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 Most of the free editor I’ve found were outdated our required to much efforts just to install.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

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…)

Sometimes even a search engine can pull a “rabbit” out of its hat. I was looking for something I can’t even remember about, and Google lead me to this very interesting Internet magazine about the open source world. Trust me, it is worth the click!

o3 magazine website

If you are running a mail server, I’m pretty sure you’ve invested some time in testing Squirrelmail or Horde in order to provide your users a web access to their emails. Both of them are rock solid, but the lack of a good looking out-of-the-box UI is starting to weight more and more in our web x.0 days.

Roundcube is an alternative, not as mature as the aforementioned, open source software released under GPL license which comes with an awesome default skin. Sadly, it still misses one important thing: the control to make user able to change their own password. But that’s your lucky day: I made a small patch to allow this in Roundcube 0.1 (stable).

(continue reading…)