Recent content on NOT Dexter's Lab
Running machine learning inference in models within the browser content is such an interesting concept! The technology has been there for a while and it’s moving at a surprising pace, with the ability to even use local GPUs directly via the new WebGPU APIs. The web browser version of the onnxruntime library provides a nice abstraction to use different execution providers (for example WASM or…
Recently I’ve been experimenting again with quite a few computer vision models (including Vision Mamba). The fact that researchers share their code make experimenting with models a much more pleasant experience! Sometimes, though, the released code is very sensitive to CUDA versions. Luckily, switching between CUDA versions on Ubuntu has now become a relatively easy task using…
At the beginning of 2024, an article came out that made the whole computer vision community excited: “Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model”. It’s a very interesting approach that promises to mitigate the cost of self-attention in transformers using a state space model (SSM) based vision backbone. The authors of Vision Mamba…
On the 7th of July 2022 I had the privilege to present my work (about transcribing voice messages in Signal Desktop) at the Common Voice Community Call. We talked about how to modify Signal Desktop in order to have it transcribe voice messages fully offline, without sending the message to any third party. There’s a nice bonus at the end: a live demo on the Coqui STT WebAssembly bindings,…
Let’s face it: if you’re reading this, chances are that you are receiving the dreaded voice messages more often than you would want. I like the romantic feeling behind voice messages on Instant Messaging platforms: you can feel the nuances of the sender’s voice, quickly deciphering their mood. However, as you start receiving voice messages more often, that romantic feeling will collapse under the…
(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it is inspired by Glean. You can find anindex of all TWiG posts online.) The last blog post:This Week in Glean: Cargo features – an investigation by Jan-Erik. The philosophy of Glean…
(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it is inspired by Glean. The previous post of the series lives here.) This week in Glean we tell a tale of components, design, performance and ponies (I promise!): how to bridge…
By: Alessio Placitelli, Ben Miroglio, Jason Thomas, Shell Escalante and Martin Lopatka. With special recognition of the development efforts of Roberto Vitillo who kickstarted this project, Mauro Doglio for massive contributions to the code base during his time at Mozilla, Florian Hartmann, who contributed efforts towards prototyping the ensemble linear combiner, Stuart Colville for coordinating…
The Go Faster initiative is important as it enables us to ship code faster, using special add-ons, without being strictly tied to the Firefox train schedule. As Georg Fritzsche pointed out in his article, we have two options for instrumenting these add-ons: having probe definitions ride the trains (waiting a few weeks!) or implementing and sending a new custom ping (doing some pipeline work!).…
Let me state this clearly, again: data latency sucks. This is especially true when working on Firefox: a nicely crafted piece of software that ships worldwide to many people. When something affects the experience of our users we need to know and react fast. The story so far… We started improving the latency of the data coming from Firefox, in the previous quarters, and got to the point where the…
The data our Firefox users share with us is the key to identify and fix performance issues that lead to a poor browsing experience. Collecting it is not enough if we don’t manage to receive the data in an acceptable time-frame. My esteemed colleague Chris already wrote about this a couple of times: data latency sucks. But we can fix that. Why is there latency, anyway? The bulk of measurements we…
By Alessio Placitelli, Ali Almossawi, and Rebecca Weiss Cross-posted from Medium We have just released the Firefox Hardware Report, a report of the hardware used by the Firefox release user base. You can read the announcement here. The Firefox team believes that this report will be very valuable to developers, particularly those who build for the web. Web developers need to know what platforms and…
With Mozilla’s Telemetry system, we have a powerful way to collect measurements in the clients while still complying to our rules of lean data collection and anonymization. Most of the measurements are collected in form of histograms that are created on the client side and submitted to our Telemetry pipeline. However, recent needs for better understanding user interaction with the browser has led…
Sadly, right now (and until bug 1169873 is fixed), it’s not possible to build Firefox for Android on Windows. That’s not nice, especially if you need to track down some Android-only failures triggered by your code 🙂 Until recently I was able to run my Android Virtual Device within my Ubuntu Virtual Machine (yeah, tricky). Then something broke in OracleVM (ticket 12941), preventing me from…
As Roberto Vitillo says in his excellent post about Spark best practices: Running Spark jobs without the Spark UI is like flying blind. And that’s especially true if your spark job keeps crashing or it’s crunching big data (yeah, I had to use the expression at least once). If you don’t want to setup a SOCKS proxy or, for some reason, that simply doesn’t work for you (my case!
On Linux and MacOS is quite normal to see the standard output in the shell when running Firefox from the command prompt. On Windows, this isn’t that easy, as the “-console” command line switch creates a new window that quickly disappears when Firefox shuts down. Luckily, there’s an interesting option that seems to produce the desired behaviour on Windows: “-attach-console“. As reported on MDN,…
Just imagine this scenario: one day you turn off your pc and you try to turn it on the following day. And it doesn’t or, more precisely, your trustworthy Maxtor/Seagate HDD (Model No. STM3320614AS) is no longer detected during the boot or shows a size of 0GB. You get mad, you get angry. Then you try to figure out how to get your data back. It appears that, due to a firmware bug, some particular…
Recently, the Mozilla Firefox build interface, aka mach, was enhanced with a great feature for Windows developers: the ability to generate Visual Studio project files. Such project files are not maintained in mozilla-central, hence the need for a way to generate them. Thanks to the awesome work done by Gregory Szorc, generating project files using mach is as simple as issuing the following…
Lately I’ve started contributing to Mozilla Firefox with some patches (yay! It’s an awesome project… consider contributing 😉 ). It was a good excuse to practice with Mercurial, the distributed revision control software used by Mozilla. I’m mainly a Git user and I have to admit I was a little puzzled at first and had to adapt to the new workflow. In this article I will try to answer some of the…
E’ nato Spinethica.it, un progetto giornalistico per raccontare storie tra alienazione e rivoluzione. Ma cosa vuol dire e di cosa parlano? Questo è un estratto dalla loro pagina “Chi Siamo“: Cos’è Spinethica Spinethica è una realtà giornalistica che racconta le storie di una generazione liquida, in costante ed inevitabile adattamento alle forme della società. Realizza un giornalismo multimediale…
I’m having a lot of fun these days with my Raspberry-pi! Since I’ve already built my own tool chain to cross-compile from my Windows plus Cygwin machine and setup my IDE to compile and debug my software using it, I finally started to compile some projects. Unfortunately I had to face a couple of problems: how to make the ./configure script use my tool chain to generate Raspberry-Pi binaries in…
Mi sto proprio divertendo in questi giorni con la Raspberry-Pi! Dato che ho generato la mia tool chain per cross-compilare da Windows con cygwin ed impostato il mio IDE, ho finalmente iniziato a compilare qualche software ed effettuare qualche porting. Tuttavia ho dovuto affrontare un paio di questioni che mi hanno fatto perdere la mattinata, ovvero da cygwin come compilo un software per…
Sono finalmente riuscito a compilare una tool chain funzionante per cross-compilare dalla mia macchina Windows 7 per Raspberry Pi. Mi ci è voluto un po’, ma grazie a dei preziosissimi interventi di Ian Linsdell sul forum di Raspberry Pi (ed un po’ di fortuna!) sono riuscito nell’impresa. La tool chain contiene le versioni Linaro di GCC (gcc-linaro-4.6-2012.07) e GDB (gdb-linaro-7.4-2012.06)…
I finally succeeded in compiling a working cross-compilation tool chain for my Raspberry Pi. It took me a while, but thanks to some valuable posts on the Raspberry Pi forum by Ian Linsdell and some luck I finally made it. The tool chain contains the Linaro versions of GCC (gcc-linaro-4.6-2012.07) and GDB (gdb-linaro-7.4-2012.06) compiled with the hardfp option. Simply unpack the archive in the…
In the past few days I’ve spent quite a lot of time on my new shining Raspberry-Pi. It’s an amazing little devil, worth every Euro I spent! Since I’ve planned to deploy a software component of my augmented reality system on this board, I needed to figure out how to remotely debug it in order to troubleshoot any issue I would run into. It took me some time, but thanks to the friends on Raspberry Pi…
I think I’ve looked almost everywhere on the net to find a good reStructured Text file editor. Most of the free editor I’ve found were outdated our required to much efforts just to install. I finally found UliPad, which also allows user to see a real time html version of the reST document. Funny, isn’t it? UliPad Homepage
This post is a little bit late, but it’s better now than never! It took some really hard work to get this release out, but version 1.0 of the Point Cloud Library is finally here. Many different institutions contributed to this open source library which allows point cloud processing (with out of the box Kinect support through OpenNI!). What follows is an excerpt from the official 1.0 release…
Questo post arriva un po’ in ritardo, ma meglio tardi che mai! Dopo un duro lavoro è stata rilasciata la versione 1.0 della Point Cloud Library, una libreria open source per l’elaborazione di nuvole di punti 3d. Allo sviluppo di questa libreria partecipano varie istituzioni, tra cui anche il MIT. Segue un estratto dell’annuncio relativo al rilascio. PCL is a large-scale, cross-platform, open…
Credo di aver girato la rete in lungo ed in largo per trovare un buon editor di file reStructured Text. La maggior parte di quelli che ho trovato erano troppo vecchi o veramente, veramente troppo complicati perfino da installare. Finalmente, quando iniziavo a disperarmi, ho scoperto UliPad, un editor di file reST che permette di vederne anche l’anteprima HTML in tempo reale! Gratis! UliPad…
Quello che vedete in fondo a questo post è un video relativo al progetto sul quale ho lavorato nei mesi passati presso l’istituto ICAR del CNR. Abbiamo usato OpenNI, Nite e OpenCV per costruire un sistema tramite il quale l’utente sia in grado di manipolare, a distanza, immagini mediche. Beh, che dire, divertitevi con il filmato e fatemi sapere che cosa ne pensate 😉
The following is a short video clip about the project I’ve been involved in for the last months at ICAR-CNR. We’ve been using OpenNI+Nite+OpenCV to manipulate medical images using Microsoft Kinect. Enjoy the clip and let me know what you think 😉
[lang_it]Oggi mi è capitato un fatto alquanto strano: ho installato la versione trial di Visual Studio 2008 e, provando ad inserire il mio seriale, mi sono reso conto che mancavano i controlli. Eh già! A quanto pare è un problema noto di Visual Studio 2008 su Windows 7! Dopo un po’ di ricerche, sono giunto all’articolo KB979576 nella knowledge base di mamma Microsoft: problema risolto, ora posso…
[lang_it]Tutti sbagliamo, falliamo, cadiamo. Nella nostra vita apprendimento e fallimento sono sempre andati di pari passo! Quante volte siamo caduti prima di imparare a camminare? Quante volte abbiamo fatto spegnere la nostra auto prima di impratichirci con le partenze in salita? 😛 In questo bellissimo articolo (in inglese) c’è un’interessante ed originale punto di vista sull’utilità dei…
[lang_en]This is how Tim Schafer got into game industry: luckily enough he didn’t get the engineering job he applied for! Tim Schafer Carreer History [/lang_en] [lang_it]Ecco come, il mitico Tim Schafer, è entrato a far parte dell’industria videoludica! Per fortuna non è riuscito ad avere il lavoro da ingegnere per cui aveva fatto domanda… Tim Schafer Carreer History[/lang_it]
Did you know you could synchronize your Windows Mobile device with Google Calendar without using any third party application? Amazing, isn’t it? 🙂 Simply follow this link: Set Up your Windows Mobile Phone
My internship at the ICAR institute (CNR) gave me the opportunity to work on some interesting projects, one of them being a software named MITO (Medical Imaging TOolkit). MITO, as stated by the project website, is an opensource software architecture for advanced Medical Imaging. I’m always proud of the projects I work on, even more if those projects are contributing to the opensource cause and…
The following hack allows users to change their own email password in roundcube 0.2-stable. Updated: Thanks to Lukather from roundcubeforum.net a bug which wiped out email passwords has been fixed **Step 1. Modifying program\steps\settings\save_prefs.inc Aproximately near line 28, there is a block where an array is declared. It starts with “$a_user_prefs = array(“. Just add the following line…
Odio quando gli hard disk si rompono. Ok, ho il backup di tutto.. però che nervi reinstallare tutto. Spesso infatti, qualche periferica che funzionava senza problemi decide di piantarti in asso: è la cosa che mi è successa durante l’installazione dei driver del mio Creative Zen su Windows XP SP3. Se anche voi avete lo stesso problema, se Windows tenta di liquidarvi con un “Sezione del file INF non…
NASA just released a 35 minutes tour of the International Space Station. Feel free to check it out following those links: YouTube Part I YouTube Part II YouTube Part III YouTube Part IV Simply… amazing.
Let me guess: you just wrote your new, shining CUDA application to unleash all the horsepower of your GPU and you are getting some compilation errors in Visual Studio. Some really weird errors. Something like: 1>CUDA_myfile.cu_generated.c 1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\INCLUDE\vadefs.h(52) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’ 1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio…
Blaze has launched its MegaDrive handheld console, which contains games such as Sonic and Knuckles, Golden Axe, Shinobi and Ecco the Dolphin. read more | digg story
Non ho avuto esattamente il giusto tempismo per la pubblicazione di questa news, ma meglio tardi che mai. Dal 31 Luglio è in corso una stupenda maratona videoludica dedicata alla saga di Zelda portata avanti dai ragazzi del Mario Marathon Team, con il supporto di Cameron Banga and the Four48 Team, il tutto in diretta webcast sui loro blog. La nobile causa alla base di questa impresa è una raccolta…
Beh, se lo siete, allora è una vera fortuna che stiate seguendo questo blog. Girovagando per la rete ho scoperto questo fantastico strumento opensource, WinMerge, che ha tutte le funzioni di windiff ed in più una accattivante veste grafica. La ciliegina sulla torta? Si integra alla perfezione con TortoiseSVN: un MUST. Well, if you are, consider yourself lucky to read this blog. I was tired of…
/Me OMFG Do you know someone on this planet who can manage to destroy a 399€ jewel in less than a hour? Now you do. I just tried to update the BIOS of my new, flaming, MSI Wind U100 Black when I found out power wasn’t plugged. So I thought “what’s the problem, let’s just plug it in”. I wish I had never done that: keyboard suddenly stopped working. I tried rebooting to Windows XP (a pure DOS…
Poter parlare, potere esprimere liberamente le nostre opinioni, è qualcosa che troppo spesso diamo per scontato. Purtroppo. “Libertà sul web. Sentenza oscurantista in Italia. Condannato penalmente da un tribunale della Repubblica per il reato di “stampa clandestina”, reo di aver curato il sito internet di documentazione storica e sociale “accadeinsicilia”, già oscurato d’autorità. E’ avvenuto un…
Ouch 🙁 This article isn’t available in your language.
Quite odd for a “so called” advanced country, isn’t it? Read More (Google Translation)
Da DigitalDivisi.net: Eh si, sembra strano, ma non c’è. Vuoi per una legge approvata dal governo appena passato, vuoi perché chi è arrivato si è adeguato a quella legge senza pensarne una modifica nel futuro prossimo, il Ministero delle Comunicazioni, uno dei più importanti, secondo noi, ma al tempo stesso anche secondo l’economia mondiale per il valore aggiunto di sviluppo che le…
You would be surprised by the amount of people searching for “ftp dreambox” words in the box at the top of this page. Hey, that’s it, just to “finally make you happy”: 1) Download an FTP client (FileZila is recommended) 2) Create a new connection profile using your Dreambox address (192.168.x.x for example), root as username and dreambox as password (some firmware have no default password set for…
Sembra una cosa banale, ma molti felici possessori di un Dreambox hanno difficoltà a trasferire files da o verso questo costoso gingillo. Ecco in breve come fare per copiare i vostri files (anche film!): 1) Scaricate un client FTP (consiglio vivamente FileZilla) 2) Create un nuovo profilo inserendo come indirizzo del server FTP l’indirizzo del vostro dreambox (es. 192.168.x.x ), come username root…