I’m breaking the photo gallery again. Just accept it. Either it will work better for Firefox users when I’m done, or it will be no worse.

UPDATE: Aw, hell with it. Switched back.

So I’ve downloaded the first developer preview edition of Flock, a web browser that (it turns out) is based on Firefox.  It aims to integrate web services such as del.icio.us, Flickr, and blogging services such as WordPress into the browsing experience. For instance, I’m composing this post (primarily, to see if it works) in the integrated blog post composer.

It definitely needs work still. There is quite a bit I cannot do in it (i.e., categorize this post). But it hasn’t crashed yet, and I give it credit for that. It’s also based on the 1.0.x branch of Firefox, which I stopped using several weeks ago in favor of 1.5 Beta 1 and nightly builds thereafter; the new Firefox builds at least feel much faster due to the “fast back and forward” (bfcache) feature. And I don’t have gestures anymore, since extension compatibility with Flock is mostly nonexistent right now. First impressions are fairly good, though. I’m not a huge fan of the custom skin, but I’ll let it slide for the moment.

UPDATE: Faux pas #1: I want WordPress to format my posts, not Flock. The WordPress autoformatting is fine and lets me manually type in HTML if I want to. It’s also much smarter about avoiding <br /> tags and spruious non-breaking spaces. Post reformatted & categorized.

(Explicit Technorati tag: Flock)

Okay, I’ve finally got the photo gallery back up to its old, error-free standard. I’m also pleased to announce that photos from Europe and photos for the 2005 Petit Le Mans have now all been posted.

Since everything works now, I hope to be working my way through the Europe photos and giving them the appropriate titles and descriptions.

Am I the only one who doesn’t think that the fact that the DARPA Grand Challenge being completed this year by several teams, compared to last year’s complete failure by all teams, is that big a deal? Professor Reynolds thinks it’s evidence of “sudden and dramatic progress,” and The Speculist weighs in with similar thoughts. I have to disagree with those analyses. The original Grand Challenge teams from 2004 had, I believe, less than a year to gather funding, assemble a team, and prepare a vehicle and GNC system, which is a lot of systems integration work. That would be an impressive effort by anyone, and the fact that no team was able to complete the 2004 Grand Challenge comes as little surprise to me.

As far as showing that there is rapid advancement, the International Aerial Robotics Competition has shown that the appropriate technologies for autonomous navigation exist and have existed for several years, with the Georgia Tech team showing Level II behavior in 2003, meaning the aircraft was able to fly into a simulated village (at an Army MOUT training center), find a particular building, and find an opening in that building. Further, the Mars Exploration Rovers have image processing technology that can perform off-road driving, and the IARC guys have been able to do basic navigation for several years, with the current course being 3 km one way—a 6 km round trip. So again, the technology exists, this is just one more (albeit highly robust) application.

Other things worth noting: the Volkswaken Touareg, such as the Stanford entry used, has 71 ft³ of cargo space with the rear seats folded down. In tandem with an upgraded electrical system, this is more than enough for some really bitchin’ computer power. Real-time image processing is not a problem for them. But it wasn’t a problem last year, either, and with that much space could have been done in 2001 or 2002, again, given about the same preparation time.

While the DARPA contest is a good thing, and while I’m sure it is difficult, it doesn’t seem to me like anything terribly revolutionary. I expect that there will be a change in the Grand Challenge that makes it more difficult, much like the IARC did when their previous challenges have been completed, and that it will prove to break systems that worked fine in this years challenge. It had better, or it’s clear DARPA has set the bar too low.

What the Grand Challenge 2005 does is provide a baseline. Now the top-tier participants know the rules, and they have a working, reasonably reliable system, that I hold could easily have been built several years ago, given they were provided about the same amount of time to build it. How these systems are leveraged and improved in Grand Challenge 2006 and beyond will be the true test of how fast our capabilities are progressing.

Fixing everything that broke on the blog side of things when I updated my photo gallery (and renamed a bunch of folders at the same time). To be followed by fixing some of the metadata I lost when I updated my photo gallery (and renamed a bunch of folders at the same time). To be followed by trying to fix the sort order of pictures in my photo gallery, which broke when I updated it. And some other stuff. I’d normally be doing Stuff with People on a Friday night, but everyone is out doing other Stuff and the weather isn’t that great anyways. And I also don’t feel 100%, which is more of an excuse than anything else.

Okay, to work.