Beijing Olympic and possibly first Gold for Malaysia

This is a bad time to be at the end of a PhD. I'm so tied up with writing and correction with the thesis that I hardly have time to watch the Olympic. Anyhow, I did watch the opening. It is just awesome! Telstra has this ads for Olympic that carries a song with this lyrics - "we are one, and we are many...." and I thought it's a very good reflection of the drummers, the Taichi performers and many others at the Beijing Olympic opening.

I also think that the concept of a painting 'drawn' by the dancers, the kids and all the athletes is just brilliant. However, the last minute change from the super-sweet -voice singer to the super-cute-looking singer by direction of high official is a bit of a shame.

Actually this post is about tonight man's badminton final between Lee Chong Wei (Msia) and Lin Dan (China). Malaysia had never won gold in Olympic and tonight may be the first time the national anthem of Malaysia being played in Olympic ceremony. Lee Chong Wei is in good form, so is Lin Dan. Actually Lin Dan is on fire and won all his games in this Olympic in straight 2 games. They played each other many times before and Lee always win when the game is in home ground.

It's sad that Australia TV doesn't broadcast it! Why did SBS broadcast woman's badminton final but not man's?

Anyhow, I hope Lee Chong Wei will win for Malaysia, like what he did for the Sudirman Cup 2007. Go Lee Chong Wei!!

Making Google Street View into 3D

I was very excited about Google Street View in Australia. I think in a computer vision point of view, it provides such a huge amount of usable multiple views data to play with.

One idea I have is to:
1. Run the SIFT descriptor (by David Lowe) over the photos along one street to grab the interest points,
2. Ran RANSAC with rather loose tolerance to find homography match, and classify regions into planar surfaces. Maybe some super pixel algorithm will be useful to grow small region into bigger one based on colour information.
3. Transform the Street View into a 3D cardboard style walk through like the Photo Popup I mentioned before.

I think it would work. And because we know it's on a street, there are many constraints that can be added like we know the ground under is flat and it's pretty much sky on top kind of things.

If you're reading this and implement the algorithm and got a paper published or something, just give me an honourary mention will do. ;)

On a non-technical note, here is one place that it didn't quite work out on Street View. There's clearly a road there, but it didn't show it.



Or on Street View live:

View Larger Map

Google Street view in Australia!

Google gets down and detailed on the street where you live


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

If you know where I live, you can even see my Daihatsu parked on the side of the road. Haha! That's pretty cool.

Win a Creative Zen X-Fi with Bejeweled

The new MP3 player looks fantastic with the in-ear earphone, the sound technology. The 16GB version even support wireless LAN.

Go play the Bejeweled-like game and enter by 22nd Aug to be in the draw to win one.



Damned! What a time waster! Here's my best score.

The Last Lecture rests in peace

The day finally came. But his words echo along.

We don't beat the reaper by living longer, we beat the reaper by living well and living fully.

Prof who posted 'last lecture' online dies

My previous post on Randy Pausch's Last Lecture.

Top 10 food myths revealed

Interesting myths revisited.
Top 10 food myths revealed

Amusingly WRONG:
3 Light olive oil is "light" on calories
6 Fresh vegies are better than frozen
10 Fat-free equals calorie-free

Condoleezza Rice in Perth

Another side thing is that I got within 500m from Condoleezza Rice today without noticing it. The US Secretary of State came to Perth today and dined at University Club at UWA. It's <500m away from computer science building and my house. See it on Wikimapia (CS is at top left, UniClub at bottom right).
I read the news too late.

My neighbours are very rich!

According to the latest survey, Nedlands resident has average $2091 weekly income before tax. That amounts to $100k annual income!
Man! I'm living in a very rich area with expired PhD scholarship! :`(
Anyway, hopefully I absorb the goodness of this area and will catapult myself into that income bracket soon. ;-)

The Power of Context and the Courage to Create, Revisited

We’re defining context here to mean “a fundamental set of assumptions”—assumptions that are not recognized as assumptions, and that go unquestioned—in which the world happens. When people thought the earth was flat (an analogy that grows old but never dies), that was a context or worldview that limited perception and behavior—how those folks saw the horizon, how far toward the edge they sailed, and so on. Similarly, our way of being a man or a woman, and the possibilities available to us, are given by the assumptions embedded in our culture, our language, and times in which we live. A girl born in the U.S. today would likely inherit a very different possibility for being a woman than a girl born in the 1930s or ’40s—would she be a dot-com mogul or running for president?

So if you consider the premise that the whole world happens inside of the assumptions we hold true (and if you do the math), what becomes apparent is that contexts are a mighty and decisive force. Contexts come to us by default, and we live our lives essentially unaware of their existence and of their far-reaching influence. It’s like wearing blinders—we don’t see the contexts themselves, we see only what they allow. These default contexts determine our worldview: what’s possible and not, what’s true and false, what’s right and wrong, what we think we can and can’t do. They travel with us—wherever we are, they are—shaping our behavior, our choices, our lives.

The Context Is Decisive

Click to start.

Full Text

A dead body found under Jojo's jetty at the end of Broadway!

Source: The West Australians

Restaurant staff find body in Swan River
12th June 2008, 7:00 WST

Staff at a swanky Nedlands restaurant found a body floating in the river last night.

Police were called to JoJo’s Café after a man's body was seen floating under the restaurant’s jetty.

A police spokeswoman said the gruesome discovery off Broadway, Nedlands, was made about 9.30pm and water police were called to retrieve him.

Major Crime officers attended the scene and police investigations are continuing.

The man, aged between 55-70, had no identification on him and police are not treating it as a suspicious death.

PERTH
JAYNE RICKARD

A More Perfect Union

I didn't really follow much of American presidential campaign and didn't know much of Barack Obama. Today I took a 2 seconds interests in him and looked up Barack Obama in wikipedia and came across his famous speech of A More Perfect Union.

Obama was responding to a spike in the attention paid to controversial remarks made by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor and, until shortly before the speech, a participant in his campaign. Obama situated his response in terms of the broader issue of race in the United States. The speech's title was taken from the Preamble to the United States Constitution.

Obama addressed the subjects of racial tensions, white privilege, and race and inequality in the United States, discussing black "anger," white "resentment," and other issues as he sought to explain and contextualize Wright's controversial comments. His speech closed with a plea to move beyond America's "racial stalemate" and address shared social problems.

The address was given on March 18, ten days after Malaysians non-racial coalition gained a great leap in political support against the racial coalition in the general election. The whole Malaysia, including myself in Perth, was in surprise, shock and excitement about a new dawn in the political landscape.

I find the speech a great lecture on racial relation in the Malaysian context also. Although the situation between the white and the black in US is different from the Malays and non-Malays in Malaysia, there are much similarity that Malaysians can learn from the speech to forge a better union too.


Read the transcript here.

Here In My Home - Malaysian Artistes For Unity

A song that truely warms my heart. I think it speaks the voice of many Malaysians, home or abroad.


Video, music, lyrics Downloads at their site. Spread the words fellow Malaysians. Sing along!

Update: Check here for the writer Pete Teo's interview, and Pete Teo unscripted video

Finding the Best Way to Cook All Those Vegetables

Processed tomato products have higher lycopene content than fresh tomatoes.

Boiling was better for carrots, zucchini and broccoli than steaming, frying or serving them raw.
Trade off: boiling carrots significantly increased measurable carotenoid levels, but resulted in the complete loss of polyphenols compared with raw carrots.

When salsa or salad were served with fat-rich avocados or full-fat salad dressing, the diners absorbed as much as 4 times more lycopene, 7 times more lutein and 18 times the beta carotene than those who had their vegetables plain or with low-fat dressing.

Source: New York Times: Finding the Best Way to Cook All Those Vegetables

New umbrella!

Funny new umbrella - "Nubrella".



Right click and click play to see video.



The website: nubrella.com

Will it take off like the new rotary can opener?

Donations for China and Burma disasters

Donations for the Quake Relief in Sichuan, China:

Account Name: Embassy of The People's Republic of China in Australia
Earthquake Relief Fund
Account No. BSB:352-000 A/C: 126512
Bank Name: Bank of China, Sydney Branch.
***Telephone No. of the Embassy: 0414880919; 0408784630;0414793168

More information and other method of donation see the China ambassy website: English version | Chinese version


Donation for he Burma cyclone:

I chose Avaaz as my channel, as they claim that the money go straight to the International Burmese Monks Organization, which will transmit funds directly to monasteries in affected areas.
Burma cyclone site on Avaaz.com

Feedback from giving talks

I have followed Jayjay (our CSSE ex-school manager, now school manager at Physics) to present at many talks he organised. At the beginning it was outreach program to high school where I showed high school students computer graphics stuffs like image morphing, video-based rendering, perspective rectification, etc.. Recently we had been going around to show the virtual 3D UWA with the new Google crown.

We did one at the UniClub auditorium to 170 high school students. And here are what they write down in the feedback form about us.

Feedback from students:
* Life is about reflecting light into dark places by using the resources you have as best as possible;
* I will remember the speakers and how they were all unique;
* My favourite was Jay Jay because I am interested in that career path;
* Tzu Yen was my favourite because he was funny and informative;
* Jay Jay and his gang because what they spoke about was cool;
* Tzu Yen, his virtual universe project was very interesting;
* The 3-D computer group was so interesting! Explored new boundaries;
* I found the computing group interesting;
* Did not enjoy the virtual tour as I found it not stimulating enough;
* The favourite was the Asian guy who showed us the designing thing on the sketch pad; ("Asian guy" I guess refer to me, and the "sketch pad" must be SketchUp)
* My favourite was Jay Jay and Gary;
* The computer man with the T-shirt was my favourite; (I'm the computer man with this :) T-shirt)
* Speakers were all awesome but Tzu Yen was awesome more; (Oh Yeah! Awesome more! I like that. Hear that Barney?)
* Some of the speeches went for a while longer than expected and got boring at some point – although they were all worth it in the end;
* I think we should have had more breaks and some speeches were too long;
* The best thing about the visit today was the speakers; they really do give us something to think about, to aspire to.

Randy Pausch reprising his "Last Lecture"

There's a 76mins full version on his CMU website - CMU website with a full transcript.

Pu22!es

I have been busy putting together my thesis chapters lately. The progress has been satisfying and the thesis starts to take its shape. Working consistently with the pace, I shall be able to submit in July. Yay!
Apart from the dry process of writing thesis, I had been doing some puzzles. Canon research lab CiSRA is having a puzzle competition. Danno told me about it as he work there and want me to never graduate. Haha!
Me, ShihChing and Minh are teaming up as Fubar Fighters to crack the puzzles. We solved the first group which was open for a long time, then this week the real battle started at the rate of 4 puzzle a day for 4 days! My brain is rather overwork. Some of the puzzles are just clueless to me!

Anyone can take part in the competition, just have to register for it and play. But Australian students are eligible to win prizes. Looks like my hope to win the camera is slowly vanishing.

A friend send me this website on puzzles which tech interviewers like to use. See techinterview.org

Snapfish 20cents online photo print

It was advertised as 15cent a print at HP's online photo site Snapfish but 1-60 photos postage costs $2.95, so it work out to be about 20cents if you print 60 photos in one order.

Beware of a catch if you print 100 photos! Because 61-99 photos cost $4.95 in postage, but 100 photos costs $8.95! Strange arrangement and I overlooked it last time! :`(
See the full pricing here.

20 free prints for new account.
(Let me know before you register if you wouldn't mind me getting 20 free print by "telling a friend")

Buying guide: Running shoes

Interesting Running shoes buying guide from Choice.com.