QuickPost
- Justin Kalweit commented on Face Recognition Part 1 Feb 28, 1:11 PM
- Justin Kalweit commented on Windows Server 2003 and RRAS Firewall Jan 23, 2:40 AM
- Justin Kalweit commented on Windows Server 2003 and RRAS Firewall Jan 12, 9:14 PM
-
- Justin Kalweit commented on Face Recognition Part 1 Jul 22, 2:21 PM
- Rajesh commented on Face Recognition Part 1 Jul 11, 8:29 AM
- Justin Kalweit commented on Windows Server 2003 and RRAS Firewall Jun 30, 10:08 AM
- Justin commented on Getting Things Done in Gmail May 8, 9:38 AM
- Justin commented on Getting Things Done in Gmail May 8, 9:35 AM
-
Getting Things Done in Gmail
David Allen's Getting Things Done (wikipedia and David Allen's website) introduced me to a very useful method of managing Todo items. Every new "Todo" is immediately classified into one of three categories: Action, Waiting, or Resource. When dealing with email, this means immediately moving every new email out of your inbox into one of the three categories, thus keeping your inbox completely empty. I've found this is the simplest and easiest method for managing action items.
In Microsoft Outlook, I created 3 folders, "Action", "Waiting" and "Resource". In Gmail, I find the best method is a combination of the "Superstars" and "Multiple Inboxes" add-ons from google labs. Both are enabled under "Settings->Labs".
Note: Globex's Google Redesigned add-on for Firefox is enabled.
After enabling Superstars, I reduced the number of stars (under Settings->General) to "yellow-star" for Action and "purple-question" for Waiting. Anything considered Resource has no star.
After enabling Multiple Inboxes, I configured 2 extra inboxes (under Settings->Multiple Inboxes). The first has the search query "has:yellow-star" and the title "Action", and the second has the query "has:purple-question" and the title "Waiting".
When reading an email, I simply click the star to cycle through "Action" or "Waiting" (no star means "Resource"), then I archive every email to remove them from my inbox. The starred emails will automatically appear in their respective inboxes, and the rest are archived as "Resource"! Voila! GTD in Gmail!Most recent comment by Justin on May 8, 2009 9:38 AM
-
Face Recognition Part 1
Before I started ripping the walls out of my house, I had a fingerprint scanner for opening the front door. That was cool, but wouldn't it be better if your front door could see you coming and automatically unlock itself?!
This screenshot shows face detection - the first step in face recognition. The color image is the unprocessed web cam image, the second shows a box drawn around the detected face and eyes, and the third is a normalized face, using a line through the eyes to calculate a rotation and orient the face vertically.
Luckily, detection is easy using Emgu, a C# .NET wrapper for the OpenCV image processing library. Most of the detection logic is translated from c++ examples I found with Google. The detection is done using Haar cascades and is faster than I expected - processing about 10 frames per second. The recognition part is much harder . . . -
IMT Duncan LLC on TheMonty.com
TheMonty.com is an industry magazine for Heat Treat companies like ours. Gordon Montgomery, who runs The Monty, visited us last week and ran a small piece about our Duncan plant. He took special notice of our machine control and order management system:
"... what is impressive is the advanced state of their data logging and order entry systems. Even including captive heat treaters with multi million dollar budgets this has to be the most advanced computer control of furnaces that we have ever seen (largely developed on their own by the way) and includes fingerprint scanning before any changes can be made ..."
The system is the brain child of my General Manager, Tim Meyers. For the last 4 years I've designed and implemented the system along with Brian Konopka, president of BK Instrumentation, a control and automation specialist. The recognition is great! Full blurb is a few from the top at http://www.themonty.com/heattreatnews.htm - the news page is live so the article will move down the list and eventually disappear -
Windows Server 2003 and RRAS Firewall
How to open ports on Windows Server 2003 with Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) enabled
If you intuitively try to use the Windows Firewall applet in Control Panel, you will be greeted with the error message:
"Windows Firewall cannot start because another program or service is running
that might use the network address translation component (Ipnat.sys)"
This is because RRAS replaces the built in Windows Firewall with its own basic firewall. The solution is to find the firewall settings built into RRAS:
Open RRAS: "Administrative Tools->Routing and Remote Access"
Expand "[your_server_name]->IP Routing->NAT/Basic Firewall"
Right click on the connection you want to configure and select "Properties"
Use the "Services and Ports" tab to configure the RRAS firewall.
In my case I needed to open port 25 for incoming SMTP mail delivery to an Exchange Server. I had a hard time finding these settings.
