Well, it’s Sunday night and I really wish that weekends were three days long. I could really do with just one more day off this weekend. I feel like I haven’t had a decent break in ages and need a bit of relaxing and unwinding time. Most of the travelling Anthea and I do is pretty full on and not much time for relaxing so I haven’t really had a break since Christmas and beginning to feel a bit flat.

Had a few little wins over the weekend and am feeling pretty happy about it. I finally seem to have my xdaIIi syncing with Evolution properly. I am using SynCE and multisync to sync my Evo contacts, task list and calendar. It seems like a pretty solid setup now. I think my initial problems were down to some faulty partnerships I created while trying to set everything up.

I also managed to get a bit of solid hacking done on my Vision project this weekend. I don’t really have any visable results to show for my efforts, but I know I am making progress. Hard to explain to your significant other that you are really excited because you’ve finally figured out how to calculate the intrinsic matrix for your camera and undistort images 😉

I also managed to get some of the translation and rotation matrix multiplication working. Well actually it’s still untested as of yet, but it compiles and runs. I am rapidly approaching the point where I am going to need to get the other camera now so I can do proper stereo. I was holding off purchasing until I was sure I was going to be able to get the first one working correctly with opencv and mono and have now reached the point where I am pretty happy with it.

Anthea and I went for a huge walk around Hyde park in the sun today. It’s amazing the change in Londoners when spring rolls round and the sun comes out. I’m sure half of London was in the park playing frisbee or walking the dog or playing with the kids, and it’s really nice to see so many people out and enjoying themselves.

So I haven’t blogged in ages. I have been pretty busy with various things, but unfortunately haven’t been able to make much progress on my Vision system lately.

Anthea and I spent 4 days in Prague over the Easter break which was cool. It is a really beautiful city if you can get past the hordes of tourists. Also not quite as cheap as people make out either. I am planning to put photos up on the website soon (I know, you’ve heard that before!).

Finally got my new phone last week, an xdaIIi. Very cool device and I’m loving it so far. Had a bit of fun last night trying to build synce to get it syncing with linux. Unfortunately synce and all its dependancies are hard masked for amd64 on Gentoo, so I had to build it all in my 32bit chroot and am going to try running all the 32bit binaries with linux32 from my 64bit environment. I got as far as creating a serial connection last night and that worked so I think this strategy might just succeed.

Am going to see Neil and Tim Finn in concert at the Royal Albert hall tonight, so won’t have a chance to push on any further with the vision system. I am struggling with the opencv calibration routines at the moment. I need to use these to extract my cameras intrinsic parameters, focal length etc, but it is proving very difficult so far. Hopefully some dedicated hacking this week/weekend will see some progress.