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L’Aber Wrac’h is on the north coast of Brittany. It’s rather beautiful. On the first night, outside the pub, we found a bucket of fish. A large group of barefoot heavily suntanned and weatherbeaten young men were very amused at me taking a photo… I presume it was their fish. But you never can be sure. Pictures of buckets of fish never come out as well as you hope though, so here’s a field of maize. The conference trip was a boat journey to a lighthouse – the tallest stone built lighthouse in the world. It’s a bit rocky around there, so I guess lighthousesRead More →

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This is a big week travel wise. On Friday we have a project meeting near Nice (we’re going there and back in a day, taking the lab car – this means I have to be at the polygone scientifique at 5.15am Friday morning, and we’re not due back till 10). And on Sunday I go to COSIT’09 in L’Aber Wrac’h, Brittany. This is about as far from Grenoble as it’s possible to get whilst remaining in France. That’ll be a tram-train-metro-train-bus trip, taking about 9 hours. Looking forward to it though – I still think TGVs are super cool (and there’s a good chance thatRead More →

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Another geeky interlude with mplayer and mencoder… See this earlier post on streaming video for video download assistance. You can get the software from here and it’s free. Taking a video file and splitting it into a load of numbered jpeg files is a useful thing to be able to do (particularly if you can’t get video input to work with OpenCV). This can be done really easily with mplayer: mplayer input.avi -vo jpeg:outdir=output_directory Replace “output_directory” with the directory you want the files to end up in and there you go. You will of course end up with lots of files if your video isRead More →

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This view takes about an hour to get to from my front door, on foot all the way. Click on it to see a bigger version, if you want. This one’s about half an hour further – the sticky out bit of grassy building & mountain you can see about half way across is where the first pano was taken from. For a 3 hour round trip it certainly blows away the cobwebs. 500m up, 500m down again…

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General geeky interlude… From time to time I need to download, grab from a webcam, convert, cut, and generally manipulate video files, and every time I do it I have to look up the settings for mplayer, mencoder or ffmpeg again from scratch. So I thought I’d put some recipes for common tasks up here just in case they are useful for anyone else. These use mplayer and mencoder which are available for windows, macosX and linux, but I can only comment on the linux version so don’t ask me any windows questions! Finding a webcam Lots of people put webcams pointing at sites ofRead More →

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Junk mail is plentiful here. Mostly it consists of the current special offers at Carrefour, or flyers for Speed Rabbit Pizza… but this one stood out from the crowd of colourful pamphlets. Here’s my attempt at a translation: Professor NABA Great international seeing1 medium! Payment after results, in the following 4 days. If you no longer want to suffer, contact me as fast as possible. Return of affection, fidelity between spouses, marriage, luck, clients. Protection against dangers, release from bewitchment, business, competition. To return immediately to the hearth of the person you like. He or she will run behind you like a dog behind itsRead More →

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Short Geeky Interlude: If you find your paper abstract appearing on a page on it’s own, using the IEEEtrans class, check you do not have a line break between the opening and closing abstract tags, and the abstract text.

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I wandered into town on the 14th of July to see what was what, and it was a fairly impressive experience. TANKS!! GENDARMES!! POMPIERS!! SWING DANCE!! FIREWORKS!! Actually I think the swing is not a traditional component of the Bastille day experience, but it was rather fun to watch anyway. I walked up to the top of the Bastille (it, you know, seemed like a good place to visit on Bastille day…) and the swing dancers were out in force. It’s rather strange looking down on a firework display from the top of a mountain though. I always thought fireworks went 100s of metres upRead More →

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I went to ITiCSE 09 last week in Paris, along with Karen Petrie from BCSWomen. Rog joined us for a day, which was great. Our talk was on opinions of women in computing – we ran a survey on women at the Lovelace and Hopper events last year and tried to work out what it was about successful women in computing (i.e., those doing PhDs or degrees or similar) that made them interested. One great outcome of the conference is that we made contacts with people in Turkey and in the USA who thought our study was interesting enough to run in their countries –Read More →