Newlywed thoughts...

Yes now I'm married... happily married I must say ;) and after a couple of months with my new status in Facebook I've been getting the same question over and over again about "how does it feels to be married?" and "is it what you were expecting?" so finally I decided to answer that question here to everyone interested about it, and why not? also too keep good memories that will put a smile on my face when I decide to read this blog again in fifty years from now.

Marriage is way more than just having a nice party with a huge cake, a honey moon in Paris including lots of pictures all over Facebook...l at least in our case, our married life started two years before signing the paper at church and having a nice party in the old town, it all started when we decided to commit to each other, to work as a team in order to accomplish common and personal goals by supporting each other, complementing each other's personalities, but at the same time respecting our personal spaces, needs and interests and understanding that nobody is perfect and that we both have flaws but we still love each other despite of all that.

All those descriptions are way too abstract for most of the people that have never done this before, so a real example may be more important than all I've said before... marriage is not only about a diamond ring but more about waking up early to cook breakfast for each other to make it on time at the office, about sweeping the living room while the other is doing the laundry, about listening to each others stories about their jobs even though she may not understand java and he may not have a clue about how to explain direct and indirect object pronouns, but not everything is like that, it's also about remembering and being happy about why the two of you are together, about going to the theater on weekends and playing chess during the week, traveling to new places together and enjoying drinks with friends every now and then...

And at this point comes to my mind to ask you back, is this what you were expecting from a newlyweds couple? is this what you had in mind about marriage? feel free to share your comments, and if you don't I still hope this post will be useful for someone out there ;)

Let things flow...

It has been a long time since I wrote my last post, honestly I lost the interest on posting what was happening in my life, not because I didn't want to share but because I thought it was pointless to share it.

A few months ago I decided to work more on the technical knowledge related to my profession, and who is interested on reading about that here????? no one! well at least that what I thought until a couple of hours ago... now I understand I was wrong, I chose the bad place to do the wrong thing, that's it!

So I just decided to create a new blog to talk about technical stuff, java, IT stuff and so on, and I will keep this one for the main purpose I created it on the first place, to write about the things going through my mind, simpled, complicated, short, long, whatever comes and however it comes it will be here, and I'll apply the wise principle of "let things flow"....

Ferbar: Autonomous mobile robot control system

The main problem was to create an autonomous control system for a mobile robot in order for him to move from point A to point B avoiding obstacles and making all the decisions without the intervention of a human being.

To solve this problem we used an ultrasonic sensor on top of step-by-step engine in order to take samples from the area and the obstacles surrounding the robot. This information was sent to the motherboard on the robot with a DSL Linux distribution on a usb drive (to avoid using a delicate HDD on our rover robot).

Ferbar was running on that machine, its main requirement is a 1.4 JDK or higher and some libraries included on the zip file, there is a tricky configuration of the comm.jar that allows the software to sent the information of each movement using the serial port, but the details are explained on a txt install file.

The core of the brain is using a SOM neural network trained by JKam. The application includes a simulator with a 2D map on which you can set obstacles of different sizes and shapes and then you can set the point A and B on the map and test the performance of the robot with the current neural network. It's also possible to change the neural network being used.

The software includes two other control systems, one of them allows the user to preset the path that is going to be used by the robot, this is useful in case if you want to take the robot to a presentation and you already know the place and you know the moves you want him to do.

The third type of control allows the user to have live control of the robot, basically is a sort of remote control, this ones is pretty useful in case the scenario is too complex for the neural network and you want to take over the control of the robot.

Ferbar can save paths previously used in case you need to reuse them later, it is also possible to save and reuse training scenarios.

There is a panel not being used right now, it's the vision panel, it was supposed to show the view of a camera on the robot, but usb for java a couple wasn't so popular as it is right now.

Well one more time, if someone is interested on using it just let me know and I will gladly send you the files.

Kohonen Neural Networks and JAVA

Well as you can see on the title of the post, I decided to talk a bit more about what I do 3/4 of my day: JAVA, hopefully to share the problems I have everyday will help somebody else and also I'm pretty sure they will also help me.

My whole Java career started 3 years ago just by coincidence, I was in charge of the development of the "brain" of a mobile robot and the best way to have an OS independent software is using Java, so I ended up buying a Java book and started messing around with my computer and Netbeans.

Anyway, to make a long story short I developed two softwares to create the robot's brain, the requirement was that the robot could be able to move from position A to position B making all the decisions by himself in order to avoid obstacles and reach its destination.

To accomplish this goal I decided to use Self Organizing Maps also called Kohonen Networks, a self-organizing artificial neural network that selects the winner neuron by using the euclidean distance.

The learning process for the SOM is to make that different areas of the network can be activated by similar input patterns, and this resembles a lot to the way our brains work when we receive auditory or visual information and different areas of our brain generate the response.

JKam is the name of the software I developed for this task, its goal is to make easier the training process for Kohonen Networks and it has the following features:

• It allows you to define the structure of the map (Input Neurons, X Neurons and Y Neurons)
• Bubble and Gaussian neighborhood functions
• Exponential, Linear or Inverse Time learning factor functions
• Training variables such as amount of steps, radius, training sets and initial learning factor rate.
• It also allows you to save and re-use training sets and neural networks on an XML format.
  

I stopped working with this software a couple of years ago but I think it can be pretty useful on different fields so if anyone is interested on using it, just send me an email and I will gladly send you the files.

Well that's it, on the next post I'll talk about the software using a SOM trained with JKam, the brain of the robot: Ferbar.

Imagine...

It has been while since the last time I wrote something here... I don't have an excuse, of course I can say that I have been busy working on my office for 8 hours and then at home a few hours more, but that's just the easiest way out of most of the problems on our daily lives.

Anyway today instead of watching another chapter of Seinfeld while coding I decided to take sometime to write, and yeap a lot of things have happened to me since the last post, I went to a football game with a snowstorm and -5 degrees, I had a bbq on the beach with -1 degrees, I became vegetarian, I traveled a couple of times to Poland and Sweden, I organized a protest against our crazy Venezuelan president, I started jogging again and decided to participate in Marathon and the final story is that I had great time with my friends on my birthday...

But today I want to write about something special for me... yesterday I received my birthday present: a piano. For those of you who don't know me and also for those who think that they know me but now are a bit surprised, I have wanted to play the piano since almost 3 years from now, but again as I said on the beginning of this post, an excuse is the easiest way out of any problem so I decided to stop procrastinating a special goal in my life and start working on it!

So after having a beer on the old town square I to enjoy a the perfect weather that we have in Tallinn right now, I went with Chris to the Kaubamaja and bought my first piano


And after 15 minutes installing everything on Linux I was following my first piano lesson, Imagine from John Lennon :)

This is not about the shoes...

It's being a long time since I wrote my last post, I have been quite busy traveling in December and working in January, but tonight I found a few minutes to focus on my blog....

I saw this tv add the other day and basically I found it really good... for some people this is just a tv add, but I guess Michael Jordan has influenced my life in a good way since I was very young, anyway here it goes:

It's not about the shoes

It's about knowing where you're going

Not forgetting where you started

It's about having the courage to fail,

Not breaking when you are broken

Taking everything you've been given,

And making something better
It's about work, before glory and what's inside of you,
Is doing what they say you can't

It's not about the shoes, It's what you do in them

It's about being who you were born to be.

Become Legendary

And well maybe it's just a tv add but I chose to take it more seriously and use it in my life, I guess that's the big difference... here you can take a look:

Become legendary

Santka Lucia in Kalmar

This was my second trip to Kalmar and this time besides getting a new job challenge for year 2008 I also had the opportunity to watch a Swedish Christmas tradition, Santa Lucia. It is suppose to happen every 13^th of December and it is related to the Sicilian Saint Lucia for some unknown reasons, at least no one in the office knew why, and actually it doesn't make sense at all because the Swedish are mostly protestan.

Anyway the tradition is that the girls from school dress up in white and they go singing around the town with candles on their hands and there is one girl representing Saint Lucia and the difference is that she has the candles on her head. I was in the office and they came to visit us and of course I took my camera and recorded the moment, take a look…