Tizen Developers Conference San Francisco

May 7 to 9 2012

I will be attending part of Monday (keynotes start at 6 PM); all of Tuesday and until closing on Wednesday.

Stay tuned for updates.

To be answered: (1) Why would Intel, Samsung and others bother with yet another *N*X mutant? (2) Why should app developers or LINUX core fanatics work on Tizen

Detecting if Windows is bitter (continued)

Dim searcher AsNewManagementObjectSearcher(“root\CIMV2″, “SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem”)

ForEach mo As ManagementObject In searcher.Get()

    pszOSArchitecture = Trim(mo(“OSArchitecture”))

pszDataExecutionProtection =

Trim(mo(“DataExecutionPrevention_Available”))

pszDataExecutionProtection32bit =

Trim(mo(“DataExecutionPrevention_32BitApplications”))

The OS Architecture field (so far) has 32-bit and 64-bit 

The DEP fields are Booleans so they return True or False

Detecting if Windows is bitter

The venerable check the size of a pointer technique

If IntPtr.Size = 8 Then “64 bit”

Else “32 bit”  (should have been 4)

This is not reliable and lately Microsoft has advised against it on MSDN

You can use the following registry location to check if computer is running a 32 or 64 bit version of Windows:

HKLM\HARDWARE\DESCRIPTION\System\CentralProcessor

You will see the following registry entries in the right pane of RegEdit:

Identifier REG_SZ x86 Family 6 Model 14 Stepping 12

Platform ID REG_DWORD 0×00000020(32)

The above “x86” and “0×00000020(32)” indicate that the Operating System

version is 32 bit.

P.S. testing for Program Files (x86) not recommended either

 

Speaking at LINUX Conference

I am speaking at the LINUX Foundation Collaboration Conference at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco April 4 at 10 AM on “Metrics for High Performance Computing” – which special examples from mathematically hideous but geologically interesting scenarios such as an Atlantic tsunami overwhelming the Orinoco River delta in Venezuela.   

Deaf Composers

Of course, Ludwig van Beethoven. He is generally thought to have had severe

problems with tinnitus by 1796, when he was 26. There were also

William Boyce (1711-1779) – English

Ignaz Holzbauer (1711-1793) – Austrian (Vienna and Mannheim)

Felix Draeseke (1835-1913) – German

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) – French

 Bedrich Smetana (1824 – 1884) – Czech

KALVEET and future antelope evolution

The KALVEET software referred to in a previous post has grown to 70 Windows forms; 15,000 lines of code; a hefty database with 45 tables; four movies (http://www.imagsts.com/KalveetBusinessPlan.html) of fairly dull screenshots as well as web pages of individual screenshots (same starting point as the videos).

As promised, the tinyURL:  http://tinyurl.com/7qdlxm9 

As six applications have recently survived verification for the Intel App Store we are now hard at work on a major upgrade of GAZELLE (atomic tracking of progress on an individual education plan) to be followed by KUDUS (continuous attonomic counting of people as opposed to a census every ten years).

Hollywood here we come

The KALVEET software is a project to use Microsoft Kinect hardware and software to capture sign language, eventually in most of the 130 known signing languages; transform the gestures to text; and speak the text in a language the receptive-enabled listener can comprehend as well as to translate vocal expressions from that listener into text and thence into a video clip of sign language configurations the user can understand. We had intended the software be useful not just for people with deafness or hearing challenges, but also for a diverse spectrum of people with expressive language disabilities such as autism, ALS and Alzheimers.

About thirty screenshots from an 18 hour burst of coding frenzy were available to make a movie. Initially, we wound up with a 122 megabyte avi file which was unloadable – at least by FileZilla’s ftp function. Eventually, using an elderly copy of Microsoft MovieMaker on a single core Vista machine, we obtained a file under five (5) megabytes in size – including a sound track which was the opening few minutes of Beehoven’s Eroica symphony. Go to www.imagsts.com click Products and then click Kalveet. Click the Business Plan link and (finally) the movie link. We’ll post a tinyURL next entry.