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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 just feel that in this company, there’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians.” “Sure. Now, if they’d only been Indian chiefs.” I have been real quiet lately. I will try to be better about writing in the future. I’ll do my best to stay away from project management issues, though. I’ve stepped on enough toes lately, I think. Here are some teasers of upcoming topics: REST, Quaere, introducing tests into existing code bases, the Norwegian conference “Smidig 2007”, my JavaZone talk, and closures for Java.

A few months back, I saw a presentation that has kept me thinking ever since. Nicholas Negroponte is currently in the completing phases of a project I think might revolutionize the world. The $100 laptop project, or, as it is known now: One Laptop Per Child (OLTP). The idea behind the One Laptop Per Child project is to create a computer that can be given to every child in developing countries.

I finally managed to finish my article on testing web applications with JWebUnit and Jetty. The article is published on java.net as last Thursday’s featured article. Enjoy!

WordPress has not been good to me lately. For some reason, this site loads really, really slow now, and I’m still trying to figure out why. If you know why WordPress may be misbehaving, please let me know. Until I fix the problem: All pages on the site still load, just give them some time… Comments: Johannes Brodwall - Apr 15, 2007 All right. I installed a new copy of WordPress exported from the old database into the new one and relinked everything together.

“I really wish you’d stop using that word - I don’t think it means what you think it means.” (The Princess Bride - of course) When my wife asked “are you a feminist,” I realized I don’t like words very much. To some people, “feminism” means women who dress like men, think pornography is destroying society and that all men are inherently evil. You know the type I’m talking about. To many others, including my wife, a “feminism” is “the radical notion that women are people”.

Here are some of my favorite words. Signs of danger ‘Just’: bad word, as in “can’t we just develop the greatest application ever”, “can’t we just replace the database with JavaSpaces”, “can’t we just expose the functionality to the world as a web service”. ‘Should’: bad word, as in “it _should_n’t take more than a few days to do that, should it,” “integrating two systems should be easy.” Listen for use of this word from people who … should know better.

After I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress as my blogging software, the comment spam problem has returned from the grave. So I’ve looked for good solutions for WordPress: I ended on a verbal CAPTCHA with a math question (which may also keep stupid commenters out - not that I have any of those, of course). I am considering some of the “fight-back” solutions out there too: Maybe returning a really big response really slowly when spam is detected, like Spammer Tar Pit.

What is the next letter in this sequence: A E I. And this sequence: A B G D? How about this one: B C D G J? A boy and his mother are in a horrible car accident. They are rushed to the hospital, but on the way, the mother dies. When they arrive at the hospital, the nurse exclaims: “But that is my son!”. How can that be? You’re in the basement of a house.

Blessed synchronizity: From Jason Yip’s blog: Vendor’s Law: Organise people into roles corresponding to the tools that you want to sell to them. And today’s Dilbert:

In the book Software for Your Head, Jim McCarthy introduces The Core Protocols (pdf). Even though the book occasionally give off a new-agey feeling with ritualistic interaction, I think the Protocols have a lot of merit. I especially like “the decider protocol” As I see it, the Decider protocol is a basic tool for consensus-based decisions. I think consensus as a tools in misunderstood and underutilized. It is easy to assume that basing decisions on consensus is a perfect way of spiraling off into meaningless discussions, but I think this is easily avoided.

One of the most profound ideas in lambda calculus, is the Y-operator. I’ve learned the Y-operator at least three times, and every time, I found it extremely hard to understand. This blog is therefore an example of a quixotic undertaking: I want to see whether it is possible for me to explain the Y-operator so that you, gentle reader, can understand it with minimal background. In this case, “minimal background” means at least a few years of college level mathematics.

The bad news is that I am taking down the articles about Hibernate-testing from my blog. This is because I am going to publish the text as an article in java.net. (which is the good news). Stay tuned for more information. Comments: [Ash] - Sep 15, 2005 I have read some of your post on testing DAO(s) using an in memory database and look forward to your article in java.net. Awesome work!

I would like to start by apologizing from having a political entry in my blog. I believe that politics is intertwined with other intellectual endeavour. As scientist and engineers, we have a duty of social awareness, to see that our creations are being used for the benefit of humanity. I was saddened by tuesday’s election results. Up until the eve of November 2nd (Central European Time), I was hoping that the Unites States would wake up from the state of collective insanity it has been suffering from for the last four years, and join the civilized world.

I am currently reading Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham. It contains many brilliant essays, but it also has a few not so brilliant ones. In “Mind the Gap”, Graham proposes the idea “in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health”. The rationale for this is that some people have the potensial to be more productive than others and by rewarding them proportionally, everyone as a whole would be better off.

It is funny how little incidents reminds us of more general principles… Today, when I went to the store, there was a baby that was crying, and it’s mother kept going, “be quiet now!”, “sit down!”, “hush!” in a real angry voice (the dog-peed-on-the-rug-voice). The whole thing just reminded me of two funny things from cognitive science: Punishment is actually a very ineffective way of teaching. Indeed some researchers believe that punishment is purely counterproductive.

Watched a show about Ada Lovelace today, and I thought about all the great names we should remember better. It would be so cool to have posters of these. I am just including dead ones. It feels kinda creepy to have living heroes. Ada Lovelace (why do great mathematicians die young?) Alan Turing (of course) Edger Dijkstra (pioneered software and computer science as a discipline) Grace Murray Hopper (championing accessible program writing) Kristen Nygaard (as far as I know, he was one of the first people to be concerned about the impact of computing upon society)

Bush ’not mad’ at France [via CNN] “I’m going to remind him, like I’m going to remind a lot of people, that we can do a heck of a lot more together than we can arguing with each other,” [Bush] said." ITYM, “I can do heck of a lot more on of what I want if you stop hasslin’ me”, Dubya. Dubya might be “not mad” at France, but I sure hope France is still mad at him.

Not waiting for the U.S. Congress to take action against spam, the California State Senate passed a bill Thursday that would turn spam from a misdemeanor to a felony offense and cost spammers an estimated US$500 per unsolicited e-mail sent. [ - from MacCentral ]

free culture Creativity and innovation builds on the past The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it Free societies limit the future by limiting the past Ours is less and less a free society

I am so sick of reading about the poor economics behind arguments when it comes to tax cut. Being a Norwegian citizen, I am used to taxation levels that would make an American faint. And I don’t know if it really hurts us at all. What I miss in the discussion goes back to the basics of economy: I am not an economist, but this is how I understand it:

A view on the conflict from the standpoint of cognitive science/social science Steven Pinker (“How the mind works”): People may use “doomsday machines” (strategies that are both harmful to themselves and an agressor) to deter agressors. Hernando de Soto (“The Mystery of Capital”) An important reason a society with big differences are more prone to violence is that the underprivileged do not have any bargaining power. Personal opinion: In a conflict with two countries that are dramatically unevenly matched, we should expect the underprivileged to resort to “doomsday machine” strategies.

What does it really mean when they say stuff like “the fighting in order to capture Umm Qasr is heavier than expected”. What does it mean when the fighting is heavier? Do more people die on either side? Do any people die on either side? After almost three days of war, I have still to hear of any casualties in the fighting. Are we supposed to believe there are none?

On the news yesterday, I heard Blair say that the british lawyer-general claims the present war on could be legal. I understand he finds his justifications in the UN resolutions 678, 687, 688, and 1441 (probably among others). These resolutions calls for disarming the Iraqi regime by any means necessary. There are two fundamental problems with this argument: First, the stated goals of the “coalition of the willing” are disarming Iraq and changing it’s regime.

A fairly decent-seeming RSS feed reader. This entry was written with it. Pretty cool Comments: [Aaron Sevivas] - Mar 12, 2003 this seems to be a fairly decent-seeming RSS feed reader. That entry appears to be written with it. Pretty cool [Sarah] - Mar 12, 2003 Is there any way you can get rid of that annoying footer when posting?