worked ok then, and I was ready for the show to begin.

I dialed in at 6:50pm. Had a video chat with Dr.Amy first. She was very enthusiastic about the Augmented Reality concepts and was really looking forward to this show. Then the show began. On the skype monitor I only saw a logo, but I heard the show then live, the music, and then Dr.Amy speaking. And then we talked about Augmented Reality for a whole hour. I gave my opinion and assessment about the AR technology. Unfortunately I got carried away and forgot to put a plug for the ongoing ISMAR conference in Basel, something that I actually had wanted to do. And when I talked about the LeedsMet project "Our City, Our Music", I forgot to mention the main proponents Ben Dalton and Megan Smith. But otherwise I think I got everything across.

It was a fun experience!

--- Update 3.November 2011: the video is now live online, see here on the TrendPOV site.

At one point during the recording a slight technical problem happened: in my LeedsMet office, the lights are dimming off, once they do not sense any motion in the room for a certain while. And since I did not move that much while speaking into the camera, the sensing switch-off kicked in a few minutes before the first commercial break, and then the lights dimmed away, and it got quite dark. Fortunately I did have another non-dimming lamp on, which kept my face illuminated, and so I just kept talking as if nothing had happened. Then during the next break I did bring the lights back by getting up, and from then on they stayed on fine until the end.

Problems with Google Chrome

Since Google Chrome came out, I have been using it as my main browser. I like its clean interface which to me is a bit more appealing than FireFox, and its fast loading which beats Microsoft's IE 8. Quite strange that in a recent survey it came out that in the UK the Google Chrome browser only has a share of 5%. But there may be reasons for this, as I too have some issues with this browser which have yet prevented me from making it my default browser: I still have MS IE 8 and Firefox on my computers, just in case something does not appear right. And one thing seems to be the handling of JavaScript.

One example: When I checked on Spiegel Online the Medal Statistics of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, the table appeared to be faulty in Google Chrome: instead of country names there was only "undefined", and the flags were empty rectangles. When looking at the same page in MS IE8, everything was shown correctly. What could be the reason for this? I have no idea... Gears is installed properly, the browser version is 4.0.249.89, up-to-date. Unfortunately the user interface sleekness of Google Chrome has the disadvantage that there are no settings for me to control: I did not find anywhere to "enable Javascript" or something similar...

Another strange thing: I wrote some HTML code for a few web pages with images, and I used the "alt" attribute there, to give an alternative textual description of the image. In all browsers this "alt" attribute is shown when hovering with the mouse over the image, like a tooltip. Not so in Google Chrome: nothing appears. This may be actually closer to the intended web standard use, which recommends to employ the "title" attribute for tooltip-like information... I may have to change my web pages to properly take care of this.

Problem with Blog on MS IE8 - only at work!

Today when checking this blog, I got an error: "Cannot find file...". I was using MS Internet Explorer 8. I tried in the other browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome), and it worked fine. So I thought it must be something on my blog which throws off MS IE 8, and I began disabling / commenting out some of the Javascripts. But the error still remained - I was puzzled.

Then in the evening, when I tried again. Now it worked ok!

So my conclusion: it must be some settings of the proxy. At work, we connect to the internet through a proxy server, and I always have to change the settings. Never had a problem though. Also strange is that it only appears in MS IE8. Google Chrome actually shares the proxy settings, but that browser has no problems....

So I will enable again all my sidebar Javascripts, as most people in the world probably connect to the web without a proxy server.

New Trial: Location on the Web

I have just uploaded another small test suite for enabling geo-tracking on the web. This is similar to the Carnegie Great Student Run demo, but I plan to have it individualised for several people so that each can update their location - and show it on a web page. In the image below you can see my current location as it is in the database (earlier problems re. updating have been solved now). This is a "live" IFRAME showing Google Maps; as I keep updating the position and the software, the image actually will change.



Since my first entry of this blog entry I have dobe a few modifications: the refresh is automatically triggered, depending on the time the user last had updated the location. Over time, the icon fades slowly away when no location updates are received. The icon color depends on the category of the user - this is to prepare for future collaborative work. The icon blinks when the updates are from GPS within the last 5 minutes.

A smaller version of this map is included in this blog here in the left column under "My Location".

Stay tuned for more news!

Google Problems?

Since yesterday, I experience the following problem with Google searches: almost every 2nd search leads to a page where Google displays something like this: "your search looks like spam"... and I have to enter a word that appears in a graphic. Not sure what is so spammy about my Google search requests... they are just standard searches as usual.

Anyone else had experienced this recently?

Domain Problems

A few years ago, I had bought two domain names: virtualphilharmonic.com for my music, and rbehringer.com for myself. While living in the US, I had taken care of renewing the domain registration regularly, and I also did it once I had moved to the UK. But I did no maintenance of those sites, they just kept there remaining stale on the web, without new info... and I was not really interested in keeping them up to date, as this blog became my "main web site".

Last summer I checked just for fun the domain www.virtualphilharmonic.com, just to notice that there was an announcement that this domain is no longer available. I checked with the domain registrar, and indeed it had expired a few months earlier. My email address had been not valid anymore, that is why I did not get the notice about the expiry. I updated the email address, and when I checked a few days later, the domain seemed to work again - guiding to my own site, but with advertisement around it. When I wanted to renew the domain, I realised that someone new owned it: hotelsbycity.com. I assumed that they would want to sell it, because a hotel busines could have no use for the domain virtualphilharmonic.com. There was mention of making an offer for the domain name, but I did not bother... so I buried the domain name without further ado.

The other domain rbehringer.com worked at that time. Again, I was too lazy to check when it would expire...

As a few days ago I was curious what my old website was doing, I found that the domain too had been gone: instead there was now advertisement for various Behringer equipment, with a top line stating "this domain is for sale". I requested an offer: $380 was the response email which I received a day later. A regular .com domain registration costs just $14 per year... so this is definitely a rip-off.

Ok, I will not pursue this any further. But just a warning to anyone who has domain names and wants to keep them: check your renewal dates! There are crooks out there who are actually paying for those domains, even if they do not have an immediate use for them - just ro resell them at a higher price.

Well, these two buyers of my former domain names may keep them and spend the money on them, if they feel that someone wants to buy those names. I guess the virtualphilharmonic name has actually some value, and the first buyer was actually nice enough to link back to my site, as (s)he must have realised that my site would actually bring some traffic to their ads.

Finally: Webcam working

On the PC in my office, there was a problem with prohibited for a long while the setting up of a web cam, but now I finally got around to fid this problem. The web cam is installed and provides pictures every minute. The latest one is here:



About a year ago, I did run a web cam from my laptop, using a software EasyFreeWebCam. Never mind the slightly sleaze applications being advertised for use of this software... I had done a few comparisons, and this software seemed to provide the most customisations. I wanted to set up the software to automatically upload a captured picture onto our web server. However, for some reason this did not work on my office PC but only on my laptop computer. A while I had this running on the laptop, but then I needed the laptop for other purposes, and I wanted to run the webcam also over night.

Today I finally came to revisit this problem. I tried a couple of other capture software packages - none of them worked with the specific situation on my PC. No idea what the problem is. WS_FTP works fine, I can access the web server from this PC. But none of the automatic ftp uploads worked, although the firewall was configured with exceptions to allow uploads.

So what I did today: I wrote a small software in good old MS Visual Studio 6.0, using MFC, for timer-triggered upload of a file onto an ftp server. Works just excellent! The video capture software captures an image every minute and stores it locally. Then my software runs constantly and uploads this file every minute to the ftp server. From there, the web page is configured to reload and show the image every minute, so that always the lastest captured image is shown. There is an inherent potential maximum delay of 2 minutes - but this does not really matter.

The website with the live update also has a Google map on it - I will keep experimenting a bit with it, related to other projects that I am currently working on.

Automatic Feeding RSS on Web Pages

Finally I bothered to look for the originator of that software which converts RSS feeds into Javascript - there are many sites which feature this tool as mirrors. The sites that I had tried out, had a bug: the RSS feed from my blogspot blogs (atom blogs) did not show a correct posting date: instead of the posting date, today's date was displayed.

But then I found the site where this Javascript conversion tool originated: FEED2JS.

The author wrote there that he recently fixed the date bug - and now I could use this excellent tool on a variety of web sites, to show automatic updates from blog posts.

Also in this my blog I added a few feeds with this tool on the left side bar (further down): I put a feed from my Flickr pictures there, a feed of the BBC weather forecast for Leeds, and a few feeds from blogs of my friends. Seems to work great!

Blogs - and Widgets

Blogging is a great way of publishing. I am aware that two of my students have blogs, in which they report on their progress of their PhD work and their activities related to it:

Monika Andergassen's work is about blogging and its use in learning and teaching context.

Johannes Christian's work is about Augmented Reality in an industrial environment.

It is a great idea to publish such a blog: it can be used to link to the international research community, and also to update the supervisor about project progress.

In order to view these blogs conveniently, I have installed a Yahoo Blog widget: First I needed to install the Yahoo Widget Manager, which makes widgets available on the desktop of my computer. Then I installed the Multi RSS Feed Widget by Matt Heidenreich - this allows to have the feeds on the desktop being automatically displayed.

One problem I noticed with this: the date of the blog post somehow gets deleted when I click on individual posts. This is ok when going directly to the blog page, but when looking at the posts through the widget, there is no date shown.

But otherwise, this widget works, and now I can see at a glance what is going on.

I would recommend this type of interaction between students and supervisors who are working at a distance. This method allows to stay in contact and up-to-date, even across different time zones. I will recommend it to all students in whose supervision I am involved.

More Pictures on Flickr

Since 2 weeks I have spent lots of time going through my digital photo archive and uploading pictures onto my Flickr site. So far I have uploaded about 10% of the more or less reasonable photos. When uploading, I have to make a decision: is the picture worth to be shown publicly? Some pictures are nice based on their impact, others are just plain documentary. I decided often to upload them anyway, even if they are not perfect, or even if I have several versions of them - it might be that someone finds something peculiar in a version which I myself would rate as less impressive.

Time is also consumed by tagging and giving a decent title. By default the title is the image name. And my Sony DSC-M camera has the bad feature to wrap around the image numbers - after 9999 comes again 0001 - so there may be duplicate numbers there because of that.

I will upload more pictures in the next few weeks.

About this blog - welcome!

Already a few years ago, when the term "blogging" was not known, I intended to create a site on the web where I would upload my comments on events and interesting issues. However, I never found the time to do this, and to maintain a specific web page for this seemed like a lot of work. Then, blogging became a phenomenon, and everyone who wanted, could publish their thoughts to a worldwide audience. Due to my lack of time, I completely missed this trend. Now, I finally jump onto the bandwagon quite late. But the threshold for starting a blog is quite low, software is easy to setup, and maintenance of a blog also has become very simple. So finally, I am ready for blogging.

The question comes up, what this blog is supposed to be. Do I want to spread out my whole life, in front of the general public? No. But I want to share a few thoughts that occur to me once and then, to share some of the observations I make, to share a little bit of my individual experiences. I also will share some of the pictures I take in various places, as documentation for my friends and colleagues.

I hope that you enjoy this blog, and I hope that I will be able to find the time for more or less regular updates, to keep this blog interesting.