A tale of two murderers in contemporary india

Here is a short tale, real-life of two murderers in India. There are both recent and their crimes were not too far apart, considering the general scheme of things. Both the crimes were heinous as I will outline shortly.
Murderer D was a watchman who raped and murdered a girl. She resided in the apartments where he was employed. Hue and cry was raised and after a court trial and due procedure; he was hanged to death. Justice served? Perhaps, yes.
Murderer M was drunk and wanted more. The female serving drinks at the bar refused him and was shot dead for her impertinence etc. Hue and cry was raised; court case was long drawn. I am not even sue about the quantum of punishment, if at all, given to the bastard. Anyways, I was frustrated enough to write this entry because the above mentioned murderer was let out on parole and was having a nightout with company. As things happen in Delhi, people love power and using it just for the sake of it. This statement comes into play because Mr.M got into a tiff with some Mr.X who turned out to be the progeny of a police official. Enter policemen and so on. Result: parole cancelled or perhaps discretion was the better part of valour. After things have quietned down again, he will come out no doubt. So, the Chief Minister says that it was routine and she signed on the paper. Which makes me wonder if she is in the habit of signing papers put to her without reading or thinking over it?
Please find the stories here and here. I think that the death penalty should be abolished if it can only hang the poor people. For that matter, why have the law? Let us revert back to "each man for him, god for all" ASAP, remove the courts, reduce taxes and hire private muscle for settling disputes.

Why I love The Register

See here

Orkut revamp?

Here is the link to one of the many articles floating around on the supposed revamp of the Orkut site. Apparently, what prompted this was the high migration of users from Orkut to Facebook. Admittedly, Facebook is "snazzier" but personally I find it too much "in your face". I do not want barely known acquaintances updating me about the number of camels on their farm and neither am I interested in the doings, musing and pondering of people with whom I have a mere passing acquaintance. That way Orkut is better! Moreover, some sites say that the new interface is "invitation only". Nobody knows how to titillate the user better than Google.
However, it will be more interesting to see how Google moves against FB. I simply love the way Google moves in and introduces new services; let us see how it hits back at Facebook. Keeping in mind that Orkut is more popular in India & other developing countries, it should be interesting to see how long or sustained Google's fight back lasts. I would not be too surprised to see Google burying or making Orkut moribund after sometime.
Now Google Voice is something to watch out for.. It is for sure that Google would have added something extra to the voice services as well. Google's innovations are always interesting, to me at least!

Music Links

This seems to be a nice website for Carnatic music "scene"!
Also, All India Radio is selling CDs and tapes from their archives. Information about the collection is here.

OpenCV Wishlist

OpenCV has an extensive set of image processing and vision algorithms. Everyone will have their own pet list of things which they would like to see in this. Some of mine "requests" are

1. Level Sets; even a base level implementation; there are a number of libraries out there, integration will be a huge headache/challenge!
   
2. Colour Edge detection, without taking recourse to grayscale conversion. Maybe DiZenzo's algorithm could be a used.

Regarding the general development of OpenCV and computer vision algorithms in general, I think that research groups should be more proactive in contributing code, rather than issue MATLAB dll which would work only on certain versions. After a ll, knowledge is for sharing and it would also increase the citation count if the code were available. Rather than churning out paper after paper using a mysterious black code which is available only to the select coterie, it would be nice if the code were freed up. After all, publishing in academia is about sharing knowledge. If it were an industry code, then perhaps the information hiding is perfectly understood.

OpenCV 2.0 VS 2008 Compilation

A very concise method for building OpenCV 2.0 using Visual Studio 2008 is given here. One can follow the instructions blindly; however there is a problem building the highgui libraries. The error is as follows:
Compiling... ffopencv.cpp Linking... LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'libgcc_.a'

Have posted to the developers as well as yahoo groups.. awaiting response. Will update as soon as i get some reply.

Laptop and Fedora 11

Finally, I achieved my major goal of buying a laptop. I acquired an Acer 5738G, since it had reasonably good configuration at affordable price. Also, there were no reports of the model coming apart within a few months, though this might be because it is a relatively new model. Acer has played a dirty trick regarding the installation media but more of that later.
I managed to shrink the original C drive to 160GB and create a new partition for installing some version of GNU Linux. I finally installed Fedora 11, 64 bit version. Funnily, there are no Latex packages available on the installation DVD. Also, some programs crib about the non availability of some gdk header files. I did a lot of searching for the missing latex/tetex/texlive packages on Google, but drew exactly blank. If some kind soul could clarify the mystery of Missing Latex packages, I would be eternally indebted. Perhaps the packagers in their infinite wisdom thought that latex packages are too "geeky", and put in exotic language support as default rather than this...
Update
So, I partitioned the original hard disk to get a 100GB partition. The Vista disk partitioner did a great job of it; creating a new partition while the OS is actually using it. I am not aware of any tool for GNU/Linux which does the same job. Anyways, there is a size restriction on the base partition that it should not be below some X GB; I think X=160/120. Fedora installation was also fine. The major problem is that running Fedora 11 gives just the 50% of the battery life of Vista. Is this a problem with the OS? Seems to be so....

OpenCV 2.0 released!

Downloads available at Sourceforge...

Equations for PPT

Here is a beautiful tool for creating equations within Powerpoint using Latex.

compilation of recent versions of opencv and ffmpeg

I downloaded a recent version of OpenCV from SVN. I also downloaded a recent SVN version of ffmpeg. This is an informal log of the installation “pains”. I have been using OpenCV since version 0.9.6 and my work fully relies on it. What follows is true for ffmpeg 0.5 also.

Short Version of how I did it

Install ffmpeg with ./configure –enable-shared. Then do ‘make’ & ‘make install’. Do ‘ldconfig’ after installation. check the ffmpeg version by ‘ffmpeg -version’. Note that ffmpeg dumps its header files in 5 header files like libavformat etc. Make a directory called ffmpeg under /usr/local/include., i.e., ‘mkdir /usr/local/include/ffmpeg’. Go to /usr/local/include. Copy ‘avcodec.h avformat.h avio.h avutil.h swscale.h’ from respective ‘lib’ directories to ffmpeg. I prefer sym-linking it.

Then download the latest SVN version of opencv from sourceforge. It is available as a tarball in case you do not feel inclined to run the SVN from command line. After gunzipping and untarring it, we get a directory called opencv. Change directory to opencv. Make the file ‘configure’ by doing ‘chmod +x configure’. Then do ‘./configure –without-1394libs –without-python –disable-apps’. These arguments disable 1394/Firewire libraries, python support and building of applications. I have not faced major limitations by disabling these. There should be a series of messages. Confirm that ffmpeg is recognised and will be used. This will be indicated by a line “Use ffmpeg: yes”. If this does not happen, go back to the step of ffmpeg installation. If you are sure that ffmpeg is installed correctly and you are able to see files in /usr/local/include/ffmpeg/, then one way of checking whether opencv finds the header files is that you search for the keyword ffmpeg in the output of ‘./configure’ typed exactly as previously. In other words, you do ‘./configure –without-1394libs –without-python –disable-apps | grep ffmpeg’. You should get the lines which confirm or deny the existence of the headers ‘ffmpeg/avcodec.h’ availability. If these headers are not found, then your linking or copying is not ok. If on the other hand, ffmpeg has been found, do ‘make’ and ‘make install’ and then ‘ldconfig’.

** For x86-64 users: the configure script has a peculiar tendency of identifying all intel CPUs as pentium4. if you run ‘make’ after ‘./configure’, then you will run into compilation errors saying that architecture specified cannot be compiled. Do not lose heart but open the config.status file and search for the word ‘pentium4′ in this file. You should get something like ‘-march=pentium4′ along with other options. Change ‘-march=pentium4′ to ‘-march=native’ or you can even delete the whole thing. If you have a recent version of gcc, you can enable openmp by adding ‘-fopenmp’ in the same line where you found the previous expression.

The above worked for me. I hope it does for you.