Lab Tricks

My 5 cents on New Apple TV

2010-09-08T19:48:00.000-03:00

I'm probably going crazy around here. I have been watching all kinds of speculation about Apple TV. Lots of people are disappointed because Apple hasn't announced any iOS Apps for it.

However, I see this a little bit different. Apple has announced AirPlay. For me, this is clearly the path that Apple will follow to deliver Apps to Apple TV. AirPlay has been announced as a way for you to stream your video content from your iOS device (iPhone, iPad or iPod touch) to your Apple TV.

From the broadcasting perspective, it makes no difference at all streaming your video/photos or just your own Screen. Adding Apps directly to Apple TV would require storage, what Apple clearly stated to be an issue for consumers. However, broadcasting the iPad screen to Apple TV would allow one to have a fancy remote (iPad) connected directly to your TV for controlling nearly anything. Apps would be available from the iOS devices, as usual, with the option for playing on the TV, via Apple TV, when needed.

This would fix the storage problem and would make the Apple products even better connected. Makes sense?

BTW, check our Apps at www.babs2go.com.br .

-Luciano

My take on iOS 4, WWDC 2010 and the future

2010-06-27T00:54:00.000-03:00

It has been a while now since WWDC 2010. I was there live this time; it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I highly recommend that you attend next year if you can. Well, one thing that I have learned over the last couple years working on the Apple world is that everyone is entitled to have opinions, make predictions and start rumours about the future of the platform. As usual, Apple will never have an official statement up to whatever is said gets launched during the "one more thing" speech of Steve Jobs and whatever I'm writing here, I'm not endorsed in anyway by Apple.

Anyway, after attending about five sessions per day, what really caught my attention is the push from Apple to the multi-tasking world. Of course that five in each five Apple blogs have already told you everything that you ever wanted (or not) to know about iOS 4 multitasking, but I think that I have a different approach here. I want to highlight, not the multitasking on the user side ( what everyone is talking about ) but I want to mention the multitasking on the App development side.

Nope, I'm not going all technical here. In general, Apple has introduced Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) for developer on iOS 4. This is a framework that enable developers to build Apps that have internal components running in parallel. Users will probably never even notice this (except that Apps would tend to be more responsive...); however, multithreaded code for developers could make a huge difference. But, we still have a single A4 processor in iPhone 4 and also in iPad; what leads me to my "futurology" session.

If you think that running code in parallel on a single processor makes no sense, well, you are right. In general, Apps will have the capacity of running in parallel but they will still compete for a single processor. The main advantage for iOS 4 on the current devices is that Apps using GCD will no longer hung or freeze on their hands. Developers will be able to put there blocking codes (load an image from the internet, open a dropbox session, etc) into a separated process what will not ever freeze your UI again. However, this will not add any performance improvements.

Going beyond iOS4, things start looking much better. My prediction after WWDC is that at some time soon we will see multi-core A4(x) processors. This would make a lot of sense. Apple traditionally introduces new technologies in phases. Assuming that developers will start using GDC to improvement their user experience now, Apple will have by the end of this year tons of Apps that will be enabled for true multitasking. Apple would be ready to "change everything again". The next generation of multi-core iPads would not even need to wait up to new Apps get developed. Virtually, every single App that uses GCD would be ready for multitasking at day one. Apple will be able to have the fastest tablet in place in no time.

Regarding time-frames, it would be just a matter of wrapping-up the offers. Apple could take the approach of launching an iPad/iPhone 4 "G" in 2011 ( I assume that by then the 4G cellular networks will be more common in US), this would keep the sales going up by itself because people would really feel the difference of the network speed; may make no sense introducing a multi-core A4 at that moment because it would add to the cost of the 4G components and it could also be a waste of a silver bullet.

As such, I'd see a multi-core iPad/iPhone being introduced to the market on WWDC 2012. Cost would have gone down, 4G will be available to most people, Apple will be ready to launch iPhone 4Gs ( s for speed, does this sound familiar? ).
Well, Let's keep following the next steps and see what predictions come true. The only certain here is that whatever path Apple takes, iOS4 is just the top of the iceberg.

- Luciano

Mutation is about to be completed!!

2010-03-30T07:42:00.001-03:00

PACMAN Reloaded is on final stages to become Squid Trap !

Apple has approved the latest update yesterday. Ever since, I have already changed all the marketing material and as the servers get updated, the migration is being completed.

I can see totally updated material in the United States, it means that most of the countries where people see the English descriptions should be fine. I still see some issue with the Brazilian translation that shall be fixed over the next few hours.

I do apologize for any inconvenience that this migration may have caused but I hope to compensate that with you when I release new versions of Squid Trap during this year.

More than 400 people have already upgraded their software. Thanks !

-Luciano

PACMAN Reloaded will become "Squid Trap"

2010-03-25T21:00:00.001-03:00

Hello Everyone

We have received a notice from Apple telling us that NAMCO has complained about PACMAN Reloaded.

As usual, I have decided to do a little research about the topic by myself and based on my findings, the only option that I could find was completely remove PACMAN Reloaded from the Market.

As such, we have completly changed the look and feel of the App. The good thing about it is that we could use more updated graphics and sounds. In my opinion, it has become an even better software.

Over the next couple days (assuming that Apple approves the new App version and NAMCO has no more requests), our "Squid Trap" should be made available at the App Store.

In case you want to keep the PACMAN look and feel, make sure you do not update your software. If you want to keep receiving the latest and greatest updates, upgrade to the new "Squid Trap".

Here are a few screenshots of the upcoming version:

"SQUID Trap 2.0"

Best Regards

-Luciano

PACMAN Reloaded Version 1.2 is available !!

2010-02-19T22:08:00.000-02:00

We in Babs2Go really appreciate all the feedback we are getting from the PACMAN community. As of now, we are particular interested on hearing your opinions about the game controls.

PACMAN Reloaded 1.2 adds the capability of controlling pacman via accelerometer.

As we saw a few reviews, it seems that some people are not happy with the current Arrow-based controls. As such, we have added the option to enable Accelerometer at the Configuration Screen. We would appreciate if you could try this other option and let us know if it works better.

Your feedback is very important to drive our activities for the next release!

Thanks

-Babs2Go Team

PACMAN Reloaded Version 1.1 is available !!

2010-02-17T17:07:00.000-02:00

Hello Everyone

This morning, PACMAN Reloaded has just toke the lead of sales overall in Brazil, South Africa and Costa Rica. Babs2Go team is extremely happy with these results and we are working hard to include on our software the most of the fix/enhancements that has been suggested by our PACMAN Community. We have been monitoring the reviews on the App Store and we are glad to say that, in record time, Apple has approved our latest version of PACMAN Reloaded. It is the first time ever that I see an App being approved in a matter of a few hours. Submitted this morning (11AM) and just got approved(5PM). It will be pushed to our installed base over the next 24 hours.

PACMAN Reloaded 1.1 brings the following enhancements:

- added Configuration screen with :
    * Difficulty Level Settings
    * Background Play List builder
- display levels on Hall of Fame
- Turned on/off sound switch into Sound Mode Switch with following options:
    * Only Background Music
    * Only Sound Effects
    * Background Music and Sound Effects
    * Mute
- Bug fixes:
    * Improve memory management - prevent crash while adding new scores to Hall of Fame
    * Fixed intermittent instability during level change
    * General usability issues

Feel free to post any suggestions on this website or just leave your comment on the App Store.

Thanks

-Luciano

PACMAN Reloaded

2010-02-13T08:49:00.000-02:00

Hello Everyone

I'd like to announce our latest product on the App Store. Babs2Go is glad to bring to you PACMAN Reloaded. The greatest thing about this game is that it is already born with a few millions of fans :).

PACMAN is a classic arcade game that almost everyone who ever had a computer have already enjoyed. My daughter is about 5 years old and she just learned to play PACMAN herself. As she liked, she asked me to get PACMAN for my iPhone so she could play while we were driving her to school.

I have browsed a few options and didn't like any. As usual, if I do not like what is out there, I build my own. Ever since yesterday (Feb 12th) the App has been available on the App Store. It seems that people are also liking it; with no marketing at all (even the Apple new release list has started showing it only today) it is already the 49 most sold App of the Entertainment category in Brazil.

I hope that you enjoy it!

If you have suggestions on what game to build next, let us know. My main source of information now is my daughter, but I'd love to bring to live your favorite game.

Here are a few screen from PACMAN Reloaded:

Thanks

-Luciano

Have a great New Year !!

2009-12-31T00:38:00.000-02:00

Hi Folks

It has been a while since I do not write on the blog. It has been a very busy couple months :)

However, I'd like to wish a Great New Year to all of you !!

About my last post, iToon 2.0 was submitted, approved and it is available on the App Store. However, I can't wait to submit the next release. If you thought that version 2.0 was a major update, you will be surprised by the 2.1 version.

Before telling about 2.1, let me share a few issues with you: Apple has changed their "New Release" list policy on the App Store and, unfortunately, "Updates" are no longer considered "New Releases". As such, I have no efficient way to let everybody know about new iToon versions.

On the previous policy, iToon used to show up on the very first page of the "New Releases" list for each update. However, on the new policy, it not longer happens. I trust that you will be happy with the new releases and let your friends know. I really need this "advertisement" help from you in order to keep the updates going.

In a glance, here are some of the iToon 2.1 features:

- Frames : You will be able to add frames to you picture, take a look on some of them at the end of this post.
- Background Painter : You will be able to overlap pictures and interchange the backgrounds.
- Artistic Highlight : You will be able to build dramatic effects with Colored Themes on the top of Black and White background.
- In-App Purchases : This will allow you to buy features and content packs directly from iToon Store.

These are major enhancements that will bring iToon to a new level. 2010 is promising great things.

Best luck to us all !

-Luciano
Babs2Go Founder

iToon 2.0 has been resubmitted to Apple

2009-11-10T11:38:00.000-02:00

Hi Folks

iToon 2.0 is on it way for approval again. we have changed the requested items by Apple and hopefully they will find no other issue. We expect to have iToon generally available by next week. I will keep you posted.

-Babs2Go Team

iToon 2.0 got delayed .....

2009-11-04T07:39:00.000-02:00

Hi folks

I'm sorry to say that things did not go as planned. Apple just sent me a message saying that iToon 2.0 has been rejected. The reason is because there are icons on my UI that resembles Polaroid features. According to Apple : "it appears to include features that resemble Polariod photographs".

They told me that and sent me a set of screenshots:

Because most of the features are already there since the very first iToon versions, I assume that they are talking about my Icons. Well, I will change the icons and resubmmit. However, the entire process will add a couple weeks to the expected time for making the product available.

Remember that iToon 2.0 will be a free upgrade to all previous iToon owners.

-Babs2Go Team

iToon 2.0 is coming...

2009-10-28T23:06:00.001-02:00

iToon 2.0 has been sent to Apple for over a week now. We in Babs2Go are expecting the approval from the App Store for the next few days. If everything goes as planned and Apple requires no modification iToon 2.0 should be available at some time between later this week and earlier next week.

We will keep you posted. Until then, feel free to take a look at the new iToon 2.0 User Guide available here and check the upcoming features.

-Luciano

iToon is growing up !!

2009-10-18T21:16:00.000-02:00

Hi Folks

I'm glad to share with you that iToon 2.0 has been sent to Apple for approval. I have added major updates on this release and I really hope that you will enjoy it. Here are the major enhancements of the upcoming release:

- iToon Camera - Grid : The camera got enhanced with a Grid in order to make the picture composition easier. If you are not familiar with "The Rule of Third", take a look at this link and you will see how useful the grid is.
- iToon Camera - Digital Zoom : Because I would not like you to spend a lot of money with additional iPhone Apps, I have decided to add the digital zoom feature to iToon as well. You will be able to zoom in your pictures up to 5 times in real time.
- iToon Sessions - On the new version you will be able to save your unfinished sessions and get back to them on a later time. No need to rush anymore in order to get the work done at once. You can take the picture, do some editing, close it and get back to it when you have time.
- iToon User Interface - iToon 2.0 has a completely new user interface. I have minimized the number of items on the work area in order to get more space to what really matter, you pictures.
- This version User Interface is available only in US English.

Because of these changes (specially on the camera), iToon 2.0 will be available only for IPhone OS 3.1 or later.

Here are some early screen-shots. Hopefully, the App will be available on the App Store in a couple weeks.

-Luciano

10th Assignment: Write a review about the Windowed Fourier Transform. What are the most common windows? How is the Brillouin plane of this transform?

2009-10-11T18:18:00.000-03:00

On this assignment, I will write a little bit about the Windowed Fourier Transform. As powerful as the Fourier transform may be, it has a major issue. Because it is originally designed to quantify the energy of all frequencies on a signal, it always takes under consideration the entire signal. It means that the results do not allow us to take any conclusion on when the frequencies have reached the peak or any other time-related information.All one can find by using Fourier Transform to analyze a signal is what frequencies are present on the signal and how much of each frequency was found. Windowed Fourier Transform adds a new constraint to the Fourier Transform in order to try reaching a certain level of time-related information for each frequency.

The core idea of the Windowed Fourier Transform is the addition of a window function to the traditional Fourier Transform. This Time Window function will segment the signal and will turn into 0 (zero) all values that do not belong to the specified time-window. From the notation perspective, this is what one will have:

As T is the time windows that one wants to study:

                         +T/2          + ∞
X(w) =               ∫    x(t)e-jwt dt = ∫    w(t) x(t) e-jwt dt
                          -T/2           - ∞

with

w(t) = 1 when |t|<=T/2
and
w(t) = 0 when |t| > T/2

There are ups and downs about this method. By using time windows instead of the entire signal, the local maximum not necessarily represents the signal maximum. However, assuming that for the specific study, knowing only the local frequencies would be enough, this could be an interesting and effective way to locate the studied frequencies inside a time period.

How you choose your time-window is also important. Different time-windows will have different impacts on your results. Many different window functions have been proposed over time, each with its own advantages and disadvantages relative to the others. Here is a list with the most common time window functions:

Window              Best with                Frequency    Amplitude
                           Signal Types       Resolution                  Accuracy

Barlett                Random            Good           Fair
Blackman           Random/Mixed     Poor     Good
Flat top               Sinusoids     Poor        Best
Hanning             Random         Good          Fair
Hamming           Random              Good     Fair
Kaiser-Bessel    Random              Fair          Good
None(boxcar)    Transient&              Best                           Poor
                          Synchronous
Tukey          Random            Good     Poor
Welch                Random         Good       Fair

OBS: I could not find any information about the Brilloin Information Plan. Any tips would be appreciated.

1st Assignment : Review text : "Wavelets: seeing the forest and the trees", by Dana Mackienzie, 2003

2009-09-28T10:41:00.000-03:00

I wish all assignments were this nice. Particularly for a non-mathematician guy like me, this text provides a very useful description on why wavelet theory is important and why I'm exchanging my free time to learn about it. You may want take a look on the full paper here.

The author goes by several interesting examples in order to show a concise history of the wavelet theory and applications. The main highlight of her paper is the comparison of the wavelet analysis with the Human perception of its surroundings. Revisiting the author's example, the Human perception allows us to go from a wide-scale overview perspective up to a very fine-grained detailed perspective. When we are overlooking a forest from a jet flying over 2000 feet above the ground, we can barely see any trees, we just see a very long green "carpet". As we get closer, we realize that such "carpet" is made of tress and if we go even closer we will see branches, leaves, etc. This means that the Human perception allows us to visit whatever granularity we need. However, cameras and/or computers do not have such capability. Digital images only represent one perspective at a time. Getting closer to a digital picture will not give you more than a blurred view of the picture.

According to the author, wavelet is one attempt of representing such different levels of granularities on mathematical models. This is the kind of theory that has been so useful that people all around the world have been using variations of it for a very long time way before it got formalized and known as wavelets.

It is very likely that you have been using wavelets for quite a long time without even knowing it. The jpeg2000 (very popular picture format on many digital camera brands) uses wavelets as one of the steps to compress the image files. On the specific case of jpeg2000, wavelets have the capability of splitting what we consider to be the objects on the scene (face, car, etc) of the background information (usually blur or fuzzy image). By doing that, it generates two stream of numbers (pixel values and variation) that can be compressed in up to 200:1 scale.

As a relatively new concept, the wavelet theories are growing in number and complexity in a very fast pace. Several different areas are still evaluating the best way to take advantage of the wavelet features. The most important is that in the case of wavelets, the theory and the practical applications seems to be evolving together. Not only evolving the mathematical foundations but also the several applications that certainly will bring major breakthroughs to several areas of science.

-Luciano

Getting back to Classes

2009-09-28T09:11:00.005-03:00

Hi Folks

I have spent a lot of time writing mostly about my IPhone Apps. It is time to go back to school and start writing about a few assignments again. I have enrolled to two very interesting courses this period. I will be working on "Theory of Intelligent Control" and "Introduction to Wavelet theory".

Stay tuned because I already have quite a few assignments that I will make available on the blog over the next couple weeks.

-Luciano

iToon 1.1 Upgrade

2009-08-11T08:36:00.006-03:00

Hello Folks

Due to the great i-Toon success, I have speed-up the implementation of i-Toon 1.1. This is going to be a free upgrade for everyone who already bought i-Toon 1.0.

Here are the main enhancements for i-Toon 1.1:

- single tap at ballon rotates it (no longer attached to the center of the picture)
- double tap on picture resizes it
- Added Resize Slider for handling small balloons
- resize picture and ballon with pinch gesture
- automatically resizes text to fit ballon
- prevents missing balloons by keeping them inside picture boundaries
- save space in your device (iToon App binary has reduced its size in ~30%)
- prevents saving duplicated cartoons by checking if there were any modifications before saving it.

Here are the new User Guides:

i-Toon 1.1 User`s Guide
i-Toon 1.1 Manual do Usuário

This release was submitted to Apple on August 11th. Hopefully it will be available on App Store in a couple weeks.

Thanks

-Luciano

i-Toon, available this weekend (08/08/2009)

2009-08-07T15:41:00.007-03:00

Hello Everyone

i-Toon está totalmente traduzido para Inglês e Português. Acesse o Manual do Usuário aqui.
i-Toon is completly localized for English and Portuguese. Check User Manual here.

I'm glad to share that our new App will be available starting this weekend on the App Store.

As we continue experiencing all different App categories, this time we bring to you i-Toon. It is a mix of Entertainment and Photography App. We will position it inside Photography but I get to say that I may change its category to Entertainment based on the users feedback.

On this tool, I got engaged into reshape the code for the very first App I designed. Back then I was going to build a cartoon generator that would automatically build a cartoon based on a picture. I found several constraints to build such application, specially because of storage and memory space.

This time, I have restructured the idea a little bit and made it more interactive. For this first release, here are the main features:

- Acquire Image from your camera or from our picture library;
- Apply "Border" filter;
- Paint image with Cartoon Colors
- Paint picture as Vivid Colors
- Add Ballon titles
- Save i-Toon pictures to your Photo Library
- Send i-Toon pictures via e-mail

Next release(free upgrade), with new features expected for early September. Feel free to send me a message with your i-Toon wish-list. I might very well decide to implement the suggested features if they fit into my planned schedulle.

-Luciano

i-Dig is Ready for Sale !!

2009-07-13T08:45:00.006-03:00

Hello Everyone

I'm glad to share with you that Apple has finally approved "I-Dig-The Recycle Challenge" and it is available on the App Store.

As our technology matures, we are adding quite a few features to our games. This time the game is available in English and Portuguese. We have also added support to three of the main OS 3.0 features : IPod Sound as background music, Multiplayer mode and Voice Chat.

Right now, I'm brainstorming in order to get ready to start working on the next release. Here is my current wish-list:

- Add earthquakes (mess up the user tunnels)

- Add at least one big “Boss” in order to complete each phase
- Shake the iPhone to change background music
- improve visual effects
- minimize App footprint
- fix any possible bugs that Users report

My windows for defining new feature should be closed by the end of this month. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

I hope you enjoy the game!

-Luciano

iDig will be sent to Apple Store today !!

2009-06-18T16:16:00.006-03:00

Hello everyone

I'm glad to share with you that i-Dig is about to be sent to apple for entering on the App Store.

Here is its description and a few screenshots. If you are interested on writing a review or becoming a beta tester of our future Apps, let me know.

By this weekend, I intend posting a quick demonstration video of the game on You-Tube. Stay tunned, more news to come.

-Luciano

I-Dig : The Recycling Challenge is an ecological adventure. On this first release, I-Dig uses the full potential of IPhone OS 3 and mixes a fun game with an ecological story.

On the single player mode, the game objective is helping out a little worm to collect as much recycle material as possible. By bringing the cargo to the Recycling Center, the user gets Worm$ that can be used to buy upgrades. If a worm were as tall as a human, each game map would allow it to dig into about 650 feet under the ground. The random map generator is capable of generating up to 1000 different maps to make each new campaign unique. As the user goes deeper he/she will find garbage and obstacles. Natural obstacles such as gas pockets will slow the worm down while drag its life away. Snakes are moving around and they may fall on you if you dig under them. Be specially careful about spiders, they can follow you around and keep dragging your life away; they will not stop until you terminate them. Use your bombs to terminate spiders and snakes. Do not forget that your ethanol tank may go out of fuel as you dig in, remember to go back and refill it from time to time.

The multiplayer mode is the greatest part! The same rules of the single player game apply to the multi-player mode. However, on the multiplayer mode you have to deal with a much smarter adversary that will control a second Worm. After the multi-player campaign starts, the users also have the option to start the Voice Chat tool and tease each other while playing. The game will keep track of both user's scores and it will assume that the highest score is the winner. However, blowing up your opponent will make you feel better in case you got a lower score :-) .

Well, help the worm, learn more about the environment and have fun !

-BABs 2Go Team

Another crazy idea...

2009-06-02T19:51:00.004-03:00

Some times I get myself thinking about things that are totally unrelated. I do not know why, but I guess that my brain likes it. During one of my divagations trying to find a theme for my theses, I was thinking about the concept of a time capsule.

A time capsule is used when one generation wants to pass information to another generation. It is not more than a chest with a bunch of letters, drawings, written messages, prety much anything that people would like to share with their kids, grand-kids, and so on.

The time capsule is fine, however, as usual, I think it is too simplistic. As a good scientist, I could not see something simple, working perfectly and let it be. On that case, I was trying to find other uses to a time capsule. That was what leaded me to a few strange but accurate thoughts.

OK, the initial idea is sending a time capsule to your relatives in the future. Moving on, I though, "Why couldn't I sent a time-capsule to myself?". All right, that concept alone could be interesting but not new; it would be just like "I will buy an Apple Stock today and leave it on the closet until I retire". Simple and not fun at all.

When I was about to give-up, I though "Well, what about reincarnation? Would it be totally unthinkable to leave something for me when I get back to life?".

Well, if you are still reading this post is because you are not too upset with me by merging science and religion. Fine, I will keep this way because I'm talking only science here.

Even that reincarnation is most of the times linked to a second life, or something mystical. I have been thinking that it is in fact a mathematical possibility. I mean, all your memories would start fresh but as long as there are human beings around, you have the chance to be born again, even at the same time! From the scientific perspective, at least as far as the current state of the science goes, your body is defined by a set of DNA molecules. Those sets of molecules have been around and mixing and matching together ever since the first Human being was born. Several mutations have created pretty much every single individual that we see today.

Even on the worst case scenario, assuming that the DNA molecules are arranging themselves in total random ways, it only means that there is a very small probability that they will ever get together again in the exact same formation that you are composed today. However, if we take another well accepted truth of these days, we know that the universe is infinite on time. Considering that the Human species will last for at least another X billion of years, that small probability that you have to be reborn becomes a possibility. Yes, you may have a really terrible luck and never be born again but you could be also be a lottery winner and be born twice at the same time (identical twins).

Of course that people can argue that those are two different individuals and that is perfectly acceptable. However, they share the very same project design. I'm not really trying to sell anything here, I sure respects other people's opinions. My point is that, just for fun, wouldn't it be nice if you could share information with yourself whenever you/him is reborn?

Imagine the impacts of this if you embrace this possibility. Ecologists could say "Save the planet for yourself" and really mean it! Anything that we do here will not only affect our children but now it could also impact your very own next life. Those Apple stocks would be even more valuable if you think you could cash them in 100.000 years from now.

Well, getting back to the time-capsule idea: Imagine if we could digitalize you life. Just create a log that would be saved on the network (I assume that Internet will survive until them) and it would be encrypted with a DNA-based key. In X thousand years from now, the other young version of "you" would get to a website, use his DNA to unlock the information and learn about an entire life that he/she had several hundreds of years before.

Well, I'm not sure if this would be a nice PhD project (the most of the technology to build this is already available), however, I'd buy a ticket to see a movie about it.

-Luciano

Ideas for a PhD Student

2009-05-12T22:43:00.000-03:00

Many people will call me crazy because I'm making this available before getting engaged on the actual project. Well, I guess this is the good part about not being a full time PhD student yet. Because my professional future is a mess right now, I have no idea what trend I will follow. May be I will implement one of these ideas, may be I will implement none of them, may be I will implement all of them. In the mean time, I'm just having fun. As such, thinking about this would not be as fun if I could not share with however is interested on reading it.

1)Computer Feelings – Because I wrote a short paper about this before (just browse http://labtricks.blogspot.com and check it out) I will not go into many details. The basic idea here is mixing several AI techniques in order to enable feelings on a computer. The procedure to accomplish (or having a starting point on) this would be by creating a frozen neural network “hard-wired” into emotion sensors. The purpose of such network would be interfering on the normal function of the emotion sensors just like Human Feelings do with the human “sensors” (tired, hungry, anger, etc). Similar to someone who loose track of time because it is reading something that he/she likes. Adding this “like” type of feeling to a machine would enable it to find a purpose to itself. A “common-sense” knowledge base would be used by them in order to balance whatever the computer “likes” to do versus what is best to its society. The common-sense plus the “like” feeling would enable the computer to guide itself during its learning activities. Always trying to perfect his leaning on whatever it likes most.

2)Ryodoraku temporal analysis – Ryodoraku is part of the traditional Chinese Medicine. It is a diagnose/treatment tool that allows the practitioner to have an energetic picture of his/her patient. The method is based on the evaluation of 24 acupuncture points. The practitioner uses an equipment similar to a multimeter in order to collect measures from each point. Those measures are plotted into a Ryodoraku chart. Based on the evaluation of the chart, the practitioner is able to diagnose the patient and know exactly what acupuncture points should be used on his/her treatment. I have already developed an Expert System that assist practitioner on this technique some time ago (available on the Apple App Store, i-Ryodoraku). My idea for a PhD degree would be composed by two parts. The first part would be running a detailed analysis on the temporal behavior of the Ryodoraku points. I'd collect and run data mining techniques in order to understand the cross-relationship between all Ryodoraku points over time. This initial analysis would provide resources to identify the behavior of health individuals and also the progression of states that bring a health individual to a sick state. On the second phase, assuming that there is enough evidence and understanding of the progression of states, I'd build a neural network which could be used to interpolate the several different Ryodoraku states of a single individual in order to predict the upcoming health state. This research would target the prediction of disturbing health symptoms into a currently health individual. Deploying such system into a Cell phone, PDA, or smart closes would allow people to prevent health problems before they happen.

3)Neural Network and/or Membrane Computing runtime deployed on a Cell Phone network. Neural networks and Membrane computing share at least one behavior. They both can be deployed on a highly parallel architecture. Membrane computing maps computer instructions into genetic cellular functions. I really do not think it is a good idea to write about this here. I promise I will write a more introductory paper about Membrane Computing at some point in the future. Right now, I know that Nei Soma has been researching a bit into this area in his lab at ITA (Air force Institute of Technology, in Brazil) – at least he was the one who introduced me into this topic. From the neural network perspective, the neurones are the smallest computing nodes of the system. I'm not sure if most people will agree but by now, Neural networks are, for me, a really clever way to build a mathematical functions. Specifically, it is possible to build mathematical functions that map anything into anything. You could map a digital representation of your face to your Social Security number. Your could map the digital representation of a flower smell into a description of the flower. It kind enhances the traditional mathematical functions into functions that map whatever you want into any other thing you want. The way the Neural networks operate is based on a lot of training. There are special algorithms that receive several (some times thousands or millions) of input x output pairs and train the network to do the mapping. This training is a very exhaustive process. However, after the network is trained, the actual execution of the “function”(neural network) is very fast. The PhD work here would be building a runtime and training environment that could be deployed on Cellular phones. The reason for using mobile devices is basically because there are millions of them widely available in the world and because the operation of a single node in a neural network requires low enough computer power that a mobile phone would be more than enough to execute it. Several problems would have to be solved; here is an interesting one: The neural network training requires lots of communication among the nodes, one way to mitigate this issue would be by using wifi-enabled or blue-tooth enabled devices closely located in order to train the network (a good scenario for this would be using the traditional high-school building to train all the nearby devices – imagine that it would be a cell phone high school as well). After the training is completed, the nodes could be activated from anywhere via SMS messages or the internet. This would not be a good solution for a problem that requires low processing power. However, for complex problems, the time to get a solution would only depend on how long it would take to send a message to the cell phones and receiving the reply from all of them. Tens of millions of nodes could be activated simultaneously. This has the potential to bit any super-computer available today.

Well, three is my lucky number. These are the ideas I have for now. I have to find a final candidate until the end of this year. So, do not be surprised if new posts like this come up soon.

-Luciano

Fuzzy Logic and the "Brazilian Way"

2009-04-24T19:29:00.002-03:00

Fuzzy is all about uncertainty. There is a common "street-smart" expression that I could not forget to mention here. Because Brazilians are, by nature, very flexible regarding their rules. We have an expression that people use every time that they are on the middle of "adapting" our rules to our needs :-). We say that there is always the "Jeitinho brasileiro" (Brazilian way... it is said in a kind and fun manner :-) ).

Anyway, I got back to this expression because it has everything to do with the Fuzzy Logic. I'd say that Fuzzy logic is the "Jeitinho Brasileiro" for logical expressions.

For Example:

One could say : "I like that girl, she is 1.62 meters tall, 56.5 kilos, her eyes are 78% black".

This would be the traditional mathematical/straight way of saying it. It is a precise description that lets no doubts. Any normal person would hear that and laugh because only a complete geek would describe a girl like that.

With Fuzzy logic, the description would be more like: "I like that girl, she is about one and a half meters tall, a little more than 50 Kilos, her eyes are light gray".

As it might be noticed, the fuzzy description is a lot more human friendly than the first one. Humans are imprecise by nature. Fuzzy logic fits on situations that precision is not required or when it is impossible to have it.

I could go forward and explain the Fuzzy Sets but today is Friday night and I'm not desperate to keep updating the blog. I may get back to this subject next week :-)

-Luciano

i-Ryodoraku has been released

2009-04-20T21:44:00.006-03:00

Hi Everyone

Great news for our Babs2Go again. Apple just approved yesterday our latest application. i-Ryodoraku is our first app on the medical category. After helping me with my i-NVADERS, my wife asked me to bring Ryodoraku to her iPhone. Making a long story short, I translated this application from Java to Objective C. I developed this application a few years ago just for her own use during her practice. Now that she has an iPhone, she said she really needed to have this application ported. In this case, why not turn it into a real app? That is what I did. Hopefully, more people will have the chance to take advantage of it.

First, let's first understand what Ryodoraku is. I'm not an acupuncturist myself, but if you have questions, I'm sure that my wife will be able to answer them. As a regular IT guy, Ryodoraku is one of those techniques that sounds like magic to me. It amazes me every time that I see her using it.

The purpose of this technique is using the chart to diagnose health problems and propose treatments. The practitioner uses an special equipment (looks a lot like an adapted multimeter) to measure the energetic levels on several acupuncture points (24 total). Those values are plotted in a special scale inside the Ryodoraku chart. After plotting the points, the practitioner has a clear picture of the current energetic state of the patient.

Following the Ryodoraku rules, two boundaries are drawn. Those borders limit the normality area. Ideally, every single value should be plotted inside that area. Depending on what points are left outside, Ryodoraku indicates symptoms and treatment. Even more impressive to my computer-oriented brain, is that the system not only suggests the correct symptoms on the most of the times, but it also propose acupuncture treatment in order to bring those "bad" points back to normality. Even more surprising is that if a second chart is built right after the session, it is very likely that the energetic levels will get back to normal or will clearly move into that direction.

Anyway, in my opinion, Ryodoraku is one of the most helpful techniques on acupuncture. However, several practitioners do not use it because it requires lots of manual work. Hopefully, i-Ryodoraku will enable practitioners with the tools they need to improve even more their patients' lifes.

As aways, if you find anything wrong or if you have any suggestion of improvements, just let me know and I will do my best to include those on the next release.

-Luciano

Brain Storm on Artificial Intelligence

2009-04-09T10:40:00.002-03:00

Hi Folks

Here is the formatted/filtered versin that I will bring to the AI class. Send to me any comments if there is anything too crazy.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14100710/INPE2009IA1stPaper

-Luciano

Artificial Inteligence - Computer Feelings

2009-04-03T09:28:00.012-03:00

Hi Folks

This is the 1st draft for a paper that I'm writing to my Artificial Intelligence class. This has been a very pleasant class so far. Hopefully you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

-Luciano

=============================================

1 - Introduction

Over the last three weeks, the AI classes went from classical to modern. The skeptical people got even more skeptical and the romantic people got even more excited. Based on History, IA has been a continuous cycle of frustrations where Objectives and Expectation have been continuously frustrated by reality. Neural networks have been made out of geniality sparks, frustrated by one man's opinion (Minsk) and raised from the dashes to keep fighting an endless war. Not much seems to be written on stone about AI, however, there are a few facts to come: Current AI system seems to be on one of two categories: 1) Play a magician role where computers try fooling a human being (Turing Test); or 2) Computers are used to classify input and generate outputs (what is considered intelligent because it is similar to some of the Human's behavior). Neither of those categories are exciting enough to bring AI to a brilliant romantic future. For skeptical people, the main goal to be accomplished would be finding new applications to the current technology, train the neural networks and watch them solving specific problems (nothing like C3PO interacting with Skywalker). For the romantic enthusiasts, this only means that the field is still wide open to build a real thinking machine.

A rough time-line for AI could be drawn starting with Alan Turing. That was possibly the first time a person recognized the possibility of inserting intelligence into a machine as we know of. The basic idea behind the Turing test would be verifying experimentally if a computer brain could mislead a human in such a way that the human subject would not be able to distinguish if he/she has been communicating to another Human or a machine. This idea has defined the first reported method on how to qualify if a machine could be considered intelligent or not. This method is not unanimously accepted but it is considered the mark that starts the AI field.

As the time goes by, the classical age objective was building an artificial intelligence that would be capable of simulating the entire Human Cognition and Rationale. No need to say that they got into a dead-lock; Since Humans are building the machines and Humans themselves have absolutely no idea on how their intellectual processes work, they have not been able to reproduced that condition on the computers yet. Getting a little closer to reality, researchers have narrowed down their scope on the Romantic age. This second cycle brought to live the expert systems. On this attempt, scientists were using computer to mimic human experts solving specialized problems in their field of expertise. Inside this cycle, it is possible to find success stories. However, the complexity around accumulating and organizing the set of rules to enable the expert systems ended-up causing frustration and brought scientists to the Modern Age.

The Modern age was marked by the Neural Networks. When mathematicians brought to life the concept of an artificial Neurones, the possibilities around those models seemed end-less. Several Neural Network definitions can be found on the literature. A simple description of a Neuron can be seen next:

<<<>>>
Figure 1: Artificial Neurone Model

On figure 1, one may realize that an artificial neuron is composed by three main parts. input signals, Summing Junction + Activation function and Outputs. Since this is not a biology paper, here is what happens from the computational perspective. Building a Neural Networks is, from a 20.000 feet perspective, a really clever way to design mathematical functions. Each of the synoptics have one associated input and one associated balance factor. In order to agglutinate the received information, the core runs a balanced sum of its input. The input "importance" is weighted on the equation by the factor associated to its entry synoptics. This way, does not matter how many inputs there are, the core will aways have a single value as its input. That single value is used as input to an activation function. The activation function could be considered the "cell activity". The activation function is influenced by the inputs on each synaptic and also by a threshold. The result of the activation function is the output of the neuron.

The neurone itself is a model, the clever part is how it can be trained to generate the required results. Assuming that there is a set of inputs and outputs (from now on called the "training kit), the training of a neural network consists of entering the input values into the artificial neurones and evaluating their outputs. If the neurone cannot match a particular output to its input, the balance factors of the synoptics are adjusted until the proper combination is found. If the neuron can generate proper outputs for the entire training kit, the neuron is considered trained and the "intelligence" to solve the problem is saved into the system. This way, one has just created a mathematical function that matches the desired inputs to the desired outputs. A special features that come with the neuron model is that, after trained, as a mathematical function, it can extrapolate that knowledge to guess intermediary values for inputs that were not part of the original training kit.

Assuming that several of the Human behaviors are not much more than action and responses (I'm hungry -> I have to eat, I feel pain --> I have to protect myself, etc), Neural networks have found a good fit on that area. Of course that the Human Being, at first sight, seems to be a lot more than just action and response. In this team opinion, the neural network could be seen as a good step on the right direction.

The Turing test and the Action/Response perspective ended-up being a good match. This is the closest that Man was able to get to the Intelligent Machines. By several different training techniques, artificial personalities have been developed. They get very close to pass the Turing test. However, even that widely accepted, the Turing Test may not be enough to really qualify intelligence. For example, let's bring the test to the following scenario:

a) keep a human painter in a room

b) keep a monkey on the second room

c) the Human judge will be a painter and will communicate to a) and b) only by looking into their paintings.

If the exercises involves a free-form of modern art (pretty much only random drops of painting on a frame). There is a chance that the human judge will be miss leaded to believe that the monkey is actually a human. Would this mean that the monkey is just as intelligent as a human?

On a few exercises with on-line personalities (www.a-i.com), it is possible to dream with a real artificial intelligence being made. However, one can realize right away that the artificial personalities are not real. There is a very clear lack lack of awareness of the world. As good as their knowledge base is, they cannot provide context and temporal realization yet. If one asks Hall about a TV show, it will promptly tell you that it loves "Seinfeld". It can tells you a lot about each character and about his favorite, George. However, it gets completely lost when one asks about the show from last Thursday... May be, this is just a matter of expanding the knowledge base but, until them, AI systems like HAL as just playing the magician role...

I consider myself part of the Classical thinkers of the Artificial Intelligence. If there is a real challenge on the Artificial Intelligence area to be accomplished is the creation of an artificial being. This my not be accomplished in my life time, however, this is the real challenge. Using AI techniques to solve other problems are not more than valuable applied engineering. On the next session, since this is not a pure scientific paper (and I do not have a scientific agenda on this area yet), there is going to be a brain storm of opinions and possible technologies that could lead to a potential work on developing a smart computer in the future.

2 - Adding feelings to Computers

I still have no idea why, but Neural Networks sound just right to me. As limited as they may be today, I do not think that they are limited because of any internal reasons. They seem limited because Humans have not been able to use them properly yet.

As great classifiers, their initial role should be composing the computer sensors. Everything from vision, tactile, hearing could take great advantage of the natural Neural Networks capabilities.

Just like the neurone model, a single specialized network is nothing without a proper training algorithm. On the case of enabling a computer to think, feelings and purpose would be required.

Evaluating the Human being, it is possible to realize that everybody is born without a purpose. When a new baby is born, there is absolutely no clue on why he/she was born and what his/her future will look like. Based on external inputs, Humans are driven to find what they like most and what they believe to be their purposes. There is going to be a balance between the boy who has become a doctor just because his father wanted and the other boy who has become a suicide just because he was old enough and still could not find his purpose. Both behaviors might indicate that without purpose, Humans get just as lost as computers. The main difference here is that Humans' "firmware" is designed to make sure that Humans keep looking until a purpose is found.

Moving to the theory ground, a "clean" brain could be compared to a neural network with specialized areas for all sensors and memory. As describe before, the single algorithm to be hard-coded would be one that enables the network for finding its purpose. However, there is a key part of this concept that is missing. Sane people do not drive their actions only by external inputs. They use their feelings (just like me saying that Neural Networks sound good without knowing why) in order to validate their actions. In this case, feelings need to be part of the system.

Reviewing the Human feeling, they are abstract by definition. In this case, they can be evaluated by their side-effects. In general, they allow people to do things that they would not normally do if they were not "taken" by their feelings. For example, a regular boy whose main exercise is playing IPhone games on his coach would run like crazy if he had to run away from a wolf on a forest. A normal guy plays a foolish role by singing on his girlfriend's front-window just because he is in-love, etc.

By abstracting those effects, one could propose that feelings are internal driven actions that over-rule or mislead the common sense in order to allow humans to reach their purposes.

Let's assume this set of feelings and their associated functions:

1) Hungry
2) Happy
3) Excited

<<<>>>

Figure2 - Pertaining functions for Computer feelings

As you can see in Figure 2, it uses fuzzy logic to define its value, and as such, each feeling overlaps with each other. The Excited state might even bring all other states to their balance levels in case it goes very high. In this case, the computer firmware would be designed to train the neural network to make sure that those "feelings" are kept as long as possible on the balanced state.

Since the emotion qualifiers have been set. It is time to enable the computer to trigger them. The initial state of the brain would be totally random (or shaped by the species evolutionary path). The fact is that the weights from each neurone would be different for each individual. A specific area could be called "talent" area. That area would be hard-wired to the feeling counters. This means that whatever outputs of the neurones get generated on the talent area would have immediate effect on the feeling counters. For example, the Hungry counter could be associated to a sensor monitoring the computer battery level. However, if the computer finds something that it "Likes" or that makes it "Excited", the lack of battery would not be realized until it leaves the current state or an emergency alarm is generated. It would be same as people studying all night long, without sleep, just because of the fear of going bad on the test that will take place on the next morning. Crazy, but reasonable.

The diversity among these artificial beings would be dependent on the topology of the "talent" area. The talent area would be an area with non-supervised learning area. In fact, the learning process would barely have a place there. Computers would be born with the talent just like Humans are. From an anonymous source, I heard that a Human can become an expert in any area; however, if he/she decides to become an expert on its talent Area, he/she will certainly become a genius. This statement would also be true for artificial beings.

The secondary purpose of those new beings would be getting as much information as possible in order to be helpful to their society (do what your father tells you to do). The primary purpose would be making sure that the basic feelings are balanced (follow your feelings). The common sense would be balancing the society needs (do not hurt anyone) and the internal needs (just because it pleases you). The talent area would be responsible by enabling the systems to "like" special subjects. By having their "body" functions enhanced by the talent areas, their firmware would drive their actions to do/learn more of whatever it is causing those feelings. This way, just like Humans, neural networks would be able to learn anything, however, whenever the talent area gets excited, it would be able to learn and do things that it was not designed to.

3- Final comments

As science fiction as it might sound, it makes sense. There is no intention here to state that this is the right way to evolve the AI area, neither it is just a crazy thought that, hopefully, nobody will care to read it. As previously stated, this is supposed to be a brainstorm exercise on how a smart brain could be designed.

As not many things seems to be written in stone on AI, hopefully this paper has been able to reach some of the kids who will not be born in 10 to 15 years from now and enable them with their technology to move one step closer to the truly Artificial Intelligence beings.

-Luciano Fagundes

I-NVADERS Released !!

2009-03-29T18:41:00.009-03:00

Hi Folks

Yesterday, march 29th 2009, our "I-NVADERS"application got released. At this time, I has kindly supported by my wife. I had to realize that by myself I was not going to be able to deliver this app. I consider myself an OK developer, however, I really stink on building Digital Graphics.

My wife is a Physiotherapist Practitioner, however, I think that she got the digital virus from me :-). One of her hobbies is painting. She has already painted several frames, bringing her talent to the world of Digital Content was critical to build I-NVADERS. Without her, any of you, who bought the game, would be playing with a black/red ()square as the defense ship and a bunch of "50's"-style ships as the invader ships ( ) on a blue background. All the great backgrounds and ships that you see now are on her :-).

Well, the game is inspired on an old arcade game that I loved. In our version, there are about 8 ships flying on the sky and you are a defensive ship. Your objective is blowing all the alien ships. The alien ships fly in random directions on the sky. Every once in a while a few of them try shooting you.

From time to time, the cargo ships reveal themselves. The cargo ships are carrying different gifts. When the cargo ships get destroyed, the gifts are dropped and can be used by the defender ship. The gifts are:

- SHIELD: Recharge your shield
- LIFE: Gives you a new space ship
- Triple Shot: Let you fire three shots at the same time
- CANON: Gives you a special cannons that shoot larger bullets.

The alien ships get faster and smarter in each level. This way, you will be continuously challenged in each new level.

As things move forward, I intend adding new levels, bosses and building a multi-player environment. I'm evaluating the new Iphone 3.0 OS. The new features seem to make the multiplayer development much easier. I will keep you posted in case I find anything interesting on that end.

By the way, I forgot to include this information on the help windows. In case you want to mute the game, you just need to tap on the top/right side of the window where there is a representation of a speaker (well, everything that us ugly is mine, the nice stuff is my wife's). When you tap there, the game goes on mute. A second tap would bring the sound back.

I hope you enjoy it. Let me know if you find any problem with the application and I will do my best to fix it.

BTW, next week I will start posting again on some of my PhD activities. This time, I'm taking a very interesting class. I'm attending classes on Artificial Intelligence. This is a very hot field. Our first subject is about Neural Networks. There is going to be lots of posts about this here in the future.

-Luciano

iMess - My First iPhone Application has been released

2009-03-05T14:52:00.008-03:00

Hello Everyone

I'm glad to share that my first iPhone application has been released. Its name is "iMess". I'm still a newbie on iTunes apple store, so I'm not sure what to expect. The status of my application has just changed from "In Review" to "Ready for Sale".

According to Apple documentation, this means that the app should be available on the App Store by now. However, I cannot find it anywhere yet. Hopefully it will show up soon (after the servers get refreshed).

Anyway, this is a fairly simple and fun application. I have chosen it because it does not require an advanced AI engine or special Graphic Effects. It is a puzzle game and it is very popular among Brazilian people.

It is composed by a background image sliced and applied into several squares. The difficulty level is based on the number of squares and on how much you ask the system to mess the pieces up. The system will iMess the board and the challenge is getting all pieces back on the right places by moving them around. The only move strategy is via an empty slot on the board.

From the developer side, I have included a feature that I wish existed when I was a kid. Believe it or not, I have never been able to win this board when the pieces were REALLY messed up. Because of this frustration, I have included an IA feature that can tell the player all the right moves to organize the board. This way, even I myself can play with the game :-) .

I will post some screen-shots later on so you can see what it looks like. If you have any interesting ideas for iPhone Apps, let me know and I may be able to make it work.

-Luciano

2009 is Here !! Let's get rich with IPhone !!

2009-01-12T21:33:00.003-02:00

Hi Folks

I'm back from the Holidays. Christmas is over, New Year has just arrived, I still have one month of Vacations left for 2009 but in January, I will be out for one week.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about my vacation schedule. Let's talk about the upcoming adventures on the lab. PhD Classes have not started yet, in this case, I have looked for alternative activities for my vacations.

I have decided start working with IPhone SDK. Yeah, Apple just got a new fan. I bought myself an IPhone and a Macbook. I have to say that Mac OS X is the best OS I have ever used. It is ridiculous how I could spend so much time on windows. I kept always waiting for the next great windows release. I wish I new MAC before. Of course, the fact that a Macbook in Brazil costs twice as much as a computer of the same configuration and that it is nearly impossible to find good games for MAC have also helped me to stay away from MAC. However, this time it was love at first sight. The system is incredible, pretty much everything that I considered easy to do in Windows it is ridiculously easy to do in MAC.

I have only two complaints that prevent me of using MAC as my primary computer: 1) No Games (I cannot live without them) and 2) Outdated MSN Version. Hopefully, at some point those issues will be addressed and my Windows time will be over. Until them, I keep a small Windows Vista Partition on my Macbook.

Getting back to IPhone SDK. Apple has enhanced their XCode IDE, the Objective C language and added the IPhone simulator to the package in order to allow IPhone development. The main inconvenient to this development is that XCode only works on the top of MAC OS. That is why I was required to buy my Macbook. This IDE will allow you to design, debug and benchmark your application. However, do not expect that you will be able to run your software on your IPhone. Running application on IPhone requires a payed subscription with Apple (Of course that I'm talking about the official procedure, I'm not using any of the jail-break software available on the Internet).

This leads the discussion to the first pain point of the process. IPhone software needs a cipher key in order to be signed and accepted by the IPhone hardware. That is why you need a subscription with Apple. On this subscription, Apple would act as a Certification Authority and would allow you to have a private and public key. With those keys, you'd be able to sign your application and run on IPhone. It should be a simple procedure to get this subscription. However, as usual, everything is more complicated to International people.

I have been waiting for over a month. The Apple website allows you to enroll and pay your subscription on-line. If you are a luck citizen from one of the listed countries, I heard that you could get your subscription in a matter of hours. In may case, I have been waiting a total of 3~4 weeks since my first contact with Apple. I have heard back from them with instructions on how to pay the enrollment fee last Friday (three weeks after the initial contact). I sent to them a fax with my Credit Card information and I'm still waiting for an answer from them if they received the fax. Hopefully I will be able to start posting my application at some time soon.

Objective C is not that bad. Considering that I have used mostly Java over the last several years, getting back to C was a little challenging but not a major problem. The XCode environment is good but it clearly feels outdated when compared to Netbeans or Visual Studio. The upside of the IDE is composed by the several automation and monitoring tools that come on the package. Tool to monitor memory and processor usage and a lot more. I have never seen tools like that before as part of the standard product. The downside is that the UI Builder and XCode are not really the same tools. They are separated tools which are integrated. This means that you need to really understand how they work together in order to write the code properly and see the changes being reflected in both ends. After you get used to it, it works fine. However, you will curse Apple several times during your learning period.

IPhone simulator is the bright side of the IDE. It is almost a fully functional IPhone running on your Macbook. It makes very easy to test and debug the applications. Almost all features work, the only feature that I really missed was the camera. I could not test the camera application at all because it does not work on the simulator. However, you can still get images from the Photo folder. It works just fine.

Well, I think that this is enough information for now. I will keep you posted as I evolve my work on the IPhone. For now, I already have a puzzle application working. As soon as Apple gets back to me I will submit it to iTunes Store. Make sure you look for the "iMess" application next time you go to App Store.

-Luciano

Fortran vs C++ vs Java

2008-11-17T23:46:00.005-02:00

Here are the latest from the labs. I had a few surprises myself. Not trying to make fun - but already doing - Visual C++ was a shame. It is amazing how much different scenarios you can have on this lab testing. Here is what I did:

1) Visual C++ against Java - Windows/Form -based application
Implementing the exact same algorithm on a Windows-based application, the Visual C++ code was two and a half times slower than Java. I implemented the exact same user interface in both environments but I guess that Visual Studio adds so much controlling code that the performance becomes extremely poor. Java (120sec) x C++ (260sec)

2) Visual C++ against Java - Command Line
The command line user interface unleashes the real power of the C++ language. The game turns completely in favor of C++; the C++ code becomes twice as fast as the similar Java implementation. Java (95sec) x C++(52sec)

3) C++ against Java against FORTRAN (yes, I did learn FORTRAN :-) )
Here, there is another catch. I was not very surprised with my initial results. I translated my C++ code to FORTRAN and it was running ten (REALLY 10) times slower than C++. Then, I have realized that there is an entire community that loves FORTRAN and that this result would never make sense.

The catch I was telling you about is on the memory allocation for arrays. This algorithm manipulates very large arrays in order to reach the result. This is something that I have never paid attention before but it made a huge difference.

Even that arrays are considered multi-dimensional entities. We need to remember that the computer memory is, in fact, single dimensional. Arrays are allocated as a single string of memory slots. This means that when you are accessing random positions from the array, there is a pointer moving back and forward on that string. If the position is near, the reading is really fast but if you have to read from a part that has been swapped to the disk, it can get veeerrrryy slow.

This particularity was exactly what was causing the slowness on my code. The way FORTRAN allocates that memory string is different than C. It would be like this:

In C++ the array is organized by columns: a[0,0] a[0,1] a[1,0] a[1,1]
In FORTRAN the array is organized by lines: a[0,0] a[1,0] a[0,1] a[1,1]

Since my program was running the second dimension first, this was making my system go back and forward on the string just to read the very first elements. After modifying my software to turn my lines into columns and vice-versa, the FORTRAN power came to place.

This was my surprise. After this very simple change, the FORTRAN code started behaving even faster than the C++ code. Java(95sec) C++(52sec) FORTRAN (50sec).

As soon as I find somewhere to host the code I will make the several versions available for download.

-Luciano

Mathematical Methods vs Simulation Methods on Radiative Transfer

2008-11-04T09:40:00.004-02:00

Hi Folks

This time I'm going a little slower on the posts because I have just got into one of those crazy phases at work. As usual, there are not enough hours on the day :-)

After implementing the initial algorithm in Java language, I was requested to implement the same algorithm in C and FORTRAN. The objective of those implementations is comparing the speed of the algorithm into the different languages.

This algorithm is very CPU intensive. I have noticed that it does not take much benefit of parallel processing because it is basically accumulating operations. I could not see any way to make it parallel because each cycle depends on values generated by the previous one.

At this point, my expectation is that Java and C will have about the same processing speed. I have executed a few comparisons between these languages on the past (good and old undergraduate days :-) ).

As one might know, Java uses a pre-compiler. Based on previous experience, the only speed issue I have ever found with Java was when the Garbage Collector got triggered on the middle of some processing. After disabling the Garbage Collector and assuring that enough memory would be available for the processing, the speed was pretty much the same as the C/C++ code.

I have never been a big FORTRAN fan, but it seems that it is still widely used by the academical community. I will implement (learn) this in FORTRAN and compare the results as well.

Anyway, the thing that I thought really interesting during the algorithm discussions was when we were talking about other methods to solve the Radiative Transfer Equation. We got into a discussion about the mathematical methods versus the simulation methods. The mathematical methods try solving the equation by applying techniques to solve the equation itself. The simulation methods use equations to create a simulated test-field by where the simulated photons would actually cross the simulated liquid.

I do not think I will have the time to implement this other set of methods during the course, but I do believe that it would be very nice to tell you a little bit about how it works.

In general, the simulation methods use computers to simulate the path of each photon across the liquid. They use equations in order to define a set of behaviors that would represent the same situations that the photon would find on the real liquid. Those behaviors are linked together as if they were a tunnel. The photon will enter on that tunnel, it will be transformed by one equation and the result will be the remaining of such photon what will be used as input to the next equation and so on.

For each equation on that test-tunnel, there are random events that might affect different photons in different ways. Each photon passing by the test-tunnel will record a new system history.

In order to calculate the final result of the equation, an statistical analysis is executed in order to consolidate the thousands/millions of recorded histories. This way, the system seems to reach an acceptable level of accuracy in order to solve the equation.

I have ever been a big fan of simulations. You do not need to guess much about which method I'd prefer :)

==================================

Just a side note for someone who may be interested on working on this field. I heard that people use pseudo-random algorithms to simulate the events to interfere on the system. As one may know, pseudo-random generators are not really random. They do offer a nice randomicity but they are not truly random. I wonder if it would make sense try optimizing the histories generated on the systems by running a pattern analysis on the stream of pseudo-random numbers.
I'm not even close to be an expert on the simulation methods, I already apologize in case I'm saying something completely wrong. I mean, the pseudo-random numbers could be easily pre-generated by using the same generator seed. If the numbers were used as actual values to add/sub/mul/div on the equations, this would not work. However, if the pseudo-random numbers were used in order to take decisions, those decisions could be predicted by analysing the pseudo-random stream of numbers. By doing this, lots of processing could be saved by knowing in advance in what stage the photon would be lost for example.

As my professor said, understanding these methods would require a PhD on its own. In this case, based on as little as I know about them, I believe this makes sense. It would be where I'd focus my research in case I'd be engaged on this subject.

Next post, I hope I will have more news about the comparison of the algorithm implementation on the several languages.

-Luciano

Method Sn - Discrete Ordinates with finite Differences method for solving Radiative Transfer Equation

2008-10-10T08:26:00.012-03:00

Things are getting clear now.

There are a few methods that can be used to solve RTEs. The Sn Method is supposed to provide a fair balance between computational requirements and accuracy.

From the mathematical perspective, I do not feel confident enough to provide a very detailed explanation. In this case, I will tell you what I know from the computational perspective.

This method uses two special math operations in order to solve the equation. As one may see in the original equation, there are two particularly hard components to implement on a computer. One derivative and one integral.

The first component is not very hard. We can replace the derivative by an approximation. The basic idea of this derivative is finding the intensity of photons that could represent the intensity of photons in a particular region/depth of the water. We can find this information by splitting the studied space into an arbitrary number of regions, we can assume that the derivative value in each region will be equal to the intensity of photons right on the middle of each region. A fair enough approximation would be calculated by a simple average of the photon intensity in each border/interface of the desired region.

Calculating this for each of the regions would give us the derivative for each region.

The integral is much more complicated. On the integral case, we use a numeric quadrature. We replace the single equation by a set of attached differential equations. In this case it is used the Gaussian Quadrature.

The reason why we have several equations instead of just one is because the original equation accumulated the intensity of all photons coming from all angles into a single value. With the quadrature approach, there is a weight representation for each angle. Each new equation represents the photon intensity for each evaluated angle. It is possible to use quadratures with lower or higher degrees. As high the degree of the quadrature is, as high the accuracy is going to be. The degree of the quadrature represents the number of different angles being evaluated for the equation.

After simplifying the general equation by removing the derivative and the integral components, one will get to these two versions of the same equation:

also considering :

After getting to these equations, the general algorithm for solving this problem is:

----- Variables -------
precision <- Desired precision
I <- hold RTE results for each angle in each interface - N (angles) lines by (# interfaces) columns
H <- previous iteration of I

---- Initialization -------
set first column of I with the external source
set last column of I with the Internal Source
set second column of I with 0.5 (*)

------ Body ----------
do {

Copy all values from I to H
for ( each layer interface )
for ( each angle on gaussian quadrature table )
if ( angle cosine > 0)

(1)

else

(2)

} while (I-H > precision)

At this point, even if you do not have a clue about Math and can understand algorithms, you should be asking yourself: "OK! On equation (2), I'm calculating the value for [k] interface based on interface [k+1]. How is that possible if interface [k+1] has never been calculated?"

This is a fair question. That is why we have to get back to the initialization of the second column (*) with 0.5 values. This method uses several iterations in order to reach the desired results. For the very first iteration, calculating the very first column, you are right! There is no value on column number 2. We solve this by guessing a number for the second position, any value between the interval ]0 1] (any number between 0 and 1, but 0). This way, the algorithm will be able to run in order to populate the entire matrix. After this initial guessing, the matrix will be entirely populated and the next iteration will use values from previous iterations to keep going.

The stop condition is found when the values from the current iteration, compared to the values from the previous iteration matches the desired precision.

At this point, I'm comfortable with the algorithm itself. This convergence to a single result after many iterations is the part that is still bugging me. On next class, I will spend a lot of time with the professor trying to understand this behavior because for me it still looks like magic. I could not find a good reason yet on why the values will converge to the result we seek.

I will post again when I have more information.

-Luciano

Equation for Radiative Transfer

2008-09-25T15:49:00.017-03:00

I have no idea on what to post this week. Not exactly because I do not have a theme, but it is because I could not get even close to understand enough of the subject to post anything very conclusive about it.

As I said before, I have just started taking PhD Classes at INPE. I'm the only students on this cycle (3rd/2008) attending the Computational Optics course. I have decided to go for Applied Computing as the Area for my PhD. I was a little tired on doing research only in Informatics. I'm glad to say that I found an area that I know absolutely nothing about :-).

On these classes, we will study a single equation. Yeap, I also thought it would be easy when the professor mentioned. The trick is that the equation looks like this:

This is the base form of the equation for Radiative Transfer . It is going to be my baby for the next three months. I'm not going to even try explaining it to you. However, its purpose is really nice.

In general, this equation allows scientists to evaluate the interactions of a flow of particles when they move around the space and go from one medium to the other. In my particular case, I'm learning how to understand the interactions that take place when a flow of photons (light) hits the ocean.

Behind the algorithm, there is a very noble cause. By understanding the amount of light that reaches the ocean and the amount of light that returns (refracts) from the ocean, scientists can estimate the characteristics of the water on that particular area. For example, it would be possible to evaluate the amount of chlorophyll dissolved into the water what would allow additional calculation in order to identify how much life (fishes, etc) is also present/supported on such area. This would be a nice feature for Google Earth, isn't it? Checking out the fish populations on the move from one spot of the earth to the other, how cool would it be?

The "real" scientists, not students like me, use the most of the equation. However, I'm glad to say that we have defined several simplifications that will allow even an IT guy like me to understand (or at least try understanding) how to solve the problem. Here are some of the assumed simplifications:

The flow of photons will not vary on time. It is the same as assuming that the Sun would always have the same intensity of light, does not matter what time of the day.
We are not evaluating a particular spot on the ocean. We assume that we have an infinite geometry. We assume that all photons emitted by the light source will always reach our ocean, does not matter where.
Our light source is isotropic; it means that photons are equally emitted in all directions. There is no preference(different orientation) for any single spot.
The photons will reach a single surface. In this case, the equation will not consider the flow of photons going through clouds before they reach the ocean, for example.
There is also a set of frequencies(light colors) being studied. In our case, we will consider all frequencies of the visual spectrum (red to violet) as a single band. Using the average values for the entire band also makes the equation simpler. We trade accuracy by simplification on this one.
We also consider that there is no internal source of light. On another words, we assume that no luminous fish were swimming on our ocean during the satellite scanning.

There are a few other simplifications that I cannot really remember now. They make the equation "much" simpler than its base form. Here its simplified version is:

Well, after the initial 30 second that you have been cursing yourself because you have no clue on what this means, I should tell that there are a few methods already tested and that can solve this equation. Here are the ones we will implements as/if time permits:

Method Sn and Method Monte Carlo.

At this point, I'm still working on understanding the problem. I will post something about its resolution as soon as I get there.

-Luciano - Don't worry, I'm completely freaked out too :-)

VMWare ESX 3.5

2008-09-08T21:01:00.000-03:00

Hello everyone

Last week, the most of my work was related to getting my lab infrastructure ready for new projects. I have had a few performance problems with VMware Free Server and I was looking for other options.

I was deploying an Interactive Voice Response Unit on the top of a VMware Server. My Server was composed by a Dual Xeon processor with 8 GRAM and about 500G HD. The system used to work just fine with several CTI/CRM suites. However, it seems that my previous real-time applications were not as "real-time" as the IVR is.

It was really annoying to hear the IVR scripts playing that slow. I could hear the prompts when I dialed-in with the phone but it was like a kid telling the words rrreeeaaaallllyyyy sslllloooowwww. This is very likely because of the problem I mentioned in a previous post that even with 8 processors available, only one of them was being used to each of my Virtual Machines.

The good thing is that I was checking out a candidate list of supported platforms for the next releases of our products and I saw that VMware ESXi is one of the options. Even better that VMware just released a free (limited-) version of this software. I have been able to download and start playing with it. Here are some findings from the tests executed last week with VMware ESXi 3.5:

Lab Environment: IBM x3650, 16GRAM, 600HD.

Installation: The ESXi software is distributed as a bootable CD. It is a sort of Linux that installs on the top of the raw equipment. I was not sure if it would work with my equipment since it was brand new for me; however, I had absolutely no problem to make it work. I did not have to enter almost any information during the installation process. Even things like IP addresses had to be configured after the entire system was already deployed. The default installation was enough to bring the entire system up.

Initial Configuration: The very first thing to do with ESXi is getting to its web-based interface. The system is initially configured with Dynamic DHCP. From the console, you should be able to see the IP address and change it to whatever fits into your network. With the new IP defined (or even the old one if you rather use your DHCP), just use you internet browser and get to it. From there you will be able to download the "VMware Infrastructure Client". Just install this on your client machine and you will be ready to go.

The GUI is very nice. It allows you to take a look on all your system resources. I have not tried anything advanced yet. It is useful to check all the system components and - of course - play with your virtual machines.

Importing Virtual Machines: This is not as easy as it sounds. This is an area that I think ESXi still needs lots of improvements. VMware has released a VMware Converter. The concept is great but I could not make it work for Linux Guests. Converter provides a wizard that asks you where the source machine is and to where it is supposed to be transfered. I was very impressed initially because it even offered me to convert directly from my VMWare Server format to the ESXi format. I just selected the source, entered the IP address and credentials of my new ESXi server and the magic started. To be fair, I get to say that the conversion of my Nuance Server which was working on a Windows box got converted and imported to ESXi perfectly. It was really like magic, never did anything easier. The nightmare started when I tried transferring my Redhat 5 system from VMServer to ESXi. I wasted a few hours but nothing worked. Luck me, it was fairly quick to create a new ESXi-based virtual machine and load the RedHat directly into it. Bottom line, converter needs improvements for conversion of Linux boxes. I have tried copying the virtual HDs (vmdk) from one side to the other but I got no luck to make the virtual machines work either.

Storage Devices: ESXi works with its own file system (vmfs3). Based on conversations with some friends, it seems that the management of the file systems on previous releases was really painful. On the 3.5 release, I get to say that I see no problems at all. The GUI really does a great job in order to create folders, move virtual machines from one place to the other, etc. The main issue (or not depending of your expectations) I found was because ESXi does not accept/recognize any kind of USB Storage. I was hoping that I could plug an additional External HD for my Virtual machines but it did not work. The way ESXi manages the disks is via the GUI. You'd have to add a new "Storage" device. The "Storage" device can be iSCSI/SCSI HDs or a Network File System. This may be a little problematic if you are not used to manage UNIX servers.

In my case, I used this as an excuse to install my first Windows 2008 Server. Since I had to find some way to translate my windows shared folder into NFS, I have decided to install windows 2008 in order to use the "Services for UNIX" package. This package is available via download from Microsoft for Win2003/2008 Server. I had Win2003 Server 64-bits and the package is not available for that platform. Since I'd have to go back to a 32-bit platform anyway, I decided to go to win2008 to have some fun.

I have installed the Windows 2008 Data Center - Without Hyper-V edition. It installs just fine (it is windows right :-)). The standard GUI looks a lot like Windows Vista but without all the cool colors. On this new version of windows, you will notice that not all packages and services are installed right away. The main change I saw was that you have tens of optional items to install after the initial deployment. For the "Services for UNIX", you just have to add this "Function" from the File Server tree. In order to have the UNIX IDs synchronized to the Windows Users, you will need to have one Active Directory installed as well. If you did everything on the Windows side correctly, all you have to do is creating a windows NFS share and creating a Storage Device from the ESXi side.

From that point on, ESXi server can access whatever files you have on your NFS share. This is particularly important if you want to access a common repository of CD/DVD images. For CD/DVD images, ESXi-based virtual machines can only see files on a "Client Device"(**) (DVD-ROM on your client computer), Host device (DVD-ROM on your host computer or Data Store ISO Image (CD/DVD Images inside a valid Storage Device).

(**) The "Client Device" mode is supposed to allow you to select a local ISO image as well. However, it did not work for my Client running on a Vista environment, connecting to an ISO image on a shared windows folder. If someone know how to make it work I'd be more than happy to hear it.

Final Comments: I'm not sure if this is important for most of you, but it is for sure important for me. ESXi 3.5 cannot use IDE Hard Drives. Because I use a few simulators that run on the top of old Linux distributions, this is something that prevented me of migrating all my servers to ESXi. Unfortunately, my PBX simulator could not be installed on ESXi because it does not have SCSI drivers. I still have to keep my VMWare Server working for these old Virtual Machines.

I think this is all I can recall from this week. I will post additional information in case I find anything new.

-Luciano

2008, New Brazilian Rules for Customer Service Centers

2008-08-27T11:48:00.000-03:00

Here is some info I put together about a major event going-on on the Brazilian Telecom Marketing.

Brazilian Government has received thousands of complaints from customers over the last several years against Customer Service Centers on several different service areas. They have consolidated the "most common" complaints and put together a set of rules that companies will have to comply in order to avoid penalties.

On July 31st, 2008, the Brazilian Government made officially available a new set of rules on how the Customer Services Centers (Contact Centers) must deal with their customers. The new set of rules is supposed to make the customer interaction a lot more effective. Things like "All Customer Service representatives must be enabled in order to cancel immediately any services as per the customer request", "the customer cannot be transferred more than once after he/she reaches the first live agent", "the customer must be offered the option of talking to a live agent in the very first interaction with an Automatic Response System", "All Customer Service Centers must be enabled with TDD (Telecommunications device for the deaf) , "All interaction costs must be charged to the Enterprise and not to the customer", etc.

From the customer perspective I'm really happy - I'm one of those thousands of guys who have complained about the end-less waiting time on my cable company phone queues being brain-washed by advertisements!

Unfortunately, I could not find any English version of the regulations. The original document can be found at "Decreto No 6523" from the Republic Presidency website.

Here is a quick summary with my own free (non-official, of course) translation:

Art 1 and 2 – This rule intends regulating all Contact Center activities regarding the Customer assistance. The rules defined here are not applied to Active Telemarketing.

Art 3 – All costs must be charged to the CC.

Art 4 – The IVR will always offer on the very first script the possibility to transfer to a live agent, complaints and Service Cancelation

Live assistance must be available from every IVR script
The CC will never be allowed to hung-up on a customer
No identification is mandatory before transferring to a live agent
Max wait time in queues is still to be defined

Art 5 – CC must be open for business 24x7

Art 6 – Hearing impairing access is mandatory for all CCs

Art 7 – CC phone number must be readily available in all Enterprise documents

Art 8 - CC must be polite / honest / etc

Art 9 – Agents must have proper training to do their job

Art 10 – Customers can be transferred only once in case the first agent cannot complete its request.

Call transfers must be completed in up to 60 seconds
For service cancelation and complaints, no transfer is allowed. All agents must be able to handle such requests.
CTI apps must allow access to customer request history

Art 11 – Customer data must be kept private
Art 12 – It is not allowed to ask the customer needs again after it was first initially asked during the first conversation with the live agent.
Art 13 – CTI apps must be in place to make sure the service quality matches the customer needs
Art 14 – It is not allowed to play marketing messages during call wait unless it is previously accepted by the customer.
Art 15 – A protocol must be generated to the customer for each request and that number will be used by the customer in follow-up contacts

All contacts must be recorded and kept for at least a 90 days period. The customer may request access to it based on its protocol number.
The recording must be kept available for verification purposes for at least two years

Art 16 – Customer have the right to receive in up to 72 hours by regular mail or electronic media the entire history of its request.
Art 17 – Information requests must be provided immediately and without complaints. Issues must be fixed in up to 5 days counting from the day they got registered on the CC.
Art 18 – CC must be able to promptly answer any Cancelation request made by the customer.
Art 19 – There will be punishments in case these rules are not followed.
Art 20 – The regulatory agencies will provide clarification in case any of these items is not clear enough.
Art 21 – The customer rights defined here do not change the other customer rights already defined by other laws and regulations.
Art 22 – The current set of rules is public and will be effective on December 1^st 2008.

Virtualization - Virtual Box and VMWare

2008-08-26T07:33:00.000-03:00

Today I'm going to write a little bit about virtualization. This technology has been growing in popularity for some time now. I have been using it since a few years ago, back when VMWare was a commercial tool only, VirtualPC did not belong to Microsoft (even supported Linux guest really well) and free virtualization tools such as Virtual Box and VMWare Server were just a dream.

Virtualization is the capability of running multiples virtual computers inside the same "real" computer. I used to consider this as a BIOS emulation. However, the technology has evolved so much that they now emulate, BIOS, Video drivers, Sound Card, NIC, etc. It makes my life a lot easier and my lab a lot smaller :-).

These days, I have done some quick testing on Virtual box. This seems a very interesting option for the future. It works in Windows Vista and several other platforms. Unfortunately, it still misses some of the functionalities that can be found on commercial softwares such as VMWare.

I was very impressed with Virtual box performance. Even that the virtual PC supports only a single processor, the response time is really fast. I particularly enjoy the fact that it can load the exact same HD file images from VMware (Makes the transition very smooth). What I did not like was the fact that each virtual network card from the guest operating system gets mapped to a virtual network card inside the host PC. In my case, it is not unusual to see me running 4~6 machines on the same physical box, with 10~15 machines created; each server would required two network cards; with simple math we would realize that Virtual box would require at least 30 virtual network cards installed on my host server (a little too much for me since VMWare requires only three, does not matter how many virtual machines you have created). Of course that one might say that I could reuse some of the virtual NICs for other machines that are not running, but I really do not want to keep changing my Virtual machine setting every time that I need to start it. I also require working with multiple processors; this is another feature that I cannot afford to loose.

With VMware Free server, I do have pretty much everything I need. Multiple processors (only 2 in fact), fairly good processing power, etc.

There is one thing that I really need to mention regarding Virtualization. This is the one thing that bothers me the most. And this seems to be true for all (or at least all the free ones) virtualization platforms. I have noticed that does not matter how many processors you have in you system, the virtual computers always use only a single processor at a time. I mean, if you have two quad-core processors, your Host Operating System will identify eight processors total. The virtual machine will run as a single Operating System process, what means that this process will keep switching from processor to processor at your Host PC. Sometimes it will occupy 100% of its processor while the other 7 processors will be doing nearly nothing. It is true that if you have several machines running at the same time, you see a better overall CPU utilization because with 2 or three machines, you will see two or three processors running close to 100%. Of course, the other 5 or 6 processors will keep doing nothing. I do not think that this is an easy issue to be addressed because all virtual platforms seem to have the same limitation. However, I think that the one which find a way to really distribute the full host potential to the guest PCs will become the main choice for all business on the market (at least, would become the favorite on my lab).

At this time, I will keep working with VMWare Free Server. However, I really encourage the Virtual Box developers to keep up with their great work because I really think that they are on the right path.

-Luciano

Current Activities as of Aug 2008

2008-08-25T17:16:00.000-03:00

Hi Folks

You will realize that I run several activities at the same time - may be that is why I cannot keep track of everything by heart. By now, I think it is fair to mention the subjects that I'm working-on right now so I can provide some more context about whatever findings I decide to record here.

Project#1 - At this point I'm working on the Contact Center area. We are developing a Business Intelligence type of tool that I obviously cannot provide much more details because it is part of the company Intellectual property. Since I cannot really provide in-depth details about the product itself, you can expect to hear (or read :-) ) a lot about Software virtualization, High performance tricks, Linux Operating system and, may be, some database tricks.

Project #2 - Contact Center self-service - This is a particular cool one. I'm new into this as well, just started about one month ago and I love the possibilities. Since we are using several open standards, I'd expect to write a lot about Java Language, Voice XML, Call Control XML, Text to Speech, Voice Recognition, etc. Lots of fun to come from this end.

Project #3 - Space Science - I'm not even sure if I should be mentioning this here. Honestly, I have not even started learning anything about this. Next week, on Sep 1st I'm planning on going to INPE (National Institute of Space Research in Brazil) in order to start taking classes for my PhD. However, I do not have the time to attend their regular PhD program. My plan is attending as many classes as possible as an "external" student (as we call the guys who attend a few classes without being officially part of the program) and when they finally kick me out I will join the official program and try taking advantage of the credits that I got as an "external" student in order to not be required to attend all classes. Well, even that I already got some not so friendly messages from there about doing this, I'm not sure how far I'm going to go. Keep you posted :)

Well, other than these three main items, I'm always looking for an excuse to do something different. Sometimes you will read things about my patents, the jokes from the sales-enablement activities, etc.

Hopefully, I will not give-up this blog at any time soon and even more hopefully I will find interesting things to post.

-Luciano