Changing Screen Resolution in Ubuntu under VirtualBox

This problem has caused me a relatively severe headache today. I'm doing a project which require me to use a Linux OS. Since I don't have Linux in my office PC, I decided to install one (Ubuntu 9.10) in a VirtualBox instead of creating a double booting configuration. The installation procedure was easy and painless, but then the problem is coming. The installed Ubuntu does not have any option to increase the screen resolution other than 800x600 and 640x480.

I tried to install the suitable driver with no result except destroying my X Window which forces me to reinstall the Ubuntu again (thank God I use virtual machine...). Then I started looking around for a solution and several forums and websites point me to this:

• Choose Devices -> Install Guest Additions... on the VirtualBox menu
• It will mount a CD which will appear on the Desktop
• Go to your terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal)
• Go to the CD directory by typing "cd /media/cdrom0" (without the quotes)
• Type "sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run", again, without the quotes. At the first try I couldn't find this file instead just a directory "OS2". If you experience the same thing, this is probably because you set your VirtualBox OS type as "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux 2.6". In this case, shut down your VirtualBox, change the OS type and redo the whole stuffs from the beginning
• Restart your VirtualBox

Now, this has successfully gave me another resolution, which is 1024x768. Not bad, but I'm rather greedy and I want something more! (Hey, my PC could do better!). Continue with this:

• Go to the terminal again
• Edit the xorg.conf by typing "sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf" (yes, no quotes)
• If you can find some already existing screen resolution, then you can add more, otherwise you can include something like this:

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        Subsection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes     "1280x1024" "1024×768"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

• Be really careful when you're doing this. It is always nice to make a backup beforehand
• Restart your VirtualBox and enjoy the new screen resolution

Reference:
1. http://www.mikesouthby.co.uk/2009/11/virtualboxubuntu-9-10-changing-screen-resolution/
2. http://www.mjmwired.net/linux/2009/09/15/default-xorg-resolution/

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Improving a Scanned Hand-Drawing

I did a lot of digital drawing and painting as a hobby. One of the most common problem I faced is the lack of quality of the scanned lines from the scanned drawing. Thus, an improvement on the scanned drawing is required before doing anything else. Before we start, I should warn you that this is the way that I found works, doesn't mean that there is not other way to do it. I'm using Photoshop and Corel Draw to do this, but I suppose any other application with similar features should work fine.

I prefer to trace a scanned hand-drawing before doing anything else. Tracing is nice because with tracing I can have an output in form of vector. Thus, further improvement could be made easily. However, tracing a scanned hand-drawing often caused many detail loss. Increasing trace resolution wouldn't help since the output will not posses simple, clear, and solid lines.

To overcome this situation, I propose to do a preprocessing for the scanned hand-drawing. I'm using a self hand-drawing with a manga-ish style. Forgive the quality, I'm only an amateur :)



Once you scan your hand-drawing, we need to adjust the color intensity. I'm using "Level" feature of Photoshop and adjust accordingly.



The next step is to apply a filter called "Photocopy" from Photoshop. I choose this because it will make the lines bolder and flatten (is this even the correct word?) the color.



The resulting image is good enough for tracing. I import the image and do the tracing with Corel Draw.



The result is clean and artistic. You can always make further adjustment easily since it is in form of vector.

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Game of Imagination

It has been a while since I wrote my last post and losing my internet connection (followed by losing the enthusiasm of writing). Anyway, here I am trying to write something again and it's going to be something fun, yups: it is about a game, to be precise: games.

A friend of mine posted this video about a game called: Crayon Physics Deluxe. I took a peek on it, and fell in love at the first sight. Crayon Physics Deluxe is a puzzle game where we have to solve a problem (mostly to guide a ball to a star) using physics rules, kind of remind me of the old-nice Incredible Machine which I played a long time ago. However, the difference (and the most interesting part) is that Crayon Physics Deluxe allows the user to create objects freely using a "pen" and transforms them into world objects which automatically follow the physics rule. Take a look at this cool video on their website:




It looks like a very nice game, but I'm not a type of guy who's willing to buy something just because it looks nice :) I tried to get more information and trial version of the game which eventually leads me into an another game called Zany Doodle, which luckily offers a trial version of the game. I tried the game and enjoyed it very much even though I only use a normal mouse instead of a touchscreen (which I believe will increase the game experience heavily). Moreover, I found out that the Crayon Physics Deluxe is actually originated from the free game Crayon Physics which is developed by the same person. However, the free Crayon Physics is nowhere as good as its paid counterpart, not even better than the free trial of Zany Doodle since it cannot create objects like a triangle or just a random line.

Should I say anything more? Just download the Crayon Physics here and the free trial of Zany Doodle here. Enjoy!

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Scour - A Social Search Engine

Scour (currently in beta) is another web 2.0 hype tagged as "social search engine" intended to give user more authority to determine results from searching process. Scour aggregates result from Google, Yahoo, and MSN and combine them with the votes from users to decide the order of the results. Besides voting, Scour also allows users to leave comments for every search results. Sounds like another Digg? Another worth mentioning feature from Scour is the reward system. Users will get a certain number of points for every search or another contribution they make (voting, commenting, inviting friends). After several thousand of points, users are able to convert them into a visa gift card. While this pay-per-search idea is nothing new, I wonder if the social part of Scour will able to keep them surviving in the next few years given the fact that they will probably have to compete with Google (Google is developing their search engine with a similar idea to Scour, I bet without the reward system).

I have tried Scour for around three days now, and I'm sure they want to improve on several things (it's a beta anyway). Currently the results are limited to 3 pages no matter what keyword I use to do the searching. The search results are also lack of highlighting (updated: not anymore!). They have also included a browser-integrated search bar, which is good for me since I want to try it without having to change the way I use Google. However, every time I click on a search result a frame appeared in the bottom of the page which allowed the users to give vote or comment on the result (this frame didn't appear when I tried to open the search result on a new tab instead of clicking it). This might be a good way to encourage users to participate in the voting/commenting activities, but I found it a little bit annoying. Hopefully they will find a better way to do it.

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Family Tree Builder

1. I have a big family which keeps on expanding
2. I live far away from most of them
3. I have terrible memory (being old and things like that... you know)

Those are my top three arguments why I sometime (or often) forget about things related to my family. Some examples: the date of my parent's marriage, my brother in law's birthday, or even the name of my one year old cousin. Now I'd like to say goodbye for all those fake arguments by introducing a geeky way to keep all family-related information in a sophisticated way: Family Tree Builder.


Family Tree Builder is a genealogy software (for Windows only) which can be downloaded for free at http://www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder. I like this software a lot, especially since it offers some nice features such as: integration with myheritage.com (allows me to share and let others review the information on the web, though without capability of multi-user editing), photograph for every family member (and events), event reminder (birthday, marriage, etc), and also possibility to input unsure information for date (i.e. birthday around January 1982).

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Blogger Wish List

Amanda celebrates Blogger Buster's birthday by arranging a nice competition to suggest some new features for Blogger. As a Blogger user myself, I couldn't careless about it, especially since it comes with a really nice incentive ;) Okay, so here are my thoughts about new features that should be implemented:

1. Give option to show only snippet of posts with "read more" button

...or using the Blogger term: "Show excerpts of my posts, with links to the full text". This is the most important feature that I think should be implemented ASAP by the Blogger team (other than in-post comment, which already introduced in Blogger Beta). This feature will allow me to show more posts in the front page and let the reader to pick the one he/she interested in instead having to scroll all the way to the bottom page and check for previous posts.

2. More variety of widgets

I realize that some really useful widgets are missing in the Blogger, especially "Top Commentators" and "Top Posts". Top Commentators should display the most active commenters in the whole blog along with a link to their blog (as an incentive for supporting the blog by actively commenting it). Top Posts could be based on number of comments, traffics, or (even better) by popularity of the post decided by several criterias such as comments, traffics, number of links, digg, technorati, etc. Another widgets that I could think of are "Recent Posts" and "Recent Comments" (It is possible but with limit of 5 entries only). Emm... am I asking too much here? :D

3. Possibility to create additional pages

I would love to have a special page for author, links, and archives. Yes, it is possible by applying some sort of hacks but still I prefer to have it as a explicit feature.

4. Shows "possible related posts" by category or content

One of the best way to keep the reader stay in our blog after finished reading a post is by offering them to read another related articles. It is very nice if related posts are shown in relation with the content but related posts by category is also good enough for me.

You can also suggest a new feature directly to the Blogger team here. I'm waiting for the good news! ;)

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The Limit of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

I always crazy about sci-fi futuristic movies. Humanoid robots, machines vs men (with the help of Arnold) wars, or robots taking over the whole earth and keeping men as batteries. Simply love them. Most of those movies introduced the existence of highly-intelligent machines. Sometimes they are shown as having a human-level intelligent, in other case they are even better. Well now the question is: is it even possible? To what extent the development of so called Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be?

Back in 1960 something, experts predicted that in 20 years machine would be capable of doing everything human capable of, which is often called as "Strong AI". With respect for those AI experts, we are now in 2008 and it's not even close. Strong AI is proven to be much more difficult and complicated to achieve. This misprediction has caused AI experts being addressed as a “liar”, and consequently being forced to changes the direction of AI research from “Strong AI” into a more short-term, specific domain of problem, which is called "Applied AI" or "Weak AI". However, the dream of “human level AI” will never cease, and debate about it is always interesting to follow.

There has been a great discussion about whether human level AI is likely to be achieved by a mere symbol processing like what most weak AI commonly use. By applying a huge collection of formal rules and in addition, scaling up processing capabilities and storage capacity, and there we are. This opinion is greatly opposed by some experts. As current system lacks of something that is called “understanding”, “minds”, “conscience”, or other things which is related to mental states. The argument based on the idea that there is something more than just behavior to call a machine have an intelligent comparable to human. For example, let say that a machine capable of translating English to French. Even if the machine did it correctly, it is arguably incorrect to say that the machine actually “understand” English (or French).

But who need minds anyway? Intelligent is all about behavior, and it alone is enough. To see it from a different perspective, I (and my ignorance) have a trouble to imagine what “minds” and “conscience” are. Are they just some terms used to express something unexplainable? Or perhaps it just simply does not exists from the very beginning?

I have a nice discussion with one of my friend about this matter, and his view is somewhat different from what I expect, but nevertheless very fascinating to be followed. His first thought is that, even if human are capable of doing it, creating a machine with human level intelligent is unnecessary. Life is difficult enough, why would you like to increase the competition among human by introducing some humanoids? Other thing he expressed is that there is no way human will be able to do such a thing. An inventor would not be able to invent anything equal or beyond itself, as human is not God.

p.s: I am not an AI researcher nor expert in this field. Just someone who has an interest in it.

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