IROS 2007

To: Mr. Philipp J Stolka
From: Prof. Thomas C. Henderson
Re: (209) Using Maps from Local Sensors for Volume-Removing Tools

Dear Colleague:

It is my pleasure to inform you that the paper referenced
above, for which you are listed as the corresponding
author, has been accepted for publication in the
Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems to be held in San Diego, CA,
USA during Oct 29 - 2 Nov.

We received more than 1300 submissions for review and
evaluation, and it is commendable that your paper is among
the 681 selected for publication. The advance program for
the conference will be available by early September at

http://www.iros07.org

[...]

Congratulations on this fine achievement! I look forward to
welcoming you in San Diego in October, to the 20th
anniversary IROS.

Sincerely,

Tom Henderson
Program Chair
2007 IEEE Int'l Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems

----------------------------------------------
Decision: Accepted as Contributed papers
Schedule Code: TuA7.2
Session: Medical Modeling and Mapping I (Regular Sessions)
Tentative time of presentation: Tuesday October 30, 2007, 09:30-09:50 hrs

----------------------------------------------
Submission information

Authors and title:
Philipp J Stolka*, Dominik Henrich
Using Maps from Local Sensors for Volume-Removing Tools

Type of submission: Contributed papers
Conference: 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
Submission number: 209




[Note by the blog owner:
However, this time something is different. Our lab got a humongous acceptance rate of 80%. Which means, fighting's officially opened.]

HK 2007 - Return: HK, Doha, FFM, BT/HA5, BT/GSP

Back in Doha:
After one week of sweltering heat, strange sounds, and chicken feet, the 10-yrs-past-graduation-reunion-trip to Hong Kong with Hi-Khan is coming to a close.



The last days were so full of sights&sounds that I'm constantly surprised when browsing through my pictures folders. Lots of places I haven't seen before (this having been the third time for me in HK), we managed to check off a long list of things I wanted to see, Hi-Khan had a long-time-no-see family reunion himself, and much more. Pictures will follow.




Am now safely back on the way to BT, with connection to GSP via Doha, FFM and HA5.

HK 2007 - Grand Hyatt

I can barely walk.

Maybe it's the sudden onset of age, but this "holiday" is made up of hurting legs much more than any previous one, including the last in Italy, which was filled with much more walking even. But maybe it's the jetlag, extreme heat/humidity, and strange food altogether.

However, there's nothing to complain about the trip itself.
Today, Hi-Khan and me finally made true the promise we agreed on ten years ago. We had our tea/coffee in the Grand Hyatt lobby, with live music and a grand view on the harbour and Central lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree. In a flash of introspection, we both found we mostly finished all steps in the last decade successfully. It was probably the most interesting one in our lives, although the consensus is that the next one will be the most decisive. And we tried to settle on a destination to meet in after the next decade, in 2017. (One idea so far is Buenos Aires, on account of neither of us ever having been there, and improbable to go there otherwise.)



I tried to soothe myself by buying a huge stack of cheap VCDs and DVDs. We went to Chungking Mansion, shoe stores ("Sneakers. Wenn's mal wieder länger dauert.") for Hi-Khan, electronics stores for both of us, took millions of pictures, and walked and walked, with AC being our tour guide, dubbed "TomTom" by Hi-Khan.

HK 2007 - Shenzhen

Yesterday was Shenzhen. Looks astonishingly like Beijing... it's true there's no heritage, but untrue about no culture.
Furthermore, there's a real deluge of pictures, but they need to be sorted first.

Today it's to the ManMo-Temple (with one of them being the God of War, the other being the God of Civil Servants) and the Sitting Buddha on Lantau.

HK 2007 - Business

The whole business class is humming with the engines adjusting the individual seats. In fact, when the seat doesn't fit you, when you feel uncomfortable, it just means you haven't figured out the appropriate setting yet.
"How may I help you, Sir?" (note "may" and capital "S" in "Sir) on the press of a button.
There was compulsory caviar sandwich shortly after takeoff, but the rest of the meals can be ordered to your heart's desire from a menu whose size which would humble several restaurants.
All this comfort, however, doesn't make the air more humid. So when I felt the onset of a nosebleed, I moved to the lobby with QiLin/PingGuo, which I have all to myself at this time (around 06:00 a.m. board time). Not for long, however, as the First Class will soon wake up, and for us from Business it's "the other lounge, Sir". The first-class lavatory is a room with a view, btw.




Breakfast was brought to bed, starting with an energizer drink made from freshly-pressed orange, milk, and oats. Then I ordered a Chinese breakfast tofu, however: "Sir, all of it is inclusive. There is no choice within the Chinese breakfast." So I had everything, starting with green tea and dim sum and continuing with chicken, rice, grilled lobster, and my tofu. In fact, the lobster was so large at first mistook it to be tofu. The chopsticks were everything but single-use; heavy and brass-plate-ended they'd make any home collection happy. The wonton soup was not too bad, either. Same as the abalone congee the evening before.

HK 2007 - Day 1: I/O, Doha, &onwards

2007-06-18
11:30
Idar-Oberstein

The first day of the 10yr Reunion Trip starts out in I/O with sunshine, birds singing, buses on time, people asking for the destination of my trip, and strawberry cake with coffee right across from the train station, idling away the last half hour before leaving.

On Qatar Airways: No green tea right away, but BTO/brewed-to-order... highly stunning.

In Doha Internation Airport, Qatar: Free WiFi. Free as in free beer, no idea about free speech. Oh, and there's free power.
Aha. And just got upgraded to Business Class. Aha aha. Oh, and the flight FFM->Doha was right in the emergency seat aisle, meaning lots of legroom. Aha. In case you ask, Qatar Airways seems to rule.

However, now about one point five gazillion people streamed into the departure hall, 1/2 of them using all kinds of gadgets (just checked that) to access the WiFi, thus totally bogging down the connection. Or the connection quality. Or whatever.

...

Now that I'm thinking of it... what an improbable luck that I've been idling at the right gate at the right time to be found by this airport ground personnel employee. Hm hm hm. When travelling, there seems to be a lucky charm about me. That's only half a joke. Italy's been a close call very often, and there's been lots of luggage involved then.

(female employee) "Are you flying alone?"
(me) "Yes..."
(female employee) "Why?"
(me) "?!?"

10 Years Ago

Ten years ago, on June 23rd, 1997, PJS passed his final Abitur (aka high school graduation) exam at the Gymnasium an der Heinzenwies.

Three written examinations (Math, English, and Physics) were followed by one oral examination (in Geography) on that day. The weeks and months before, everybody was delving deep into the mysteries of the final grade calculation scheme, and was busy extrapolating their Abitur marks.

One year earlier, in 1996, my Dad and me had been on a world tour together, leading us to a whole bunch of places, roughly following the footsteps of "80 Days around the World". Since my Dad had taken tons of pictures and video footage, I had a chance to give a short presentation to my geography class after our return when we were - by chance - discussing the socio-political-economic status and development of Hong Kong. It seems my teacher recalled that when deciding on a final exam topic for me, and this allowed me to excel ("brillantly shine", in case you didn't get my point) in that cross-examination.

One week later, on July 1st, 1997, Hong Kong was in the limelight of international news, as the 100-years old lease of Great Britain for the New Territories was ending, and Hong Kong itself was returned to the Chinese mainland then. In short, it was HK's big days, both on a world and personal scale. (Oh, my mom had visited that place in the meantime, too.)

So after our Abitur and in the turmoil that engulfed BA and me because of a less-than-warmly-received criticizing feature of ours in the Abitur newspaper, she, me, and Higgins decided to have our own, alternative 10-years reunion. We'd not meet up with everybody else (provided there'd be a big-scale reunion at all), but discreetly have a sip of coffee or 5-o'clock tea in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt in HK - provided it'd still exist by then.

PJS, my then-gf, and Higgins (probably in 2003)

Now it's June 2007. Time to 'fess up.

Higgins and me will go through. All the way, straight to the bottom of that long-ago agreed-upon cup of coffee. We'll lift our cups in reverence to BA, who won't be able to join us, and rejoice in old memories, wading through the muck which accumulated around our feet during those ten years, and soberly ponder our fates, all the while musing about the ways of the world.

And sure, have a jolly good time, too.


It will start 30 minutes from now, with PJS running down the same side alley to the main street of Tiefenstein, trying to catch the bus. The bus to the train, the train to the airport, the plane to one week of catching up with old plans.

Bonito Shagging

One message on a side note... incoming spam, saying:

"bonito shagging incurred!
Life Should be Full of Luxuries, yet, only a handful of people can afford the finest products, the luxuries of the elite. (PJS: Sounds like they're talking about the MacBook.) Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix. (PJS: That's a kinda Linux! Damn right, dudes!) Tubes, transistors, and transistors on integrated circuits can be used as the "storage" component of the stored-program architecture, using a circuit design known as a flip-flop, and indeed flip-flops are used for small amounts of very high-speed storage.
Sincerely,
Candice Mcclendon"

Well, Candice, you don't know how right ya are. You don't, babe.

The New One: DianHua, PingGuo, QiLin

On a totally other note: The new notebook.
After something like four-and-a-half years, I got fed up with DianHua. There were a few irksome peculiarities about it that made me more and more unhappy (like its battery-hoggishness, its weight, but most of all its lack of standby mode... what.... S2, and S4? Standby and Hibernate, in any case. They both disappeared after an upgrade to a 160GB hard disk, in exchange for keeping DMA transfer capability. Losing that seemed an even worse option. However, why those three things - 160GB, DMA, and standby - need to exclude each other is a mystery to me.) Even though I don't know if there'll be many more opportunities to actually make use of this, but having a computer without standby in a conference setting is a severe no-go reason to look for a replacement. In those (conference, or just any general presentation) settings, a snappy response to sleep/wakeup requests to your own computer is a must.

Anyway, many years of experience with different operating systems (Windows and Linux) on many computers (desktop and portable, networked and standalone, personal and office) instilled a deep, gutsy feeling of utter revulsion towards those. The constant need to reconfigure stuff at the smallest change (as in Windows) or the total lack of any usability (as in Linux) made me look for alternatives. Where do you *not* have to choose between speed and size, DMA and GB, as in Windows, and where do you not have to bother to *restart* your computer to use a simple USB stick a second time, as in Linux?

The choice was clear: The mother of all operating systems, Mac OS X. Some drumrolls please.



Finally I settled for (okay, I was driven into this choice) a mid-sized MacBook. The comparatively good deal I got inspired me to pimp it to da max ASAP, together with a general sluggishness under the god-damn-power-user load conditions I subjected it to. The 10MP picture editing, virtual machines, and software development gained a lot from upgrading it well nigh near to the physical limits of computing power a confined region in time-space can bear. And confined it is, fellas - a smaller, sleeker, and generally more attractive notebook this world ain't seen yet. Oh, small and light I mentioned, right. The one bad part is... all the stickers adorning the bottom side of DianHua are gone now. All the time, all the effort, collecting travel and other stickers during all those years... all gone!

Having a truly mobile computer leaves a print on your lifestyle, too. Bulky DianHua was too large, heavy, and power-addicted to be carried around. The new one... okay, let's face it, it's got no fixed name yet. There are a few competitors shortlisted already:

• DianHua:
  The incumbent. This name's been around for ages for PJS' computers (all of them, forever), and man, it sticks.


• PingGuo:
  The lifestyle choice. Meaning "Apple" in Chinese (and thus being hilariously funny), it both gains and loses on account of its phonetic similarity to penguin, which in turn reminds one of Linux. And man, that OS sucks.


• QiLin:
  The runner-up. An immensely powerful animal in Chinese mythology, it symbolizes the motherlode of kick-ass impressiveness and sovereignty. Unfortunately, it's difficult to explain to outsiders.

Mac OS X being the end point of the evolution of graphical user interfaces, there are still some... quirks in the Mac OS user interface. Like, no mouseless use. Maybe it's possible to use the system without a mouse, but it's either highly improbable or highly impractical. There is a humongous number of shortcut key combinations; no even halfway consistent (not to mention logical) way to group them; and gosh it takes time to get used to different keyboard layout. The iLife program suited, totally hyped (by Apple) for multimedia tasks, is basically useless when it comes to importing large collections of existing music or photos. Are all Apple users dummies? Somewhat improbable. So am I the only guy who wants those applications have some at least partly transparent way of handling data, instead of gobbling it all up and stuffing it away in some huge opaque archive file? What's wrong with using pre-existing, user-provided hints for data layout?
On the other hand, stuff like WiFi (aka "AirPort"), printing (even over a LAN), and hooking up to the Internet with Mac OS X works like a charm. "Instant-On" gets a whole new meaning. That's what a user interface should be all about.
Still, file system navigation and window navigation suck badly. There's some additional program to iron out the worst mistakes of the interface design, but that's not the way it should be.
On the (final) up side (at least from a CS/developer point of view), there is a whole lot of "frameworks" (OpenGL, Java, X11, Qt, ...), RDP clients, virtual machines, emulators, and all kinds of other stuff available for that system, making it probably one of the most versatile and extensible systems around. And when factoring in the general ease of use, it wins hands down.

Normal People

The other evening (or rather, "some time ago") BA and me reinstantiated our old habit of late-Monday phone talks into its own right. There was a longer break in this habit as well, for several reasons... some of which I can only guess, while others are completely my own responsibility. We did have our share of disagreements over time, mostly on topics where her and my point of view on "how the world works" are just totally incompatible. That evening, I made a conscious decision to change that. She's maybe not my longest-time-friend, but something very close to that, and although I could rather confidently point to the exact moment of time when we started disagreeing on this and that, this fruitless exercise would probably yield no more or no better results than laying the seeds for more disagreements over time. And since we had shared the one or other hilarious time back then, that evening it appeared worthwhile to me to try to look behind the veil of mismatched opinions.
Without getting into too much detail, I could safely say this was the most refreshing normal-people talk on the phone I had in a long time. I liked that very much.

Long Break No Read

Hello everybody (not everybody, but this blog's readers, and not even all of these, just the ones who still stick with this place here after this long break)...

... after I (the blog owner, for those who forgot) heard from several sides this blog is starving/drying up/gone orphaned/otherwise abandoned, probably the time has come to expand the notes I kept making in a small text file on the desktop into a full-blown bells-and-whistles spankin'-sparklin' new blog entry! Hold ya seats!

There were several reasons that made me stop... or interrupt... the common flow of posts here. I can only try to point out a few ones, without any guarantee for completeness, truthfulness, or anything.
One was my last trip to Italy, which took a whole lot of time to organize, and which was so chock-full of impressions there was not only no time to blog it, but hardly any time to sort those impressions. Then I got myself a new notebook (whose nameplate is still kind of up for grabs, several names vying for acceptance), and which made me learn a whole new user interface language and programming environment and ways of hooking up accessories and stuff, so this had a huge impact on free time as well. Third, I delved a bit deeper into my ever-growing stack of Chinese textbooks, mags, and learning tools, got a new teacher/learning partner, and since ole PJS is the original one-trick pony, this took its toll on free attention mass as well. Smoerebroed had its maladies, too. Happy, unhappy, know, no-know... everything happens in time.

But one by one.