Over this summer, I’ve been working on a side project: AI Shack.

What is AI Shack? It’s a place where I put simple-to-understand articles/tutorials on computer vision, image processing and robotics.

Why? I never really found any good online resource for this. All I ever found was abstract lecture slides of various universities and academic papers. Not good.

If you’re interested in how computer vision works or robotics, go have a look: http://aishack.in/

Like I mentioned in the previous post, The Creative Economy, creativity is priceless! At least in terms of money. You can’t pay a person a billion dollars and force him to come up with an alternative to fossil fuel in just one day. It just won’t happen.

Economists and managers worldwide have started tinkering around with ideas. They’re looking for a way to promote creativity in jobs and motivate employees to work better. Motivation theories of the past don’t work for the kind of work needed today. They worked best when people were employed only to do mechanical tasks.

So new theories are being formed. Here are two videos that go into the topic of motivating employees to do their jobs better. Both videos are by Dan Pink. The first one is a TED. The second one goes into more details and the studies being done around the world.

The TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

The illustrated speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Computers have not been able to generate “creativity”. At least till now. Neither do humans know for sure what “causes” creativity. So you can expect computers to stay that way. So you have an opportunity right there! Something that just cannot be outsourced or delegated to computers.

There’s just a LOT of people getting degrees every year. Some institutes have even been labeled as engineer churning factories. Having knowledge simply doesn’t have the same value it used to have a few decades back. You’ll have to have the knowledge, and actually do something that makes an impact on the lives of others.

Here are a few examples: Facebook has had a pretty BIG impact on the way we use the internet. So has Google’s android phone.

With today’s technology, you have enough resources to create whatever you’d like. You can do things on computers: create movies, design graphics, simulate the human race, whatever you want. And the internet lets you connect with thousands of like minded people almost instantly.

So we have something that is rare, and everyone wants it. Creative output. That’s the currency of the Creative Economy. Oh, by creative I don’t mean just design oriented, or movie making related stuff. Here’s the idea – create something no one has imagined or done yet. We have enough steel plants, clothing companies, and sweetened coloured soda water sellers.

What are your views about this? Was this a pointless argument and knowledge is power supreme? Or is this a part of a paradigm shift?

Mystique is an awesome theme designed by the people at http://digitalnature.ro/ Over the past few days I’ve been working with this theme, tweaking it and trying to set it up.

And I found a little bug in the theme. On single pages, $post has an unexpected behavior. Its there, but points to the wrong post.

After a few hours of bug hunting, I was able to figure out what was causing this. The flaw was in the “comments” part of the code. The commenting area has a list of “Related posts”. To generate this list, Mystique has to use the $post. Thus, all code after the comments box (like the sidebar, footer, etc) cannot access any post data.

To fix this, go to Theme > Editor in your WordPress installation. And select the theme to edit as Mystique. We’ll edit the “Comments” file… comments.php.

Scroll down to the very bottom of the file. You’ll see some code for related posts. It starts with

if($rp_query && $rp_query->have_posts() && $jquery): ?>

To fix the bug, you need to restore $post to its original value. We’ll do just that. The line of code above checks if there exist any related posts. If it does, it echoes them out with proper formatting.

So add this line just after the if($rp_query… line:

<?php /*MODIFICATION */ $currentID =$post->ID; ?>

Now, we need to restore the $post using this $currentID. And the place to do that is right after the Related Posts work is done. And that happens here:

<!– /related posts –>
<?php endif; ?>

We’ll restore the $post right before the block of text ends. And that is done using:

<?php /* MODIFICATION */ query_posts(‘p=’.$currentID); the_post(); ?>

Here’s what the entire block of code looks like on my screen:

I found this in the latest version of Mystique (v2.3.1) so I’m guessing this has been an issue with past versions as well.

Anyway, I hope you found this useful.

People are waiting for some great football. Here’s a collection of football videos of a different kind. Robots playing against each other. Coming up with effective passes on their own. And they play quite good. At least the ones that have been programmed by pros.

How do these robots work? There’s a camera at the top of the “field”. This camera is connected to a computer. The marks on top of the robots help identify a computer where each robot is. Based on this, a strategy is developed and sent out wirelessly to the robots (bluetooth, FM, wifi, etc).

These competitions are conducted by FIRA, or the Federation of International Robot-soccer Association. Their aim is to promote research, so that a machine team can win against a human team.

You’ve probably heard the tale of success several times. He was determined. His will to keep moving never wavered. He kept doing the smart thing over and over until someone recognized it.  The extreme poverty taught him lessons necessary for the cut throat business world (eh?)

In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues how a person’s success isn’t because he’s talented, hardworking, etc. There are other factors as well, like opportunities, your surroundings, and even your ancestors.

Sure, you need to be hardworking and all that good stuff. But there are other critical factors that determine whether you’ll be successful or not. Things that are beyond your control. The book is full of examples. One of them being Bill Gates.

Obviously, he was talented, hardworking, sincere, etc. But the one critical factor that determined his success? He got a “time-shared” computer in 1968, when he was 13 years old. In 1968, the top colleges didn’t have even a punch-card based computer, let alone time-shared. Thus his interest in software took off.

And why did this happen? Because his parents were super rich. They could afford a computer when colleges and universities couldn’t.

So, the author raises a question. Why didn’t the scientists provide computers to all 13 year olds in the world in 1968. We’d have millions of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs today (a meagre 0.1% of the population of a billion). And that would be great. Just imagine products like iPods and Windows 7 coming out every day from each of these companies. Why not start doing this now?

Well, here’s a possible answer.

The Earth can’t support so much. It doesn’t have enough resources (oil, electricity, minerals, et al). Imagine a million Googles running around the world. Would we have enough electricity to power their complexes? Or rather, would these million Googles have enough cement, steel, silicon, etc to construct their complexes?

The society has “caused” such systems to be formed. A system in which people are deliberately discriminated. The lucky ones reach the very top of the pyramid. The others reach varying distances from the apex.

Its 12th May, 5pm. Its over

Theoretical mathematics is over. I’m an undergraduate Master now. Neat.

Looking forward to some Computer Science now. Finally. 8-D

THE RAVEN – 720 HD from THE RAVEN FILM on Vimeo.

The final set of exams… and I’ll be a Master of Mathematics. Interesting.

I should probably get back to studying right now.

Here’s a list of the most essential extensions. If you don’t have these, God help you survive the internet age.

1) RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)

Whenever you see visit a website that has an RSS subscription option, you’ll see a feed icon in the address bar. Click it, and choose one of the feeds. It’ll open up in Google Reader directly (or whatever feed reader you specify). You can then choose to subscribe if you like.

2) Google Dictionary (by Google)

Are you one of those who keeps doing a “define:<whatever word>” search just to check its meaning? This this addon is for you. Double click a word (or ctrl+double click) to check its meaning. Plus you can type in a word to check its meaning too.

3) Proxy Switchy

Do you keep changing proxies? Whether it be for anonymous browsing, or accessing internet through a gateway at your organization. This extension gives you the ability to switch between proxies quickly. Plus, you can define wildcards and regular expressions for different proxies (like, use the China proxy is the URL has the term “hack” )

4) Google Mail Checker

This addon lets you see the number of unread mails in your GMail inbox. It however does expect that you’ll stay signed in all day long.

5) Chrowety

This is possibly the best twitter app/extension/addon I’ve seen. It is probably even the prettiest of them all too. It shows images (from twitpic, yfrog, etc) within itself. Amazing extension.

6) SpeedDial

Replace the default “new tab” page with a speed dial page. This one just might get you to type a lot less.

7) YouTube Converter/Downloader

Get links to the video files for every video you watch. Integrates perfectly with the new layout of YouTube.

That wraps up the 7 extensions you MUST have. Or else the devil will eat you.

Anyway, got any extensions that you just can’t live without? Let me know!