CTIVISM for software freedom seems to have weakened somewhat. Truth be said, the FSF saw its power declining, key staff at the FSF left, and Android, which champions the Linux ideology in some sense, does almost nothing for GNU and very little for software freedom. Its code is Free/open source, but it also embraces DRM and other nasties.

Speaking for myself, I intend to extend my activism to freedom in general, as well as justice. For the past 5 years or so I’ve described myself as an advocate of fair competition. This also implies greater parity and more opportunities for new players, as opposed to the cabal of corporations that reign the status quo.

Yesterday I spent a long time speaking to a gentleman from Afghanistan. He came to the UK some years ago and I’ve had several opportunities to speak to him and ultimately befriend him. Things in his own country are grim, he told me, but he does not seem bothered by police state culture in the West, let alone the unjust inequality. For some people, perhaps not idealists or perfectionists, a world full of flaws is OK and not worth improving. But one needs to always be reminded that progress in society never happens without the hard work of those sacrificing their life for good causes.

George Bernard Shaw once said: “The resonable man adapts himself to the world; the unresonable on persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

NE of my clients, SH Property, recently had the site redesigned. As I do architecture and programming for a living in a field which is very competitive, I often have to depend on tools that lower down the costs. The means by which I rebranded the site at the domain level only required Apache redirects, which sure saves a lot of money. It is worth noting that Libre/Open Source software was used almost exclusively to build the site and the previous logo/header/banner (when it was called SJ Property Investment), for instance, was created using the GIMP. It was temporary. Here it is:

While Libre/Open Source software usually costs nothing to acquire, it’s far from impossible to make a living with it; services and skills — requiring manpower — are the real scarcity.

ASED on further experiments, at the expense of performance in terms of framerate we can easily improve accuracy to the point of perfect tracking for particular cars. This is done by increasing the sample (window) size on which the tree is trained.

Using 20 positives and only 10 negatives for training.

20 positives and 20 negatives with a sample size of 40×40

ased on cascade training with just 10 negatives and 20 positives (various cars and distances, poses). The real FPS rate is 6+; in the demo it’s decreased by the grabbing/streaming of screenshots for video capturing.

Initial Test

Zoom Changes and Local Binary Patterns Classifier Applied to Red Car

Car Tracking Test (Static With Panning)

6 FPS for tracking (1-minute video)

This video shows tracking of a car based on training with just 10 negatives and 20 positives (without cars like the one in this demo). The real FPS rate is around 6; grabbing and saving a video such as this (in real time) entails a massive performance penalty, so this demo cannot show just how smooth the tracking really is. For a classifier trained on more examples the performance will be comparable. If some code cruft is removed and the rendering gets optimised, 8 FPS seems reachable (this device generally captures raw video at about 10 FPS).

ased on a cascade training with just 20 negatives and positives, performance of some merit can be reached (yes, even with a small number of images). Here are three videos that show it in action, where the goal is to track the car (for navigation purposes as will be shown another day).

Local Binary Patterns With Red Car

Local Binary Patterns With White Car

Local Binary Patterns With Nearly Black Car

Note: My program’s demo should be treated as just the testing of a concept at this stage. I will later on proceed to proper training and thus good performance.

n 2004 I got rid of my television. That was 8 years ago. The reasons for this are numerous and the following new image which goes around the Internet explains the resultant situation extremely well.

ith a training set of just a dozen positives from a single car I have let the experiment run. The purpose of this experiment is to test the alarm (collision) mechanism for short-range D alone.