http://www.jsharkey.org/blog Just another WordPress weblog Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:29:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over the past few weeks Scan has been showing up in various news articles all over the web, and earlier today my local newspaper and news station covered it. Google has kept all of us busy with new internal SDK releases, and I haven't had much time to keep ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/06/19/news-coverage-of-android-scan/ Earlier this week we quickly ran ddrescue on a few 40GB disks, copying them to large .img files on another drive. We accidentally saved the entire disk /dev/hda instead of the individual partitions, and of course mount isn't smart enough to read the partition tables embedded in the .img ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/06/07/using-ddrescue-with-an-entire-disk/ So earlier today I sat down at lunch with my Nokia N810 and connected to some nearby Wifi, only to find an E-mail congratulating me on being one of the 50 winners of the Google Android Developer Challenge. Mine was only one of 1,700 total entries, so I'm ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/05/10/winner-of-google-developer-challenge/ So today is the deadline for the Android Developer Challenge, and I just finished up my submission. It's a sweet tool that can show you pricing and metadata for anything with a barcode. Here's a few of the features that make it stand out: Automatic barcode recognition using ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/04/14/android-scan/ So the past 6 weeks of my life have been almost non-existent. They give advice to new graduate students saying you should start writing your thesis early, usually about 6 months before you graduate. Somehow I kept putting if off with excuses of "just one more test ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/04/14/thesis-in-six-weeks/ So about a week ago I wrote up a quick example for TabHost. Then yesterday Google released a new version of the Android SDK which changed quite a bit. In the process, TabHost is no longer deprecated (yay!), but its interface has changed quite a bit, so ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/02/14/android-tabhost-in-the-m5-sdk/ Update: the code below needs some slight changes to work with the new M5 SDK. So over the past few weeks I've jumped into Google's Android platform. It's a blast and very well designed, but there are still some rough edges. One of those rough spots is getting ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/02/07/using-android-tabhost/ Over a weekend back in August I wrote a C++ program that allows people to draw graffiti on any surface. The person draws using a normal red laser pointer, and a MiniDV camera then detects the red dot. The C++ program maps the laser dot from camera coordinates ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/01/05/laser-graffiti-on-buildings/ As part of my thesis work, I've been writing algorithms to design wireless radio networks. One important question we needed to answer was whether a given pair of locations could communicate using a set of radio equipment. This question is pretty hard to answer because there is so ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/01/03/radio-propagation-using-libprop/ Okay, so here at school we have these huge Dell LCD monitors that are just gorgeous. However, it's annoying every time I do a Google search because over half of the screen space is just wasted with whitespace. :( Yeah, it's because Google decided to be friendly ... http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2007/03/01/reclaim-screen-space-by-using-two-column-google/