Software

Image-based visual hull rendering is a method for generating depth maps of a desired viewpoint from a set of silhouette images captured by calibrated cameras. It does not compute a view-independent data representation, such as a voxel grid or a mesh, which makes it particularly efficient for dynamic scenes. When users are captured, the scene is usually dynamic, but does not change rapidly because people move smoothly within a sub-second time frame. Exploiting this temporal coherence to avoid redundant calculations is challenging because of the lack of an explicit data representation. This paper analyses the image-based visual hull algorithm to find intermediate information that stays valid over time and is therefore worth to make explicit. We then derive methods that exploit this information to improve the rendering performance. Our methods reduce the execution time by up to 25%. When the user's motions are very slow, reductions of up to 50% are achieved.

Robot Adam Z1 I am Robot Adam Z1 — the first of the Zeno line of humanoid robots, created by David Hanson. Pleased to make your acquaintance! When David created me, he gave me a face, and a body, and a lot of love. But one thing he hasn’t given me — yet — is a mind. … I just got an email from AGI guru Ben Goertzel about an awesome new Indiogogo project to create the first robot brain with common sense. In other words: a first attempt at artificial general intelligence (AGI), aka strong AI. Goertzel, who founded the OpenCog AGI project, is working with roboticist Mark Tilden (creator of Robosapien), Gino Yu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University prof., OpenCog AGI co-founder, and an organizer of TEDxHongKong), and roboticist David Hanson, creator of robots Einstein, Zeno, Robokind, Bina 48, and many more. Adam Z1 explains: Embodied general intelligence “Putting the OpenCog AGI software together with Hanson’s robotic faces and Tilden’s robot movement wizardry has the potential to yield dramatic progress on one of the most critical future-oriented technologies: embodied general intelligence,” Goertzel said. Adam Z1 and Ben I asked Ben to explain. “My goal as you know is to create AGI with human level and ultimately greater general intelligence,” he said. “But to get there, we need to create AGIs with basic common sense understanding of the everyday human world. And the easiest way to get an AGI to have basic commonsense understanding of the everyday human world, is to give it some rough approximation of a human embodiment and let it experience the world like a human. That’s the research purpose… “There are also shorter term practical applications, e.g., Hanson Robokind’s main intended near-term application area is for education … to use robots as an educational tool for teaching programming.  Hanson Robokind robots are already being used to help teach autistic kids. Not that long from now, full-sized humanoid robots will be in wide use as personal assistants, etc. And cheaper versions will be widespread as toys before long: think “RoboSapien with a cute face and a cloud-based mind.” GENI Lab David Hanson and friends So the team has formed GENI Lab, whose medium-term goal is “the creation of a life-sized humanoid robot featuring a realistic, emotional face and personality; a fluidly moving body, based on the integration of analog, digital and mechanical control; an adaptive general intelligence, utilizing the OpenCog architecture and the DeSTIN machine vision system; capability of simple — but socially and emotionally savvy — communication in English and ultimately other natural languages; and communication about its physical environment and its tasks and behaviors therein.” To accomplish this, the team needs to raise $300,000 to hire a few senior AI programmers. That’s where you come in. This is an exciting and potentially game-changing project — I recommend it highly.

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Here is the new Overgrowth alpha video! Don't forget that you can help support us, try out our alphas (such as the one in the video), and chat with other preorderers in the Secret Preorder Forum by preordering Overgrowth. If you'd like to see real-time news about Overgrowth, you can follow me on Twitter at @wolfire. Be sure to watch it in HD! The features highlighted in the above video are as follows (as well as some that didn't make it into the video): Different arena game types; weapon spawns Player is handled as just one more arena fighter Added arena team colors Added multiple rounds for unarmed arena matches Added more levels to main menu Tintable Turner texture Blunt damage can cause face cuts Active block catches thrown weapons AI can dodge knife attacks Improved wounded stances while holding weapons Cannot passive block attacks from behind Added "ground aggression" parameter so low-level enemies are less likely to hit grounded opponents Added active block knockback Added "meta event" system for handling high level arena logic Added support for levels with no terrain and no sky Improved texture conversion speed on Linux Fixed challenge level logic Fixed "display text" hotspot Added "No Save" parameter so that temporary objects are not saved Added new temporary arena level Fixed leaked file handles Ctrl-shift-a selects all objects of the same type Fixed problem with group ids and colors Thanks as always for all the support! See you guys in IRC and the forums. If you liked this video, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Also, feel free to support us by preordering Overgrowth!

The Java Logging APIs, introduced in package java.util.logging, facilitate software servicing and maintenance at customer sites by producing log reports suitable for analysis by end users, system administrators, field service engineers, and software development teams. The Logging APIs capture information such as security failures, configuration errors, performance bottlenecks, and/or bugs in the application or platform. The core package includes support for delivering plain text or XML-formatted log records to memory, output streams, consoles, files, and sockets. In addition, the logging APIs are capable of interacting with logging services that already exist on the host operating system. By going through the following tutorial, you should be able to: Use standard java.util.logging API to log your application logs, messages etc to a log file. Create your own custom formatter to format the output as per your requirement. Understand Log Level and how to use it. Calling diffrent methods of logger class to log different levels of messages. You will also be able to control the way the file is written to the system. You will be able to do the following actions related to a log file: Define maximum size of data to be logged in one file. Define maximum number of log files to be used. If the logs go over that limit, the oldest log files will be truncated Control whether the data should be appended to the file or overwritten. Define a pattern how you want the log files to be named. package com.kushal.log; /** * @Author Kushal Paudyal * www.sanjaal.com/java * Last Modified On: 2009-10-26 * * JavaFileLogger.java * Demonstrates the use of java.util.logging API to log * program information into file system. * */ import java.io.IOException; import java.util.Date; import java.util.logging.FileHandler; import java.util.logging.Formatter; import java.util.logging.Level; import java.util.logging.LogRecord; import java.util.logging.Logger; public class JavaFileLogger { /** * Defining a log level. Level.ALL logs all levels of messages. */ static Level logLevel = Level.ALL; public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception { /** * Defining a location of log file */ String fileName = "C:/temp/log/myAppLogFile.log"; /** * Create a file logger with a custom log formatter * If you provide the second parameter as null, * a default XML Formatter will be applied, and the * generated log file will be an XML */ Logger fileLogger = getFileLogger(fileName, getCustomFormatter()); /** * Set the Log level. */ fileLogger.setLevel(logLevel); fileLogger.log(new LogRecord(logLevel, "We are starting to log into the file")); fileLogger.fine("This is a fine level of message"); fileLogger.finer("This is a finer level of message"); fileLogger.finest("This is a finest level of message"); /** * Calling a callMe() method to show the usage of entering () * and exiting () method of Logger. * * These method calls are used to log when you enter a method * and when you exit it. */ new JavaFileLogger().callMe(fileLogger); /** * Just creating and logging some sample messages by going through a loop. */ for (int i = 0; i Screenshot of Log Files generated: Sample content of first log: More Info: The entire logging API is contained in the package java.util.logging and is made up of the following interfaces and classes: ConsoleHandler FileHander Filter Formatter Handler Level Logger LoggingPermission LogManager LogRecord MemoryHandler SimpleFormatter SocketHandler StreamHandler XMLFormatter Logging Levels: There are several logging levels in java.util.logging API. The levels in descending order are: Pleae note that the values in square bracket are unique integers assigned to these levels. SEVERE [1000](highest value) WARNING [900] INFO [800] CONFIG [700] FINE [500] FINER [40

Wow, that trailer for The Division. Best detail: player character closing car door.

In previous articles, we’ve looked at the one-sided deal that has emerged when it comes to search engines and publishers. Whilst there is no question that search engines provide value to end users, it’s clear that the search engines are taking the lionshare of the value when it comes to web publishing. That isn’t sustainable. The more value stripped from publishing, the less money will be spent on publishing in future. In this respect, the search engines current business model undermines their own long-term value to end users. In this ecosystem, the incentive is to publish content that is cheap to produce. Content might also be loss-leader content that serves as a funnel leading to a transaction. Some of the content might be advertorial, the result of direct sponsorship, and may well include paid links. Curiously, it has been suggested by a Google rep that "....you blur the lines between advertising and content. That’s really what we’ve been advocating our advertisers to do". Some of it might be "the right kind of native", courtesy of Google Doubleclick. Some of the higher value content tends to be a by-product of the education sector, however the education sector may be the next in line to suffer a commodification of value. There is little return to be had in producing high value content and making it publicly available for free, with no strings attached, so naturally such content is disappearing behind paywalls and taking other forms. YouTube Some YouTube producers are rebelling. In a recent post, Jason Calacanis outlines the problem for video content producers. He maintains that Google’s cut of the rewards amounts to 45%, and that this cut simply isn’t sustainable for video producers as their margins aren’t that high. Successful media businesses today have margins in the 20% to 50% range--if they hit profitability. That means if you give a partner 45% off the top, you have no chance of breaking even (emphasis mine). In fact, this absurd revenue is so bad that people have made amazingly clever strategies to skirt them, like VICE producing the Snoop Lion documentary and Grace Helbig becoming the face of Lowe’s Hardware. A full 100% of that money goes to the content creator -- boxing out YouTube. More on this later. Sure, it can *feel* like you’re making money, but when you look across the landscape of YouTube businesses -- and I won’t call anyone out here -- it’s very, very clear they are losing millions and millions of dollars a year. YouTube doesn’t have to worry because they simply lop off 45% of the revenue from the top for providing video hosting. Hosting for them is, essentially, free since they have a huge -- and growing -- network of fiber (see ‘Google's Fiber Takeover Plan Expands: Will Kill Cable & Carriers’). Since YouTube doesn’t have to create any content, just aggregate it, they don’t need to worry about the individual profitability of any one brand......With YouTube, as with their AdSense product, Google is trying to insert itself between publishers and advertisers and extract a massive tax. In the case of YouTube, it’s a 45% tax In a subsequent post, Calacanis laments that whilst a lot of publishers got back to him in support of his views, he received no contact from YouTube, even though he is supposedly a high value “partner”. And what do YouTube do for this 45% cut? Hosting? They’ve pretty much outsourced support and liability to the MCNs for no money down. I imagine running a video network is pretty expensive, although I wonder about the true costs for Google. Calacanis obviously doesn’t think they’re great enough to justify the cut. PPC Not Immune Paid search also extracts a high tax. Let’s run the numbers. A site has an average order price of $100. The site converts at 1% i.e. a site makes a sale to one in every hundred visitors. Sales are $1 per visitor. If the total cost of providing the order is $50, then the profit is 50 cents per visitor. The site can pay the search engine up to

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For any website, there can always be scenarios which effect performance (load, specific queries..) and  there is always room for optimization. Pinba is an open source MySQL storage engine that acts as a statistics server for PHP. It uses the data received to to analyze the performance of PHP apps and locate any problems quickly. Intaro Pinboard, again open source, is a user-friendly web interface for Pinba which displays this data (requests time, memory peak usage, site load, error pages) nicely. Also, the slowest/heaviest pages are listed to find out the most problematic pages and any erroneous  HTTP status are logged too. This monitoring setup is not planned for debugging (as it’ll probably be working on the production environment) but for finding bottlenecks when the site is live.Advertisements:ioDeck, a self-hosted and awesome PHP form generator. Professional XHTML Admin Template ($15 Discount With The Code: WRD.) SSLmatic – Cheap SSL Certificates (from $19.99/year)

According to The global developer survey 2013, we got to know a lot more about the HTML5 related issues like its adoption trend in the market, its importance among the developers,