(Lisp) is mind-numbing

Well, not entirely Lisp... its actually (lush). But the parentheses... Oy. Thank god for Emacs paren highlighting. Here's the whole thing: robotest.lsh, but here's just a little sample of the beauty of (lush) syntax:

(setq len (* h (/ (- (* k f) y) (+ (* k y) f))))

Just like http://xkcd.com/224/ and http://xkcd.com/297/!

The whole point of this was to take in an image (top), mask out the color (bottom) by first eroding, to eliminate noise, and then dilating, to get back the origninal big blob of color (the eraser):

Then that formula (above) tells the robot how far the object is from it, based on how many pixels down the screen the middle of it is, how high off the ground the robot's lens is, and its focal point (-371). That distance formula took a whole classroom a while to figure out....

This is for a Rovio robot (which is controlled over wifi), and that picture was taken from the robot.

Robots attack in subtle ways...

Trying very hard to get this little schmuck to follow a line (done.) and then go back to where it started (not even close...).

I'm still figuring out how to work this blog site, and I think they have a tool to do this, but its very useful to use

mogrify -resize 640 *.jpg

and, if you need the package,

sudo aptitude install imagemagick

Brunch in NYC

Why is finding a place to have brunch in the city so hard? Well, its because there are about 5 places every block serving brunch, and its impossible to find menus for most of them online. So, will my brunch come with a free drink and some coffee? Or just some eggs and toast? Hm... my current favorite is Blue Water Grill, which is ridiculously expensive the other 6 days of the week, but Sunday Brunch is a bargain. You can get an entree for $13, with drink, coffee, and snooty atmosphere gratuit.

1st problem with blogger

It won't let me put my birthday as 2/29! It says its an "invalid date"...

hey

So maybe I'll start weblogging about what I do 10 hours/day.... play with computers! Google thinks weblogging is spelled wrong, and suggests "we blogging, backlogging and flogging" but recognizes its abbreviation -- blogging!