Wiion – the movie
I’ve created a movie about the wiion game mentioned before. The movie only shows the process of finding and repairing one leak, in the real game there are a total of 3 leaks in 3 out of 4 different maps. We got green light for buying a new camcorder and I hope the next movie I’ll show will be shot on the Canon HF11 
The movie, voiced over by Geodans own Barry White 
Wii-on game
To present the new WION service which Geodan set up with its partners we, Geodan Research, were asked to create a nice WION related game. WION services is about preventing digging up cables and other underground infrastructure. The game will be used during conferences at the booth as a public-magnet.
Animation showing the original map and the final map
Loedertje has arrived
This morning I’ve collected Loedertje from the animal shelter. Apparently she was quite the lady and they warned me that she was very difficult. When I met her I thought she was a cuty. Apparently this affection wasn’t mutual since she digged her claw in my carefully stretched hand. However it was in a playful kind of way and she looked quite happy with herself.
I was told that she couldn’t live with other cats and they didn’t want to let her out of the cage otherwise she’ll kill them all 
. So she reminded me of Frodo and I decided that I would take my chances with her. Getting her in the carrying basket turned out to be a major problem and in the end I received her in an industrial style cage.
Once in the car she calmed down a bit, happily meowing away. This gave me hope for her mood at home. I put the cage in the living room and prepared her litter box. Next I let her loose in front of that box. She quickly moved out of the cage and started to inspect her new home. Every time she passed me she purred a bit and wanted to be stroked.
I had to leave for work but when I got back, she walked towards me. She is very inquisitive and doesn’t stay longer than 5 minutes at the same place. She seems to be very happy and affectionate, so if this is a difficult cat, I’d like to know what an easy cat is.
Loedertje doing her rounds
netatalk and os x playing up
I’ve spent my entire evening fixing my appletalk set up after I accidentally ‘upgraded’ my handcrafted netatalk with the stock ubuntu one. I crafted my own because the stock package doesn’t support encrypted passwords.
I’ve reinstalled, rebuild and rebooted netatalk on the server and I kept getting this error:
“The operation cannot be completed because one or more required items cannot be found. (Error code -35)”
Googling this error didn’t give me much and it took me a while to realize that googling for: error code -35 will give you no useful results do to the minus sign. In the end I discovered that it is not ubuntu but Apple to blame for the error. Apparently at some point in time the globalpreferences get fcked. So the solution is:
rm ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist
Is it better to burn out, or to fade away?
Last week we, the Mapbuilder PSC, have decided to gracefully terminate Mapbuilder. We found that other webmapping projects (notably OpenLayers) had passed us in userbase, developbase and finally also in features. We decided that the answer of the ageold question is to burn out. We’ve sent out an announcement that we have reached the end of life of Mapbuilder. It is a sad day…
Dark skies are looming over me
But in general I think this is a good thing and OpenLayers will grow even faster, it is a great package after all.
New camera
My shiny new Nikon D60 with extra lens has arrived, woohoo!! Since I’m still at work I can’t play with it yet, but here is my first shot with and of the camera.
More to follow
Panoramas
I found an incredibly easy to use panaroma stitcher tool for OS X; DoubleTake. It is shareware, but worth all the few euri it asks for a license. Just drop in the photos of your panorama and 9 out of 10 times it creates the correct panorama. It works with both photos shot in ‘Panorama mode’ and series of photos shot in series without fixed lighting and white balance settings.
As a result my Panorama gallery is growing fast, working my way through my backlog.
Insanely high mountains
… paint it black
I finally finished painting all the doors and jambs. I managed to squeeze in one black door, although it was not originally red. My bathroom door is now painted with chalkboard-paint and since it is visible from both the living room and the kitchen it serves very well as a todo list. (and no I haven’t found Maartens book yet 
)
Finished painting
A rift in the internet
the evidence is finally there that Google is building its own version of the internet. If you search for images in the Dutch version of Google you have the option to search for images or search “The ‘The internet‘” (het het internet). Not to be mistaken for the common internet, currently in use by billions of peasants. Apparently this is a specific subset of the Internet, probably only with content that Google has approved and/or cached. This might be the new internet without the flaws of the current one, like freedom of speech.
Finally it has arrived the ‘The Internet‘
Wii-mote readings
We are asked to develop a short game which is controlled with the Wii-controller. Since it is expensive and not too easy to develop for the Wii itself (you require a SDK from Nintendo and permissions once the game is finished) we decided to develop it on the PC. It is possible to connect your Wii-mote with the PC using bluetooth. There are multiple libraries to do so.
I was curious what kind of feedback you get from the Wii-mote and where it fails (in light of the news about the Wii motion plus). There are some issues around getting your Wii-mote connected to a PC by bluetooth, not every stack is good, nor areall bluetooth chipsets, however the MacBook supports the Wii-mote out of the box. So I connected the Wii-mote to my MacBook instead and used the DarwiinRemote application to get a reading from the sensors.
DarwiinRemote sensor readings.
The wii-mote is equiped with an accelerometer, which does not record the position of the wii-mote. What is does is that it records the different forces (accelerations) that are applied to the controller. So in rest it will record a force of 1G down (z= -1). If you hold the controller upside down it will record a force of 1G up (z = 1) (seen from the point of view of the controller). If you hold it on its side the reading will be x=1 or x=-1 or y=1 or y= -1, depending on the side. The other axis will be 0 in rest. Actually since in rest the only force acting on the controller is earth gravitation, which is 1, the absolute sum of the forces on x, y and z will be 1.
Wii sensor reading in three orientations.
With this knowledge you can deduce the orientation of the Wii-mote from the readings above. In the beginning the Wii-mote is held horizontal pointing forward (blue line at -1). Then the Wii-mote is rotated along its body, the left side is pointing up (red line at 1). Finally the Wii-mote is pointing downward (green line at 1). Note that we do not know how the Wii-mote is pointing downwards (whether the buttons facing forward or sideways). When you start moving the Wii-mote the forces applied on the Wii-mote easily surpass the 1G and when that happens it is much more difficult to deduce the orientation. The new Wii-motion Plus extension is supposed to solve this problem. From what I’ve seen and read it most likely will use a gyroscope to calculate the orientation of the Wii-mote regardless of the forces applied to it.