I played around with Window 8 consumer preview for a while on a vm on a high-end laptop, but after a while got bored of the lack of touch support so decided would give it a try on my Asus EeePC with Swival Touch Screen. Before I say anything I am aware that the tech specs say that this screen is below resolution. I installed it primarily to find out what the result of installing on a very common piece of hardware.

Well as you can see the error is handled, but the problem comes is it essentially makes the merto interface completely useless. In fact it makes it more than useless it is very annoying pressing start key then being presented with a load of icons that you cant click... 

I hope they put in some fall back options for low res monitors, otherwise they will eliminate all notebooks atleast for update.

Stuart James  …

Update: New Baldur's Gate game in the summer with updated graphics etc... meh too obvious

Stuart James  …

Have finally got around to writing a service to handle my index. It may seem strange it has taken so long to do this but, performance often doesn't take much of effect in my work. As long as the search is performed in a reasonable time there are many many ways to speed this up.

Therefore I have looked into a few different ways to do this, but to utilise as much code as I could I wanted the solution to be witten in C++. I found an incredible library POCO, that was incredibly easy to use. Sadly I am busy working to a deadline at the moment so I don't have enough time to write a full guide to using POCO.

Hopefully after ICPR deadline and getting settled back into being in the UK will write some tutorials on using POCO as well as index structure.

To note my further work on this is a KD-Tree to hype up the performance a bit more.

POCO API Structure

Stuart James  …

Taking inspiration from some work my supervisor did on the Digital Dance Archives website, exploiting a match heat map can help identify matches within a video.

Since I am currently pushing for everything to be done in HTML5, I started thinking about how I could achieve a similar effect utilising the <video> tag. So after googling around came across a blog for creating a custom player that is cross browser compatible. A custom player would allow me to be able to add in the heat map without much difficulty.

Here we go, some quick javascript to load the heat map pumped out of my indexing service. So if you are interesting in customising your own player explore an Opera guide, Building a custom HTML5 video player with CSS3 and jQuery.

Sadly I am currently just prototyping but I hope to get a full system released soon so you can see the full system in action, probably applied to generic key frame video retrieval.

Stuart James  …

The release date for Diablo 3 is nore confirmed as 15th May. I remember playing this as a kid so is nice to see another game I loved coming together for a sequal.

Stuart James  …