No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

More at Code.Google.com.

House of Cards Video

The Making of House of Cards Video

Il video è stato realizzato con Google Code, lo stesso programma utilizzato per Street View. E' open source, quindi liberamente modificabile dagli utenti, che ci stanno già provando su youtube. Ancora una volta i Radiohead si dimostrano un passo avanti a tutti, una band che non ha paura di sperimentare, caso più unico che rara nel panorama musicale di oggi. Chapeau!

LINK

He also mentioned that an associate producer over at MTV news proposed that "the 'Cards' clip could actually be Radiohead's loving acknowledgement to the Grid, the high-speed super-Internet currently being developed by scientists at CERN, a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland". How very Matrix. I like it.

For the techy, nerdy, science-y, and curious among you, go to the Google Code page and eat your heart out. You can learn about, you know, data visualization and stuff. Otherwise just watch the video:

You almost have to know the story behind the video to be impressed by it. The technology used is indeed very interesting. And very Radiohead.

In fact, when the makers of the video came across research being done at UCLA for real time 3D recording and had the idea for a video, they immediately sent a proposal to Radiohead's management, figuring that they would be the only band willing to take that kind of a risk - making a music video without cameras. After all, Radiohead has quite firmly established itself as a pioneer in today's music industry, has it not?

But if you blindly watch, without knowing the story behind the video, it can be a tad... simplistic. Or to quote James Montgomery once again, "a total triumph in technology, but a decidedly underwhelming experience for the viewer." Kinda like Winamp skins a la 1999. Yet, if you put on your artistic appreciation hat and keep in mind the made-using-data aspect, it's pretty damn cool.

To further your appreciation of the feat, watch the making of video below:

As director James Frost notes towards the end, "in a weird way [the video] is a direct reflection of where we are in society... everything is data-driven in some shape or form... our lives are digital."

They've just released a very cool video that was created using rotating laser scanners, 3D imaging and data visualization techniques -- and no film or cameras.

Says the director of the video, James Frost (who's done videos for the Flaming Lips among others):

In a weird way it's a direct reflection of where we are in society... that everything is data. Everything around us is data-driven in some shape or form, and we're so reliant on it now. It seems like our lives are digital, and so in that sense, it definitely felt apt.

Actually, that is as good an explanation for the current data visualization craze as I've heard yet.

Aesthetically, "House of Cards" reminds me a little of Tron, crossed with those toy boxes with rows of movable cylindrical metal pins that make a 3D contour when you press your hand or face on them (what the heck are they called?).

And Google is totally getting in on the action - Google Code is also hosting the video, as well as a "making of" clip (where I got the quote from the director above) and assorted other goodies for programmers who want to do remixes/mashups.

It'll be interesting to see what comes out of making the data and source code available. There's already 15 videos posted to the official YouTube group. Most focus on fiddling with the image data - this one is neat - but there's already one that takes a hack at both the visual and auditory channel.

I would promise to stop posting Radiohead related stuff, it's not as if they needed exposure, but this is to cool to ignore. This video was done using Google Code's Creative Commons License software. It was done with no cameras and no lights. From the Google Code Page:

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images:Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

More information about this here and you can play with Thom Yorke's head here.

El año pasado, semanas antes de su lanzamiento físico, pusieron a disposición de los internautas su último disco, In Rainbows, dejando a su elección el precio que consideraban justo pagar por él (sí, se admitían los 0 € como precio justo). También fueron el primer grupo en dar un concierto en streaming por fin de año, y colgaron en su web el tema Nude para que, quien quisiera, pudiera remezclarlo a su antojo.

Ahora acaban de publicar su nuevo single, House of cards, acompañado de un videoclip totalmente novedoso: para su grabación no han utilizado ninguna cámara de video, sino un dispositivo con 64 rayos láser disparando 900 veces por minuto. El resultado es impresionante.

P.D. Radiohead ha incluido el código del video en Google Code por lo que cualquiera puede descargar los datos y realizar todas las modificaciones que desee.

Google y Radiohead se han asociado para realizar el nuevo vídeo de la banda House of Cards del álbum In Rainbows.
Para su realización no se usaron cámaras o luces, sólo datos. El video utiliza 3D en tiempo real de grabación, utilizando luz estructurada y escáneres láser.
En code.google.com proporcionan un gadget de la aplicación del vídeo, se puede ver el Making Of y bajarse los datos para realizar tus propias variaciones y enviarlas al Grupo de Youtube House of Cards.
El video fue creado por el director James Frost, y el manejo de la tecnología corrió a cargo de Aaron Koblin.

El player está basado en Flash, por lo que puede jugar con el zoom o hacer clic y arrastrar para mover la animación. Hacedlo porque realmente merece la pena.

Gracias a Surrealisma por el chivatazo que vió en Google Blogoscoped

Música: Radiohead "House of Cards"

directlaser

[via creative review]

This serialization framework is heavily used inside Google itself, lightweight, easy to understand and definetly worth a look (YAML anyone?). Check it out here: Google Code - Protocol Buffers

About:
This website provides tutorials and sample course content so CS students and educators can learn more about current computing technologies and paradigms. In particular, this content is Creative Commons licensed which makes it easy for CS educators to use in their own classes.

The Courses section contains tutorials, lecture slides, and problem sets for a variety of topic areas:

• AJAX Programming
• Distributed Systems
• Web Security
• Languages

In the Tools 101 section, you will find a set of introductions to some common tools used in Computer Science such as version control systems and databases.

The CS Curriculum Search will help you find teaching materials that have been published to the web by faculty from CS departments around the world. You can refine your search to display just lectures, assignments or reference materials for a set of courses.

Visit the website here.

So there have been some other solutions:

You can install VeohTV in wine, but in my opinion, this is not a proper solution, because it needs a second copy of Mozilla Firefox installed in wine.

An alternative was using OpenVeoh, but that doesn't work anymore.

Fortunately, I recently came across a new way to watch VeohTV-Videos by using VeohProxy.

Installation

You'll need »python«. On Debian, you can install it by typing this into a console:
sudo apt-get install python
After installing »python«, you have to download VeohProxy:
wget http://veohproxy.googlecode.com/files/veohproxy-1.3.zip
Then unzip it by typing:
unzip veohproxy-1.3.zip

Usage
First, start VeohProxy:
python veohproxy-1.3/default.py.
Now you take the Video-ID from a Veoh-Link, e.g.:
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1021877pQkpC7Hz?rank=13
With this ID, you can start downloading:
wget -c --proxy=off http://127.0.0.1:64653/v1021877pQkpC7Hz

Please note:
Sometimes the download seems to freeze, but that's no problem. The download will continue after some time.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-code-jam-is-back.html

http://code.google.com/codejam/

if you're programmer, take a look!

No era la primera vez que solicitaba un proyecto. Sabía que debía pasar como mínimo una semana, días no laborables excluídos, para que fuese evaluado. Así que inicié el proceso, escribí una descripción detallada de la aplicación y su propósito, y esperé.

Han pasado dos semanas. El contador de días restantes se ha atascado en uno y no recibo respuesta alguna de SourceForge. Y me fastidia, vaya si me fastidia, porque recuerdo con cariño mis primeros pinitos con su CVS. Pero el tiempo pasa, no me apetece esperar un mes y el señor Google, como no, me deja un SVN para mis cosas.

No, si al final la gran G acabará absorbiendo todos los servicios de Internet...

This code is open source under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license that this blog uses Creative Commons BSD license. Neville's code appears to be under CC:Attribution 2.5 for South Africa, by what I could glean from his site. I have considered making this an open source project under Google code but have yet to take it all the way. Google sets a lifetime limit of 10 projects, so I will continue to hoard those against future need. If you make modifications to the code, please let me know and I will probably post them here and in the code for future releases, so we all win.

Note that the command line parameters have changed:

plurk.py <twitter username> <twitter password> <plurk username> <plurk password>

And of course, as with all software, use at your own risk.

It started great...

When you put a lot of time and energy into something it sure is great to see that it was not in vain. Well, last week was exactly that way for us. From May 23^rd Faviki is a featured project on Google code homepage, as a tool that uses Google AJAX search API.

Google API helps Faviki users with adding tags and searching. Sometimes it is hard to find the most appropriate tag with autocomplete list, especially in the cases of abbreviations and ambiguous terms. That is where Google search comes in handy. We'll have more about this feature very soon.

This was a great nod to us and we were very excited and proud especially considering that we are a long time users of Google tools and services. Since then we've had a huge increase in visitors and Faviki started getting the attention we honestly believe it deserves.

But that was just the beginning. On May 26^th an excellent article about Faviki was posted on ReadWriteWeb. The article is a great description of what Faviki is, how it is used and what problems it solves. Among other things the article concludes:

If that turns out to be true [that tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web,] then Faviki represents a big step in that direction by offering a transitional service between social bookmarking and a purely semantic-based bookmarking service that would automatically know how to tag any content saved by discovering the semantic aspects already associated with that web page.

...and then got even better!

They say that when it rains it pours, but when it's shining... well it can be really bright! Here's more of the "sunshine" we had during last week.

For a while Faviki was present on Del.icio.us homepage and has so far been bookmarked by 207 people. A lot of other web pages that deal with Faviki have also been bookmarked.

Also, Faviki is officially a killer! A killer startup, that is. Here is a part of what Killer startups had to say about us:

Why it might be a killer
Faviki is the next generation in social bookmarking. There are a lot of implications for semantic search and semantic tagging. It makes this a lot more efficient and easier for the user.

A Rotorblog post by Arnold Zafra entitled Faviki Offers Social Bookmarking with Semantic Tagging stated the following:

Faviki has the making of a killer application. The only problem it faces right now is how to get into the social bookmarking niche with the presence of already popular del.ici.ous, magnolia and others. But sometimes, we users tend to look for something else. So, Faviki is a good alternative, if not worthy of at least a try.

There is also a very good post Faviki uses Wikipedia and DBpedia for semantic tagging. Author's question was:

One interesting research question is whether it's possible to combine the ease of using user-generated tags with the power of mapping them into tags in a structured or semi-structured knowledge base.

And his conclusion is:

Deriving knowledge bases from Wikipedia and using them in innovative is a very exciting topic that is sure to receive a lot of work in the coming years.

Dennis D. McDonald's question was How Important Are Tags to You?. He notices the following:

While controlled indexing vocabularies and classifications schemes have existed for as long as indexes, catalogs, and information retrieval systems have existed, the benefits of such controlled vocabularies have been somewhat limited to professional and specialized communities or other organizations that already have a vested interest in standard ways of referring to concepts and ideas.

Once authorship and usage extend beyond such communities - which happens very easily online - it's possible that the advantages of standardization, specialization, and specificity of tags might start to break down as profession- and knowledge-based borders are crossed.

We are really excited that Faviki has broken the language barrier. A detailed description of Faviki in Japanese can be found at http://mojix.org/2008/05/27/faviki. Two more posts about Faviki in Japanese can be found here and here. There are also posts in Chinese and Italian.

In addition, the first printed article is published in the Italian magazine Digital life. Check out the online version. Thanks, Donatella!

We are so modern we belong to the museum

But a very special type of museum it is. Faviki is now a member of Museum of Modern Betas. Even if you are not exactly a museum type you can get your dose of cutting edge bookmarking!

Faviki is also „on display" at Emily Chang - eHub, at Betadaily, at I’m Not Actually a Geek as well as at LawyerKM.

The word about Faviki has also spread on Twitter. We found two of the tweets especially cute:

my social bookmarking prayers have been answered: http://www.faviki.com/, from Socialthing! (link)

and

Playing with http://faviki.com/ ... Social bookmarking with DBpedia concepts instead of tags. Cool! Can't decide if it's Web 2.0 or Web 3.0., from twitterrific (link)

Finally, we would especially like to mention the very first post about Faviki. Matt was among the first Faviki users and his support has meant so much to us.

So, as you can see, last week was really great. We extend our thanks to all of the websites and people mentioned above. Also, we send thanks and best regards to all of our users. You Favikings :) give us the energy and drive to continue our quest of developing Faviki. Your feedback is always welcome, as we are trying to make our website better for you (and for us, because we use it too :)).

From the project' description, it uses pyparsing to detect Chinese keywords, class names, methods, arguments, and variables and translate them back to Python.

Check out the basic usage, it's interesting.

Resource:

ZHPY @ Google Code

O departamento russo da Fundação ReactOS inaugurou um novo portal para a hospedagem de projetos de código aberto, na mesma linha dos já conhecidos SourceForge.net ou Google Code. A justificativa para a criação do portal é que ele foi desenvolvido para incentivar projetos que tenham como alvo usuários(as) russos(as).

O FireForge.net não se restringe a hospedar os projetos, mas também fornece serviços de hospedagem de páginas, FTP, sistemas de controle de versões SVN/CVS, disponibilização de arquivos lançados, rastreamento de bugs e funcionalidades, listas de e-mail e tudo o mais necessário para construir uma comunidade open source de sucesso.

O site também está disponível em inglês e outras línguas, inclusive em português praticamente perfeito.

Google Doctype es 100% abierto.

* Código abierto.
* Contenido abierto.
* Abierto a contribuciones de cualquier persona.

Mark Pilgrim, autor de "Dive into Python" y ahora un Googler, nos explica más acerca de Google Doctype en la siguiente entrevista (en inglés):

Enlace:
http://code.google.com/p/doctype/wiki/Welcome

Via:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/
google-doctype-encyclopedia-for-web.html

Página de Mark Pilgrim:
http://diveintomark.org/

For anyone curious about the process of managing a LaTeX document with the Subversion (SVN) version control system, I have to highly recommend it. Now that my dissertation is officially finished, I have a bit of time to explain the process I used to back-up, archive, and otherwise manage the beast.

The three major components of the computing end of my dissertation were Textmate (and the LaTeX and SVN bundles), Google Code, and of course LaTeX.

I set up a project at Google Code (free hosting for < 100 MB) which includes SVN access, a project wiki, and a nice web interface. Almost all of my LaTeX was written in the Textmate editor simply because it has a lot of useful macros and plugins including a feature that lets you drag and drop images to make figures (it automatically inserts the \begin{...} \end{...} code and has lots of other type-savers.

Another advantage of Textmate is built-in SVN support. The above screen capture shows the result of an SVN "commit" which happened to be my 200th revision. In the end, I had 202 revisions, but the last two were trivial (adding an updated figure file, and a little typo).

There is a fair bit of documentation out there about how to do each of these things individually, so I won't reiterate any of the instructions here. I mainly want to suggest this approach to anyone who is managing a large document, or especially sharing the responsibility with multiple authors.

I don't know if this was an intended use for Google Code, but it certainly serves the computing community well. If you are interested, the repository for my thesis (i.e. the source code) is available at http://code.google.com/p/dawes-phd-thesis/

• First checkout the current whole mono soc svn repository : svn checkout https://mono-soc-2008.googlecode.com/svn/ mono-soc-2008 --username your.google.code.username
• You should be prompted with a password request, to get it go to : http://code.google.com/hosting/settings
• Add three folders corresponding to your project's trunk, branches and tags : svn mkdir tags/[your project name] branches/[your project name] trunk/[your project name]
• Commit these changes : svn commit -m "Added folders for project [your project name]"
• Use git-svn clone to get a working git-svn environment with the command : git-svn clone --tags=tags/[your project name] --trunk=trunk/[your project name] --branches=branches/[your project name] --username=your.google.code.username https://mono-soc-2008.googlecode.com/svn

Now you can use standard git commands to add files, revert changes, do bisect or whatever. Once you want to mirror your changes back to SVN, just do a git-svn rebase to resolve possible conflicts with svn HEAD and then a git-svn dcommit will convert your git history to the svn repository.