At the summer school

 
The summer school is going well. We have been filmed by Italian TV. We got motor control and object tracking going. Now, a day off (going to visit Monaco) and then back for three more intense days!

:) 

Gentoo meltdown

At the most critical time - at the beginning of a 10 day programming summer school - gentoo let me down big time. I found that multicast wasn't working properly on my Dell X300 laptop, so I was going through a number of steps to try to resolve it, including udating my baselayout. This included an update to devfs which basically left my system unbootable. version 1.3.25-r8 of devfs has a bug leaving out the 2 crucial scripts that start and stop devfs. fixed in r9 of course, but the emerge --sync left me with r8. Nasty.

Of course this is resolvable by booting a liveCD, but I don't have a CD drive on my laptop - its at home. So, I have been - in the background while trying to keep up with a fast-moving school - been trying to get a USB stick bootable linux working. No luck so far.

To keep up with the school, I have been using cygwin on windows, which has many problems, but ironically, multicast is working.

anyway, more pictures here.
(PS - I love Piccassa !)

Summer school

Day one at the summer school was great. The location is unbelievable, cote d'azure, villa set in botanical gardens, view of Monaco over the bay. Some pics.

Have a look at the school website.

Day 1 was: just get everyone setup with ACE/CMake/YARP and get example code running. All very successful.

Day 2: disaster
I have managed to completely screw my linux installation.
long story - requires its own post. Later.

Why so long ...

OK, way too long since my last post. Nevermind, I don't think anyone actually reads this (Hi Lars).

So, to tell: I've been to Austria for a really nice seminar on complex systems which included talks on semiotics and how ostocytes work as sensors in the bone and help reconstruction happen. There was also my talk on interaction histories in robots, which while totally left-field for the audience, went down quite well. It was orgainised by Prof Sawaragi-San from Kyoto Uni, and was a really excellent little jaunt.

I've also submitted a final CR for the Epirob conf comming up. I am looking forward to that one.

My sis had a 40th B-day party which was just wild. Its funny, when you get everyone to dress as school children, they behave as school children. With booze. I had a 2-day solid hangover.

I read a really nice book (How Babies Think by Gopnik/Meltzoff/Kuhl). Would recommend it as an easy way to get into the some of the new ways of thinking in developmental psychology.

And, on sunday I fly to Ventigmilia in Italy (near Monaco on the Itialian/French border on the Cote d'Azur) for 10 days of robot programming. FUN IN THE SUN!! (Actually a geek version - I'll be programming on my laptop instead of hanging out in bars/beaches)

So, till later
Ciao