Stuart James ( Tooey )

A Window 7 desktop gadget under a little load the usage graph is pretty much useless... this view is at 120% not sure how much screen estate I can give to it.

Well I barely use many of the features in Visual Studio 2008 for C++ development, but generally there are not many of much use. The big draw of Visual Studio is the automatic build environment that after writing a lot of make files on linux it is very nice.

When shifting to Visual Studio 2010(VS2010) the first big hitter was the change in global includes / library's. For some reason I am not completely sure they have decided to relocate the includes that used to be in Tools - Options - Project and Solutions - VC++ Directories, to the property manager or at least that is what I found online. Other than that there is this annoying habit when ever listing directories, libraries it includes all the global as well as the local in the list that I would of thought was for local settings.

But not to dwell on the bad, things I have found useful -- autocomplete or intellisense this is greatly improved much more stable is even able to handle including files easily. Also one of the things that has always bugged me about visual studio is the theming options, apparently developers don't like to change colours. Well generally we revert to high contrast but still its nice not to be stuck with grey. One of the addons I stumbled across allows a colour scheme configuration. It is missing a few things like solution explorer but is greatly improved. 

So if you fancy changing the colour of Visual Studio some handy links

• Visual Studio Color Theme Editor
• Visual Studio Dark Expression Blend Color theme
• Metroline Text editor theme

Well there we go my breif introduction to Visual Studio 2010 for C++ development

Brighton Beach, 04 / 06 / 2011 Me and Pixel running on the beach, photo by Cemre Zor

I am the occasional listener of TWiT(This Week in Tech), I was listening back to a previous weeks podcast while doing some work and they talked about open beta for gdgt.com, and as you do thought I would go sign up and have a play.

So I created a profile, and added a few devices that I own. After a few minutes though I started to wonder why I was doing it. Reviewing products is nice but either professionals do it, or people like me blog about cool tech they have and they want to add their own two cents. Why would I really want to go on to another site other than to join all the information together and organsie it in one location. That might be reason enough you might think, but pretty much anyone that writes anything about a product does it for some sort of recognition. By putting any effort into a site like this it seems I am basically giving my time away for little to no recognition other than to make a number go up on their site.

Maybe if more of my friends were using it I would use it more but with current missing integration to Twitter and Facebook it doesn't have the social competitive drive to make me spend much time writing on a site that doesn't link back to my own.

We shall see with time how it develops, it is a little mean to critisise a site that clearly displays it is in beta. But when its open beta its fair game in my book also I have added two links two to their site in this one post, not bad even if it isn't an amazing review!

I have spent a few days experimenting with different fixes to an issue where it states the the mex files included with mmread(a Matlab video reader) are incompatible. Well after playing around for a week with a few different solutions I think I have found a very easy solution that I should of realised...

I assumed there this update would require a recompile and all would be fine, what I should of done was try to play a video. It seems when the libstdc++ was updated the Ubuntu update didn't also update dependencies on this such as gstreamer / ffmpeg. So therefore playing a video in your player will say then promptly say "no available decoder" and update this automagically for you.

Well that was a stupid waste of time... back to research!

Just under a year ago I got a Dell Streak this updated the way I use my phone before this point I was on a Nokia E90 after breaking a few XDA style phones over the years prior. So I am not new to the smart phone industry but as with most techies changing onto an Android/iPhone/Windows Phone 7 was a change of user models.

Well last Tuesday I took my Dell Streak into O2 for repair since it had developed an annoying problem where, when you placed it on the table or put pressure on it in pretty much any way it decided it was a good time to restart. As a replacement they gave me a Samsung feature phone...

I never really realised how dependent my life had become on my "smart" phone, this feature phone can make calls... i haven't made one yet, send texts without easy access to my contact list ... i haven't yet, receive texts I have had a few but generally are automated. The one real feature of note is I haven't even found the charger yet. With my Dell Streak a daily charge was essential, so this has been nice but equally I haven't used it so it is good that it doesn't need any charge.

After walking out the store to the bus, I suffered quite bad withdrawal the useful things like sending or checking emails, weather, news,  twitter/Facebook all being ripped away was very confusing. I am used to filling the 5(to 60) minutes waiting for a bus with general tinkering on my phone with a feature phone all I can really do is play catch.

I thought this was just me being a bit on the quirky side, but after several days I am still finding this phone completely useless. My feelings are that we don't use our "phones" as telephone device but purely for information retrieval. We pull down information for analysis when we have brief moments to review.

Maybe it is just my use case or the fact that I am too lazy to add peoples contacts to the phone, but even if I did add them I would have to allot a period of time to talk to someone or take the hassle of typing on a 1-9 layout keyboard to send a brief text.

Is my phone making me more anti-social than I am by factory settings? Or is it just a different form of communication that is now common to the "smart" phone.

Last night I was exploring a problem with an update to libstdc++ library that broke a lot of my code, so after fiddling around with that I went for plan B

Plan B is to re-write the section of code to use OpenCV, sounds simple ? well I have been working on a Visual Information Retrieval library, to help with my work and other people in my group, part of that code is a VideoReader wrapper for OpenCV. So I thought this would be an easy solution...

Well turned out not to be so much, modifying the library to work with mex was easy, but I quickly hit a compatibility issue between 32bit and 64bit. Since I prefer to use Matlab 64bit, it therefore requires you to use 64bit mex files and hence all dependent libraries have to also be 64bit. Now compiling up OpenCV and Boost for 64bit no biggy, but one issue I completely forgot about was codec's...

Well now I am working on a work around to the OpenCV codec problem but is seeming like one problem after another. When eventually done this library should be quite useful for anyone getting into Video Retrieval...

Am sat on the sofa, working on adaption to my current sketch retrieval system and as you do allowed Ubuntu ask you to update and so I did. Unfortunately one of the updates is libstdc that links to well everything. So am sat trying to recompile everything with a lot of difficulty due to not always having all the code for everything.

Well hopefully eventually I'll get there....

To start with my aim is to integrate Windows Phone 7 and Android with my current retrieval. This will allow me to explore how users sketch on phones as well as make a good looking demo!

So to start with Windows Phone 7, I will post a blog on the development of my completed interface and the code to make it later but I have got a basic doodle pad running that is quite a satisfying start for my first day of Windows Phone 7 development.

02 Stadium 17/05/2011