Jun 17 2011

Kinect SDK

Category: .geek,.microsoft — Amit Bahree @ 2:58 am

Microsoft recently release the Kinect SDK which allows you to implement a Natural User Interface and program against it! There is a lot of interest  around including claims on how Robotics will change to how you can integrate a light sensor.

You can use Visual Studio (C++, C# and VB.NET supported) and get quite interesting results.

Here are a series of links below which will help you get started.

  1. Download and install the Kinect SDK
  2. Download and install Quickstart Samples and Slides (zip file)
  3. Understanding the Kinect hardware
  4. Setting up your Dev Environment
  5. Understanding the basics of skeletal tracking using the Kinect sensor
  6. Understanding camera fundamentals
  7. Understanding the audio fundamentals
  8. Playing with the Coding4Fun Kinect toolkit and seeing how one can build cool apps such as:

Keep and eye out on the Coding4Fun Kinect blog.

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May 15 2011

Tips on Buying a UPS?

Category: .desh,.geek,.media center,.whs — Amit Bahree @ 1:11 pm

After moving to Bangalore, it turns out that I would need to get one or more UPS’s for the machines at home. The place we will be moving to in a few weeks does have power backup, but if/when there is a power cut it takes a few minutes for the generators to kick in and is not instantaneous as I was thinking.

I have never bought a UPS until now and don’t have any experience with it – what are the things that I need to consider? I will have the following equipment running which will need to be powered up for about 15 minutes:

  • 4 Desktops (including a MCE and WHS)
  • Two 17” LCD Monitors
  • A set of powered Speakers (optional)
  • Few switches
  • KVM Switch
  • VOIP Phone
  • Wireless Router
  • DSL Modem

Would it make sense to buy a few smaller UPS’s instead of one big one? Which is a good one? How much wattage/capacity should I look to get? Can one get second-hand ones – are they recommended? Does the UPS required any maintenance or are they maintenance free these days? :-?

Of all the machines, the WHS is one of the most critical ones. Is there any UPS’s which work well with some Add-Ins? I am interested in WHS shutting down in an orderly fashion so as to save all the data whenever the UPS battery gets low (in case for some reason the generators don’t kick in).

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Mar 02 2011

Upgrading through every version of Windows

Category: .geek,.microsoft — Amit Bahree @ 11:39 pm
Upgrading through *all* versions of Windows from v1 thru to Win7.
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Jan 16 2011

Opensource ZigBee stack?

Category: .code,.geek,.mobile,.opensource — Amit Bahree @ 5:10 pm

I was planning on getting the Telegesis ETRX2USB and wanted to know if there are any open source (or shareware) open source ZigBee stacks that I can use with that?

I also wanted to know if there is any opensource (or not too expensive), network management or network analyser for a ZigBee network? Essentially I want to be able to programatically view network and node information on the ZigBee network (e.g. S/N ratio, signal strength, etc.) – something similar to Ember’s Insight Desktop which shows the details I am interested in. I could not find anything specific and would be interested in getting ideas.

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Dec 25 2010

Upgrading to WordPress 3.0.3?

Category: .geek — Amit Bahree @ 5:29 pm

The latest version of WordPress 3.0.3 and the Redirection plugin (v 2.2.3) don’t play nice together. If you upgraded to the latest version of WordPress the redirection plugin will always show only your last post on your blog’s homepage. Until the plugin is fixed, the only way around this is either not to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress (not recommended), or to disable the Redirection plugin.

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Nov 05 2010

Cray XMT

Category: .geek — Amit Bahree @ 2:16 pm

As you might have heard, the Cray XMT implemented a multithreaded processor architecture (called Threadstorm); these processors are compatible with Socket F which means they can use the AMD Opteron CPUs. The interesting part however is that these Threadstorm CPU’s only execute user code and avoids memory dependency stalls i.e. when the memory dependence prediction goes wrong and stalls the specific load to ensure there is no violation.

The Cray XMT does this by switching among 128 concurrent threads. As the XMT supports more than 8000 CPUs, if one needs to maximize throughput the developer must provide at least 128 threads per CPU, With 8K CPUs you are looking at over 1,024,000 threads! Surprised smile Needless to say, with such large number of threads, it is extremely important to get thread management implemented correctly – without that the system won’t be able to scale and even deadlock.

Another factor is the application design specifically the parallel programming models (including the recursive threaded models) and resource management to be able to successfully handle resource exhaustion.

If this is an area of interest then you should check out the likes of OpenMP, Parallel Extension to .NET 4 (which include PLINQ and TPL), CCR, etc.

Underpinning all of this of course is Amdahl’s law which one should be comfortable with; including its relation to the law of diminishing returns.

I wonder, where I can I get some time on a Cray XMT? I can also settle for a Cray CX1 – anyone willing to donate some money to a poor geek to help with this? Winking smile

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Jul 28 2010

Microsoft’s Street Slide

Category: .geek — Amit Bahree @ 6:22 pm

This is quite cool – now only if MS hurry’s up and incorporated this to Bing Maps.

MS Street Slide
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Jun 20 2010

Hardware Chart

Category: .geek — Amit Bahree @ 7:15 pm

This computer hardware chart is quite cool. Not sure why, where and who would want to use this. But, it does beg the question – can things get any geekier? :)

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Mar 26 2010

Analysis of Algorithms

Category: .architecture,.geek — Amit Bahree @ 6:50 pm

If you were interested in algorithms and interested in some mathematical foundations for algorithm analysis? For example if you are interested in proof techniques, probability, Amortization analysis techniques, Case studies and Asymptotic notions (such as Big-Oh, Big-Omega, Little-oh, little-omega, Big-Theta) then check out these lecture notes (in ppt, 224kb) from California State University.

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Mar 09 2010

Ubuntu on a HTC Touch Pro 2

Category: .geek,.opensource — Amit Bahree @ 10:44 pm

Well this is the phone I have maybe some day I will try this – pretty geeky albeit useless. :)

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Jan 15 2010

Geek moment of the day

Category: .geek — Amit Bahree @ 9:49 am

(: ¿ɥǝ sıɥʇ sı looɔ ʍoɥ

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Dec 19 2009

Allowing remote desktop with blank passwords on Win7

Category: .geek,.media center — Amit Bahree @ 12:47 pm

I finally got the time to upgrade my MCE with the RTM bits of Win7 (was running an old RC build until now). Given this is a dedicated MCE with nothing else on it and an on an isolated part of the network, I don’t have a password set for the Account I use to login (of course not a recommended practice). Now, I wanted to RDP to the machine and I realised then that Win 7 does not allow RDP with blank passwords by default (Vista behaves in the same fashion). The workaround is a simple fix – to update the group policy as Dan shows in this post. Even though that post is for Vista, its the same steps for Win 7.

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