Even though I try to eat vegan most of the time, I just can’t help but eat turkey on Thanksgiving… and the next day. But, although we had turkey leftovers, we didn’t have any cranberry sauce leftovers when I went to make my mom’s famous turkey and cranberry sauce sandwiches. So, I whipped this stuff up in 5 minutes and it was as good as if you made it on the stove for hours and hours… here’s what I did:
This book is another attraction in Tom Robbins’ impressive line of books. Tom is far and away my favorite fiction author; and although this isn’t my favorite book of his, its worth a read. It started off slow, but once the plot got going I couldn’t put it down. “Just one more chapter, then I’ll go to bed.” Yeah right!
Here’s the synopsis: A loin-cloth-wearing magician, a sexy, enlightened debutante-turned-gypsy, a hemorrhoidal scientist/author, a rogue athlete/drug dealer, and a roadside hotdog-serving zoo are the characters and participants in a caper that might have changed the world, but ended up vanishing in a puff of light. How’s that for a summary?! This book made me want to be a hippy and eat mushrooms. In fact, I made mushrooms for dinner last night! Let me leave you with some notable quotes that found nestled in the pages:
“The principal difference between adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape. (The narrower the margin, the greater the adventure”
“Romanticism and science are good for each other. The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human.”
“The world is perpetually changing. It doesn’t do much else but change… Why do you want to stick your nose into it?”
This is one of three recipes that I made this Thanksgiving weekend… Expect “5 minute Cranberry Sauce” and “Hummaganoushus” soon. This particular recipe, though, is a good one that I actually made up last Thanksgiving. This is a great general-purpose sauce that is full of flavor and will add zing to anything you put it on. I of course usually put it on veggies : ) Click to continue →
Recently I have decided to explore tracking from 3D point clouds extracted from stereo vision cameras. Step 1: Extract 3D point cloud from stereo vision cameras. So right now I’m implementing Segment-Based Stereo Matching Using Belief Propogation and Self-Adapting Dissimilarity Measure” by Klaus, Sormann, and Karner. This paper is defined by the source on stereo vision to be the best one around. This paper has two parts. Part 1: Segment the image. Part 2: Compute disparity (and depth) from the segments. Well, today I finished Part 1.
The authors refer to a mean-shift segmentation algorithm presented in Mean Shift: A Robust Approach Toward Feature Space Analysis” [pdf] by Comaniciu and Meer to do the image segmentation. This paper (unlike some of my own previous work) leans towards oversegmentation of an image. Meaning that you prefer to get lots of little bits rather than the “right object” after the algorithm has run.
Well, after looking over the paper and getting a grasp for the mathematics, I took a crack at implementing it. Easily done… HOWEVER, my first attempt, written in Matlab, was painfully slow. (For a simple image it took 6 hours to run!) So, I got on the internet and came up with a better solution!
Some great guys at Rutgers University implemented this paper in C++ and made the code available to the public under the name EDISON. (there’s also a nice GUI that goes along with this if you want to just play to see if these codes will work for you). Okay, so I had C++ codes that worked well (only 2 sec to do an image rather than 6 hours). The next step was to bring the code into Matlab.
I cracked my knuckles and got ready to write a MEX wrapper for this EDISON code. Then I said to myself, “Self, maybe you should check the ‘net first.” Turns out I had a good point. I found the website of Shai Bagon. Mr. Bagon had already made the MEX wrapper! Awesome.
I downloaded the codes and put them together. Mr. Bagon’s stuff worked right out of the box, although it would have saved me about an hour if I would have had this information (alternative readme.txt for Matlab Interface for EDISON). I also wrote my own wrapper-wrapper so that I could process grayscale images, and do simpler calls to accomplish what I wanted. If you’d like the code, download my wrapper-wrapper here (msseg.m).
Here is a sample of the output of this algorithm. The first image is a regular photo of some posed objects. The second image is the segmented version. Notice how the regions of the image are much, much more constant. This image has been broken into “tiles” of constant color.
Don’t re-invent the wheel. Taking a first crack at the implementation was good, and it helped me understand the algorithm. However, there was no need for me to spend a week tweaking it to be super-fast or two days getting the Matlab interface working. These things had already been done! It feels nice to knock out a task that you thought was going to take a week in a few hours : ) Stay tuned for the stereo part of this paper coming soon. Then maybe people will be writing about my page!
My buddy Naomi suggested that I make some apple sauce when she visited from NYC two weeks ago. Actually, she insisted and we bought a bunch of ingredients at Your Dekalb Farmers’ Market. So, here I sat weeks later, lots of apples, cranberries, and cinnamon in my house and no recipe. So, I got on the internets and came up with this. (based on this one from epicurious)
In my struggle to do more, be better, and kick ass I try a menagerie of techniques, experiments, etc. Most recently, I’ve developed a set of mantra that seem to give me that extra push to get things done, and done well. I keep these three phrases in mind all day and let them spur me to action.
The idea that you should always deliver on what you say you will is a strong one. I want to be known as “someone who delivers.” This keeps my head in the game long-term thinking about not just actions right now, but how they will translate to tangibles later on. Deliver at work, Deliver in relationships, Deliver financially. DELIVER.
This one comes from my friend Naomi. In this crazy world, it’s all too common to work or play to the exclusion of sleeping. When things start to drag, when my pen slumps and my eyelids get heavy, I think to myself, “More Action!” Its a great way to get going, and keep moving fast. “More Action!” at the gym. “More Action!” when programming. “More Action!” when you want just 5 more minutes before you get out of bed… “More Action!!”
Here’s one from my buddy Jon. We tease Jon because, “he pushes it.” However, pushing it is a valuable quality. Whenever I want to quit, take a break, slow down for just a sec’ because its more comfortable… I think “push it.” This means working for 10 extra minutes when I’m stuck on a problem, or running for one extra mile when my lungs and legs burn, or knocking one more thing off of my to-do list before going to bed. I hope working just outside my comfort zone will make me stronger. Push it.
These three are short and simple enough to keep with me mentally all day long. If it were just about that though, I’m sure I’d forget eventually. Hence, I put up sticky-notes with these mantra. I put them on my monitor at work, my microwave at home, my dashboard, my laptop, you name it. Seeing them all the time reminds me to do More Action so I can continue to Push It and eventually DELIVER.
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