Category Archives: Programming

Cookies and Internet Explorer

Cookies for everybodyImagine you have a Zend Framework (version 1) application on a domain example.org, and another on a domain admin.example.org. They both have authentication mechanisms using Zend_Auth. This authentication information is stored in a browser cookie. Now I came across this problem that being logged in on both systems does not pose any problems with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, but for some very strange reason, Microsoft Internet Explorer didn’t like it. The admin.example.org domain would be broken if you were logged in on example.org first. The server spewed out a 500 Internal Error, so I checked in the server logs to see what the heck was happening.
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Webcam streaming, signals, and Computer Vision

In my previous blog post, I wrote about my webcam library, which I recently applied to an SDL application to show streaming pictures in an SDL frame, and it works pretty well. The code can be found in a branch on my GitHub.

When I posted about my webcam library on a social network, someone mentioned a C++ library that would do all the computer vision stuff I mentioned in the blog post. This library is called OpenCV. I took a quick look, and it seems very feature-rich. It is supposed to have a set of functions for accessing the webcam as well. I guess I should read more on motion analysis and object tracking, but first I’ll play with some of the basic features of OpenCV, such as image processing and image analysis.

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Simple webcam access in C

I have been wanting to write something that detects things in real-time, on images streamed from a webcam. People who have watched the RoboCop, Terminator, or Iron Man movies, will probably remember the rectangles or circles around objects in video, with a description next to it. While having a rectangle around my head would be a good start, I’d like my computer to also recognize other things, such as a book, a key or any other object. But to do this, I needed a simple interface to my webcam, so that I can say with one function that I want to read in a frame from the webcam.

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Multi-lingual resource in Zend Framework 1

To continue my previous post, but this time tie it to the Zend Framework (version 1), I have added a ZF application resource plugin to my library which redirects the visitor to the correct language sub-domain according to his browser’s settings. This plugin will take care of the redirection logic, and keep all the necessary information for the application to provide the user with the GUI elements for switching languages.

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Multi-lingual support in software development

One of the biggest challenges in software development is multi-lingual support. Surely you could create different versions of the application, and translate the bits of text where translation is needed. But this is not practical, as you would then have to maintain a multitude of versions.

In this post I hope to shed light on some tasks to make your application multi-lingual.
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