SemanticMetadata.net

GDC Europe 09: Art & Production Management

First presentation in the morning I listened to was the one from Stefan Baier and Rainer Banninga, both co-founders of Streamline Studios. They talked about how art, coding and production are interconnected and what is there approach to manage all this.

They state that it is crucial to communicate interdisciplinary and to know people personally (meet them at least one time). For the art side they point out how crucial it is to stay within limits (memory, hardware, etc.) and to allow streaming of content. Another point they make is that you have to buy in the right tools or that you afford having an in-house dev team for tools you need (e.g. a race track editor for a racing game). An interesting artist team streamline studios has is the SWAT team. That’s 2-3 people just taking care of unexpectedthings in projects like cleaning up, changing details, removing glitches, etc. Rainer Banninga stated they had no crunch time for the last 18 month, so the approach looks good Surprisingly the Stefan and Rainer elobarate the need of standardized metadata meaning keyords. That’s a good sign that industry doesn’t really know about whats going on in standardization and acadmia or the other way round that standardization and academia are not working on solutions that can be applied in industry.

NetBeans Community Approves NetBeans 6.7 for Prime Time Release

The NetBeans community acceptance survey has voted for thhe last NetBeans 6.7 RC to be stable enough to be shipped. While this sounds great there is one minor details I consider critical for the significance of the survey: Only 182 people responded. (re-engineneered from 144 people being 79%). If we go with common numbers in empirical research ~5 % of the population take part in survey like these and therefore I conclude that the size of the NetBeans community is around 3.600 people.

NetBeans is actually having quite a a hard time with Eclipse pressing from open source and Idea pressing from commercial alternatives. Also the free IDEs of Microsoft’s .NET family affect the scene. However, I still think that if NetBeans manages to advance from the “I can do all” principle to a small and lean application development environment featuring a fast and intelligent editor and a WYSIWYG gui builder there is definitely a chance.

Links

• Announcement.

Visual VM is Part of Java 1.6 Update 7

Java 1.6 u7 was released recently by Sun. While not bringing major changes it brought along some bug fixes and solved some security issues. However there is one main addition: The VisualVM. This is a really great developer tool: It connects to running VMs and shows “some statistics” about them. Besides memory usage and threads information it also allows to do some basic profiling. In my opinion Sun did a good job on including VisualVM in the package! Not that this thing is build on the NetBeans Platform

Links:

• Java 1.6 u7 release notes

Less than 20% of Flickr images tagged …

While writing a scientific paper on tag recommendation I checked – just out of curiosity – the share of images tagged by their uploaders on Flickr. I found out that 4 out of five images are untagged and that less than 15% of images have 2 or more tags.

My method and detailed results: In general one would need a random sample for such an investigation, but a truly random sample is hard to obtain without access to the data base. Therefore I just grabbed 20,004 images from the RSS feed for recent uploads and counted the number of tagged images. Easy enough I also computed the confidence interval:

• In my sample 3,650 images were tagged with at least one tag, that makes p1=18.25%
• With alpha=0.99 p1 is in [16.84, 19.66].
• That leaves more than 4 out of 5 images untagged.
• Also in my sample 2,628 images were tagged with at least two tags, that makes p2=13,14%
• With alpha=0.99 p2 is in [11.9, 14.37].
• That means that less than 15% of the images images have more than one tag.

Finding duplicate code …

I recently found myself in a scenario, where I tried to figure out how implementation clusters have been implicitly created within a group of students. All of them were given a task (with 4 sub tasks) for a whole semester. Everyone was meant to do the task alone, but collaboration was allowed. However I needed to know who helped whom and – of course – who helped whom with source code.

A colleague had a similar problem and he pointed me to PMD CPD (= PMD Copy & Paste Detector) . This tool works lightning fast and has a GUI Also its open source -> respect!

Links:

• http://pmd.sourceforge.net/cpd.html

Compiler Construction & Lord of the Rings

Recently I had an idea on compilers and code generation. Generating assembler code (I’m talking about MIPS code) and with it labels I thought: Why not using cool names for labels? Instead of

LB_WH002_001G:
beq $a1, $v1,  LB_WH002_002G
add $a1, $a1, $v1
j  LB_WH002_001G
LB_WH002_002G:
...

One could be more creative and use for instance Names from Lord of the Rings like:

THE_SHIRE:
beq $a1, $v1,  MORDOR
add $a1, $a1, $v1
j  THE_SHIRE
MORDOR:
...

While this definitely does not increase readability of assembler code I still think it doesn’t lessen it much. Instead it introduces “geekiness” to assembler

For those who are not creative themselves and need a lot of labels I recommend the numerous fanrtasy fantasy name generators available on the internet like this, this or this one.

Lire development: a big next step ..

While it has been quiet for some time around Lire, recently development has been pushed forward. I switched to SVN for development and integrated simple RGB color histograms as a feature for comparison with the MPEG-7 features. Savvas Chatzichristofis (or on facebook, his image search engine) contributed the CEDD feature, which works great! Marko Keuschnig and Christian Penz contributed implementations for the Gabor texture feature and the Tamura texture features, where the latter is already in the SVN. I also integrated the new features in LireDemo. A new version – already compiled – can be downloaded here: liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk16.tar.bz2 Note that Java 1.6 is required.

Caliph, Emir and Lire development switched to subversion

Today I did something I should have done a long time ago: I switched (within sf.net) from cvs to subversion. Now login, update and commit are much faster and development gets easier. If you are interested you can browse the repository here: http://caliph-emir.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/caliph-emir/. If you want to check out and get the code, then you can find the documentation on sf.net.

NetBeans 6.1 Released

The new NetBeans IDE 6.1 has been released 2 days ago. Changes are more incremental than fundamental, but it features now support for JavaScript and code completion for JavaDoc. Furthermore support for MySQL has been added. Release notes can be found here.

Image Mosaics with Ajax

Did you ever think image mosaics in a web application are something that can only be rendered on server side? Well a very interesting post gives an example for the generation of image mosaics with JavaScript and Ajax. The authors employs a JavaScript binary file reader and uses the raw values from greyscale BMPs to find the mosaic. The approach for mosaic creation is simply yet effective: The overall luminance of an image is taken as “single value descriptor” and single pixels are substituted by very small BMPs.

Related Links:

• Ajax mosaic builder – The blog entry describing the Ajax way of mosaic creation
• Lire Demo – The offline way for image mosaic creation (also featuring colored images and formats different from BMP)