Monday, May 21, 2012

Lost in Storage - Find data zombies using Sequoia

Ever wondered where all your disk space went?

Check out SequoiaView!
It is a pretty nice visualization tool from university of Eindhoven that shows you a explorable treemap of your disk space usage. Thereby you can pretty fast identify old VM images or installers which are lying around wasting your storage.
As you can see in the image below, you just have to follow the huge blobs to find the wasted space.


Check out the homepage of the project:
http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview//

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Touch Paint

How to make your own touch pad and implement a simple drawing app with it?
This was the challenge during the HCI Research lecture by Baudisch at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute.
Probably for me even a harder challenge caused by my lag of programming skills with C/C++ and my lag of image processing knowledge. Nevertheless, after quiet a time I handled it. Check out the video!

The right picture in the video is the surface of my own touch pad. I build it using the instructions of Anne (http://www.anneroudaut.fr/diy/acrylicpad.html).
Glowing tips
My Pad
To implement a drawing app Anne already provides a simple frame for your app. The frame is implemented in C using OpenCV. I prefered to implement the whole stuff in C++, because the OpenCV API is easier to understand and one gets rid of all this memory management stuff.
And remember to set all the necessary path variable (include, libary, execution).
Check out my visual studio 2010 project ZIP. (Just a prototype^^)