Non Nerd on John Stowers

A Change

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:15:32 +0000

2011 has been an interesting year. Between the stupid earthquakes and the pressure of finishing my PhD, I have been silent because I have had nothing interesting to talk about (cf. twitter…).

But there is a light at the end, I’m on track to complete my thesis, ‘Biologically Inspired Visual Control of Flying Robots’, in December/January.

I’m excited to say that I have accepted a job at the Institute of Molecular pathology , in a research group studying the mechanisms of visual flight control in insects. Technology wise, it is a perfect fit; the experimental apparatus involves a multi-camera real-time flight tracking system and estimator for multiple targets in an augmented reality flight arena. It is open-source (ish), and python/numpy. Research wise, it allows me to investigate some of the assumptions and unknowns in the biomimetic control systems I implemented during my PhD. And it is in Vienna, 1st Feb, 2012!

One Month In France

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 11:29:04 +0000

ENAC

Hi Everyone, Its been a long time between blogging but I have an excuse. I have moved from Christchurch New Zealand , to ENAC , Toulouse, France . I have now been here for a month, working with the UAV team here.

Screen Envy?

The work has been really challenging, and I have settled into my routine, working towards some things I would like to demonstrate before I leave. I have spent a few weeks doing a lot of electronics design, updating the paparazzi autopilot board, the IMU, and the GPS boards. Nothing revolutionary, just some evolutionary improvements over the previous hardware.

GUADEC Report: Late As Usual

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:34:40 +0000

GUADEC was effing awesome. I have successfully repayed my sleep debt, and can reflect on all that I observed and learned for the week. In bullet point form;

_Insurance for the last night (WAKE ME UP, English and Turkish) _

My Conduit talk went really well. I thought I was able to reach a good balance between ’this is cool for users’, ’this is cool for developers’, and ’this is a flagrantly useless technical demo because I can’. Following the talk, and over the rest of the week I had a number of chats with people regarding

Frantic

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:22:38 +0000

Frantic would be how I described my last two weeks. I have had very little free time to work on Conduit. Everything seems to have come at once!

I got accepted for summer of code - adding SyncML support to Conduit.
Alexandre Inacio Rosenfeld also got accepted to SOC to work on Ipod and media support in Conduit.
I got accepted to speak at GUADEC , which I will be attending, providing all finances work out.

Why Engineering and FOSS is Satisfying

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:56:34 +0000

I recently came across the post; why student programmers rant about business students with ideas . Putting my ideological belief in FOSS aside, I think it eloquently describes why I chose to return and pursue a PhD after a year spent studying engineering management (like an MBA - for those North American folks).

I also think it is highly applicable to FOSS. Many successful FOSS projects are born from engineers, the ‘decision to execute’ has already been made. As the article mentions, _’leadership and the ability to make decisions _is valuable, but only in groups with realizable ability to execute’. As a FOSS project evolves, the (normal?) combination of a BFDL and the constant freedom to fork keep the project relatively free of the ownership style disputes described in the post.

Back To Reality

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:48:45 +0000

Conduit 0.3.5: Enough Excuses

I am a terrible project maintainer. It has been a full 3 months since the last Conduit release, and I have run out of excuses. First I got distracted by online desktop shenanigans, then by Opensync and Ubuntu things . I got caught up in moving Conduit to GNOME SVN . Then I got distracted by JHBuild on windows . Finally I lost my nerve and went on holiday, not touching a computer for 3 weeks. Enough is enough!

Misc Updates

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 11:34:36 +0000

Conduit

For all those that are interested I just released Conduit 0.3.1 , the second development release in the series. The release includes a heap of bug fixes and some interesting new features including;

Evolution Support (memos and tasks) using evolution-python
Ipod calendar and tasks support
Support SmugMug and Picasaweb

Goals for the next release include

Supporting box.net
Google notes support
100% test coverage of the core sync engine

The thing that keeps me interested in conduit is the speed at which we are progressing. Each new dataprovider added has a benefit proportional to the number of already included dataproviders; for instance adding evolution support opened up the ability to do tomboy notes <–> evolution memos, as well as evolution memos <–> ipod notes, etc.

Life Updates

Fri, 04 May 2007 07:59:40 +0000

So I thought I should spice up my blog with a post about non nerdy stuff. Currently I am travelling around Europe and will continue doing that until about June/July at which time I fly to Canada.

I was initially planning on doing a University exchange at the University of British Columbia but have since decided to take up a PhD at the University of Canterbury . I will (hopefully) be working on UAV stuff , likely machine vision related, in the Geospatial Research Centre at the university, beginning on the 1st of August. Travelling by car across Europe by car is so far been exceptionally awesome. Have me some cool characters and have certainly become a better driver. It has allowed us the freedom to go where we want, and when split three ways, has been just as economic as train travel.

More pseudoscience..... debunked!

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:23:25 +0000

Like many people I am becoming incredibly frustrated with the way that science is twisted for political and religions means. It is good to see that this latest pseudoscience article wrongly dismissing climate change from the Sunday Telegraph has been debunked .

"[The Sunday Telegraph Article] is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong… In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in [the Sunday Telegraph], it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation, and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist… As for James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate — high, medium, and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was ’the most plausible.’ As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000."

Borat

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:36:35 +0000

Words cannot describe how much I am looking forward to the Borat premiere. Before you see the premiere make sure you watch these deleted scenes.

[youtube]Om7SkkN2T7c[/youtube]

Motivation....

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 22:06:09 +0000

“Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project. "

Nuclear Energy

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 13:43:47 +0000

It is good to see that some environmentalists are not as dogmatic in their anti-nuclear views as others. I think it is high time that New Zealand had a mature and open nuclear energy debate.