Ces dernières semaines…

Ces dernières semaines, j’étais particulièrement occupé avec un paquet de trucs. Il faut dire que cette dernière session à temps plein à l’ÉTS est à la fois exigente et excitante. Au début du mois dernier, j’ai pris part à l’organisation des activités de la rentrée en tant que chef d’une équipe (avec Olivier) de nouveaux étudiants. C’est assurément la fois ou j’ai eu le plus de fun à participer aux diverses activités (olympiades à la plaine des gens de l’île Notre-Dame, 36 heures des dieux, rallye des bars, party R&D), probablement parce que mon équipe de ptits nouveaux était vraiment motivée. Ça m’a donné un coup de vieux quand je me suis dit que ce serait la dernière fois que je pourrais le faire et que ça faisait déjà 4 ans que j’étais à leur place. (Les photos du 36 heures de dieux sont sur Facebook)

Entre temps, j’ai formé mon équipe pour le projet de session de GTI664 (Applications multimédia et Internet). On a décidé de développer une application hyper cool basé sur les techniques décrites dans “Pérez P. et al., Poisson image editing. ACM Trans. Graph. 2003″. En résumé, cela consiste en une application permettant d’effectuer des montage photo presqu’entièrement automatisés. Je n’entrerai pas dans les détails d’implémentation, mais je dois dire que l’algorithme est d’une élégance mathématique certaine et que c’est un sacré bon défi technique pour tout l’équipe. Rendez-vous à la fin de la session pour un compte-rendu…

Olivier et moi avons également travaillé d’arrache-pied sur plusieurs projets : organisation de la compétition informatique des Jeux de Génie 2008 (+ de 400 participants à l’ÉTS), on a développé un agrégateur RSS pour téléphone mobile (en J2ME avec support OPML pour l’édition de la liste des fils RSS) en plus de participer à tous les partys de la rentrée étudiante
J’ai finalement reçu le tant attendu iTouch jeudi dernier après plusieurs semaines d’attente. J’avais même promis à S. que je l’attendrais pour ouvrir la boite :-). C’est vraiment un device fantastique ! Il est pratiquement parfait, encore mieux que je l’avais imaginé. C’est encore un “novelty item” à Montréal, alors plusiers personnes à l’école sont curieux de l’essayer.

Le weekend dernier, je suis parti faire un road trip à Boston avec 3 amis de l’ÉTS (Nicolas, Gab T. et Damien). Le but premier était de répéter l’expérience de l’année dernière ou 5 de mes amis étaient venus me voir au MIT pour faire la fête pendant le long weekend. Cette année, j’ai convaincu mon directeur de lab. d’accueillir un autre étudiant de l’ÉTS (Gab G.). On a loué une voiture vendredi dernier et on est parti avec le minimum de baggages, iPod Touch à la main On est arrivé à Cambridge tout juste un peu avant 20h00 et on s’est empressé d’aller retrouver Gab G. pour manger et prendre une bière. C’était pour moi à la fois quelque peu bizarre, mais tout à fait naturel de me retrouver à nouveau à Cambridge, après tout j’y ai passé plus de 7 mois et je suis fortement attaché à la culture underground du MIT. Après le repas, on s’est rendu à l’arrière du musée (N52) pour visiter MITERS, la fameuse shop étudiante qui tient des “building parties” à chaque vendredi. Nous avions fait le plein d’alcools en tout genre en arrêtant dans le fameux liquor store sans taxe du New Hampshire : gin Bombay Sapphire 60 onces 31$, vodka Absolut orange 26 onces 15$, rum Bacardi apple 13$, cognac Remy Martin VSOP 37$…. On était prêt à aller faire la fête sur le toit de TEP, c’est d’ailleurs là ou nous avons pu être hébergé gratuitement pendant tout le weekend (ah… l’avantage de faire partie d’une frat. américaine).

Le lendemain on s’est tous levé avec un petit hangover, mais on étaient tous motivés à poursuivre notre visite de la ville. J’ai donc joué le guide touristique à nouveau en faisant visiter une bonne partie du campus du MIT (en révélant quelques uns de ses secrets cachés) en fin d’après midi on a rapidement visité le MIT Museum pour ensuite rejoindre Gab G. au bar Mystery of Science pour la première bière de la journée. On a ensuite un arrêt bière dans plusieurs bars le long de Massachusetts Avenue en direction de Harvard. J’ai fait visité au meilleur de mes connaissances le campus de Harvard, bien que j’en connaisse beaucoup beaucoup moins que sur le MIT. Après avoir souper au bien connu pub John Harvard, on a pris le metro (on dit le T à Boston) pour poursuivre notre tournée des bars près du Quincy Market / quartier historique de Boston. De retour à TEP, les gars étaient tous un peu fatigués, mais moi j’étais toujours motivé à aller explorer le campus du MIT de nuit. Je suis donc parti avec Dan Vickery et Danny Q. à la découverte des nouveaux buildings qui ont été construits depuis mon départ le printemps dernier.

Dimanche matin, on est parti visiter le quartier historique de Boston. Puisque le lendemain c’était Colombus Day (jour férié), il y avait une grande parade qui passait par là. Gab T. et moi on étaient les kid kodaks de la gang (Canon Rebel XTi et Nikon DX40). On a pris une tonne de superbes photos du voyage. Ce soir là, on a fait le party un peu plus tranquille puisqu’on devait se lever à 8h00am dans le but de partir vers Montréal avant 9h00. Sur le chemin du retour les feuilles d’automne étaient encore plus saisissantes, tout particulièrement dans les montagnes du Vermont.

Comme à l’habitude, toutes mes photos sont dispo sur Flickr.

Voilà.

Early tests with the multitouch table hardware

Pfffeww ! I finally completed the construction of my mini multitouch project this weekend. In total, I probably spent 5 or 6 hours actually building, the rest of the time (spread over a few weeks since the beginning august) was spent scavenging and buying materials, parts and tools. The most frustrating part was that I had access to a very limited set of power tools (basically only a drill and a dremel). I had to do everything else using a hacksaw, which sucks for cutting wood ! Hopefully my uncle let me use his table saw when I needed to cut the acrylic sheet at a 45 degrees angle. The funiest part was when I went to get my ghetto IR filter (basically an unexposed film negative). I bought a brand new film and told the clerk to develop the film right away. You should’ve seen the look on his face ?! All I wanted is to get the film processed so that the unexposed parts turn black, which by the way block visible light, but not infrared

Anyhow, now that the hardware is essentially completed. It’s probably one of the very few wooden firewire peripherals you’ll ever see I did some spray painting with the stencil I carved last week, so now it has the Creative Commons logo on the side.

Here are some pictures and a quick video I generated by some code I hacked with Processing.

Now I need to code a whole bunch of software. I’ll probably start by porting some of the code from Processing to a clean Java project. Then I’ll somehow need to hack some code for fixing that heavy barrel distortion caused by the use of a 1.9mm fisheye lens.

I’ll keep you guys updated.

“… all the pieces of the pie and the venti latté”

I was just listening to Macbreak’s discussion about Steve Jobs’ latest keynote that unveiled the new iPod touch, iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store etc… They pointed out that now Apple really has a fully vertically integrated market reaching out to a wide audience. That is going from production (with Final Cut Pro, Logic and GarageBand) to the iPod touch, iPod nano (that all support video podcasts covering many price brackets) through the iTune Wi-Fi Music Store and even on-the-spot impulse buying at Starbucks (that is “location-based multimedia content retail”).

They, jokingly, referred to it as “Now Apple has all the pieces of the pie and the venti latté.”

The trip to San Francisco Bay Area

So here I am, back in Montreal, after spending six amazing days on the other side of the continent. This will be a quick rundown of what I’ve done and seen…

All the photos of my trip are available here on Flickr. The photos are in the same order as I recall the events in the text below.

Wednesday, August 15th 2007:
I left my appt. early in the morning so I had to call a cab to get to YUL. This time I packed the minimum amount of stuff I needed so that everything would fit in my 50 liters backpack + my smaller bag for my photo rig. Upon arriving at SFO (a little after noon), I continued reading Woz’s book “iWoz” while waiting for my luggage (it’s a fun book to read). I took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) … (the machines selling tickets have a pretty confusing and lousy user interface) to 24th / Mission close to where the hostel I had reserved for the first two nights is located. “Elements Hotel” is located right on Mission St. in a part of town that is not particularly attractive and that doesn’t have the reputation for being the safest at night, but it didn’t look that bad in my mind. Probably the best part is that they have an incredible terrace on the roof with a complete bar. I dropped my backpack in the room and hopped on the next MUNI bus (SF’s public transport).

So first thing I did after quickly grabbing a sandwich was obviously to head towards the Apple Store on Stockton St. ! I wanted to see the brand new iMacs and play with the iPhone too. I noticed that all the iPhone were activated and ready to use on AT&T’s network, so I called my parents for free ! Then I played a little and tried the news iPhone-optimized Facebook user interface to call Pierre-Nicolas. After being recharged with Apple goodness I headed towards Chinatown to continue visiting the city. While walking on Powell St., I saw one of those famous cable car coming by so I hopped on it to go down the hill. I could see Alcatraz island. I took a couple of pictures while I was standing on the side of the car. What a fun ride After some time I decided to stop and walk towards Lombard St., which is supposedly one of the “crookedest” street in SF. So I continued walking towards Fisherman’s Wharf. But instead of seeing Fisherman’s Wharf that day I decided to walk towards west instead. I took some pictures of the Palace of Fine Arts (amazing architecture), then headed towards the Presidio, which is an historic national park and old Spanish fort. There are lots of very nice old houses. That’s also where Lucas Arts and Industrial Lights and Magic moved their headquarters to (in the Letterman Digital Arts Center). So I walked all the way back to Lombard St. and stopped in a nice, inexpensive Thai restaurant, yummy Not long after I went back to the hostel to get some sleep.

Thursday, August 16th 2007:
Probably because of the jet lag and long day of walk in the steep SF streets… I slept in and woke up only around 10am. I decided to take the MUNI light rail towards to ocean (close to the Golden Gate Park). I walked back from the beach to the center of the Golden Gate Park and decided to the bus to take a few pictures of the Golden Gate bridge. Then I spent part of the afternoon at Fisherman’s wharf visiting the Musée Mécanique (an amazing collection of antique pinballs and various coin-operated games of the early 20th century). Around 7pm, I joined Adam Goldstein, one of my friend from TEP at MIT. He was giving a talk about his book “Applescript: The missing manual” at the Apple Store. Later, Mark and Celeste, also good friends from TEP joined us for dinner. Adam is currently working as the CTO and lead developer for a Web 2.0 startup “Booktour”. After dinner, we went to Adam’s appt. right on Telegraph Hill, so you can imagine the nice view we have on the roof deck. I went back to the hostel for the night.

Friday, August 17th 2007:
I woke early this time to catch the Caltrain towards Silicon Valley. I actually stopped at the Mountain View Caltrain to catch the Apple employee shuttle. I pretended the be an Apple employee and tried to overhear some interesting things so I could feed the Mac rumors machine, but unfortunately they seem to be well-trained by Steve so that they don’t leak to much info On Apple’s campus in Cupertino I joined Matt Gordon, another good friend from TEP, who gave me a quick tour of the campus. Matt is an intern for the summer. I saw the “Town hall auditorium” where Steve gave his latest keynote about iLife 08 and iWork 08. I stopped by the “company Apple Store” to pick up a t-shirt. I had to sign an NDA so I can’t say much more… But I did get to eat with Matt at Apple cafeteria which has some pretty good food.

As public transportation in the valley isn’t the best, I called a cab so I could quickly get to the “Computer History Museum” in Mountain View. As an über-geek, this was probably one of the best part of the trip. I was so excited to see all the old computers that they have : Xerox Star (the one that pioneered the GUI), Altair 8800 (for which Bill Gates wrote Basic), a working DEC PDP-1 from 1960, a early ARPANET interface from BBN, Doug Engelbart’s first mouse (used in the ‘68 “mother of all demos”), etc…. I ended the afternoon by visiting the Intel Museum in Santa Clara, but that wasn’t nearly as interesting after seeing the Computer History Museum. Mark and Celeste came to pick me up at the Caltrain station near there. We went back home and they left me the keys to their appt. in Santa Clara. They were leaving for a two days trip to the Yosemite park. So there I was with my appt. in the valley, with a pool in the back, Mark’s Macbook Pro, a fast internet connection and a bike so I could go a little further than just by walking, what else could I ask for ? Dany Q., another friend from MIT came back from work later that night.

Saturday, August 18th 2007:
I slept in and continued reading Woz’s book and enjoyed the sun. Towards the end of the afternoon Dany Q. invited me to follow him to Google, where he is an intern working on Google Earth. We took the bus with our bikes. I got to get a bit more familiar with directions in the valley. After chilling at Google and getting some free food (as they say, you are never further than 100 feet from food) I took my bike and went to the Stanford Campus, by then it was already pretty dark. I bikes around the campus and took some pictures before taking the bus going back to “my appartment” in Santa Clara ;-).

Sunday, August 19th 2007:
I gave a call to Star, another TEP friend, who is working for Squid Labs (the startup that runs Instructables). I took Caltrain to go north with my bike and then the BART to go on the other side of the bay. I kinda got lost in Oakland while trying to find the entrance to the tunnel crossing to Alameda, where Squid Labs is located. Anyway, after going through the very scary tunnel (that has only a tiny 40 cm sidewalk that is 2 meters above the cars) I was in Alameda. Alameda was basically a city created for the purpose of this, now decommissioned, naval air base. Star was waiting for me at the end of the tunnel. After exploring around the old base, we stopped to get some food and then headed towards Squid Labs headquarters. They basically bought the old control tower of the naval air base ! You might’ve already seen this place, because if you watch Mythbusters, they often use the old runway to test explosions. Also, for the movie “The Matrix reloaded” they built a fake highway on the base for the chase scene. Anyway, so Star showed me around the place. They have some pretty cool toys (3D printer, 2 laser cutters, a water jet cutter etc… I met Tim Anderson, a very famous guy at MIT, who builds robots and other cool stuff. After the visit, I took the ferry to cross the bay again. I stayed in San Francisco at Adam’s place because it was already pretty late.

Monday, August 20th 2007:
I took Caltrain early in the morning to go back to the valley, because I had an appointment with Arshan Poursohi at Sun Labs (Martin Morissette, a good friend from my school did his last internship there and thought I’d like to visit the place). I biked all the way from the Palo Alto Caltrain Station to Sun Labs in Menlo Park (right by the bay). I spent about an hour there visiting the facilities with Arshan. I was really impressed by the environment, it looks like a great place to work. I stopped by Mark and Celeste’s appt. in Santa Clara to leave the bike and get my backpack. Here I was again on the Caltrain, but for one las last time ! Back in SF, I met Adam waiting in line in front of the Apple Store for a free concert. “Public Enemy”, a famous rap / hip-hop band was playing that night. The concert was pretty awesome and we were literally in the first row of seats.

So the next day I took the plane back to Montreal. Pfffeww what an amazing week that was.

Alive and well in SF !

So I’m in SF right now. I’m actually writing this from the Apple Store on Market St. with a shiny new iMac 20inch. They are gorgeous + as a bonus all iPhone are activated on AT&T so I could call mom and dad + Pierre-Nicolas for free ! I even used the new iPhone-optimized Facebook (iphone.facebook.com), I gotta say just for the user experience of this website it could almost justify the pricetag of the iPhone !!! This will quite probably become a reference for building iPhone-friendly web apps.

Anyhow, enough Apple geekery for today… I’m on my way to catch a cable car towards Lombard St.

See ya

Gone going gone … to California !

So the summer semester ended a week ago, now I’m on vacation until the beginning of september. I’ll be taking 4 classes next semester (GTI515, GTI664, GTI780 and LOG520).

In the meantime, I’m taking the plane in the wee hours tomorrow morning for a week to visit the San Francisco Bay Area. I know about a dozen people (mostly friends from MIT) who are either doing internships or actually live there. It’s shaping up to be an amazing 6 days in geekdom doing some plain old geek sight seeing + some hardcore partying in SF As usual, I’ll be posting some pix on Flickr in the next few days.

I also have an exciting vacation project in the works: a portable FTIR multitouch table Yeah, that’s right, I’m using exactly the same very simple technology that Jeff Han is using. As of now, I’ve gathered pretty much all the hardware components (acrylic sheet, infrared LEDs, tricked-out webcam, homemade IR band pass filter, aluminum frame) + some bits of code (cross-platform video capture abstraction (OS X, Linux, Windows), blob detection and tracking algorithms, some fancy efficient fluid solver based on FFT to play with smoke…).

I’m planning on getting the prototype working by the end of the month. My goal is present the device and how to build one at the next BarCamp / DemoCamp. Medium term goal is to clean up the code and abstract it as a gesture-aware multitouch HID API. That is, provide a simple, scalable API that can detect any complex gestures (such as iPhone-like pinching, double-tapping, rotate about a point, lasso selection etc…). Another goal would to port it as an OS X native framework in Objective C, as a premise to learn OS X Core frameworks.

Looking forward to post here on a more regular basis also.
(I know, Shame on me for posting so irregularly this summer…)

New CBC tv show starring Tiki Bar TV’s Lala coming soon

About a month ago, it was announced that Tiki Bar TV’s Lala (yeah, the hot girl) is going to be hosting a brand new show on canadian national tv, CBC. The show is called Exposure and will star short films, movies, animations. It is scheduled to start on Sunday July 29th. Suddenly, CBC becomes more appealing to me

Mac OS X UNIX geekery aka. fun with Darwin

I thought I’d share some of my favorite UNIX commands (no, not the stuff for beginners), stuff I use almost everyday on OS X. Some of these commands are in POSIX, but a lot are Darwin / OS X specific (they are the other reason why I think OS X is cool, besides what Steve’s reality distortion field says).

Display ARP cache (useful to get MAC addresses of devices):
arp -a
Flush local DNS resolver cache:
lookupd -flushcache
Browse the LAN for multicast DNS (aka. Bonjour / RendezVous):
mDNS -B _daap._tcp local.
Useful alias to scan 802.11 networks with Apple Airport:
alias ap=”/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport”
Update locate database:
sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
Quick grep to search through all files under a directory hierachy:
grep -ri “super regexp” ~/Documents/ (for instance)
Spotlight live metadata find:
mdfind -live [PATTERN]
built-in image manipulation tool based on Quartz (replaces ImageMagick when you don’t have it):
sips RTFManpage
ping broadcast address is always useful to find IPs and MACs of devices on the subnet:
ping 192.168.1.255 (for instance)
Dynamically resize partitions (great to prepare Macintel for triple boot):
diskutil resizeVolume RTFManpage
Darwin substitute for sed, powerful text manipulation, format conversion etc… (handles RTF, HTML etc…):
textutil RTFManpage
Darwin’s super intelligent launch command :
open [somefile]
Trigger interactive screen capture:
screencapture -i
Launch Apple software update:
softwareupdate -l
Interactively manage your OS X Keychain:
security -i
Use OS X text-to-speech:
say -v “Bad News” “Mac OS X Leopard is gonna come out only in October of two thousand seven!”
read magic bytes of any file:
file [somefile]

This is a work in progress. I’ll probably add more stuff in the next few days / weeks.

Radio-Canada se débarasse enfin de ZapMédia

Je m’en suis rendu compte il n’y a qu’une semaine, mais Radio-Canada a lancé le 7 juin dernier son nouveau site Web de diffusion de contenus multimédias (audio/vidéo). Ce nouveau service vise a remplacer ZapMédia, un système vieillissant). Après un brin de rétro-ingénierie (ah! comment se passer de Firebug et Venkman) j’ai découvert qu’ils utilisent toujours Microsoft Windows Media comme codec, mais qu’ils forcent explicitement le recours à Quicktime sur Mac OS X lorsqu’il détecte Flip4Mac, ce qui explique pourquoi ça fonctionne mieux qu’auparavant… J’aurais toutefois souhaiter un passage à MPEG-4 H.264 …

Radio-Canada l’appelle Audio-Vidéo (qui se targue de l’appellation “beta”, pour aller avec la tendance…).

L’interface est vraiment pas mal dutout: combinaison judicieuse de Flash et pas mal de Javascript pour négocier proprement avec la grande majorité des navigateurs. Bravo ! J’aurais d’autant plus apprécié le service lorsque j’étais au MIT au cours des deux dernières sessions… Heureusement qu’il y avait Bazzo.tv et Christiane Charette en podcast pour me tenir au courant de l’actualité québécoise.

Flickr party wrap-up

Last night was the Flickr party to celebrate the launch of the i18n and of the “24 hours of Flickr” book. There was plenty of cool YULblog and Flickr friends, great music (Ghislain Poirier was the DJ), good food, good booze, lots of schwag and some Mac Mini where you could upload your photos of the party on-the-spot to Flickr =) I was glad to chat a bit with Aaron and Simon, two of the core software engineering team in San Francisco. I also met with Sol Lang and his wife that I only knew from their wonderful photos on Flickr.

Thanks to Katz for invite me.

Lots of photos of the party
A short video taken by Martine