Starbucks, Manchester

I guess I'm getting addicted to wireless internet access around the world. Right now I'm having a tall cup of caramel macchiato at Startbucks in Manchester.

The last week has been quiet successful and during the next two weeks my QA application will go into production. Last night I wrote a machine simulator and a database simulator to be able to show to Anne what I have been doing over the last week (and the weeks last year and the year before...).

Since my flight will depart pretty late in the evening I yet have some time to explore Manchester. From where I have been already I actually like it better than Birmingham. But that's probably because I have not been to the pedestrian areas in Birmingham...

The day before yesterday there were some "fake bombings" at Manchester. The police took down a man with a taser gun because he was "looking suspiciously". The British are so crazy about terrorism that they just jail everybody away who only remotely looks like anything that could maybe a vague sign of a remote connction to someone that may have met without knowing a terrorist, or so. Too bad. Is that the future we are facing in Germany, Europe, World? Hopefully not.

Anyway, I hope today there is no "crazy" guy preventing my flight from lift-off.

HotSpot

Finally I can make use of a promotional deal that I signed up for a couple of months ago: Until the end of the year I can use all T-HotSpots for up to three hours a month for free. So I'm sitting here at the Airport, reading news and writing such trivial nonsense like this. Nice. I like life.

Life is fast

Over a month no entry. And so much happened! So this is a review of the last month.

As you may know my last entry was written in Crianlarich while Anne and I were doing the West Highland Way. We are now back home for more than three weeks...
The walk was great! We were lucky regarding the weather and had a lot of fun in the Scottish highlands. After we finished the WHW we did a second two-day trek on the Isle of Skye from Elgol to Sligachan via Camasunary walking through the Cuillin. Originally we planned to walk by Loch Coruisk via the Bad Step. But the weather turned bad just before we arrived at Camasunary and so we decided to stay there. It was a good decision as it turned out. We had a nice birthday morning at the boothy. If I find some time I will write a little bit more in detail about the treks.

The first two weeks back in Germany I spent on fixing and enhancing our new computer vision software for the AllemaniACs RoboCup robot soccer team. We did a complete rewrite of the image processing software as the old one turned out to be too slow and unmaintainable. We called the software FireVision and it now cotains image processing pipelines for the front camera (high resolution, damn fast good images), the omni vision camera (Apple firewire cameras at VGA resolution with an ordinary light bulb as mirror) and several accompanying pieces of software.

Last weekend we attended the German AI conference KI 2005. We were one of two teams participating in a world premier: Playing in a full size gym on a handball field with dimensions of 40m x 20m! The average RoboCup field is 8m x 12m or sometimes 10m x 15m. This was quiet a challenge but we took it. From the vision side the biggest problems were the orange and red lines on the field. We taped the orange ones but in the end the red ones caused major trouble. We are using a color map generated with a bayesian approach to decide which colors are considered to be ball colors. With the red lines we had to adjust the color map in such a way that all red-like colors where not seen as ball. This resulted in bad ball recognition rates. This is something we have to tweak the software further. Also the shape recognition of the ball is not yet as stable as we would like it to be. So that is where a lot of the work will be spent during the next weeks. All over nothing seemed to be completely finished, a lot of screws need to be tightened or found again...

Last week I was in Cologne. Anne and I went to a library every day to get to learn without distractions. This is really a good thing which we will continue.

Next week I'm going to be in England to port the middle ware I wrote for a company in Northampton for another company in Birmingham. One week less for learning...

Today my brother and I dug out the roots of a tree my father cut down last week. That was quit some work but luckily the roots were already somewhat decayed so that in the end we could get it to break loose.

I think that's it for now.

Crianlarich

Anne and I are doing the West Highland Way right now. We are currently staying in the youth hostel in Crianlarich and thus have made almost half the way. We are both fine and well. Tommorrow we will go to Tyndrum where we are going to have a rest day the day after tommorrow. More to come.

Hot

Something you do not want to have in your log:

Jul 12 20:58:37 evilgenius kernel: Critical temperature reached (93 C), shutting down

Note to myself: Do not leave the notebook in active state in the backpack.
Fortunate me that the kernel took care of this.