This is a follow-up of my previous post: Setting up OpenCV 2.3 and Netbeans 7.0 on Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10. A couple of days ago Gijzelaar’s PPA for OpenCV has updated from 2.3 to version 2.3.1. So I thought I’d share this with you guys. I also think this is a slightly better approach

OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) is a library of programming functions mainly aimed at real time computer vision, developed by Intel and now supported by Willow Garage. It is free for use under the open source BSD license. The library is cross-platform. It focuses mainly on real-time image processing. (Wikipedia)

The upgrade did leave my machine with some broken packages, so be cautious! I managed to fix the broken packages, but that’s another story and it probably was a rare case.

Okay, so here is a quick guide:

1. Installation of OpenCV 2.3.1

Launch a terminal and execute these commands. This adds the PPA of our friend Gijs Molenaar, which now contains OpenCV 2.3.1.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gijzelaar/cuda
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gijzelaar/opencv2.3
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev

2. Installation of Netbeans 7.1

Ubuntu 11.10 also comes with Netbeans 6.9, just download the Netbeans 7.1 from the Netbeans Homepage and you’re all set. Be sure you download the version with C/C++ support.

3. Set the project properties

Create a new C/C++ project in Netbeans 7.1. First, set the project properties correctly. These settings worked for me.

In the C++ Compiler dialog add “/usr/locale/opencv2″ to the “Include Directories” field.

In the Linker Dialog, Click on the “…” button for Libraries, a new Dialog appears, choose “Add PkgConfig Library…”. Search for “opencv” and add it.

This should add the following library expression

`pkg-config --libs opencv`

(Note that this is a better solution than in my previous post)

4. Set the includes

Note: this has also changed since my previous post!

#include "opencv2/highgui/highgui.hpp"
#include "opencv2/core/core.hpp" 
#include "opencv2/imgproc/imgproc.hpp"

I find it easy to work with the cv and std namespace by default, so I don’t have to type “cv::” before every function.

using namespace cv;
using namespace std;

And if we re-use our previous example (yea, I’m lazy), a little program that shows an image, you have something like this:

#include "opencv2/highgui/highgui.hpp"
#include "opencv2/core/core.hpp" 
#include "opencv2/imgproc/imgproc.hpp"
#include <iostream>
using namespace cv;
using namespace std;
 
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
 
    Mat image;
    image = imread(argv[1], CV_LOAD_IMAGE_COLOR);
 
    if (!image.data) // Check for invalid input
    {
        cout << "Could not open or find the image" << endl;
        return -1;
    }
 
    namedWindow("Display window", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE); // Create a window for display.
    imshow("Display window", image);
 
    return 0;
}

OpenCV has really poor/decentralized documentation, which makes these simple things over-complicated. I hope this helps some people struggling with getting OpenCV to work. Let me know if it works!

Cheers!
Ruben Verhack

OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) is a library of programming functions mainly aimed at real time computer vision, developed by Intel and now supported by Willow Garage. It is free for use under the open source BSD license. The library is cross-platform. It focuses mainly on real-time image processing.

1. Installation of OpenCV 2.3

First of all, Ubuntu 11.10 comes with OpenCV 2.1, and I wanted 2.3. Luckely our friend Gijs Molenaar provides us with a PPA for OpenCV 2.3.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gijzelaar/cuda
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gijzelaar/opencv2.3
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev

(Little notice: the package that comes with Ubuntu 11.10 is called libcv-dev, however in the PPA of Gijs the package is called libopencv-dev)

You might also want to install other packages related to OpenCV, just search for them in the Ubuntu Software Center. However, libopencv-dev will do.

2. Installation of Netbeans 7.0

Ubuntu 11.10 also comes with Netbeans 6.9, just download the new version from http://netbeans.org and you’re all set. Be sure you download the version with C/C++ support.

3. Set the project properties

Then create a new C/C++ project in Netbeans 7.0. First, set the project properties correctly. These settings worked for me.

In the C++ Compiler dialog add “/usr/locale/opencv2″ to the “Include Directories” field, also do this in the Linker dialog. In the Linker Dialog, also add the libraries opencv_core and opencv_highgui. You can find these libraries directly under “/usr/lib/”.

4. Set the includes

#include <opencv2/core/core.hpp>
#include <opencv2/highgui/highgui.hpp>

I find it easy to work with the cv and std namespace by default, so I don’t have to type “cv::” before every function.

using namespace cv;
using namespace std;

And if we put this all together in to a little program that shows an image, you have something like this:

#include <opencv2/core/core.hpp>
#include <opencv2/highgui/highgui.hpp>
#include <iostream>
using namespace cv;
using namespace std;
 
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
 
    Mat image;
    image = imread(argv[1], CV_LOAD_IMAGE_COLOR);
 
    if (!image.data) // Check for invalid input
    {
        cout &lt;&lt; "Could not open or find the image" &lt;&lt; endl;
        return -1;
    }
 
    namedWindow("Display window", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE); // Create a window for display.
    imshow("Display window", image);
 
    return 0;
}

There we go: Our first OpenCV program in Netbeans! I hope this will work for you too

MamppControl

Hey,

Yesterday I had some spare time, so I decided to take a look at the Cocoa collection of frameworks, APIs, and accompanying runtimes that make up the development layer of Mac OS X.
I’ve created this first application with XCode in Objective-C and named it MamppControl.

It allows you to start, stop, reload Mampp from the tray, with a handy tray icon & menu.
Mampp is the other name for Xampp on Mac.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.

More information about Xampp here.

I know that there is a launcher includes in the xampp package, but it has no tray icon and stay’s visible in the dock.

Default Xampp Control Panel

At the moment Mampp supports only the basic commands (start, stop, reload). If there is need for the other start/stop settings, contact me through the contact page on this blog or shout it here in the comments.

Mampp needs root access to start the xampp, that’s why you get the security login at start.

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sudo /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp start

You only have to do this once for the lifetime of the process. And when you change the path setting.

Also keep in mind that there could be some delay when starting or stopping Xampp, since ProFTPD usually takes a few seconds to launch (at least on my laptop it does ).

MamppControl checks if Xampp is already running on startup, and behaves appropriately with that knowledge …

Screenshots

 

 Quicksilver

 

 Security login

 

 Tray Icon

 

 Tray Menu

Download

MamppControl is licensed under the MIT license.

Copyright (c) 2009 Ninetynine.be

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Download : MamppControl - 116.76 kB


Current version: 2.0
Requirements:

   • Mac OS X 10.5 or higher.
   • Xampp installation @( /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp )

Version History

v1.0

• First public release

v2.0

• Added support for latest Xampp for Mac OSX (1.0.1)
• Added option to choose path to “xampp” executable
• Added complete events for starting & stopping & reloading
• Some minor changes internally

As a PHP developer it comes in handy to run your websites without having to upload them to your server. You can run them on your own computer if you want to, there isn’t much to it. I also like using the CodeIgniter framework for my projects, this is a really speeds up the whole process!

I will take you through the basic steps to set up your localhost to get CodeIgniter running.

1) Use Synaptic package manager to install “apache2″, “php5″ and “mysql-server”.

During the installation you will be asked to enter the password for the root user for your mysql-server.

2) Create a symbolic link, so that when you go to localhost in your browser, you get the website you want.

sudo cd /var/
sudo rm -r www/
sudo ln -s /path/to/website www

Always look before you delete something with “rm -r”, normally there should only be a index.html file in your www/ folder.

I prefer creating a link to my website that I put somewhere in my home directory, as this is being back-upped frequently, and is on another partition.



3) Install the package “phpmyadmin” through synaptic.

It is important that you wait to install phpmyadmin until you have installed the other packages and created the symbolic link. Otherwise it can be a mess to get things running.

4) To allow mod-rewrite, to get the clean CodeIgniter URL’s, you need to do the following.

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

You will see something like this:

        DocumentRoot /var/www
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
        </Directory>
        <Directory /var/www/>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>

Change the AllowOverride’s to All.

5) Restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

This wasn’t so hard, and it really makes life easier!

Note: You can’t use the function mail() or CodeIgniter’s mail-class without further configuration. I won’t go into details about this.

Also note that there are many ways to tackle this, this is only one easy suggestion. If you need to switch a lot between different websites, then changing the symbolic link each time is too much work. You can check out this article here.

Happy coding!

‘Why is this useful?’, you could ask. Well one situation is you’re creating an online rich text editor, and you want to add a font
to the font list. You would only have to edit the css and upload the new swf instead of the whole application. Or you want a client
to be able to add fonts without him having the source code from the application.

Luckily it’s possible in Flex to load runtime CSS compiled as an SWF with the StyleManager class.
StyleManager on LiveDocs

Fonts.css Example :

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@font-face {
    src:url("fonts/Arial.ttf");
    fontFamily:"Arial";
}

How to compile the CSS to SWF?



In Flex Builder you can right click any CSS inside your source and check the “compile CSS to SWF” option.


An alternative way to compile the CSS to SWF is using the command line :

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mxmlc Fonts.css

Loading the compiled stylesheet

For the example where we just compiled the Fonts.css to Fonts.swf

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import mx.styles.StyleManager;
 
StyleManager.loadStyleDeclarations("Fonts.swf");

It’s as simple as that… you can now start using the font.
The nice thing about this is you can now load your fonts visually using an intermediate loader or animation.


Loading the stylesheet visually with intermediate loader

First thing we do is create a custom titlewindow with a preloader in it to show the loading.
We can catch the StyleEvent.COMPLETE with an IEventDispatcher.
Right click the example for the source code.

You can use this to ‘preload’ any stylesheet.

Compiling CSS to SWF and loading it runtime is also used for application with theme support.
You can read more about that and view an example here : Understanding runtime CSS

Happy coding!