MacLin : A technologic revolution

An earthquake is never something that is fun to live, it’s even more true for the people in Haïti right now. Every media is talking about it and even if it’s really a sad thing, I strongly believe it would be a good idea to move on… BUT, it certainly is a good thing to get our little internal voice to tell us that there is peoples with a worse day than the one we just had at work…. I wish the best to every people in Haïti and hope that everyone will stand for each other, instead of killing their neighbor as a desperate move for survival. A group is always stronger than an individual.

Now, lets move on to the main subject of this post. It was showed to me by a colleague today, he saw it on Cyberpresse.ca… that took it from CNN… that use the technology of Immersive Media.

Wikipedia have a description of the technology that is surely better than what I could summarize here, so why not simply quote them :

An immersive video is basically a video recording of a real world scene, where the view in every direction is recorded at the same time. During playback the viewer has control of the viewing direction, up down & sideways. Generally the only area that can’t be viewed is the view toward the camera support. The material is recorded as data which when played back through a software player allows the user control of the viewing direction and playback speed. The player control is typically via a mouse or other sensing device and the playback view is typically 4:3 window on a computer display or projection screen or other presentation device such as a head mounted display.

It’s an interesting technology, the video are interactive and let you see what you want while the video is still running !! Awesome !

Here is a video of what it looks like:

Seeing this today remembered me of a night passed at the SONIA lab with my friend J-F Im where he was trying to do stereoscopic vision with 2 development webcams … Awwwwh so good memories!

The title of this post was though to go in the line of my previous entry of the night. It was related for me changing this website theme so no big deal here. This one is to share my experience with the new router I bought some time ago.

I was having a hard time getting connection stability with my previous DI-524 from D-Link. Last week I opened it to see if the stability issue could come from an hardware problem and I discovered that 3 of the 5 capacitor of 1500uf was cambered. I was planning to change my router anyway to get wireless N capabilities, but though I would wait for the WNR3500L that was announced in October. This router is supposed to be a fully open source router which can be flashed by open firmware like DD-WRT and have a USB port on it to connect an external drive for network storage.

My DI-524 broken, my lack of WIFI inside my own apartment and the no availability of the WNR3500L in store or online made me start searching for an alternative. The website of DD-WRT contain a database of all the routers supported by the project and in the list was an even better router than the WNR3500L, the WRT610N from Linksys/Cisco. This router also have N capabilities and USB support, having previously use DD-WRT on older Linksys routers during my years at SONIA project, I knew that I would be satisfied and the router was in sale at FutureShop, so I bough one.

Its the second revision of this router, so DD-WRT was supported, newer revision are not yet supported at the time of this writing so I have been a bit lucky. I started by using the original firmware that came with it but I was experiencing some connection drop with my IPod Touch and sometimes it would not accept the WPA2 pass-phrase and constantly asking for it. So, last night I followed this pages to put DD-WRT on my WRT610Nv2. The upgrade went well, but I must admit that during the process I got nervous, I would not have like to destroy the router and throw 150$ to the trash.

The first version of the firmware that I put on it was not very stable tough… the router was rebooting by itself at an interval of about 3 minutes. I had to use the “hold button reset for 35 seconds” to make it work and for me to return to the web interface. I passed a couple of hour trying to understand what could go wrong but based on the 3min delay before the reboot and my experience with Linux Kernel development, I assumed that it was having a “kernel panic” that rebooted the router. I though of that because the default delay for a kernel panic to reboot is 180 seconds… (well on a powerpc, don’t know if it’s the same for this router but I simply guessed) and I though it would make sense. But I can be wrong.

After looking at the router database entry concerning the WRT610Nv2, I saw that the firmware linked there was from a previous revision of DD-WRT. This revision is 13401 instead of 13575 proposed in the other page. After trying this one, the router was very stable.

When I bough the router, I also bough an external 1.5TB USB hard drive. I formated the drive as ext3 and hooked it to the router, I activated some options inside the WebUI of DD-WRT and the drive was accessible through the network as an FTP share… I did not like this way of doing so I started to look on the DD-WRT forum and discovered that some user are going with Optware to add functionalities to their router. I followed this page and after installing some packages to the router I had the SWAT interface to configure a samba share for the attached 1.5TB of storage. That’s nice because samba shares are seen in Windows, Mac and Linux !

Now I have a very good router, WIFI is back and now more secure in my home and 1.5TB is available as a storage on my local network ! Sweet!

Bon, je viens de changer l’apparence de ce site web. Il n’y a pas grand chose d’extraordinaire la dedans puisque j’utilise un thème déjà existant. Je dois avouer que le thème a des couleurs dans la même palette que Windows Vista … mais bon il faut avouer que ce n’est pas la couleurs de Vista qui en a fait un échec… selon moi.

Yep it’s been nearly a year since I wrote on this blog. It could be related to the fact that I decided to spend (or invest) my time with someone that is 100% more important than an internet site… but that is my opinion. I’ve just update Wordpress to 2.9.1 so I though I should write a little about it, everything worked fine so nothing to say really about it.

Someone may ask, LaMs what did you do during all this year ? I would simply answer him… working. The reason is, I completed my degree in IT Engineering this year while working full time for Novariant. The company was in a rush during all the last year to complete the project for November. We achieved this goal, but it was hard and stressful. Unfortunately the economy problem touch our company and many of my colleagues were laid off during 2009. I’ve been lucky enough to keep my job… or maybe the skills I developed with Linux over the past few years are now what helped me to keep this job, I don’t know.

My new sport:
Beside work, I needed something new, something to help my body to get in shape, so I started DragonBoat. I did it from May 2009 to september 2009 and the 2010’s season has just begun for me last sunday with an indoor training with my new team, SuperStars.

Future of this Blog:
From the beginning of this blog I have chosen to write my blog posts in english to help me improve since english is not my first language. But the problem is that now I often write in english at work and my french is getting in a bad shape… so in the future I may do some dual english/french post or write in english or french only. I think this will depend on the subject and which audience is more prone to read it. So, probably that everything computer/tutorial/electronic/Linux will stay in english because they are prone to interest a wider audience and that DragonBoat and stuff more not related to computer will be in french… We will see.

Could not be more true …