Paul(admin) |  | | | | | Wednesday, July 23 2008, 21:02 | While Luminos just moved virtually, the other company I co-founded, CrimsonBase, is moving physically. Today Eric, Mathijs and I — the three owners — visited our office space in Utrecht University's Kruytgebouw that is still busy being renovated.
My appologies for the poor quality images; they were taken with my cell phone.
The building is still being renovated. Since the west wing (shown above) will only be finished in September, we looked at completed offices in the south wing as a temporary workspace. | 
Our office is opposite the also newly renovated lunchroom. | 
This is the office we finally chose for. It is big enough and despite only having two windows, lets in more light than most of the neighboring offices. | 
The high ceiling, matte wall and colorful carpet give it a very homely feeling. | 
Although the building looks dull from the outside, from within it is colorful and aesthetically pleasing. | 
Eric, Mathijs and I briefly sit down to discuss which office we want to move in to. | 
Until this wing is finished, you can find CrimsonBase in office Z110. | 
When the west wing is be finished, a larger, 30 m² office will constructed here which we will consider moving in to. |
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Paul(admin) | | | | | | Saturday, July 19 2008, 0:10 | Some time back, I set up an SVN server for Luminos on a virtual server at XLS Hosting. I've gone ahead and moved the entire server tonight since we no longer find it necessary to have our web server separate from our intranet.
The good news is that I now have root access for this subdomain and some more space. This server is also faster, which is a welcome bonus.
If you run in to any issues related to this move, please let me know. | | Rating: | | | Actions: | | |
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Paul(admin) | | | | | | Wednesday, July 2 2008, 17:02 | I've been doing some post-processing on the data I captured from several test subjects for my experimentation project. Each subject was put in the motion capture lab, where they simulated some movements that mimic "dynamic peephole" navigation. The idea here is to be able to navigate large amounts of data on a device simply by moving it around in space, instead of having to interact with it in the conventional manner (i.e. pressing keys or touching the screen).
Here is a large resolution sample video I made of all the data playing simultaneously. On the top left you can see the video stream recorded by the phone. On the top right are the motion capturing markers as recorded by Vicon iQ. Finally, the graph indicates the three axis data output of the phone's accelerometer, where red line is the x-axis, green line is the y-axis and blue line is z-axis.
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Paul(admin) | | | | | | Sunday, June 15 2008, 17:24 | While developing an application for my ongoing experimentation project using a Nokia N95, I ran into a mysterious problem that was causing my application to crash. No message; it simply disappears.
This phenomenon is known as a panic. You can discover the code associated with the panic using one of many on-device tools, but popular existing ones presently do not work with S60 3rd edition and require signing of the SIS file.
Since I don't have a publisher ID, and I don't have the money to pay for one, I found a great free alternative: Y-Tasks.
- Download and install the Y-Tasks application along with it's Crash monitor plug-in onto your device.
- In the menu, locate the directory "DrJukka.com", and start up Y-Tasks.
- Open "Crash monitor" and be sure to select "Set On".
- Press and hold the Switch Application button (
 ) to open the task manager to switch to different applications. In my case, I switched to the standby screen, opened my application, and observed the panic code returned by Y-Tasks.
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Paul(admin) | | | | | | Friday, June 13 2008, 1:39 | Finally have I found the perfect opportunity to see one of my all-time favorite bands perform. I was a faithful Iron Maiden fan for years and years, and although my flavor in music has broadened and moved on, I still enjoy listening to some old school heavy metal.
I've been talking about going to a performance together with a nephew of mine for some time now and since he's going regardless, I decided to join him and bring my brother and a niece along. Four huge Iron Maiden fans, from past and present, are going to Assen this summer! | | Rating: | | | Actions: | | |
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Paul(admin) | | | | | | Saturday, June 7 2008, 16:33 | On my Windows XP SP2 notebook, Carbide C++ and S60 3rd Edition SDK for Symbian OS work marvelously, but when trying to install the SDK on my Windows XP SP3 machine, the installer crashed without any error or message.
 The installer crashes within a few seconds of copying files This can often fairly easily be fixed by creating a new, empty file in the directory from which setup.exe is executed, called S60_3rd.xml.
 Create a new, empty file called S60_3rd.xml If this doesn't solve your problem, read the long discussion on Nokia's Developer Discussion Board that's full of helpful pointers.
Also bear in mind that under SP3, if you intend to use CMdaAudioOutputStream, you need to modify the following header file:
\epoc32\include\mmf\common\mmfcontroller.h
Change the following line:
#include <mmfPluginInterfaceUIDs.hrh>
To:
#include <mmf\plugin\mmfPluginInterfaceUIDs.hrh> | | Rating: | | | Actions: | | |
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Paul(admin) | | | | | | Thursday, June 5 2008, 21:14 | | | Rating: | | | Actions: | | |
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Paul(admin) | | | | | | Thursday, June 5 2008, 2:13 | My father recently asked for my help opening a Word document he had received from a colleague using a Mac. Evidently Outlook corrupts the file when saving it to disk, making it impossible to open it in Word without getting a File Conversion dialog similar to the one displayed below.
 Symptoms of KB951679 Problem
Opening any kind of Macintosh binary attachment from Outlook 2003 results in an error. JPEG images (.jpg) and Word documents (.doc) are affected in particular.
Solution
After looking long and hard, I discovered that the culprit is a Microsoft security update (MS08-15). There are two solutions:
Solution 1: Install the corresponding hotfix
Knowledge Base article 951678 provides a link (top of the page: "View and request hotfix downloads") to an irritatingly long procedure of requesting a hotfix, getting an e-mail, downloading the fix, inserting a password, unpacking it once, unpacking it again and finally installing it.
It's a pain to install, but it worked perfectly straight off the bat.
If you don't want to give your e-mail address to Microsoft, free anonymous e-mail solutions like Mailinator.com work, too.
Solution 2: Uninstall the guilty update
I urge you to apply the hotfix described above, but if for whichever reason you can't or don't want to, you can simply uninstall security update for Outlook 2003, MS08-15. (See this Knowledge Base article for information.)
Open the Control Panel, select Add or Remove Programs, and scroll down the list until you find "Security Update for Outlook 2003 (KB945432): OUTLOOK". Hit Remove to uninstall the problematic update.
 Uninstall procedure for KB945432 | | Rating: | | | Actions: | | |
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Paul(admin) | | | | | | Wednesday, June 4 2008, 21:25 | I've been getting acquainted with the system and have already performed various motion capturing takes. All in all, I am very impressed with the Vicon hardware I have to my disposal. Although newer software is available, setting up the cameras, calibrating them, performing motion capturing, modeling and post processing is made fairly easy using Vicon iQ.
The learning curve is steep, but with some help from fellow students and documentation built up over the years I'm learning how to work with the system fairly quickly.
Presently I am doing an experimentation project that looks into the viability of using a user-facing camera on a mobile device to determine its relative position to the user. As a ground truth, I will be performing motion capturing on several test subjects holding a Nokia N95 smartphone.
Friday I will perform an initial experiment and I hope to get more subjects recorded by next week Wednesday.
 Motion capturing suit, demonstrating reflective markers | | Rating: | | | Actions: | | |
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Paul(admin) | | | | | | Saturday, May 24 2008, 18:01 | Just the other day, I was experimenting with Google Translate's new Web 2.0-inspired feedback form. Users can contribute to better translations by simply clicking on a sentence and changing the translation.
Evidently, this technique is sensitive to vandalism. I had to laugh when I read the translation of the following bit of text:
Here, I'm telling about how I moved to the Netherlands at the age of 11. Google translated this to:
Apparently, some joker made Google think "Nederland" means "Canada." Har, har. | | Rating: | | | Actions: | | |
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Since Friday we have four tables, four chairs and a bookshelf!
