Very interesting: Surface tracks shapes with its vision system. There are five cameras in the Surface. The system has a very high resolution (dice can be tracked). Surface uses high-power leds with a mirror system.

via blogs.msdn.com
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Recently, I have been totally fascinated by those ferrofluid installations. Ferrofluid means that there is some kind of oil in which very small particles of metal have been dispersed. Thus, this fluid reacts on magnetic influences. This video should make things clear:

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I LOVE HEXAPODS. I WANT ONE!
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pymt demo reel from Thomas Hansen on Vimeo.

With PyMT there is a new kid in town for visual multi-touch interaction frameworks, which is based on the scripting language Python and connects to TUIO producers like the Touchlib, reacTIVision or Touchsmart TUIO.

Currently, the most multi-touch applications seem to be implemented in Flash AS3. Flash is relatively easy to learn, offers great possibilities in interactive 2D animation programming and there seem to be of people that at least can make multi-touch things work in Flash by plugging modules together. Python has not so far been common for interaction or animation but for rapid, high-performance and professional “underneath the hood” server development.
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Today I had the problem that i needed to create a Flex element by hand and apply to it a width of 100%.

This goes as easy with MXML as this
<mx:VBox id="wrapperBox"><mx:UIComponent width="100%" height="100%" id="elementXYZ"></mx:VBox>

But you cannot code this to achieve the adding programatically with Actionscript:
var elementXYZ:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
elementXYZ.width = "100%";
elementXYZ.height = "100%";
wrapperBox.addChild(elementXYZ);

Instead, you have to use this:
var elementXYZ:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
elementXYZ.percentWidth = 100;
elementXYZ.percentHeight = 100;
wrapperBox.addChild(elementXYZ);

Nice tutorial.

Yesterday, I struggled with a problem on my virtual server that Plesk automatically sets /srv/www/vhosts/default/htdocs as the htdocs directory of the Apache.

Anyway, the greatest advantage of the Apache configuration of opensuse is its biggest problem: everything is set up very modularly. There are many things you can edit and install with yast and there are many that you can not. The point is that you will have to decide at one point if you tweak a setting manually and give up searching on Google for the appropriate solution with yast or some rpm manager or whatever the best solution should be.

Then you will haveto start searching in the VERY modularly set up apache config directory /etc/apache2/.

I could solve my problem by deleting the file /etc/apache2/conf.d/zz010_psa_httpd.conf. Files from this directory are included automatically in the file /etc/apache2/default-server.conf into the Apache configuration by the directive
Include /etc/apache2/conf.d/*.conf

/etc/apache2/default-server.conf itself is included into the main config file httpd.conf of Apache by the directive
Include /etc/apache2/default-server.conf

Phew…

This is a bit off-topic for this blog but recently I’ve needed to cope with Java ME and my Nokia S60 device Nokia Navigator 6110.

The problem: If you are doing what I have done and want to run an old midlet project with the Symbian SDK then do not forget to add all your old midlets to the ‘Application Descriptor’ file you will find in your project’s directory in the eclipse workspace folder.

Otherwise the Symbian SDK emulator will tell you something about an ‘IllegalStateException: No application specified in Jad or command line’.

Therefore, add a line like this to the ‘Application Descriptor’ file for each midlet, save it and run Create Package once more:
MIDlet-1: YourMIDlet,,your.package.name.YourMIDlet

Done.

I just wanted to mention the great Open Source multi-touch tracking application Touché for Mac OS X from Georg Kaindl in my blog.

Touché supports lots of image processing possibilities and is written purely in the Cocoa Objective-C framework from Apple. The Touché code can be accessed via Google Code. Touché supports loads of video cameras amongst others the Pointgrey Firefly MV.

Touché produces TUIO OSC messages and also the TUIO XML analog for Flash rendering FLOSC unnecessary.

As far as I have seen and tested Touché it has a slightly bigger latency than the Touchlib with an appropriate Touchlib configuration.

However, Touché seems to be the best choice for everyone, who wants to use Mac OS X for the tracking in multi-touch setups. It is highly cofigurable. Georg Kaindl is developing Touché on his own. Thus, there is only one responsible, friendly and very capable programmer that can be easily contacted.

The discussion about Touché in the NUI group can be found here.

Finally, here is a video of Georg Kindl showing Touché on Vimeo:

Touché 1.0b3 + LLP Table Demo from Georg Kaindl on Vimeo.

There are more videos of Touché available.