Looks like some hometown entrepreneurs are making waves with their quantum computer, and getting plenty of coverage to boot. Alas, I wasn’t able to score an invitation to the party at the Computer History Museum, but The Register covered it nicely (I especially like the quote “the management’s mix of enthusiasm and frank realism made the pitch all the more believable” – something uniquely Canadian).
Way to go guys!
From the fun side of the 2007 RSA Conference: Zepparella (seen at the Veracode party). Four women play Led Zepplin the way it’s meant to be played and tear the roof off the place. Enough said.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod – the next (and final) Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is available for pre-order on Amazon.com (and there’s some kind of deluxe edition as well if that floats your boat). It’ll be released July 21st. Methinks I need to submit a vacation request for that day, given our history with consuming each new booking in one sitting.
I saw that George Ou is reporting a remote exploit in Vista based on it Speech Control functionality, wherein a malicious sound file (for example, on a web page) can trigger arbitrary commands.
For a second, I couldn’t believe no one had thought of this exploit before – and then I remembered this old chestnut dating back to at least 1997:
At a recent Sacramento PC User’s Group meeting, a company was demonstrating its latest speech-recognition software. A representative from the company was just about ready to start the demonstration and asked everyone in the room to quiet down.
Just then someone in the back of the room yelled, “Format C: Return.”
Someone else chimed in: “Yes, Return!”
Unfortunately, the software worked.
I’m not sure I get all the Demo excitement over the Zink micro-sized printer.
While I applaud Zink for the environmental aspects of its product (no printer head cartridge = less waste), I can’t help but find some irony in using state of the art technology to replicate Polaroid film. Do people really want to print photos “on the go” that badly?
I noticed that Darren Barefoot (yah, Vancouver!) was pretty quick to capitalize on the micro-fame of his Get A First Life spoof of Second Life. Maybe I’m just imagining things, but I swear those CafePress T-Shirts that are now for sale on the site weren’t there this morning.
As part of my new year, I’ve decided to start putting more code out there earlier. I have a tendency to build projects in private, trying to get things perfect before I reveal them publicly. The end result is that I have a lot of code gathering dust in the corners of my hard drive. No more. That’s why I’m going to post one of the mini-projects I’ve been working on for the last little while: a Flash-based barcode recognition library.
I know what you’re thinking: Why the heck would anyone want to build a Flash-based barcode recognition library? Why not try the demo yourself and see! 😉
The idea is simple: allow use of a commodity webcam as a barcode reader, thus allowing users to efficiently input physical items into web-based applications. Using digital cameras as a cheap alternative to traditional barcode scanners isn’t an original idea – Delicious Library uses iSight to allow its users to input their CDs, DVDs, and other media into a personal media library. Unfortunately, that particular application is a heavy application that’s only available on the Mac – what I want to do is build a simple way to provide that same kind of functionality in platform independent web-based applications.
Think of the web applications that could benefit from quick and efficient input from physical items that carry a barcode – cataloging items you own or consume to drive recommendations on sites like AllConsuming or Shelfari (or any number of other similar sites), tracking your personal property for insurance purposes, or easily selling or trading large numbers of goods on eBay, Lala, or Swaptree. And of course, I’m sure there are some other applications that I haven’t even considered.
I built the original library in Java as a proof of concept, more to figure out how best to reliably extract a barcode from an image. I knew it had to be fairly straightforward as there are a number of SDKs available on the web to perform image-based barcode recognition, but I was uncertain if a commodity webcam was up to the job. I used the cheapest webcam I could find ($20 at Best-Buy) to make sure I had something that would work with even the worst hardware.
Once I had the basic algorithm for scanning an image and extracting an EAN-13 barcode, I ported the code to Flash 9 in an evening (ActionScript approximates Java). Flash was an obvious choice for a couple reasons:
The core library is in a functioning state, with a couple of caveats:
The second shortcoming is the most problematic – we can only expect embedded webcams to become the norm. I’m not clear if recognizing a barcode from these types of cameras is possible – Delicious Library claims that it can work with the built-in cameras on MacBooks, but I’ve not had an opportunity to confirm it myself.
This brings me to my questions for the technologists out there:
Ashley came down with a horrible head cold today, so I headed out early to try and grab her some Sudafed. No, not Sudafed PE (which doesn’t work), Sudafed. Not only were all the pharmacies closed at 8am, no one at either Longs or Safeway apparently has the authority to allow you to purchase Sudafed, despite the fact that it’s a non-perscription drug. The reason? Federal legislation that requires you to show ID to purchase drugs containing pseudoephedrine, all in the name of reducing the illicit production of crystal meth.
Sigh, I am getting sick of the Nanny State.
I’ve been asked on a number of occasions by various friends to provide them with some guidance on how to be a good product manager. While I can’t claim to have complete knowledge after only three years in the role, I thought now would be a good time to summarize some of what I’ve learned:
If you need more advice on honing your Product Management skills, I also highly recommend taking one of Pragmatic Marketing’s excellent courses.
This is a little thing that’s been bugging me since we got our TiVo a while back, but I never got around to solving it – exporting my music playlists from iTunes to TiVo. TiVo’s jukebox interface is simply horrendous, so playlists are an absolute must, unless you like scrolling through pages of your music collection. iTunes makes matters worse in that it doesn’t allow you to export M3U-formatted playlists, the format TiVo requires.
Sigh. A little shell scripting and awk is all that’s required to resolve this problem in short order. Here’s an awk script called m3u-ify.awk to convert an iTunes playlist (exported as plaintext) to an M3U playlist:
BEGIN {
FS = "\t"
print "#EXTM3U"
}
{
if (match($27, /\.mp3/))
{
time = $8
name = $27
location = $27
# Figure out the location from the absolute location
# that iTunes exports. Note that we remove the '- ' from
# the location, which iTunes seems to add erroneously.
# Using 'sub' is not ideal, but gensub seems flakey in
# my version of gawk, otherwise I'd use the following:
# location = gensub(/D:\\Music\\\(.*\\.*\\[0-9]*\) -\(.*\)\.mp3/, "\\1\\2", "g", location)
sub(/D:\\Music\\/, "", location)
sub(/ - /, " ", location)
# Find the name of the song - this regex is giving
# me problems in Cygwin with gawk, so I coded an
# alternate way to get to the normalized song name
# name = gensub(/D:\\Music\\.*\\.*\\[0-9]* - \(.*\)\.mp3/, "\\1", "g", name)
sub(/D:\\Music\\.*\\.*\\/, "", name)
sub(/\.mp3/, "", name)
sub(/[0-9]* - /, "", name)
print "#EXTINF:"time","name
print location
}
}
Note that my music collection is located in D:\Music (which needs to be stripped out of the file location to create the M3U file) – you will have to alter this script if to the location of your iTunes music folder.
To use the script, you’ll need awk installed on your machine (for those of you using Windows, you might try grabbing a copy of Cygwin) . To convert a playlist to M3U:
awk -f m3u-ify.awk input.txt > output.m3uYou’ll now have an M3U-formatted version of your playlist. If you really want to be fancy, export all your playlists at once, and then generate a batch shell script to process them all at once by running ls -1 *.txt |sed -e 's/\(.*\)\.txt/awk -f m3u-ify.awk \"\1.txt\" > \"\1.m3u\" /g'>batch.sh. This will generate a shell script called batch.sh that will process all the text playlists in once go.
Note: I point TiVo Desktop to my iTunes folder directly – I’m not sure if this affects file location specified in the M3U or not. Your mileage may vary.