NOT Dexter's Lab

This post is a little bit late, but it’s better now than never! It took some really hard work to get this release out, but version 1.0 of the Point Cloud Library is finally here. Many different institutions contributed to this open source library which allows point cloud processing (with out of the box Kinect support through OpenNI!). What follows is an excerpt from the official 1.0 release announcement.

PCL is a large-scale, cross-platform, open project for point cloud processing that is free for commercial and research use. The PCL framework comprises state-of-the-art algorithms that have endless uses, such as filtering outliers from noisy data, stitching 3D point clouds together, segmenting relevant parts of a scene, extracting keypoints and creating surfaces from point clouds. With the 1.0 release, PCL is now a completely standalone library, using a few “system” dependencies (Boost, Qhull, VTK) with some extra third-party libraries (FLANN, Eigen, CMinpack, OpenNI). The release features a number of changes and updates to help you do more — and help you do it more easily. A few highlights:

• Full Linux, Windows and Mac OSX support. If you can connect an OpenNI camera to it, PCL can run on it
• Complete OpenNI interface for PSDK, Asus WAVI XTion and Kinect. Just hook up your camera and start hacking in 3D
• Complete Octree interface for point cloud compression, nearest neighbor search, change detection and more
• Lots of tutorials and demos – with more on the way

PCL 1.0 Release Announcement

I think I’ve looked almost everywhere on the net to find a good reStructured Text file editor. Most of the free editor I’ve found were outdated our required to much efforts just to install. I finally found UliPad, which also allows user to see a real time html version of the reST document. Funny, isn’t it?

UliPad Homepage

The following is a short video clip about the project I’ve been involved in for the last months at ICAR-CNR. We’ve been using OpenNI+Nite+OpenCV to manipulate medical images using Microsoft Kinect. Enjoy the clip and let me know what you think

Today something very, very weird happened while upgrading my Visual Studio 2008 trial edition: I was looking for the “Upgrade Serial” control in maintenance mode and… I couldn’t find it. And believe me, I looked everywhere. It turns out is a Visual Studio 2008 minor issue on Windows 7 systems. As usual, after a digging through the Internet, I found Microsoft Knowledge Base article KB979576: problem fixed! Just download the hotfix and proceed

KB979576 – Hotfix Download Link

We all fail. We have been failing since we were children, that’s normal. In the end, how we learned to walk?And how many times our car shut off when we were learning how to drive it properly?

In this awesome article Francisco Inchauste explains his interesting point of view. A must read… and try to remember it next time you figure out your software design sucks!

Did you know you could synchronize your Windows Mobile device with Google Calendar without using any third party application? Amazing, isn’t it? Simply follow this link:

Set Up your Windows Mobile Phone

My internship at the ICAR institute (CNR) gave me the opportunity to work on some interesting projects, one of them being a software named MITO (Medical Imaging TOolkit). MITO, as stated by the project website, is an opensource software architecture for advanced Medical Imaging. I’m always proud of the projects I work on, even more if those projects are contributing to the opensource cause and managed by some public funded research institute! You can find out more by following the links below.

MITO: ICAR Project Page

MITO:  Sourceforge Project page

The following hack allows users to change their own email password in roundcube 0.2-stable.

Updated: Thanks to Lukather from roundcubeforum.net a bug which wiped out email passwords has been fixed (continue reading…)

I hate when Hard Drives fail. Ok, I’m a paranoid so I backup everything but… reinstalling everything just sucks. And if you have a bad Karma, a device that worked may not install anymore. That’s what happened to my Creative Zen which refused to work on a Windows XP sp3 fresh installation! If Windows tries to scare you with an error message stating that “a section in the INF file is invalid”, simply download and install the following file:

UMDF Driver Update

Don’t thank me:) Donate to  myCreative Fansite

Let me guess: you just wrote your new, shining CUDA application to unleash all the horsepower of your GPU and you are getting some compilation errors in Visual Studio. Some really weird errors. Something like:

1>CUDA_myfile.cu_generated.c
1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\INCLUDE\vadefs.h(52) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’
1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\INCLUDE\vadefs.h(61) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(426) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘type’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(427) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘type’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(428) : error C2054: expected ‘(‘ to follow ‘operator’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(428) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘type’
1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(430) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘}’
1>C:\CUDA\bin/../include\cuda_runtime_api.h(79) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’
1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\INCLUDE\crtdefs.h(485) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’

Right? This is your lucky day. After some struggling, I figured out the solution to this weird issue! Simply right click on the file in the “Solution Explorer” then selectd “Properties”. Now choose “Compile as C++ Code (/TP)” in “Configuration Properties->C/C++->Advanced->Compile As” and apply the changes. Compile your project and.. it should work.