I am visiting my parents and connect to their network via wireless router. My laptop, which is (still!) running Vista kept dropping wireless connection every couple of minutes and reconnecting again. Interestingly, the other computers connected to the same router had no problems.

I could not figure out where to even start troubleshooting this issue, until I noticed that the problem only happens while I am running on battery and not when I am connected to the mains. Once I notice that, the solution was simple - power management module must have been too eager and turning off wireless after 30 seconds of inactivity. Given that I was trying to read emails or webpages, that would occur fairly regularly.

The fix is to go to the power-management control panel and adjust on-battery behaviour to match the full-power one. I am putting this out because an hour of searching for this problem online did not bring any result. I hope the next person to be flummoxed by this repeated connection loss will find my blog entry fast.

I have written about converting Microsoft Word files into text or html using OpenOffice before. However, the wizards I described in that article were crashing when the number of files crossed into several hundreds.

I have written some macros to do the conversion, but they were scary looking and fragile. Fortunately, I now found a tool that does the same job better and with more flexibility. DocConverter by Danny Brewer and Dan Horwood allows to convert a whole directory of files at a time from any to any OpenOffice-understood format.

I have just converted more than a thousand documents from doc to txt without any problems.  Actually, I had a small problem, but it was my fault. I had some corrupted files that OO would not open and that was breaking DocConverter and throwing some ugly looking Basic runtime error. I had to delete the problem files, kill the Open Office (stop macro did not) and rerun the tool. Otherwise, it just run.

No, I am not complaining about food. I love food. And I love it different and - sometimes even - adventurous. Which is where Sour Grapes come in.

We have been walking around the neighborhood and have discovered Middle Eastern shop with some unusual but recognizable foods and some not-quite-recognizable ones. Our strategy with the later is usually to buy it and then google for its name/recipe. Usually it works quite well.

Not so, with the “Sour Grape Ground”, which looks like brown sand-like stuff with some white flecks. And it is impossible to find on the internet.

The problem of course is that “sour grape” means complaining, and there is a lot of that on the internet.

So, in the end, we just had to go from the general description. We had it in a stew and it was nice, though not outstanding. This probably has more to do with us not knowing the proportions, than with with the sour grapes themselves.

They say at BarCamp that if you don’t like the session you are in, feel free to go to a better one. No hard feelings. But what do you do, if you show up for the announced moderated discussion session yet the moderator does not.

That’s what happened to us with the last (5:15pm) slot of the second day of BarCampNYC3. So, after waiting for 10 minutes past the start time, I decided to step in and moderate.

We talked a bit about everything: a definition of Artificial Intelligence (no agreement) and statistical algorithms that try to find the tanks, tune adverts and prevent SPAM. We discussed the state of art in computer vision and why once well-known consumer company in that space (Riya) still failed miserably. Near the end, we also talked about artificial intelligence as an emotional one and whether Pleo is intelligent.

All together, it was a very spirited discussion and most of the people contributed their opinion and their knowledge. We may not have discussed what the original moderator had in mind, but we certainly discussed interesting topics.

I have gone (and will go back tomorrow) to the BarCampNYC3. The requirement for every person to speak was not enforced, but I figured I have something to contribute anyway. I brought and talked about the Chumby. I entitled my talk “Chumby - Open, Cool, Cute“.

My session must have only had 6 people in it, but I think all those people were interested and asked good questions. I certainly got some queries after the talk and even later in the evening, when I put Chumby on display again. Certainly, the accelerometer-based Chumball widget was inviting; after all, the only other well-known device that supports accelerometer is iPhone. I even got a positive review of the session already.

I also got to speak to some people about my research and allowed for a silly photograph to be taken of me.

I have enjoyed a number of other sessions. Not every presenter had a strong idea of what they wanted to say, but there was plenty of people in the audience willing to lend their understanding and interpretation. I think this must a part of BarCamp’s culture.