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Small Games for Kids – New Release

Besides the two already existing games (GuessWhat and Soundmachine, more information here) I added a new one called SoundVis. The main idea is to animate a kid to make sounds by for instance clapping or yelling. The louder the sound the bigger the blue circle in the center gets. While this sounds trivial it is great fun Note that the microphone has to be functional. A simple test is included in the start screen of SoundVis.

Installation:

Find the new package (including source, licensed under GPL) here. Use 7-zip to unzip them. Launchers (.exe files) for windows are included. Linux users might peek at the included batch files to get a clue how to start the games.

Final Standard for KB Confusion

Is a Kilobyte 1024 Byte? Or maybe 1000 Byte? Xkcd posted the final solution for the KB confusion.

Learning how to program with Scratch

At the CSKGOI workshop Ian Eslick presented ScratchTalk, a system which creates programs from natural language input. It is based on Scratch, which is an animation framework with a visual program language. Scratch has been developed at the MIT and is used to teach kids how to program. It is rather easy to create a small side scroller game with easy graphics so I think I might give it a try in my teachings (e.g. in “Introduction to computer science” for students from social science).

What is the meaning of ESSIR?

Checking out if this year a European Summer School for Information Retrieval takes place a friend of mine found out something interesting: Searching for ESSIR, which is the abbreviation if the event, reveals that ESSIR is not only the IR summer school, but also the ad site “European Society for Sexual and Impotence Research” at essir.net

Note that this society actually does not exist, its just a hoax site with sponsored links. It belongs to Marchex Network, which claims to own more than 200.000 web sites and to reach 16% of the internet users. Check out the pages and you will find that there is virtually no information but only sponsored links. Due to the links in between the ad sites and the well chosen domain names (petshop.com etc.) they get ranked high. My recommendation: Pull the plug.

Nonogram for iPhone and iPod Touch

While I’m not Apple’s best fan I contributed my (sparse) mathematical knowledge for a Nongram puzzle for the iPod Touch, which was implemented by a long term friend of mine:

• In the Apple WebApps listing
• The game itself

While its actually played on devices named like a popular fruit one can also play them in a browser named like a burning mammal.

Category: Answers to questions which have never been asked

Read here on ZeroK’s blog how Sony answers questions … For me this is especially funny as I always experience the same with practically every support hotline i call. One example: My DSL connection always breaks down in early evening. Then I have to reset the router and it works again. I called the support hotline multiple times and always the same scenario:

Me: “It happens that my connection breaks down and computer does not get an IP address any more. Then I have to reboot the router and it works again. I don’t want to reboot my router every 5 minutes, so what can I do?”

Support: “Is your connection currently down and your computer on?”

Me: “Yes.”

Support: “Disable your network interface and enable it again.”

Me: “The computer gets no IP address, I already told you!”

Support: “Please note that you have to do this … bla bla bla ”

Me: “Fine, done, no address. So what now?”

Support: “Reboot your router.”

Me: “I already told you: It works again if I reboot the router!”

Support: “Bla bla bla … have to do it … bla bla bla”

Me: “Fine done, works again.”

Support: “Call again if the internet connection goes down again.”

For computer science people it’s obvious that such conversation can result in an endless loop.

Simpsons Avatars: That’s new!

While many people have already posted their simpsons avatars, Ralf Klamma has blogged a mashup of avatars showing the Community Information Systems Group in at RWTH Aachen.

Ralf: We are waiting for the movie!

Definitions in Context: “Deadline”

Sometimes one might think about the meaning of a word a bit longer than usual and might even find that the common understanding of a word is different to the actual meaning. I had the experience with the term deadline. I found now qa most interesting definition that seems to match the actual behaviour of people encountered with the concept of a deadline. And here goes the definition:

Deadline is the day one week before the actual submission of the finished work.

Common Mysteries & Myths of Computer Networks V

Answers to Common Questions

Checking the proceedings after the ACM Multimedia reminded me of the las slide of Mike Gleicher. His paper was best paper nominee and dealt with post processing of videos to enhance the camera motion quality (straight motion and zoom, remove shaking etc.). He presented notable results and at the end of his talk he gave some answers:

• I don’t know.
• No, we don’t introduce cuts.
• The details are in the paper, send me email if its not clear.
• Friends in industry say they can do the camera motion estimation robustly, in real time.
• Yes, I would like to go to Oktoberfest Friday.
• Our in-painter builds a 4 second mosaic for each frame.
• 2
• Logarithms and exponents of 3×3 matrices can be computed robustly and efficiently with iterative methods.
• Yes, this slide is an old joke –but I haven’t used it in years.

Ref. Michael Gleicher and Feng Liu. Re-Cinematography: Improving the Camera Dynamics of Casual Video. ACM Multimedia 2007, best paper nominee. September 2007. [on his homepage]