Shane's Blog » Fun

Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge

Shane — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 04:21:05 +0000

Sebastian Thrun of Stanford Racing gives a great a talk on what it took build an autonomous vehicle to win the DARPA Grand Challenge. There are lots of cool technical details on the use of machine learning to achieve this. You can watch it on Google Video here.

DARPA Grand Challenge

Shane — Thu, 04 May 2006 02:18:23 +0000

Start your engines, the DARPA Grand Challenge is on again only this time its an urban challenge! The last two competitions were to race an autonomous vehicle through a desert, with the 2005 winner, Standford, taking home a US$2 million prize.

Stanford’s software in action: Input from GPS and many sensors feed the algorithms to determine the safe path (see tech report).

TV Revolution

Shane — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 12:00:58 +0000

Recently iTunes Music Store launched in Australia, with Apple selling songs for $1.69 each (ouch!). While I haven’t tried the new Music Store, I have downloaded the latest iTunes to test out some of the other features. The podcast integration seems like a good feature, however my initial experience was that it was quite slow and unresponsive.

The tight integration and ease of use of the podcast functionality got me thinking. With the number of quality podcast and IPTV (Internet Protocol TV, sometimes also called a vidcast) shows being made available on the Internet, there is really going to be a opportunity for a shakeup of the way people watch TV. Particularly considering there is a slew of free high quality content (especially Tech shows eg. This Week in Tech, Diggnation, Systm, LUG Radio) with more appearing each day. There is even comedy (Tiki Bar TV!) and sports (The AFL Show), so who knows what will be next!

The way I see it, unless the TV and movie studios react with a online distribution tailored to what people actually want to watch (such as selling more shows on iTunes), they could be left in the dust. Especially considering that 1 million videos were sold in the first 20 days of the iTunes video service. Its no wonder Apple is focusing on increasing the content available! In the mean time though, lets sit back, relax and enjoy some of the content that is available, not forgetting the high quality content thats coming from podcasting and IPTV shows.

Segway

Shane — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 10:51:21 +0000

Andy acquired a new toy at work: a Segway HT! It was only fitting that I visit and give it a spin! Let me just say, the Segway is one impressive ride — I want one!

Weee!: Me riding the Segway HT.

Cruising: Video of Andy riding the Segway (DivX, 6.6MB)

The Segway website also has a proof-of-concept 4-wheeled product called the Centaur. Awesome! Check out the video too.

Google Maps

Shane — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:50:20 +0000

Google Maps now covers the entire world! Some interesting sites include the Pyramids and the Arc de Triomphe. An interesting comparison can be had between The White House, which has blanked out roof tops, and Parliament House… who is alert and who is alarmed?!
It seems only about half of Melbourne is covered in high resolution and none of Geelong is! However Lara is entirely in high res, go figure!! Here are some local maps:

Docklands, Telstra Dome and Spencer St Station
Monash Clayton (horrible resolution!)
Lara SC, Safeway and APCO
Andy’s old house, new house

Andy: since Google Maps uses the same Long/Lat co-ords as Street Directory, I wonder if the two could be combined?

Going 64-bit

Shane — Fri, 20 May 2005 07:10:20 +0000

Last Monday I purchased a new PC. The specs are pretty spiffy: its a AMD Athlon 64 3000 (2Ghz) system running on an Asus K8N-E Deluxe motherboard (nForce 3 250Gb based motherboard with SATA and onboard LAN & sound). I decided to try Gentoo Linux with has been with mixed success. Here are some notes:

SystemRescueCd and KNOPPIX are both great tools for doing system maintaince work. I put my old hard drives in the system and booted into KNOPPIX do copy over the files before there was even any operating system installed. One problem I had, which I’m not sure how it is related, was getting the partioning/formatting of the new SATA drive done. In the end I used the Ubuntu Linux 64-bit install CD to do the partitioning then SysRescCd/KNOPPIX.
All the various live CDs I’ve used have recognized the SATA drive ok, but the kernel I’ve installed myself doesn’t. I’m not sure if I might have missed a module somewhere. Generally the Asus K8N-E Deluxe/nForce 3 250Gb hardware seems to work well with Linux – better than the Silicon Image SATA RAID controller thats onboard anyway.
I’ve started reading about how to do Gentoo on AMD64 it seems there are some tricks to get certain applications working. So far problem programs which are easy to get working have been openoffice and firefox/flash. They just have 32 bit binary versions you can install.
Video might be a bit harder because of the w32 codecs being 32-bit dlls. I personally use Totem, but most of the info online points you to using mplayer and doing a lot of mplayer voodoo magic to watch videos.

Thats all for now… I will try to put some more info up soon.