New Company Website
No article this week. I spent the last two weeks working with everyone else to relaunch our company’s website. I’m sick of writing. The good news for you, though, is there tons of material to be read about face detection, face tracking, and face recognition:
Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition
The highlight of the page, though, is probably our online face recognition demo. You give it two images, it will try to match the faces between the two. I’ll probably write a bit more in the coming weeks about various topics related to face recognition, the new site, and the new demos. Before I go, however, I have two comments to make.
The web is such a hack. After doing my first good spell of web programming in a while, I cannot shake the feeling that the entire web infrastructure is a complete hack job. HTML is a “language” that kind of describes the data of the webpage, and half of its layout. CSS is a second “language” that describes the other half of the layout, and the style. Javascript is a third language for the client. PHP (or Python or Ruby) is a fourth language for the server. And then there’s SQL. And none of that includes a templating language (we used Python and Textile). There has to be a better way.
Javascript bug. Our front page (www.pittpatt.com) crawls to an absolute halt because of the javascript animation. It only happens on Firefox, in Linux, using the propiertary nVidia drivers. I haven’t had much of a chance to research this bug but it seemed like a small enough bug to go live knowing about it. I’m going to spend some time this afternoon seeing if there is a workaround. I figured I’d mention it here to see if anyone knew more.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
The front page works fine for me with Firefox/Linux/nVidia, so the problem could depend on a specific version of something. I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 (kernel 2.6.27-11-generic, firefox 3.0.7, nvidia driver 177.82-0ubuntu0.1) if that helps.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I am running with the same exact specs as Matthew, and I also didn’t have a problem. My guess would be the issue is with a specific version of the driver or you tried this on an older version of Firefox.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Ugh. I have the exact same versions, 8.10 ubuntu, 2.6.27-11, and the 177.82 nvidia drivers (on two computers) that cause the behavior. Top shows xorg CPU usage skyrocketing to a full CPU. I haven’t had much time to dig into it, yet.
March 12th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Maybe take a look and see if it has anything to do with whether it’s a problem with 64bit vs 32bit versions of Firefox? I’m using a 64bit version of FF, and noticed a slowdown (not super huge, but… noticeable).
March 25th, 2009 at 9:44 am
I am unable to duplicate the problem you mentioned. More likely than not, it is because I am not using a NVidia driver, but the Intel Mobile 965 chipset, AMD64, on Debian Lenny. Tested using both Konqueror and iceweasel (broken firefox).
March 31st, 2009 at 5:08 am
That sounds suspiciously like the performance problems caused by the XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps or InitialPixelPlacement settings when using particular configurations.
September 5th, 2009 at 12:45 am
Your company’s logo looks a lot like the Goodwill logo.