ViSP

Visual servoing platform
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India passport portal disarray

I recently applied for the renewal of my passport. The application process has been considerably revamped but there still exist some hiccups. Still considering the sorry state of affairs which existed as recent as 5 years ago, this is heaven sent. One must pay obeisance to the "babus" and ministers who could agree to the change. Considering the state of affairs in India, this seems like divine intervention.
However, all is NOT well. For online application of passport, the link is in this page for applicants living within Bangalore and Chandigarh. One clicks on the "How to Apply" link in the left side of the above page and it takes us to a page which has more information on the application process. All this is fine. There is also a "Login/Register" link for new users. For a number of days, I have been seeing that after entering the username, password and the "captcha", the site seems to have "lost" the security certificate. This, in Firefox, results in a security warning. I have to add an exception to reach the page. Most of the time the page does not load. The page is maintained by none other than India's premier software merchant Tata Consultancy Services. I feel no need to say more. If a maintainer cannot maintain a security certificate for such an important portal in order, I shudder to think of the security of the database. Such a shoddy maintenance of an essential portal is only possible in the IT "superpower" that is India. Let us not lose hope though. Some countries are worse. Let us sing "jai Ho" and "all is well".
Also, one can apparently check the status of one's passport application here. The file number which we are supposed to enter is a letter followed by 6 digits. Somehow, mine is much bigger. Of course, who cares.

Online book buy review

I have been purchasing a fair amount of books online. This is not a comprehensive review of online sellers in India. Till now, I have tried 4: flipkart, infibeam, bookadda and nbcindia. Of these, Flipkart is undoubtedly best; it beats others hands down on terms of service. If they show that a book is available, you can be pretty much sure that it indeed is. Their price is generally below the marked price or equal. They deliver for free anywhere in India for orders above Rs. 100/-. This last bit is true for all the others. Their customer support is very good and answer queries about pricing promptly. I have made purchases more than or close to Rs. 3000/- in the last few months. I have also bought some cheap VCDs. Full marks to the team.

Next, I would rate Infibeam. The price of books is generally lesser than that of Flipkart. Their service is also pretty good. I suspect that their inventory management can do with some improvement because it has happened that the book is shown as available but after the order has been placed, I get an email from the customer support saying that they could not complete the order. Refunding has been generally prompt. Customer service is not terrific but adequate. Sometimes, one has to act as the “annoyed customer” to get response. They sell both old as well as new books. I wish it were clearer if the book being purchased is old or new! This is well worth a wait if one is not in a terrible hurry to get books. They send books in inventory but take some time to acquire books and pass it on to you.

While looking for cheaper and cheaper deals online, i came across Bookadda. It has a user interface very similar to that of Flipkart. It looks so similar that I thought that Flipkart was operating a sister site. Also, the registered office is in Bangalore. The similarity with flipkart ends there. I put an order for a book which was not available with flipkart and infibeam. The book is “introduction to calculus and analysis: volume 1″ by Courant. Incidentally, flipkart showed the book as not available and infibeam does not show the indian edition to be available. However, bookadda shows this to be available. As nothing was moving after placing the order for a few days, I emailed customer support and got no response. I called up the local contact number and was told that I would be contacted in half an hour. My cell as well as landline numbers were taken. I often wonder what kind of miserable slugs become these call centre agents who promise all the time but deliver not a whit. Anyway, there was no call in half one or two hours. Generally, I do not like to pursue and pain people but this was annoying me. So I called up again and was told that the book was not available and I would get a refund. No refund status was forthcoming and I called up again to find out how long it would take. I have been promised a refund by today, I do not of course believe it. The amount is not high but nobody like the feeling of being hoodwinked. Personal opinion: GIVE ANOTHER CHANCE.

UPDATE (20/09/2010)

I got an email about 2 days from the customer care of bookadda expressing regret for being unable to complete their order and have also given a gift voucher worth 50/-. Not a tremendous amouunt but the gesture is appreciated. I could not update this earlier as I was travelling. Will give these guys another shot.

I placed an order with nbcindia last week. It is too early to say but I fear that it is headed the bookadda way. I hope not because there are some hindi books available there.

Update 25/09/2010

After calling nbcindia’s customer service, they informed me that of the two books I ordered, only one was available immediately. They were waiting for the other book. I do not know how long they would have waited if I had ot called them up. They gave their word to dispatch the available book and refund the amount for the other if the publisher did not get back to them that very day. Apparently, the publisher did not get back and they sent it by Aramex Courier that day. I got it in two days flat. The book which did not make it: “Manto ki Chuninda Kahaniyan”.

Google commandline services

It seems to be a bit odd to be posting something in praise of Google on blogger; if anyone bothers to read this blog they might be forgiven if they accuse me of toadying up. Anyway, the big news is that Google has released Python based scripts to access and use a host of Google services. No wonder Google has consistently beaten the pants off its rivals. 

OpenCV 2.1.0 and FFMPEG compilation solution

I had been recently struggling to compile OpenCV 2.1.0 with FFMPEG support on GNU/Linux. The problem was that the OpenCV CMake script fails to detect the important component of ffmpeg it needs; like avcodec, swscale, avformat. The more idiotic thing is that if one uses ccmake, the log is not visible. It is only after building that one sees that ffmpeg support is not there. One has to use cmake. Anyways, after doing cmake ../OpenCV-2.1.0, noted that config log said “ffmpeg 0″ and also put zeros against the above mentioned components of ffmpeg. Well, I knew that ffmpeg existed in all its components. I had also made a directory called ffmpeg in /usr/local/include and made symbolic links for the respective header files. Now it was a clear case of cmake being unable to find these, either because of poor CMakeLists.txt or the cmake itself. At this point, I did not want to dig into the innards of CMake; unlike autoconf it has an annoying tendency to hide information; for example where it searches for ffmpeg and such things. Such blackbox approach suits Ubuntu users no doubt. I tried parsing through the CMakeLists.txt and could not find anything that I could rectify. However, I did know that CMakeCache.txt contained the configured values. After that it was a matter of putting manually the include, lib paths and the linker flags in this for each of the ffmpeg components. After running cmake again, I could immediately see that ffmpeg components were recognised and ffmpeg was turned to 1. make happily started building cvcap_ffmpeg which meant that ffmpeg was actually being used. However, the build process croaked at 99% when trying to link to the actual libavcodec/libavformat and libswscale. Clearly, the linker links I had passed as a guess had not worked. Now, I did cmake again and passed -L/usr/local/lib and -Wl, -rpath,/usr/local/lib. Voila! the compilation was complete. I build a test program to read and write videos. All worked ok. This was a rough sketch of the compilation solution. I will post the details of the CMakeCache.txt in case someone is interested.

Acer 5738G review

I bought this laptop after doing a "literature survey" of the different models available in the market. I had considered Dell Studio as an alternative; however it was extremely expensive for nearly the same specifications. HP & Lenovo were way too expensive. My primary requirements were a good CPU( Core2Duo 2.0+), 4GB RAM, a low-end graphics card and a good HDD. 5738G fitted in admirably. My requirements were not on the portability side. There were enough laptops with 2GB RAM or so from Sony and costing nearly twice this model. Also, I tried to cleverly time my purchase during some festival season, where the offers would be there. The usual freebies thrown in would be a USB mouse, a pair of cheap speakers or something similar. I went to an Acer store itself and was convinced by the salesman to shell out 42,000/- for this. He would throw in a cable lock(which he himself admitted was one of those "cheap Chinese junk") and a USB hub. I had a look at the mouse; it was a micro-mouse barely bigger than the inside of my palm and was of some obscure Chinese make; I should have known better. I thought that as i was going to an Acer store, the offer there may be more true to the word. On my protests, I got an equally cheap cable lock which is lying unused. Anyway, after I swiped my card the salesman quickly brought in a new box, showed me that the seals were intact, broke them and powered up the laptop. When I reached home, I saw that the instructions that the laptops were *not* supposed to be powered up on battery alone for the first time. This showed the complete lack of professionalism again.

I had searched for a DOS-prompt or preferably GNU/Linux loaded laptop. Sadly, these things are unheard of in Bangalore. Nobody had such models, the most they might do was to wipe out the default OS and install some earlier version of Fedora but this was not advisable. So I paid the Windows tax and took the Vista Home Premium version with the promise of free upgrade to Windows 7 as and when it came. Little did I know that this was another conspiracy to hoodwink and cheat from consumers. This is because when Windows 7 was released, I tried to upgrade but the media for my region was supposed to be shipped for which I would have to shell out yet another good amount of money. So much for free market.

I installed Fedora 12 on it. The default stupid HDD configuration is one huge drive. I had to use the re-partition tool to create two nearly equal partitions and installed Fedora on the other. The laptop came with a lot of junk software, games, promos and a big virus called Microsoft Office 2007. This last piece of junk was a 3 month trial version and reminded this everytime I started it. I uninstalled it faster than it could squeak "Bill Gates". The general feel is ok; the keypad feels cheap but is fairly rugged. I have banged on it a number of times in frustration and it seems to have taken it well. On the other hand, I have a Dell Latitude E6400 which is feeling its "Shift" key despite careful usage. Thats one plus for Acer though I am not sure if the "ruggedness" is deliberate or accidental. The screen is ok, a bit too reflective, you have to turn on the screenlight quite a bit to do something useful. Naturally, this reduces battery life.

Coming to the most important part, the battery life is something I am fairly ok with. This laptop comes with the usual company specific power management tools. There are 3 modes:
Powersaver: Saves power and extends battery life. I get about 2 hr 30-40 minutes for very normal usage. Maybe I have a browser, a text editor and some python scripts running while I learn the language.

Balanced: This turns up the power more. I have noticed a 50% reduction in compilation time for the ITK software library between this and the Balanced mode. Obviously this eats up battery, never timed it though.

High Performance: As per the blurb this mode reduces battery life and bring out the high performance. When you turn this on, be sure to bring out your pan to boil tea or eggs. Unfortunately, you would have barely begun to boil the stuff when the laptop freezes and shuts down. Initially, when this happened I thought that the laptop had conked out. Then I figured that the heating was too high. So, the "high performance" mode is really a low performance mode. In any case, there is not much of difference between "Balanced" and this mode at least in terms of compilation time for ITK code. This is a serious disappointment with Acer and I consider this as lying like the "friendly" greengrocer who has been shafting you for years and generations together.

One thing which worries me is that the battery is now getting charged to 91% of its rated capacity at full charge. I am not sure if this is the norm. This is strange because i do not do a full discharge everytime and start re-charging when the battery indicator goes less than 20%.

========== Conclusion =========
This was my first laptop purchase. I am not elated and not too disappointed. I would have expected a clearer specification of the deal from the Acer exclusive authorised dealer; I would definitely have expected better power management. I would also expect to have a no Windows version. The laptop bag is piss poor and the laptop is heavy. Not for regular travellers.

On the plus side... erm.. the laptop still works. I think that the 5738G is now phased out and Acer is offering newer and better configurations at lesser or equal prices barely 8 months after I purchased 5738G. However that is the flipside of the electronic market. The idea behind the review is to make the other aware of my general experience with Acer and of course the model. Based on my 5738G experience, I would probably pay some more money and try out HP.
If you can stick tolerate Windows Acer offers features at prices that are really tempting. Also, once you accept that the quality of Sony and Acer models are going to differ considering the price difference; you would probably not feel too bad. Dell is way too heavy and my friends have reported the heating problem.

This review is of course kind of incomplete without the after sales services. Thankfully, I have not yet had problems which would require such trips and hopefully I would not need it either!

One major grouse is that despite paying for the full Vista, I do not have an installation media. Sure, I do have a backup and restore option which will "restore" my last stable state in case the C drive gets corrupted. However, I will not be able to install a fresh version. This is rather annoying, after all I have paid a good amount. All laptop manufacturers are following this tradition now sadly.

Update: 30/11/2011
The battery has kind of gone to a large extent. Gives barely 7-10 minutes after "full" charge. The pluses are: sturdy build, especially the keyboard. I have seen two equal priced or more Dell, keyboards are pathetic. One was an office laptop, hence not a problem with the cost.  The laptop also took a screenfirst fall to the ground from a chair. This was a few weeks back. No damage(yet!).

Free MATLAB Substitute

During my PhD days, I had looked around a lot for Matlab substitutes. While MATLAB is an excellent piece of software, it is prohibitively expensive. Two substitutes I can recall immediately are Octave and Scilab. While GNU has generally cut it well on the software it offers, somehow Octave has not made it. I definitely appreciate the time the community has put in; my comment is based on the conversations I have had with friends. Perhaps the non availability of an easy to install MS Windoze version may have something to do with it. My main requirement is image processing and vision. There are tonnes of software written in MATLAB, which is perhaps the main software of choice in many universities. So, a MATLAB substitute must be able to process this vast collection of tools with no or minimum effort. Sadly, this may not be possible. One problem with such packages is that these get tied down to specific releases of MATLAB.
Recently, I came across FreeMat which seems to be a good substitute. I have barely begun to use it but some people I know report a fairly good compatibility with MATLAB. At least the general commands seem to match well. The flip side is that compiling from source in GNU/Linux is a bit of bear.

Python(x,y) software

This is a superb software! This Python library/software packages OpenCV, ITK, VTK, Scipy, Numpy and plotting utilities all under one umbrella seamlessly. This is what I was looking for a looooong time. I have not really begun to explore it as I had problems with the Windows installer. I am eagerly looking forward to using this.

BSpline Code

Here is a small package which has the code I wrote during my PhD thesis. The code implements parametric curve evolution using B-Spline and a tangential redistribution term for curve point matching. This code uses OpenCV.

SCface database

Here is the link to the SCFace database.