Dragisa Krsmanovic

El Paso, Mesilla, Alamogordo, White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns

My Flickr set

Official website

Three days of Robogames were in San Francisco’s Fort Mason this weekend.

My interest was in autonomous sumo robot competition.

Robot sumo is played on round black steel plate. Edges are marked white so robots can detect boundaries. The goal is to make a robot that would detect the opponent and push him out of the ring. Robots are autonomous so there is no radio control. There are several categories : 25g nano, 100g micro, 500g mini, 3kg, LEGO ..etc.

In both 500g and 3kg categories, Singapore’s Ngee Ann Polytechnic won all first three places.

What I could see, for all their design they used Microchip dsPIC microcontrollers and 10-20 Sharp infrarred proximity sensors pointing in all directions. They also used, what I didn’t know was legal, magnets underneath their robots to increase traction. They were fast and pushed their oponents from the rink with ease.

There is a proposition to include rfid chip in new Serbian ID cards.

I am not strictly against rfid but what this document proposes is to put
– biometric data (digital photo, fingerprint, signature)
– nationality
– id of parents
– home address

One more movie not to miss. 4 by Ilya Khrzhanovsky is like a Gogol’s horror story filmed in modern Russia. Trippy. Pay attention to this director !

Yesterday i went to see Spanish film Take My Eyes and the show was interrupted by a fire alarm in the building. We had to leave the theater and wait outside. Fifteen minutes later we were allowed back. This is the sound I recorded. The movie is very good. Pilar is a young mother living with a violent husband. Slowly she manages to set herself free.

Here is another sound from the streets of the Mission I recorded today.

The Descent (UK, 2005) New horror by Neil Marshall who did Dog Soldiers three years ago. A story about group of soldiers fighting werewolves in Scottish Highlands. This time it’s all hot chicks fighting creatures in a dark cave. What else can one want !

The Sun (Russia/France/Italy/Switzerland, 2005) by Aleksandr Sokurov. Slow, detailed portrait of Japanese emperor prior to his surender to Americans and his decision to renounce his divine nature. Great acting by Issei Ogata as emperor.

The Wayward Cloud (Taiwan, 2005) A porn actor and a girl meet during a water shortage in Taipei. With dancing and singing. I loved it. Ming-liang Tsai’s previous full feature, Goodby Dragon In, is one of the best movies that I saw in last few years.

Sa-Kwa (Korea, 2005) A story about one women and her relationship with different men in her life. A non-simplifying portrait of romantic relationship. Good first feature by Yi-kwan Kang.

Underground Game (Brazil, 2005) Probably my favorite movie from San Francisco International Film Festival. A lonely lounge pianist stalks women in Sao Paolo subway looking for his true love. And he finds her. Directed by Roberto Gervitz. Based on a story by Julio Cortazar.

A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or The Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos) (Philippines, 2005) A first feature by the 22-year old Raya Martin. Most of movie is silent, black and white. Done in style of early 20-th century theatrical films. So, so.

I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed (France, 2005) French are digging dirty moments from their recent past. This one is about kidnapping and disappearance of famous Moroccan political leader Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris in 1965 (Including involvement of Margaret Duras and Georges Fraju in it). Done in noir style. Interesting political thriller. By Serge Le Peron.

Workingman’s Death (2005, Austria/Germany) Great documentary about people doing hard physical work in different parts of the world. Filmed in Ukraine, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, China and Germany. Beautiful camera. By Michael Glawogger.

Art School Confidential (USA, 2006) I bet Terry Zwigoff went to art school at some point. Fun, fun !

Drawing Restraint 9 (USA, 2005) by Mathew Barney with Bjork. I felt asleep during the show but it’s not the fault of the movie. I liked it. Not as much as his Cremaster movies but it’s good. Realy.

Last weekend I went to SD Forum’s Silicon Valley Ruby Conference.

I started learning Ruby just recently. I heard about it a few months ago reading about some of these Web 2.0 startups. Seemed like that’s what cool kids use nowadays. Although it’s not that new language, it was invented in Japan in mid 90-ies, first English books appeared just few years ago.

Rails is an extension of Ruby (what experts call DSL – domain specific language) that helps you build web applications very quickly. It very cleanly separates view layer from controllers. You can generate your HTML by using RHTML files that look very similar to JSP’s. Ruby code is embedded in HTML using familiar <% = JSP syntax %>

Data to object mapping is done automatically and it expects your schema to be built in certain way. That means it might be hard to use it if you have proprietary database schema. For example, it expects all tables to have one primary key named ID.

Other thing that shows immaturity of this language is that Oracle drivers are still an effort of one person. They are built over Oracle 8i (which is desupported by Oracle now). I tested, they work on 10g. They are OCI drivers. That means you still have to install Oracle client software on your machine. For example, there are two versions of Oracle Jdbc drivers – OCI that use Oracle binaries and Thin that are 100% Java. There is no 100% Ruby version of Oracle drivers yet.

I haven’t worked on a software that didn’t need to talk to database in my career. Since I come from Oracle world, it was usually Oracle database. What I tried worked. Would I run my credit card processing system on Ruby ? Hmmm…

Built in 1929, it’s the design of Timothy Pflueger. He and his firm made several other Mexican-inspired Art Deco buildings in San Francisco. He designed 8 theater buildings including the Castro Theatre, Paramount Theatre in Oakland, New Mission, El Rey and Alhambra theatres. The Stock Exchange Tower and the interior of City Club and City College campus buildings.

In 1940 he brought Diego Rivera, right after his divorce from Frida Kahlo, to do City College mural. Frida went to San Francisco where she reconciled with Diego.

My flickr set .

Michael Wolf’s exhibition at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.