Day: November 11, 2005

Fog of War: A Truly Thoughtful Movie

I only just tonight got to watch Fog of War, a documentary which interviews Robert S. McNamara and draws from his past experiences lessons about the nature of foreign policy and wars.

One of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking movies I’ve seen about a person who advised presidents who had the power to wipe out entire countries with a single military order, and who years later realized that nuclear warfare and human fallibility can only mean something horrible for this society of ours.

You must see this movie; after you do, you’ll also see why I’m not so quick to buy the line about the necessity of Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

User interfaces with GTK+ and Glade

I’ve been hacking up a user interface for my motion capture/computer vision project called “Hand2Hand,” found here.

At first I was gonna do the user interface in Python and have the image processing done in C, but then I decided that the user interface was simple enough that I should just give GTK+ in “pure C” form a try. Of course, I used Glade, which drastically reduces the amount of annoying code for things like Vboxes and Hboxes and Containers you have to write. In fact, using Glade, interface design becomes somewhat straightforward in C. Which is weird, because C seems like it was never built for user interface design, but the g_signal system makes it easy to catch events that occur in your program, and GTK+ is high enough abstracted that you can do pretty well. I don’t know how well GTK+ scales for large programs (i.e. many dialogs, many lists, etc.)–in that case, I think I’d definitely pick a higher level language.

Looking forward to how this application may turn out. OpenCV looks like a pretty awesome library.