General news around the Internet

A handy SDK for Facebook apps: www.microsoft.com/facebooksdk

In my Master’s thesis I used Adobe Flash (AS3) and creating games is quite easy in Flash. It’s an ECMA language as is Java, so it’s easy to work with. On the other hand the backend integration is quite tricky. Adobe Flash Media Server is not free, and the universities don’t have licenses for it either. That caused me a lot of problems which were learning experiences for me, but figuring out which open source projects would work was not related to the learning goals I had been trying to achieve with my interactive educational platform. It would be much easier to use .NET development through the entire project than try to provide Bridges between different programming languages through socket programming.

Since there is already guides about ASP.NET development and Facebook, in my opinion it will be easiest to integrate Silverlight with that. Microsoft provides a number of free downloads and free licenses for university students including Visual Studio, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, etc. through the official Microsoft student website www.dreamspark.com, so it’s easy for student projects to get access to their products. Also, the really interesting thing about using Silverlight for your Facebook project would be that it would also work with the new Windows Phone 7 platform that will be released later in 2010.

I had a couple of troubles setting up OpenCV 2.0 in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. I simply updated the working build from VS 2008. It had been working fine. So the first thing I found out that there was an error with “std::back_inserter”. The problem is that it was part of the standard package, but now it’s not. This trouble affects two files: “cvmodelest.ccp” and cvhog.cpp” so it’s easily cured by adding 

#include <iterator> 

to cv.h. somewhere around line 60.

Another problem I encountered was a crash with videoInput.lib. It seems that it’s been compiled with VS2005 and it’s source code is not included. So with a bit of research I found that it’s not exactly a necessary thing to include anyway, so I followed the instructions:

http://www.opencv.org.cn/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9199

# On Windows: enabling the VideoInput library:

The libvideoInput.a library file provided by Willow Garage was built with the old SJLJ exception handling method. Therefore, you cannot link against it using compilers that use the new DWARF-2 exception handling method like MinGW 4.4.x, unless you rebuild the libvideoInput.a file using MinGW. The best bet for compilers using DWARF-2 is not to use VideoInput at all. This can be done by taking the following step:

1. Comment the line containing “#define HAVE_VIDEOINPUT 1″ (i.e. near line 101 or 105), in file src/highgui/_highgui.h.

In contrast, for old compilers using SJLJ like TDM, to have VideoInput included in OpenCV 2.0:

1. Edit file src/highgui/CMakeLists.txt
2. At line 199, insert ” ole32 oleaut32 uuid” at the end of the list of libraries to be linked against (i.e. after “videoInput strmiids”). The developers have forgotten to insert them.

So it’s time to start developing Android apps, but you have a Nexus One running Froyo 2.2. What are you supposed to do at the stage “Create new Android Virtual Device (AVD)”? That’s exactly the question I was tackling today. In fact it’s not too important, since you would be developing for all types of Android phones, not just Nexus One, but in principle it seems right to set up the emulator exactly for the Nexus One.

So the first thing to do when creating a new virtual device is to give it a name. I was thinking about calling mine “NexusOne” but then I thought I should add a little more detail. However, there is a restriction in the naming policy: you are only allowed to include letters and numbers, no spaces or decimal points (but yes to underscores). This means the logical name “Nexus One Froyo 2.2″ is no good. Finally I settled on “Nexus_One_Froyo_2-2″. I selected Target: “Android 2.2 – API Level 8″. If you don’t have it as an option, you need to run the Android SDK updater.

Next select the size of the SD card. I put 2000 MiB.

And the skin of the Nexus One would correctly be WVGA800, which corresponds to 800 x 480 resolution. Technically it’s a slightly different since the particular screen used, but it’s effectively the WVGA800.

Next there’s a bunch of settings to add. I’ve seen some people suggest you need to add all the hardware components manually, but according to the following chart most of the stuff is there by default. (Chart is from http://www.51testing.com/?uid-49689-action-viewspace-itemid-212142)

Thus according to the chart we should add “Camera” and the 5.0 megapixel camera on the Nexus One corresponds to 2592 Maximum Horizontal Camera Pixels and 1944 Maximum Vertical Camera Pixels (The exact number of pixels is a guess of mine based on the 5.0 Megapixels, but unless you’re doing some hardcore testing I think it will be fine). Set the Device RAM Size to 512 MB for the Nexus One.

Ok, that’s about it. Now click “Create AVD” and the program will appear to freeze for a while. Finally, the AVD will be created and Nexus_One_Froyo_2-2 is located in the .android\avd folder.

Andrew Parsons from Microsoft gives some pointers about how to make your on-campus marketing campaign successful. Maybe google or apple should watch this and learn!

A collection of possibly useful links:

www.gutenberg.net – Free, in the public domain books. Lots of older books like the Wizard of Oz and some more modern books; it’s mostly only sci-fi publishers are releasing their books into the public domain. http://worldebooklibrary.net/ also distributes these (same) books in .pdf format, but gives you the chance to pay.

Maybe you could try negotiating with one of the services for libraries, such as: http://www.overdrive.com/ or http://www.exacteditions.com/. Basically, after the institution pays, these sites generally allow the members of the institution (numbering in the hundreds of thousands) to read books.

And also on the topic of libraries, you can try a public library. Taipei library has a few different types of ebook collections: http://www.tpml.edu.tw/TaipeiPublicLibrary/index.php?subsite=english&page=english-eresource-index.php

I was also paying for questia.com but the selection is big but oriented towards nonfiction.

www.oreilly.com – It really depends on the type of books that you’re looking at. For computer/tech books, uses the epub format, which might not be so hard to use, since it’s basically just a kind of html with divisions for chapters, etc. Kate did Traditional Chinese translation for their epub reader, but for some reason they haven’t posted that version yet…

Mostly tech books: safaribooksonline.com
For kids: http://www.benchmarkeducation.com/ebookroom

The trouble is you might have problems of scale. You can pay for 10 or 100 books, but if your experiment is on free-choice, that’s not much of a choice. So that’s why I might suggest that you use something like wikipedia or a particular popular online e-magazine as the source. There’s so much to choose from and it’s free~