Abqorian Planet

"Ha", that was the word I said after registering myself to social networking website, Twitter. The http://twitter.com/abqoriaula .

But what took me so long?
Yeah, I wonder too. Maybe because I was busy with the other social networking website. or maybe because I am busy with my course and another ad-hoc activity.
Well, I can't blame myself for that, I am a student anyway. And I am also a man, so I need to make some money to pay my tuition fee :D

Anyway, the reason I registered to twitter was because yesterday night I stumbled upon a twitter account in which the user used my mostly-everywhere-preferred-nickname 'abqorian'. So I decided to take it over. No, not take it over from him, but trying to make sure that I am the only abqorian, hehehehe.

But, also because of that I decided to make a blog out of my blog.com account. Just to make sure that nobody will use the nickname.

Well, I guess that's all the  update about my activity.
The other thing I've been doing was preparing a one hour presentation for my Advanced Robotics class. It will be about the application I am using right now for my research, Player/Stage.

The other, other thing that I've been doing was developing a website for a group of students in my university. It was a very important, since it would be the first website I designed that goes public, :p
Yes, I have been developing websites for myself. It was part of learning process. But, now I am more than ready to go public.

OK, that would be all for today. I must finish my presentation first. Keep upm with my update.

Yesterday, during Advanced Robotic class, we the students had to present our research title in front of the class. For your information, all students are taking Master and Ph.D. degree.

And as most of you may have noticed from the title of the course, most students were presenting their robotic related research. But, there was one student with a different field of research. The IoT, a.k.a. Internet of Things.

It was the first time I ever heard of this field of research. He said it was a new trend in todays all-web-related technology. So, he presented his slides. He tried to tell us what is this IoT thing.

He started his presentation with a very confident face. Founded and being researched by MIT, he explained to us the definition of IoT, which is some thing like "everything goes internet". We make every thing in our real life to have ID for its internet identification. And he meant everything! Every single thing! While wikipedia defines IoT as networks of everything. Kinda funny but obviously an interesting idea.

In his slides, he stated the main problem to implement this kind of thing. It involves many line of disciplines, such as wave technology, in this case he mentioned RFID. Also the hardware part, which can be an AVR module or ARDUINO starter kit or something else. He defined the state he currently in, which was to study further about this Internet of Things thing. And he said, it might takes him one whole semester, since it involves many areas of research.

The fact is, it was a very interesting idea to me. Today, after a meeting with our lab's director, he even told me he wanted to put this IoT thing onto my honeybee research. He wanted to make the bees goes internet! "WOW", I said. That surprised me. But yeah, why not.
Using this technology, it will allow us to see a 3D version of honeybees' life. A 3D version of their world. To monitor their activity and at the end it will ease us to study more about their behavior.

I can only say one thing, "Good luck, Hamid! Thank you for sharing your idea".

Installing Player/Stage on a computer with OpenSuSE was the easiest and funnest installation I've ever done. Why?

Because by default, many of Player/Stage dependency packages are already installed by OpenSuSE. So you don't have to install a new ones. And to be honest, personally I still think OpenSuSE installation manager is the best and the easiest installation manager ever compared to others. Note: I was using OpenSuSE 10.3 when writing this post.

Anyway, how to install Player/Stage on OpenSuSE, then?
Well, let's first check the dependency packages required by OpenSuSE. For the general requirement, read this post.

The dependencies available by-default are:

• gcc-fortran or related;
• libgnomecanvas;
• imagemagick;
• openssl;
• libjpeg, libusb;
• libdc1394 and libraw1394;
• sed, gsl, statgrab;
• libtool, libltdl;
• swig, gawk, gtk;
• freeglut;
• cmake, and
• boost

The complete list was uploaded here. The rest is still need to be installed. If you can't find the package in your DVD repository, you can always check OpenSuSE's website and search the package there.

The next step is the same as installing Player/Stage on PCLinuxOS, though Player was not in OpenSuSE's repository.
So, the same first step is to compile Player from its source.

cd ~/player-<version>
make uninstall
make clean
./configure --prefix=/home/$USER/playerstage

make
make install
export PATH=$PATH:/home/$USER/playerstage/bin/
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/home/$USER/playerstage/lib/pkgconfig
export PLAYERPATH=$PLAYERPATH:/home/$USER/playerstage/share/stage/worlds:/home/$USER/playerstage/lib/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/home/$USER/playerstage/include:/home/$USER/playerstage/lib:/home/$USER/playerstage/share/player/examples/plugins/logplugin

Next step is to add these lines into /etc/ld.so.conf.

/home/$USER/playerstage/lib/
/usr/local/lib

Then, test the installation using pkg-config:

pkg-config --libs playercore
pkg-config --cflags playercore
player ~/playerstage/share/stage/worlds/simple.cfg &
cd ~/stage-<version>
make uninstall
make clean
./configure --prefix=/home/$USER/playerstage
sudo make
sudo make install
pkg-config --libs stage
pkg-config --cflags stage

That would be all.