computing

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Cyclabile, a labile bike lane

Cyclabile is an experiment about showing a moving bike lane on the road: the image moves according to the bike movement, producing the effect of riding on an actual bike lane, even when there isn't one.

The effectiveness of projecting an image on the paving instead of using a traditional light can be argued, of course.

For now the project purpose is more about having some fun and making a statement (there should be more bike lanes) rather than building an actual usable product.


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Remove images from PDF files

Some times ago I ran into some Service Manuals with unusual background images:


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SaveMySugar: exchange messages using only phone rings

From “The Lord of the Phone-Rings”, about SaveMySugar:

One RING after them all, one RING to end them,
One RING to get the... messages, and from Morse code decode 'em.

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KITT showing an Applesoft BASIC program

I was watching a Knight Rider episode (namely from Season 3, Episode 1: Knight of the Drones) and I spotted some source code of a program listed by KITT.


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How to trace and visualize POSIX threads

Writing even a simple multi-threaded program is a complex problem, synchronization issues are always around the corner, causing race conditions which can lead to deadlock or resource starvation; and the stress of not being sure that our program works correctly is another component of the complexity.


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Infinityx larger

A small JavaScript bug in Google image search.

Google image search - Infinityx larger

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Don't mix LDFLAGS and LDLIBS

Compilation of kinect_upload_fw (from kinect-audio-setup) was failing on some systems with messages like:


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Halloween?

Inspired and adapted from a math joke:

Why do computer scientists always confuse Halloween and Christmas?
Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.

Computer Scientists Halloween demotivational poster

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User-aware scheduling

Recently both OSnews and Slashdot pointed out some experiments about context-aware UIs done by Christian Giordano at Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux), and the first results are somewhat interesting. As you can see in the good video demo from the original article the effects are nothing mind blowing, but they serve greatly to illustrate the concept, and by building on that something more useful would come out eventually.

That reminds me of another (never realized) old idea of mine from when I was attending the Operating System course at the university, I wanted to bind system responsiveness —at a lower level— to user presence, by tuning scheduler parameters according to the user being at his/her computer or not.