Emergency Exit

Inside of very german Coca Cola cap is a code to download a fourth iTunes song, so 4 caps = 1 song. I do not drink coke, but my brothers have a high Coca Cola consumption. Manually type in all the codes is very annoying and I always wanted to do some research in image recognition. So I have written some code to automatically detect the key inside the cap.

The first problem is take a good image. I made a mark on my desk where to put the cap. The code has to be in the upper part of the image. The next step is to find the center and crop the image. This is done with simple pattern matching of a mask. Removing the colors and adjust the brightness is a simple batch job.Arrange the code in a straight line is done by a simple program I have written with OpenGL. It uses the image as a texture and draws a quad strip with circular texture coordinates.

In the end I pass the final image to an open source OCR tool. At the moment the recognition rate is around 50%. But maybe I can improve this.

P.S.: The pictured codes are unused. So this is your chance to get a free song.

After working on a lot of other projects, enjoying my life and the totally disapointing iPhone SDK (The greedy Apple). it is time to pick up the Quake 2 PSP project. It is nice to see that some people still waiting for the game. I do not know when I when will release the next version but I will start coding again soon.I never really gave up Quake 2 PSP, I just favor some other hobbies like improve my guitar skills, programming some highend 3d stuff and playing on the PS3.

Burnout Paradise is a really amazing game. The great single player titles are also fun, but only multiplayer games can offer this everlasting motivation. Burnout made the online mode so easy and perfectly integrated. So if you want to challange me or just collect some online challanges with me, join the chat.

I am also looking forward to Wipeout Pulse HD with a hopefully more addictive and feature packed multiplayer mode. Wipeout Pulse was a little bit poor in this case.

I was really excited when Apple announced the free, offical iPhone / iPod touch SDK yesterday. My girl friend has one of these wonderful devices. I downloaded the SDK today and played with the simulator until my girl was back from work so I can test on real hardware. But there is a little problem:

Codesign error: no certificate for identifier "iPhone Developer" was found in your keychain

They want to have money for being a registered iPhone developer, so I can sign my code for the device. I am so disappointed by Apple like never before. I had written such a nice game perfectly fitting to the touchscreen and now that.You have to pay for the iPod, you have to buy an Intel Mac and now I should pay for being a developer that wants to support this platform to make it more popular. Fuck you, you greedy idiots! I think a lot of people think the same way as me. So a lot of great programs will never be written or released.

My girlfriend is afraid of jailbreak the iPod, but it seems to be the only option.

It took a while but finally Apple has released an Update to fix the keyboard issue I have written about.

I am happy wih my Mac after the phase of being really annoyed with it. The USB issue is not really a probem for me and I know it will be fixed fast and reliable as soon as I hand in my computer for a few days.

14th December 2007 - letter box finally contains a small packet. This game will deflect me from all my Mac OS X trouble.

I am really annoyed by Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) and thinking about going back to Tiger. Can you here it Steve, I will probably downgrade my MacBook Pro!
I always loved my Mac but at the moment, I am really unhappy. The USB malfunction is not that critical for me, because I rarely use it. All the problems with Leopard give me some lousy feeling when using my Mac.
Instead of wasting so much time for implement completly useless Cover Flow in the new Finder, Apple should focus on removing bugs, because Leopard is full of smaller and bigger bugs.
When the keyboard has the hiccups and working become impossible I begin to really unhappy with my Mac. There are a lot of blogs, threads and news about Leopard problems. Additionally there are no new killer features like Expose in 10.3 and Spotlight in 10.4. In my opinion Spaces is the best new gadget in Leopard and except the keyboard problem I can accept the problems but this issue makes me think about downgrade to Tiger. Sad but true …

13th December 2007 - letter box emtpy

My wonderful, beloved MacBook Pro has some bad problems. Well Leopard has some strange minor bugs, especially in the new features. But new Xcode and improved Interface Builder excuse a lot. I waited a long time for improved versions of those programs and the weak Xcode compared to Visual Studio is one of the reasons, why I cannot completly switch to Mac OS X.
Sadly I have a really annoying software bug since a few days and after some research I am not alone with this. On some MacBook Pros with Leopard (10.5.0 and 10.5.1) the keyboard stops working properly after putting the system to sleep once. The input is not processed all time, it exposes for a few seconds once or twice a minute and make working impossible. The only solution to this is a reboot or plug in an external keyboard.
When I attached my normal keyboard to the notebook, it also did not response. It was the first time I tried to use an USB device on this MacBook Pro and my external HDDs or the PSP are also not working. I guess my USB controller is faulty.
My only hope is that I have very good experince with the Apple support. But I need my notebook and cannot give it away for a long time :(

12th December 2007 - letter box empty

Currently I am working on an intro for the TUM Demoparty. Keep code small and portable seems to be tricky. I know there are issues in code between platforms like Windows and Mac OS X. But I always expected the shader language to be portable. But I never had such problems with the OpenGL Shading Language.There are two usable versions of GLSL: implicit version 1.10 and version 1.20.Both specifications have in common that no cast operator is defined. Instead the constructor is used to convert types.
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