Seminar Done

The Business Intelligence Seminar went well. Our good friend, Iman Eftekhari opened up the seminar with an introduction to BI, Dr.Abdollah Zadeh from Amir Kabir University expanded the definitions for BI and the program was followed by other professionals talking about problems that can arise in BI implementation projects and an introduction to MS Sharepoint as a front end portal for managing BI Solutions. Iman finished with some demos on Microsoft products for Business Intelligence.

There were a few things we wished could have been handled better but considering the fact that this was our first Seminar experience, it was ok.

We are looking forward to expand the consulting and implementation fields here at Fanafzar to include BI in the near future.

Honor Machine

This is the first post from a new machine which is going to help me a bit from now on, Wakizashi (脇差). Part of the FW290 family from VAIO. The extra wide screen seems good for handling text and other toolbars on the side of applications, although the full HD resolution which to my surprise can only be reduced one level to 1024 seemed a bit strange, but increasing the OS size will provide smooth curves everywhere which kind of feels nice. The Vista and specially the 64 bit OS is a new experience for me, not that bad so far. Overall I expected a bit more performance from the T9400 CPU and the ATI 3650 graphics card but anyway it is going to save me some valuable minutes or maybe hours everyday. Anyway this little shiny thing at these critical times will either help me find some glory through success or some honor through failure. Refer to the original Wakizashi usage for more information.

My euphoria with Endorphin

I had a chance to go over the Endorphin product in detail today and it amazed me big time. This technology is really great and playing with the product is really fun. Advanced animation systems in a physically simulated test bed with artificial intelligence for active agents, what could be better. The technology is called motion synthesis by Natural Motion.

Behavioral animation is created using Artificial Neural Networks which are trained using Genetic Algorithms, combined with forward and inverse kinematics and a flexible animation framework brings the otherwise lifeless dolls to life.

This video on TED by the owner of the company describes the techniques.

This is the original research paper, "Evolution of central pattern generators for bipedal walking". The following paper is one of the main sources of inspiration for the study.

"The Use of Genetic Algorithms for the Development of Sensorimotor Control Systems"

This area of science is just so interesting.

Chrome Time

I'm having fun with Chrome, the new google browser. Among the reasons for this fun are the fact that it is very light weight and minimalistic. For some reason I always get attracted to minimalism, being simple but with power. Powerful Simplicity. Fast small foot-print code is fun, easy short solutions to mathematical problems are beautiful, minimalistic furniture is awesome, cheetah is my favorite animal, strong people with little overhead are great, sports with little gears needed are the best! Flying is the ultimate dream!

Other reasons for having fun with chrome are the tabs being separate processes instead of all living in the same process and being multi-threaded, enabling all of the tabs to remain open after one crashes, which makes the 50+ tabs I usually have open in the hopes of reading their content some day remain there for a bit more time until I consciously decide that I'm never going to read them and make me feel a bit  ... umm.. well... this one might not be so good after all :).

The comics done by Scott Mcloud are great too. Don't forget to read his books about comics if you have the slightes interest in this media.

ScribeFire

Let me see if ScribeFire actually works...
hmm...

Big brother is watching you ... run ... run ..

Computer vision is an interesting field, well, first of all the name is interesting... it says computer "VISION".. like vision is something which is very basic for computers and has had a long history :).. the field is very young though and still a lot of areas which needs to be covered or uncovered in fact.

A recent application of computer vision recently has been in the Euro 2008 games. I was shocked a bit the first time I saw a player was being substituted and they showed the amount of kilometers this guy had ran. The first guess I had was that they use one of those little gadgets that you can attach to your waist and run with.. but a bit of investigation revealed that the technology uses several cameras to cover the field and stream the video into a few computers that basically analyze the scene, find out the needed information and do the necessary calculations. Quite cool and interesting.

Gadget Time

Going to the gym has always been a a fantastic experience except for one aspect, and that is the music played in there. I started by working out at home where I could select my music and everything was great, then there was the era of gyms with only the sound of people exhaling hard and iron hitting iron, then there were gyms with very light and slow music, followed by the gym at USC playing mostly hip hop and rap ( I hate RAP!, actually I used to like some rap in the nineties but nothing now), we would occasionally switch the radio to a local classic rock channel to witness it switched back to rap in less than 15 seconds. After that, the gym close to my work played rhythm and blues mostly :)... back to the old gym these days with lots of techno and trance!... probably brings the groove on for some of the machos around .... Overall these are the type of music that you have to try to not listen and ignore while you're trying to lift the weights, this fact itself is a big exercise and needs more concentration.

I've been able to overcome this problem very recently by purchasing one of these "Superb Design" products from Apple. It being very small, light and minimal is ideal for the place. It has turned out very well and transformed the gym experience into what it has to be. Nothing could help you on the bench more than Tom Araya expressing himself seriously.

By the way these Apple products really take the idea of design to the next level.
Design, this magical word which needs to be explored a lot more. Have a look at this book "The Design of Everyday Things" if you feel you need to explore more.

Hello Joomex!

A new idea has been around for a while here in our office flourishing from the creativity visions of Farshid. Ajax enabling a PHP portal with the least modifications. Success was achieved for the xoops portal, however after a few discussions, the project is based on joomla portal now.
The project is called Joomex and it will be born officially on the internet pretty soon. It is still in a womb called Meijin.

Old gaming devices

I recently ran into this article in gamasutra : A history of gaming platforms, the Commodore 64
It reminded me of the days that my cousin had this device and the lots of fun that we have with its games, which were loaded by a tape reader and it took around 30 minutes for each tape to first load in the system. Many times the tape would just crash in the middle and you'd have to do it all over again.
However in the same time, the device that had taken my heart by far was the Japanese Famicom (Nintendo). The first game I had for it was Spartan X. I would still love to play it. And the game which was irresistible was Dragon Quest, I followed it up to the third relesase. It was probably the most precious thing to be for me for quite a while.
Around the same time again, my brother was busy with his Apple 2 e.
The first of the Ultima series was the wonderful RPG for that machine.
But these weren't the first devices for us to experience the digital gaming world with, the first was an orange box which was called a TV Game at that time, I don't really remember the brand or any more information about it now, haven't been able to find it on Wikipedia due to lack of info. The game for that device was a tennis game which consisted two sticks going up and down and a ball (square) moving between the two sticks.

Google Reader

Started using it a while ago ... it was ok ... then it was nice ... then it was cool ... now can't live without ...

Google Reader