FAMiLab

Abyss surprised us all by connecting to our new fancy high-def PTZ IP camera (hostname ‘ptzcam’ on familab LAN – play with it!) to the OpenCV face detection library! He created a twitter bot that updates how many faces it detects in the lab at each run. It tends to see faces in everything, but if it sees any faces at all chances the light is on and somebody is in the lab anyway :p.

famduino on Twitter
The Abyssknight’s Blogpost
famicam sourcecode on github

He still needs server space on our rack to get it running 24/7, so when it’s up there’ll be another post.

They called it the ‘CodeDojo‘ at BarCamp. In a professional sense, it’s a coding style and standards workshop. In a metaphorical sense, it’s a martial-arts training group for your code-fu.

Kata (n): a Japanese word describing detailed choreographed patterns of movements practiced either solo or in pairs.

They propose ‘Kata’ at the beginning of each meeting, and is solved appropriately according to best practices. With ‘Prepared Kata‘, a professional enlightens the attendees, step-by-step, the appropriate way to solve the problem, using TDD and BabySteps. With ‘Randori Kata‘, participants approach the board in pairs and spend 5-7 minutes solving as much of the problem as they can, often with the mentoring of the partner, then rotate out.

The next meeting is tomorrow, Saturday, April 10th, at Camden Apartments right next to Colonial and I-4 (link below).

CodeTown Event Invite
Location on Google Maps

CodeDojo WordPress Blog
CodeDojo Google Group
Google Group Mailing List Threat

Maybe we can offer them our lab as a meeting place. If it’s not too out of the way.