Got back my Sony Vaio VGN-C1S - unrepaired; Sony declines to replace defect rechargeable battaries within warranty. They arbitrarily limit warranty to 6 month for battaries.
The company denies to comment on their interpretation of warranty terms. This sucks!

posted at: 14:17 | path: /rant/Sony | permanent link

My paper 'Toward robust watermarking of scalable video' got accepted for presentation at IS&T/SPIE's Electronic Imaging conference (January 27 - 31, 2008) in San Jose, CA, USA.

posted at: 01:12 | path: /academic | permanent link

Enabling swap (on an USB stick ) on my OpenWrt slug helps to serve larger Mercurial transactions.
Had to flash OpenWrt trunk (rev #8779) to get swap working.

posted at: 01:08 | path: /projects/OpenWrt | permanent link

Added a calendar and list of blog categories.
And the pysmiley plugin .

posted at: 00:57 | path: /projects/blog | permanent link

lighttpd fails with writev(), maybe only serving big files over slow connections, opened ticket #2401.
Time to try the 1.5 version...

posted at: 01:23 | path: /projects/OpenWrt | permanent link

I picked the Python-based MoinMoin engine, my wiki is available here.

posted at: 01:21 | path: /projects/wiki | permanent link

Got two webcams working on my slug: a Hercules Webcam Classic (0x5a9:0x4519) and a Linkspeed (0xc45:613c), supported by the ov51x-jpeg and spca5xx-le driver, respectively. No luck with the Logitech QuickCam Pro (0x46d:0xd001) yet (nw802 driver).
The trick is not to use an USB hub, and maybe to set the correct resolution (352x288) and use the correct v4l program.
vidcat is good for the ov51x-jpeg driver, while spca5xx-le wants spcacat with the -g option (no mmap()).
Submitted OpenWrt ticket #2364 to add spcacat.

posted at: 21:14 | path: /projects/OpenWrt | permanent link

Playing with a web server after a very long time can be fun...
I set up lighttpd (aka 'lighty') to serve Mercurial and this blog.
Unfortunately, lighty 1.4.x cannot limit authentication just to PUT or POST requests -- 1.5 can. I tried building lighty 1.5 on OpenWrt which inevitably dished up some more OpenWrt tickets (#2247, #2224 ). On the other hand, I learnt quite a bit on the GNU libtool craziness (see http://www.metastatic.org/text/libtool.html)...

posted at: 07:00 | path: /projects/OpenWrt | permanent link

Pyrex allows to mix Python and C data types (type specialization), and compiles it into a C extension for Python.

I adapted/transformed/re-wrote part of the motion estimation routine within my motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) package to Pyrex. It simply computes the sum of absolute difference (SAD) between blocks of two video frames.

posted at: 01:16 | path: /academic/MCTF | permanent link

Managed to cross-compile the ov51x-jpeg and nw802 kernel drivers, tickets (#2314, #2315, #2319) pending.

Here's a list of my OpenWrt tickets.

posted at: 01:06 | path: /projects/OpenWrt | permanent link

Mercurial is a distributed Source Control Management system written in Python.
OpenWrt ticket #2226 to commit the new Mercurial package is still pending but some preparatory bug fixes (#2225, #2248) have already been included.

posted at: 00:49 | path: /projects/OpenWrt | permanent link

Finally, I managed to set up my private blog. It's hosted on a slug device running OpenWrt.

posted at: 00:40 | path: /projects/blog | permanent link