Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Synchronizing(Syncing) Bookmarks, Passwords and even Open Tabs

I am amazed at the extensions and utilities available for browsers these days :-)
I work on three different machines on a given day: My Desktop, Lab laptop and home laptop. One of the many features I wanted was to be able to synchronize my browsers across these machines. They use different operating systems and I end up using either chrome, firefox and sometimes internet explorer. Firstly, I love Chrome because it syncs to my google account which has many uses but the main one being synchronizing bookmarks and extensions across machines.

Then, I added Lastpass another extension that is a password manager. I dont remember passwords to most of the websites as they are automatically generated using Lastpass! Its an amazing tool that will save you a lot of time.

Finally, I found Xmarks another extension that takes synchronization a step further. It synchronizes open tabs across machines! How cool is that? In the lab I can now open tabs that are open on my laptop at home. Its made the entire process of moving across machines so much easier.

I strongly suggest anyone who is looking to deal with synchronizing your work on the browsers across machines to use the following combination: Chrome browser + Synchronize with Google account + Lastpass + Xmarks

!!!The combination is uncanny!!!

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Opencv knnSearch example

After searching through the web and going through the FLANN api I could not find a decent example that showcases the K nearest neighbor search capability. I found that OpenCV also has a wrapper written around flann so checked if there exists a simple example. To my dismay I could not find one. So, I spent couple of hours and put together the following code. Hope someone looking to use flann with opencv will find this example useful!

The example generates data randomly centered around a mean and a variance of arbitrary dimensions(provided by user, default is 1) and generates query data with similar properties and invokes the single query and batch knnSearch function calls and prints out. Just to let you know its not a class, its just a simple example to help people use knnSearch function in openCV. Enjoy!

code: cvKnn.cpp
Command to compile the code: g++ cvKnn.cpp -L /usr/lib -lopencv_core -lopencv_flann -o cvKnn