Gorilla Arm

Well, First of all let me clear it that, I am not talking about some ancestor of ours or anything related to them. I am posting this about a problem, I just encountered and I need your help in this thing. According to Wikipedia, Gorilla Arm's definition is as given below:


"Gorilla arm" was a side-effect that destroyed vertically-oriented touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s.[32]

Designers of touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized—the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going to fly in real use?".

Gorilla arm is not a problem for specialist short-term-use uses, since they only involve brief interactions which do not last long enough to cause gorilla arm."

Well my problem is that I made this software, that makes use of a horizontal hand gesture in front of the web cam. This thing have similar physical movements involved what Wikipedia called as "vertically-oriented touch-screens".

While developing the application, I felt the similar "Gorilla Arm" but I thought that it's just some problem with my hand specifically and it won't be general. But now when I just passed through this, I think that it will be a serious problem for projects like this.
So I was wondering, if anyone can help me out on this thing. If you don't understand completely what I am saying, I will love to elaborate.

For the whole of my last semester, I was totally uninterested in one of my subjects, that was Artificial Intelligence. Although before the starting of this semester, this was the subject, I was just waiting for. So what was the reason behind such a change in mindset. Well let me explain a little...
The AI starts with "Making the computers think...."
I don't quite understand. What do they mean by think? We do think... What's that...? Isn't that a computation itself. Isn't that something that our mind computes as per our motor nerve responses, and our earlier experiences, which can be thought of a database. So why do we say, "Making the computers think" Why not just "compute in a way human minds can do". I am not advocating computers here. I am just saying, that it's just a thought of people, however of a larger group, but why it has to be implemented on everyone . Why everyone have to study the "Making the computers think..." thing.


So after thinking so long over it, and getting some "Not So Good" grades in my AI subject, I am left with nothing else to say.

Configuring Visual Studio 2008 with OpenCV2.0

You will find a lot of tutorials on the web telling you how to configure Visual Studio 2008 with OpenCV2.0. One of them was this. I bookmarked it, but still for two days I had been trying different IDEs and a lot of tools... and so many things. But the truth was that I was not able to run a single program on it. At first I thought that it's a bad idea to change from JMF to OpenCV but some how, I got out of these problems.
I got an error that was error PRJ0003 : Error spawning rc.exe
The rc.exe seems to be the resource compiler and it was missing in my visual studio. Some blogs told me to reinstall the Visual studio, Of-course that didn't worked. some even told to reinstall windows, but that was a really bad suggestion. There was One suggestion about installing SDK also. So I did that, and I installed Visual C++ 2008. As the file missing was related to Visual C++ so I thought reinstalling it may solve the problem. And really it was solved.

The next part was telling the linker about the files to be include.
Well the files that they tell over here don't seem to exist for me.
Also I tried these two blogs : http://blog.aguskurniawan.net/post/OpenCV-210-with-Visual-Studio-2010.aspx
and
http://uowteaminvincible.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/getting-started-with-opencv-in-microsoft-visual-studio-2008-in-windows-vista/

and in case of the linker input the files I included were in C:\OpenCV2.0\build\lib\Debug\ eg.
C:\OpenCV2.0\build\lib\Debug\cv200d.lib

Also the program given at one of above resources have to include some header.
The edited program that was running is as below:
------------------------------------------------------------------
#include
#include "stdafx.h"
#include

int main( int argc, char** argv )


{


IplImage* img = cvLoadImage( "c:/temp/monas.jpg",1 );


cvNamedWindow("Monas", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE );


cvShowImage("Monas", img );


cvWaitKey(0);


cvReleaseImage( &img );


cvDestroyWindow("Monas");


}

------------------------------------
So...
Now i am ready to switch to OpenCV.
:)
It Feels Good.

Virus Everywhere

Well while posting this, I just got out of a great virus attack. This is a common thing now a days, when your anti-virus program will start beeping up, but it was kind of a new experience for me.
These viruses were removed by MSE(Microsoft Security Essentials) however, there were some problems that were created by those viruses, which I was still facing, they were
1. Task Manager not working
2. Command Prompt not working
3. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome not working
4. Also many other programs were not working....

So I got this tool, called RRT Sergiwa Antivirul Toolkit, and this has to be run in safe mode,
So I used it in safe mode after a restart and got all my problems solved. :)