ITHOUT preparation I’ve just created another video that can hopefully introduce new users to QtOctave, which is an excellent program.

Before we get to the essence of programming with the toolboxes as well as basic syntax, there ought to be a proper introduction to each component in QtOctave, which simplifies Octave by wrapping it with a GUI.

ITHOUT preparing any notes I’ve embarked on the task of making this first Octave tutorial, which hopefully helps show how to install it on a Debian- or Red Hat-based system.

Please bear in mind that this was done on the spot without rehearsals and future tutorials will hopefully be more organised.

ACK in October I planned to create some videos that explain to people how to use Free (as in libre) software in scientific computing and also how to program with the corresponding syntax. The following unscripted video is an opening demo of what I hope will improve as I gain experience with screencasting. It’s down to figuring out the audio, the window size, and all sorts of intuition-related skills which will be acquired over time.

In later parts I shall introduce readers to QtOctave, as well. I currently experiment with all sorts of video capturing/editing programs and I also upload old videos like this one.

Direct download as Ogg (1:46:40, 32.0 MB) | Direct download as MP3 (48.8 MB)

Summary: Tim, Gordon, and Roy speak about games and make their picks of the year (for 2010)

TODAY’S show covers what was missed since last week’s show and OpenBytes has published the show notes with most of the topics and some corresponding links.

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

As embedded (HTML5):

Download:

(There is also an MP3 version)

uring the holidays I decided to see what else is out there which is already free/libre software like my own work, which thus can be merged for comparative purposes. It would be valuable to have applied to my work some comparison to existing tracking algorithms which deal with cardiac images. A decade-old paper from Osman et al. covers the very popular HARP and states in its abstract that it offers an “image processing technique for rapid analysis of tagged cardiac magnetic resonance image sequences.[...] Results from the new method are shown to compare very well with a previously validated tracking algorithm.” It’s not easy to gain access even to code samples of complete frameworks that facilitate benchmarking, so the search ascended to SourceForge. I uploaded some projects of mine to SourceForge about 8.5 years ago and hoped that others would do the same. A search in SourceForge for “cardiac” yields about a dozen results (at the time of writing), but there are empty entries in the code repositories where there ought to be complete projects. The Cardiac MR toolbox for Matlab, for instance, is an empty project:

[roy@blueberry cmr-toolbox]$ svn co
https://cmr-toolbox.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cmr-toolbox cmr-toolbox
Checked out revision 0.
[roy@blueberry cmr-toolbox]$ ls
cmr-toolbox
[roy@blueberry cmr-toolbox]$ cd cmr-toolbox/
[roy@blueberry cmr-toolbox]$ ls
[roy@blueberry cmr-toolbox]$

The same goes for Neonatal Rat Cardiac Action Potential, but the Evaluation of Cardiac MR Segmentation project (all of them written for MATLAB but ought to be compatible with Octave) contains some LGPL-licensed code. Repository access (SVN):

svn co https://cardiac-mr.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cardiac-mr cardiac-mr

Looking at MATLAB Central for some more existing code I find an old BSD-licensed function but almost nothing else when searching for “Cardiac”. Since the literature review phase and the subsequent finding of some data [1, 2, 3] there has been almost no room for code reuse, so I had to code everything from scratch. I will soon publish the code (GPLv3-licensed), but in a more scientific society more code would have already been out there for others to collaborate and build upon the work of others.

HEN Fedora 14 was released there was a lot of excitement about it, more so than when previous releases of this leading GNU/Linux distribution came out. This was justified. After almost 8 weeks with Fedora 14 the only major issue I have had with it is conflicting packages, which would not really be Fedora’s fault. For the most part, when it comes to the experience on the KDE (4.5.x) desktop, everything is great. Some reviewers of Fedora 14 have been harsh and said that it would mostly suit advanced users; I’ve not yet found something which would justify a need for advanced skills though. Maybe once a week or so a technical issue may arise that requires technical understanding, but it’s never something critical.

All in all, having used Fedora 14 since it was released I can happily recommend it.

VERY once in a while we all get a break from everyday life and potentially introspect. As the year 2011 is almost upon us, it’s time to explain — on a more personal note for a change — what needs improving. First of all, from a professional point of view, it would be important to ensure effectiveness and to spend less time responding to Internet trolls and other such distractions. It’s just too easy to descend to gossip sometimes, however it gets nobody anywhere. There are some people who revel in harassment of progressive individuals and the worst those latter individuals can do is lose sight of their goals, then engage with the harassers. It’s tempting to do so (one’s own defense), but it’s counter productive as it leads to more of the same. When one expresses strong opinions on any matter, detractors will exist; the polite ones are worth debating with.

On the subject of research, my plan is to ensure that I maintain contact with my roots in computer science with emphasis on computer vision. I may soon have a start-up on the side, but there is no final decision on that yet. Research can produce a skills-based service that helps individuals. This can be an ethical service which even advances software freedom.

Last but not least (quite the opposite in fact), living an ethical life is not the priority of those to whom keeping score means accumulating wealth, even when it comes at the expense of someone else’s (even one’s own) health. We only live once and we must take advantage of this opportunity to do something positive for our neighbours to enhance solidarity. The Earth’s resources are finite and wealth is relative, where one person’s well-being often depends on someone else’s labour (typically dissociated geographically). For harmonious co-existence on this planet people need to increasingly work together and this sometimes means sharing of knowledge, commodities, food, water, and shelter. It’s too easy for people in the West to pretend that the world is just the West when in fact it accounts for less than 20% of the world’s population. Legislators must begin to take into account that inequality is not necessarily the result of imbalanced motivation and determination among minds; many people are born with little or no opportunities and particular conditions imposed by international laws keep it that way. Institutions like WIPO, WTO, WB, and IMF are just part of it and with gradual reform a safer world for everyone to live in is not a distant fantasy. The only real wars are class wars and dimensions like religion/race/nationality are often just instruments that act as surrogates for those in power, not a replacement for identical, scientific, and social doctrines.