Aaron Mavrinac

I just set up a Bazaar repository server at work. Gentoo has no official ebuild for Loggerhead, so I installed it from Mark Lee‘s Bazaar overlay. Unfortunately, this does not ship with an init script for serve-branches, so I wrote one. The script is /etc/init.d/loggerhead (mode 755): #!/sbin/runscript # Copyright 1999-2009 Gentoo Foundation # Distributed […]

A good friend of mine recently tossed me some computer parts, including an HP illuminated multimedia USB keyboard (model SK-2565, part no. 5185-2027). Since I had been looking to replace my old keyboard (a $10 PS/2 job that I turned into a k-rad all-black cowboy deck with blank keys), and had been suffering from an […]

My research area at school is distributed smart cameras, a field which is primarily rooted in computer vision. Despite having access to a range of expensive proprietary software libraries by virtue of having purchased the equipment, most of my computer vision work uses a stack of free software running on Gentoo Linux. For interfacing to […]

Crystal bought me this USB Drum Kit for my birthday back in November. If you followed the link, you may have noticed this: Includes custom software (Windows only). Naturally, I want this thing to be sitting on my desk, ready to crank out a beat at all times. And naturally, the computer that’s sitting on […]

I play a lot of StarCraft. Here’s how I do it on my Linux box. Installing Wine First, I install and configure Wine. In particular, I leave the virtual desktop option off, and ensure that a sound driver (in my case, ALSA) is configured. ISO Images Both CDs are required for installation and play (assuming […]

While testing the Thousand Parsec single player mode on Gentoo the other day, I came across something strange. The wxPython client, when run from a Git working directory, wants to use development versions of libtpproto-py and libtpclient-py. It does this by prepending ‘.’ to sys.path. For some reason, though, import tp.* was still finding the […]

Thousand Parsec single player mode is almost ready! The initial goal is to release tpclient-pywx with single player mode, along with at least one server and one AI client supporting two rulesets, on Windows and Gentoo Linux. We achieved a few of the final steps last month. First, we have the release of tpserver-cpp 0.6.0. […]

Things are going well after the first week working with OpenCV. I have no proper complaints about the library, but I still have that uneasy feeling one gets when using something so high-level. It is particularly acute in this case, as computer vision problems are notoriously ill-posed and, having researched many of them heavily, I […]

I’ve been building on my research lab’s computer vision codebase for a couple years now, slowly adding functionality as it’s needed to get some experiment or other done. It’s built on National Instruments’ LabWindows/CVI IDE, along with their image acquisition and low-level CV stuff, so it’s strictly Windows-based and the code is basically useless in […]

We’re planning to release a version of the Thousand Parsec tpclient-pywx client soon with the new single player wizard. Support for single player mode is also coming in tpserver-cpp and (hopefully) a couple of the AI clients. The target date for the first candidate is October 19. I’ve significantly updated the Gentoo overlay for Thousand […]