However, many times that we feel insecure, worrying whether our codes are still running normally or dead already. Are there any errors arise? How much are the current progresses? Are they finished already? This is where this little script comes in handy.

NotifyMe script for Matlab let us send notification emails right from our Matlab code to your (or any other) mailbox.

Very simple to use. You can implement them to alert you in any situations you want. If you have a smartphone with a push email service, this script will let you follow your program in a real time, from anywhere with Internet access.

Download here: NotifyMe

How to use:

1. Initialise this service by using command

notifyMe('set',address,password,server,port);

where address is your email address                      (* Required*)
password is your email password                            (* Required*)
server is your email account smtp server            (Leave empty for default server: Gmail)
port is your email account smtp port                    (Leave empty for default server: Gmail)

Don’t worry, I do not collect your password.

2. To send a notification use this command

notifyMe('send',text);

where text is a email message body.

P.S. This script is written and tested in Matlab 7 (R2010a) 

P.S. This script is released to celebrate my birthday ~~

Sadly to see the US government going to make the same mistake as some under-developed countries.

For more interesting information, visit the following sites:

http://americancensorship.org/

http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_internet_d/

http://www.mozilla.org/sopa/?WT.mc_ID=sopa-tw

This post dedicates to the liberalism, free speech, democracy, and the future of the technology.

However, if you don’t feel comfortable to download and install these software on your computer, you might consider this online photo editor. The Pixlr is a online photo editor which provide a full-function, easy-to-use, and Photoshop-like photo editing experience. The great thing about this one is that it’s really similar to Photoshop, which made me, as well as any other Photoshop users, to start working with it right away.

It can open images from your computer or open directly from URLs. It can also save images onto your computer or directly save and share images to various online albums.

http://pixlr.com/editor/

One can easily write equation into WordPress by using LaTeX syntax and quote is using $latex and $ sign

For example

$latex  y = 2 x_{1} + 3 x_{2}  $

gives

another example is

$latex  \left | \left | x \right | \right |_{0} = \frac{1}{2} \left ( 1 + \frac{1}{\mu \left ( A \right ) } \right ) $

gives

The references how to write a latex equation can be found here:

http://amath.colorado.edu/documentation/LaTeX/Symbols.pdf
http://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex/
http://www.personal.ceu.hu/tex/cookbook.html 

or  a very beginner LaTeX user would interest in this online LaTeX equation editor

http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php

There are many reference managers nowadays. Some of them only be able to manage the reference data in BibTeX format (a global standard script for bibliography) which are not so useful compare to the other mentioned here. These are the list of renown reference manager applications your should check them out;

1. EndNote

http://www.endnote.com/

One of the most widely used reference manager among the professionals and researchers. Many institution have it available for their member. However, its price is quite expensive as almost $300, thus, make me to look for its alternatives. (Its website also not so attractive, though.)

2. Papers

http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/

I never uses this application myself. Many of my friends told me this is one of the very good reference manager available on Apple Mac. However, it’s ONLY available for Mac. So sad for Linux and Windows user like me. Its price is about $79 and it seems to have a good Apple style. Also available on iOS as well. The good thing I saw for this application is its ability to search the research papers directly in its application.

3. PDF Stacks

http://www.pdfstacks.com/

A good and easy to use reference manager. Actually it works well to organise the PDFs all over the computer into one place. Its disadvantage is that good thing is the only thing it can do. No cloud service or sync system at all. Its price is not so expansive about $40.

4.  Zotero

http://www.zotero.org/

Zotero is a FREE reference manager which is a Firefox extension. The best thing is that it integrates itself into browser and, therefore, have the ability to store and manage the reference sources during visited their site. It’s also provide online sync system to sync across the computers. The disadvantages of it are, firstly, it is the Firefox extension which means you’re required to use Firefox in order to use it. Secondly, I found it’s not so easy to use compare to other applications. Lastly, if its online storage (which is quite small) is not sufficient, you have to upgrade its size with a monthly charge.

5. Mendeley

http://www.mendeley.com/

This application is quite interesting because it’s FREE. Easy to use, full feature reference manager with ability to organise the PDF libraries, read, highlight and put a note into PDFs. It has a cloud service to sync entire library to other computers as well as iOS devices. Moreover, it can work well on both Windows/Mac/Linux desktop and on website. It also has the online community and database which can search for articles’ data and provide the related articles. Its drawback is that it only provides 500MB free online storage. To use more than this quota, you need to pay for it monthly at least $5 a month. I personally recommend this application over  the others because of its full functionality and its price.

6. Qiqqa

http://www.qiqqa.com/

This application is also FREE! Full feature reference manager with online sync service. It’s also very good compare to other applications discussed so far. It lacks of the online database of  Mendeley but, however, it has the better PDF viewing, highlighting, Adding note than Mendeley. It’s also have the brainstorm system to help the collaborating work. However, I found that its interface is a little bit confuse and hard to use. It provides 200MB free online storage for storing and syncing the documents which is quite small, however the expansion price is quite cheap less than $1. Even though its online service is cheap, I found that its web library really lacks of useful functions. No mobile devices platform also, which they suggest to use the web library (which lacks of functionality) instead. Also, its online service requires users to top-up their account in order to store and sync files if free space is not sufficient, which is not quite so comfortable compares to a normal subscription methods.

Author: Wattanit Hortrakool, AAI AlHarbiy, Ji Song, Xiao-Yang Ji, Yu-Ou Jiang
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Sheffield

This work is a part of my coursework. It’s unpublished yet and post here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

My windows (as well as I) suffered from many problems, which are

• Windows  Desktop Gadget not working properly. For example, only black square displayed with no other details, except a clock second hand.
• Skype cannot play game from extra menu. Everytime I try it keep saying

One or more ActiveX controls could not be displayed because either:

1) Your current security settings prohibit running ActiveX controls on this page, or
2) You have blocked a publisher of one of the controls

As a result the page may not display correctly.

• Many programs, such as Microsoft Project, and website are not working. They also display above message.
• In case that you work with e-Book, one of the most useful and most important program – MOBIPocket Creator – used for creating the E-Book in MOBI format –  is not working at all. It only display a blank page with wield details.

I try to solve all of these problems one-by-one for some times. Surprisingly, once I found A solution, all of them are solved!

To solve it, follow the following steps:

1. Click Start, type regedit into search box.
2. Choose regedit, and click “Yes“
3. Browse to
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\
4. Their should have some key from “0″ to “4″. See whether their is a key before “0″ – most people found it looks like a superscript “L”.
5. DELETE that “L” key away. THIS key is the source of ALL problems.
6. Restart the Windows. After restarting, all of these problems should be gone.

This method solved all my problems, so I hope it could be useful for the others.

However, this technique requires a modification of registry. If you do not sure about what you are doing, find some guru to help you.

What is the Image Pyramid? Of course it has nothing to do with the ancient  Egypt. Image Pyramid-formally called “pyramid representation of image”- is a image and signal processing technique, to represent a single image using a set of cascading images. Image pyramid provides many useful properties for many application, such as noise reduction, image analysis, image enhancement, etc.

Why we need these Pyramids?

Images that we can see in everyday life are represented using  so-called Spatial domain, which is actually the things that most people will think of  when talk about images. This spatial domain represents images by the luminance values of each image’s location.
There are many processing operations that can be done with the spatial domain, such as basic low-pass filter and high-pass filter, adaptive filter, median filter, and many other things end with filter. Normally most of these filters work by using local information from each location. However, since images mostly contain complex informations, sometimes they are hard works to process in spatial domain.

Lena in Spatial domain

There is another popular type of image representation known as the frequency domain. If we perform the Fast Fourier Transform to the image, we will get the totally different image called frequency spectrum. For those who didn’t know about the frequency domain, let’s simply explain like this: From the signal theory, every signal (including image, of course) can be express as a linear combination of a set of various-frequency sine and cosine signals. The process to transform from normal signal to frequency domain is called Fourier Transformation, and the transformed result – in this case, frequency spectrum- is actually a set of coefficients of each sine and cosine signals. In our case, low frequency represents smooth details, shapes, and colour in the image, and high frequency represents fine details and noise in the image.
The introducing of frequency domain make more possibility for image processing. For example, we can just discard the high frequency responses to remove most noises from the image! Sounds great except that the beautiful object edge also gone with the noises. A major problem of frequency domain is that it will mix all frequency from every object in the image together, formally called “loss of locality”, and most of the time we don’t want to mix our faces’ beautiful details with the detail of the grass in background.

Lena in frequency domain

In order to get the advantages of both spatial domain and frequency domain, the new representation is invented and called spatial-frequency domain. This new domain give us the ability to deal with separate frequency easily as well as preserve the locality of the information.  Our image pyramid is also in this domain.

What is exactly this Pyramid?

The image pyramid is actually a representation of the image by a set of the different frequency-band images . For example, if we put our original Lena image to construct her pyramid, we may get, for simplicity, 3 layers of pyramid. The first image will represent low frequency band (smooth detail), the second image will represent middle frequency band (some detail), and the last image will represent high frequency band (finest detail). Image Pyramid is also called “multi-scale” and “multi-resolution” because of this characteristic.

Example of Gaussian Pyramid

Example of Laplacian Pyramid

How to construct this Pyramid?

To construct the pyramid, we have 2 options here. Since we know that the each layer of pyramid represents a different band of image’s frequency, we may use multiple filters, a filter for each band, to convolute with the image. Some of us may  already known that just only a single time of convolution will need some effort, do not try to imagine multiple time of it. ( Convolution literally means “things that extremely complicated and difficult to follow”)

Another option is , according to some great-mind persons, instead of using multiple filters to the image, we can use multiple image to convolute with a single filter! The best part is these multiple images are obtains by reducing size of the original image. This way is much better than the first option. So we will use this technique to construct Lena’s pyramid.

Comparison of each layers in the same size

We can notice that each pyramid layer is constructed by applying the low-pass filter to the upper part and then reduce its size by the factor of 0.5. This process is called “Reduce operation“.  Because each layer of this pyramid is a low-pass filtered image with a different filter range, this pyramid is called “Gaussian Pyramid” or the pyramid of low-pass filtered image.

The Gaussian Pyramid itself still doesn’t have much usefulness. However we can use it to construct another pyramid called “Laplacian Pyramid” or the pyramid of band-pass filtered image. Each layer of this pyramid is made from subtract two consecutive layer from Gaussian Pyramid together. In order to subtract, the lower later need to be upsampled to be the same size to the upper layer, and this process called “Expand operation“.

How to construct Laplacian Pyramid

This Laplacian Pyramid is the true useful member of the image pyramid. Each layer of this pyramid is the band-pass image, which means we can now do some things to the specific frequency just like in the frequency domain. We also see that even after its frequencies are shown, the local features of the image are still there. By using this pyramid we can get the so-called spatial-frequency domain as explained in the beginning.

After we finish our work with this pyramid and need our Lena back, we can just sum every layer of the Laplacian Pyramid together so that we can get back the original image (or result image after we have done something). This process is called “Reconstruction“

Reconstruction

In conclusion, the image pyramid is another technique to represent the image. Unlike another domain such as spatial domain and frequency domain, because the image pyramid, which is the spatial-frequency domain, have the advantages of both domain. Moreover, the computation of image pyramid is much easier than that of the frequency domain (Who would like to do the Fourier Transform?)

Reference:
E.H. Adelsom, et al., “Pyramid Methods in Image Processing“.

Normally I have a chance to win several rewards before this time. But this is the first time that the reward is, instead of some goods or product, a money. It’s the reward from the Walker Rainy Day campaign. Walker is the most popular potato chips brand in UK, just like Lays in Thailand. This event ask us to ‘predict’ the time and location that the rain might fall, and got £10 for correct prediction. I randomly chose some grid only once, and with that grid I won!

I know that £10 is that big reward to be surprised, but as least I know that I can win some reward too.

Recently, I just want to see my program run on my phone. According to the Android Developer website ,if you using Eclipse IDE with Android Development Tools (ADT), what you need to do is;

1. Declare your application as “debuggable” in your Android Manifest.
Change “Debuggable“ to true in Manifest ( Either in Application tab or adding android:debuggable="true" to            the <application> element in AndroidManifest.xml )

2. Turn on “USB Debugging” on your device.
On the device, go to the home screen, press MENU, select Applications > Development, then enable USB                   debugging.

3. Make sure that you system have appropriate driver.

For the last step, they are quite tricky. The description is as follows:

- For Ubuntu Linux, you need to add a rules file that contains a USB configuration for each type of device you want to use for development. Each device manufacturer uses a different vendor ID. The example rules files below show how to add an entry for a single vendor ID (the HTC vendor ID). In order to support more devices, you will need additional lines of the same format that provide a different value for the SYSFS{idVendor} property. For other IDs, see the table of USB Vendor IDs, below.

1. Log in as root and create this file: /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules.For Gusty/Hardy, edit the file to read:
   SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666" 

   For Dapper, edit the file to read:
   SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"

2. Now execute:
   chmod a+r /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

- For Mac OS X, it just works. Thanks to Steve Jobs.

- For Windows, you need to install a USB driver for adb. See the Windows USB Driver documentation.

However, the Android Debug Bridge driver for Windows (I don’t sure about other platform) is ONLY SUPPORT several phone, which are T-Mobile G1, T-Mobile myTouch, Verizon Android, and Nexus One. The other phones not in this list are not support by ADB driver.

So in order to connect my HTC desire to Windows, I need to reconfigure ADB driver.

1. Open the android_winusb.inf file located in the /usb_driver folder on Android SDK

2. Find this line

[Google.NTx86]

3. Add the following line appending to the above line

4. Save the file. Your Windows should now recognize this driver and can install it as your phone usb driver.

If your phone are other phone rather than HTC Desire, you have to change the Hardware ID (e.g. USB\VID_0BB4&PID_0C87) to be your phone’s ID. You can get this ID by

1. Right-click on the My computer -> properties.

2. Click on Device Manager.

3. Find the ADB in the list on left-hand. (Should be some warning mark if you don’t have driver for it)

4. Right click on ADB -> Properties -> Detail

5. Change the drop-down box to Hardware ID. This is where your phone USB ID is keep. Use this ID to put in the android_winusb.inf as described above.

After all these steps, you should be able to test your own application on your mobile. Much more impressive than testing in Emulator, I assure.

Source:

http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html#setting-up
http://www.flexjunk.com/2010/05/01/installing-htc-incredible-android-sd-drivers/
http://blog.jmedved.com/2010/06/android-debug-bridge-on-htc-android.html