At JavaZone this year, I gave the talk “Computer Vision for mobile Java developers”. Here, I live code finding conference badges in a picture. The coding is iterative and interactive and I use it to illustrate Haar cascades, Canny edge detection, Otsu thresholding, contour detection, erosion and dilation and contour analysis.

In my experience, developing a good algorithm with OpenCV is about setting up yourself for feedback. I read an example image, add one and one processing step to it and display the results as I work. This both works well as a development technique and is a good framework to explain what’s going on.

If you’re looking for an entertaining and practical explanation of OpenCV image processing, this talk covers a lot of ground.

The alumni organization from my old university is arranging a debate about open source, and I’ll be moderating. The debate will be next Wednesday at Scotsman in downtown Oslo.

There will be a four person panel, with two skeptics and two open source fans. So far, the panel looks as follows:

• Heidi Arnesen Austlid, Friprogsenteret
• Per Hove, Oracle Norge
• Shahzad Rana, Questpoint
• An exciting surprise!

The event will be held in The Scotsman, where they sell beer! And there will be free pizza! Free code, free beer, free pizza!

More information

Hope to see you there.

The text of this blogpost was shamelessly ripped of Ferris’s blog and patched slightly

In the middle of changing jobs, I have also been quite busy with the last minute preparations for the Smidig 2008 conference for the Oslo Agile user community (“smidig” being the closest Norwegian translation of “agile”).

The conference be two days of lightning talks before lunch and open spaces after lunch. The program is in the final stages of being finalized as we speak.

There are still a few open seats. We’ve structured the price so that we don’t need to sell out to avoid losing money. But we want to make sure that as many people as possible take advantage of the opportunity to learn and discuss with a large number of other practitioners of agile software development.

You can sign up at http://smidig2008.no. Hope I see you there!

Here is a wordle of my blog:

(Inspired by Thomas Ferris)

I am changing employers. As of October 1st, I will no longer be lead software architect at BBS Nordic. Instead, I will be the chief scientist at the Norwegian division of Steria.

This weekend, I was invited to join my new employer at their gathering at a resort in the south of Norway. I’ve had a chance to speak with a lot of my new colleagues, and I was overwhelmed by the number of skilled, thoughtful and friendly people.

Steria has lots of very talented people, and I’m still looking for the best way to help the organization in my new role. I hope I can personally teach a lot of people the architecture and testing techniques that I’ve learned over the last years, and I hope I can help the people who actually produce the results that are needed at the end of the day get a stronger voice with our management and our customers.

Watch the thrilling story: What happens when you take a domesticated programmer out of his natural habitat and put him into a new world. Will be be overwhelmed by the differences, or will he be a new invasive species in the foreign ecosystem?

(Yes: I will insist that my proper title should still be JustAprogrammer. How long will I get away with it?)

I just watched another amazing talk from the TED conference. Spencer Wells is a natural public speaker. He talks about where we all, as a species, came from. Amazingly enough, everyone who is alive today share a common ancestor in Africa no more than about 2000 generations, or 60,000 years ago. Wells describes the fascinating questions and their answers, as we know them today.

The TED conference is full of remarkable talks. Here are some of my absolute favorites:

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The TED conference has some amazing talks. If you never knew you were interested in car seats for children, classical music, or feet (yeah!), some of these talks will blow you mind.

A recent video that really moved me was Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. His insights and inspiration is invaluable for everyone who considers themselves a leader.

“The conductor doesn’t make a sound, he depends for his power on the ability to make other people powerful… I realized that my job was to awaken possibility in other people.”

I got this one from xkcd via Chris Searle. It’s now posted on the walls at work:

My presentation at JavaZone was riddled with technical difficulties this year. To make a long story short: I learned five minutes before the presentation the the projector would be inoperative for a while (turned out to be 30 minutes). This threw a wrench into my plans, as I had planned to open with a demo.

I have read many times on presentation zen about presenting without slides. But before I stood in front of four hundred people with nothing to look at except me, I didn’t really believe how effective it would be. I’ve never seen a more attentive crowd! Thanks, everybody!

I don’t know if I had dared to throw the slides away if I hadn’t been forced to do so. But my next talk, I want to do without slides, too. This really was a serendipitous mishap.

There will be a video available of the talk, sadly, I forgot this, and spoke in Norwegian when I learned it was an all-Norwegian audience. I will link to the video for my Norwegian readers as soon as it is available.

“I just feel that in this company, there’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians.”

“Sure. Now, if they’d only been Indian chiefs.”

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