Good plot explaining why data oriented design is rather actual today:

From this presentation:

http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gcapaustralia09/Pitfalls_of_Object_Oriented_Programming_GCAP_09.pdf

Conv nets

I knew that Convolutional neural networks has been succesfully applied in many comercial systems including ATM automatic check recognition. I also knew that Microsoft research guys works on it (prooflink) and seems to use it in MS Document Imaging OCR. But it was a very nice surprise for me that convnets are used by Google Street View to detect faces and license plates (prooflink).

And as a continue of this subject:

NEC has deployed ConvNet-based system in Japan for tracking customers in supermarket and recognizing their gender and age. Vidient Technologies has developed a ConvNet-based video surveillance system deployed in several airports in the US. France T´el´ecom has deployed ConvNetbased face detection systems for video-conference and other systems

(http://bit.ly/aYYesZ )

Here's another interesting application. Canon has developed VLSI chip for hardware implementation of Convnets.

P.S. If you have MS Office 2007 and want to try Document Imaging OCR for recognizing russian text you'll need to download CYRILLIC.SHP and copy it to Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MODI\12.0.

File can be found here http://ifolder.ru/629971

Dropbox over proxy

If you're want to install dropbox on linux and you access internet through a proxy it's not a straightforward task. After downloading and installing application from dropbox main page it will try to download a proprietary daemon and will fail although you have set http_proxy environment variable. The solution found in the dropbox forums. You just need to manually download and unpack the latest but not stable version.

Google chart API

It was a pleasant surprise for me that google have an API to generate images with formulas using TeX formated strings. This is possible using Google Chart Tools.
You simply write link like this
"http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chl=J^{*}_{t}=\left(%20j^{*}_{t}(1,1),j^{*}_{t}(1,2),j^{*}_{t}(1,3),%20\frac{\partial^2%20W_1}{\partial%20t^2},\frac{\partial^2%20W_2}{\partial%20t^2},\frac{\partial^2%20W_3}{\partial%20t^2}\right)^T,\\&j^{*}_{t}(1,k)=\left((P^T%20\ddot%20A_{k1}+%20\ddot%20A_{k2})P+2(2P^T%20\dot%20A_{k1}+%20\dot%20A_{k2})\dot%20P+\ddot%20A_{k3}%20\right)"
and get the following png picture:

CUDA Toolkit 3.0 now available

Good news!

There're some really delicious things in it:

• Multiple Copy Engine support
• Concurrent Kernel Execution
• C++ Class Inheritance and Template Inheritance support for increased programmer productivity
• CUDA Driver / Runtime Buffer Interoperability, which allows applications using the CUDA Driver API to also use libraries implemented using the CUDA C Runtime such as CUFFT and CUBLAS.
• CUBLAS now supports all BLAS1, 2, and 3 routines including those for single and double precision complex numbers
• New CUDA Memory Checker reports misalignment and out of bounds errors, available as a stand-alone utility and debugging mode within cuda-gdb
• On Linux, use cuda-gdb and cuda-memcheck, and check out the solutions from Allinea and TotalView that will be available soon.
• OpenCL Images support, for better/faster image filtering

C++ class inheritance is what I already was needed in my project. Higher performance and new debugging abilities also sounds great.

Resolving slow Eclipse problem

If you try to use Eclipse in newly installed Ubuntu, you might find that it's terribly slow. Just writing a dot after the variable can hang it for a minutes. The problem is in OpenJDK. You just need to install proprietary Sun Java to get a comfortable work. A very good howto about this could be found here.

New face database

Very nice surviliance cameras face database. 4160 images, different environment, different cameras, annotated positions of mouth, nose and eyes. And it's free! Though the request process is not simple, you'll have to fill an agreement and to be a full-time staff of the university.