Abeocracy

The coming Tuesday (29.09.09) there will be meeting of all the GSOC'ders in the Benelux. This meeting will be at the HSB in Brussels during TechTue25 (more info at HSB). There will be a lot of other people from outside of GSOC so you are always welcome if you would like to connect with technical minded people and share ideas.

def test(a, b):
    return a+b

PS Bring you GSOC-tshirt if it arives on time!

I was quite shocked this morning when I read on deredactie.be about a terror alert aimed at a local school in the Belgium city "Mechelen". A total of 333 police agents where dispatched, 9 arrest where made and there was even a helicopter circling the airspace in search of possible killers.

Only later this day I learned that the source of all this commotion, was a message posted on 4chan.org saying: “293 days to go until I strike at KTA Lyceum Mechelen, watch the news”.

That's correct, 4chan the internet community famous for several internet memes like Rick'Roll, Chocolate Rain, the Sarah Palin email hack, spamming YouTube with porn, claiming Steve Job died of a heart attack, spamming the swastika symbol into Google Hot Trends, the Project Chanology, the pedo bear, threatening to bomb several football stadiums with dirty bombs, posting pictures of mock pipe bombs, and several other 'joke' threads.

Well on this 4chan someone threatens to harm a school almost 9 months after the posting the actual message on a site that could be considered the social dumpster of the internet. The only thing this overreaction the can ensure is just more jokes of 4chan….

From now on you can post comment on this blog thank to the friendly people of Disqus. Adding Disqus to Tumblr (or any other bog system for that matter) is very simple, and I can't recommend enough to anyone who wants to add comments to his/her blog.

PS The comment section's layout is still a bit ugly, I will fix that later...

The color masks of the camera are working correctly now...

With the midterm evaluation behind us I thought it would be useful to post a update on the progress on the camera module for Mac OSX. The current version on github can read a frame from the camera and copy it to the surface. There is still something wrong with the colors, this has probably something to do with the masks in surf->format. I have tried out some combination but non seem to work, so if you have suggestion on how to get the colors write please post them on the pygame mailinglist.

I have thoroughly cleaned up the camera_mac.m file and have removed all Cocoa code because it caused to many problems. Only the mac_gworld_to_nsimage used Cocoa so I didn't have to trow away too much code. The following functions are now available:

• mac_list_cameras()
• mac_open_device ()
• mac_init_device()
• mac_close_device()
• mac_start_capturing()
• mac_stop_capturing ()
• mac_read_raw()
  note: When I try to print the string I get nothing, this is probably because of a 0 byte in the array.
• mac_read_frame()
• mac_camera_idle()
• mac_copy_gworld_to_surface()

The PyCameraObject struct has altered a bit because I don't use a ImageSequence anymore because it was easier to get the frame copy the frame directly instead of recording a frame into a sequence and then decompressing a frame out of it. In addition to removing the ImageSequence I make use of the 'buffer struct'. Here is the current PyCameraObject struct:

typedef struct {
    PyObject_HEAD
    char* device_name;              // unique name of the device
    SeqGrabComponent component;     // A type used by the Sequence Grabber API
    SGChannel channel;              // Channel of the Sequence Grabber
    GWorldPtr gworld;               // Pointer to the struct that holds the
                                    // data of the captured image
    Rect boundsRect;                // bounds of the image frame
    long size;                      // size of the image in our buffer to draw
    short bytes;                    // number of bytes in gworld
    struct buffer pixels;           // pixels
} PyCameraObject;

A usual you can find the latest version on github.com/ab3 so if you would like to test the latest changes or would like to help with the color problem or the read_raw function, you are always welcome.

ToDo

Here is a list of thing I still have to do:

• fix the colors of read_frame()
• fix read_raw()
• implement set_controller() and get_controller()
• add simple computer vision stuff
  • thresholding with hysteresis *...
• optimization, sbggr8_to_rgb???
• implement proof of concept game...

Conclusion

So this concludes my midterm report, feel free to post any bugs, comments and suggestions