fluxcapacity

We found Shun at Columbia University, where he's a master's student of computer science in the vision and graphics track.

Shun has worked on a lot of interesting projects, but what we thought was especially cool was his work with Professor Aoki at Tohoku University in Japan. There he designed a system using a projector and stereo camera that compensates for the photometric characteristics of a projected surface. What that means is that using what Shun's lab created you can use a projector with a non-white and non-uniform surface, like a brick wall, and still have it look good! Here's an example:

From left to right are the display surface, the original image, the image projected onto the display surface without compensation, the compensated image, and the compensated image projected onto the display surface.

When he's not working on hard computer vision problems, you can probably find Shun taking long walks around the city to clear his mind.

Shun really impressed us during the interview with his quick and creative responses to our tough algorithm question. He was even prepared with his old research paper when we asked about interesting projects that he had worked on. We are thrilled to work with him this summer.

A lot has changed in the last few months. We want to mention that Adam Herscher left in early January to pursue other opportunities. We wish him the best. More news coming soon.

Thank you to everyone who attended the tech talk on Monday. We were really happy with the interest and the turnout. Some of my preparation was seriously last minute! Three small features were added to the whiteboard literally an hour and a half before the talk.

I have posted the slides with slight post-talk enhancements (they now contain download links to much of the demo material and source code).

• Tech Talk Slides (pdf)
  • Code download links are inside the PDF.

Jeff will be giving a tech talk on March 31st at the University of Michigan. Here's a preview of one of the awesome technologies that he'll be showing:

Download
(Music: L'espoir fait vivre by Bézèd'h, Skyline: Sh0cked on flickr, Beach: tata_aka_T on flickr)

We're looking for a few brilliant and creative minds to interview with us for a summer internship position. If you're interested, come to the talk or email us@fluxcapacity.net.

Here's what's on the agenda:

• Wiimote + Laptop + Projector + Semitransparent Glass = Whiteboard from the Future
• When regular speed just doesn't get you in the mood anymore - Ultra-fast numerical operations in C# using dynamic MSIL (bytecode) generation
• Getting other people's computers to work for you

Here is the info for the tech talk:
When: March 31st at 5:30 pm
Where: 1014 Dow, North Campus, U of M College of Engineering
Food: yes
RSVP: here please, although not required it will help us get enough food

Hope to see you there!

After months of developing in our top secret facility on Beaver Island, we are nearly ready to enter the next phase. On February 1st, we will be moving to New York City!

We are excited to be moving to a place with millions of people from all walks of life, each carving out a unique story throughout the city. In this myriad of crossing paths, we hope to find inspiration, and look forward to bringing others on-board in the city that never sleeps.

You're probably wondering what this has to do with a Spaniard and two nuns.

The story begins with an apartment search. If you've lived in New York City, then you know how crazy the apartment hunting process is, and ours was no exception. The search led us all around Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. We checked out the up and coming Prospect Heights, ate delicious island food in Crown Heights, got stood up in Queens, roamed the ruins of industry in Williamsburg, avoided the clutches of a broker in Astoria, and finally found a place in Washington Heights.

View Larger Map

When we went to see the place in Washington Heights, we were greeted by a talkative Spaniard named Juan. He is from the Basque area of Spain and is a very kind, yet complicated man. We learned about his time in Manhattan, his favorite workout spots, the occasionally loud neighbors, and his entire family's travel itinerary for the next 60 days. The place was beautiful, and after drinking some juice with him we agreed to meet the next day if we were still interested.

After seeing some more places we realized that Juan's apartment was the best and we went to Chelsea to meet him. We met in a McDonald's (one of the few places open on January 1st) and started going over some details. Then Juan suggested that we go to a place to see his friends so that we would all "feel more comfortable."

We walked over to a small building and knocked on the door and we were greeted by Mother Teresa-style nun, right down to the age, skin tone and texture, lively eyes, and tolerant yet mischievous smile. She ushered us into a small meeting room which had a large painting of Jesus and as we sat down to talk some more nuns joined us. The nuns asked us questions and helped us with copies and office supplies as we settled a minor dispute on rent terms, until Juan agreed, "it's good. good for you, good for me."

As we sat there, handwriting the final details of our agreement on convent letterhead, I was struck by the absurdity of the situation. Here we were in Chelsea, the Castro of New York City, making a deal for a sublet with a Basque Spaniard in the presence of South American nuns under the watchful eyes of a large portrait of Jesus.

I came across the announcement that Mono 1.2.6 is finished and available.  From what I can tell, the new release essentially brings Mono up to par with the .NET 3.5 enhancements (like LINQ).  There was also a brief mention of Moonlight support.

Earlier this year there was buzz when Moonlight -- an open source implementation of Silverlight 1.0 -- had been written by the Mono team in just 21 days.  21 days?!  I'm not sure how they did that, but they must have burned the moonlight oil.  Anyway, if they could pull that off in 21 days, I wondered that amazing feats had been accomplished in the intervening six whole months.  So today, I spent a few hours installing the Moonlight Firefox plugin on Ubuntu in order to answer that question.

It turns out that installing Moonlight isn't exactly a cakewalk.  It's a lot easier than some Linux horror stories (like, say, installing obscure drivers) but the process had far too many steps.  At a high level, the steps are like this:

1. The quick part: download+compile mono & libgdiplus.
2. The longer part: add a handful of auxilliary packages and sources needed by moonlight.
3. The anticipation rises: download+compile moonlight itself.
4. The happy ending: copy the freshly compiled Firefox plugin into the Mozilla/plugins folder.

 Once finished, there are three basic steps:

1. Cross your fingers.
2. Load up Firefox and navigate to your Silverlight-enabled webpage.
3. Don't cry.  Remeber, it's an alpha beta.

Even if you did step 1, odds are, it won't be a pretty sight.  For instance, check out Fluxify on Linux:

 (Hey, at least it didn't crash.)  I tried a handful of other sites, and it was hit or miss -- usually miss.  Most were broken in one way or another, and they all crawled along on my relatively slow 1.5 GHz Pentium M laptop. 

The status of Silverlight on Linux

It's very cool that the Mono team is working hard to complete the cross-platform picture for Silverlight.  If you're developing for Silverlight 1.0, you should definitely get your hands on Moonlight right away.  A 1.0-only plugin can be built without dependencies on normal Mono, so you should be able to forego much of the pain.  Unfortunately, the 2.0 ( recently renamed from Silverlight 1.1 alpha ) support just isn't yet worth the installation effort, given that your application will most likely be broken.  However, if you're like me and just can't resist the allure of the creative title, and you enjoy being frustrated, you should definitely give it a try right away.