Shape Collage

Some collages of Tiki made using Shape Collage

Shape Collage is the latest side project that I've been working on. It is an automatic photo collage making program that can make collages in different shapes. Just look at the collages above and at the end of the post to see what it can do. There are a lot more examples on the Shape Collage web page.

It's really easy to make a collage. You can make one with just 2 mouse clicks and in as little as a couple seconds! It's quite customizable as well, as you can change the shape to really, anything you want. You can even draw your own shape! You can also customize the border, background, etc.

Arranging photos into a collage

The photos are automatically placed in the desired shape of the collage using a machine learning algorithm that I came up with that is simple, but fast and effective. Basically what it does is put the photos on a page and jiggle them around so they are arranged nicely. This is a much harder problem than you may think. My readers with some knowledge of computer science will be familiar with NP problems. My algorithm isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job most of the time. If you're really anal about it, you can save the collage as a Photoshop PSD and edit the collage in Photoshop if you don't like the automatic placement of the photos.

I started working on this project b/c I read a paper that automatically created a photo collage and thought that it was really cool, especially since it took me so long to make my Californian photo collage. Since they didn't actually release a program or their source code, I decided to just implement their approach, but it was overly complicated and rather slow - it took several minutes to create a collage with just 30 photos. So, I tried something simpler that was much faster - my program can easily create a collage with thousands of photos. Then I realized that my algorithm didn't have to only create rectangular collages and could also create collages in different shapes, something that I had never seen before, and so Shape Collage was created!

Anyways, check it out and let me know what you think! It's available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and anything that supports Java.

Snowboarding snowman collage

Volleyball collage

My computer screen

I love how there are multiple internet streaming feeds for this year's Olympics :)

As a bonus, I'm also able to record the videos right to my computer :)

Volleyball's wrecking my jewlery

I jammed my pinky finger about 2 weeks ago. It's swollen and I can't take off my iron ring anymore...

Tonight, my gold chain necklace got caught in the net while I was blocking (never happened before) and as I landed, it snapped. Gotta see if I can find a place that can relink the chain together...

Time to wash the floors

I figured that my floors were pretty clean until I walked around my apartment with my new volleyball shoes and looked at all the dirt that my shoes picked up.

In other news, 5 guys walk into a volleyball store and leave with over a grand in stuff...

Why I haven't been blogging

Hint: It starts with "L" and rhymes with "crazy"

I had a backlog of posts that I wanted to post and I didn't want to post new posts until I had posted these posts for fear that if I didn't post them, I'd never get around to posting them and they really needed to be posted, so due to my laziness and this posting mentality, all posting of posts was halted, and now to catch up, I'm posting a single post that summarizes all the posts that I wanted to post, and because of the diversity of topics in this post, I think there are more labels on this post than any other post that I've posted before. Post.

I have however, been keeping my delicious and picasaweb up to date, and those are always good if you want to check up on what I've been up to.

Here are the posts that you missed from the last 3 months or so:

iCat

• iCat backwards is taci, but iKitty, or iKit, for short, backwards is Tiki!


• I got her off of Craig's List and she's much cuter than your cat, dog, hamster, mouse, budgie, fish, snake, chinchilla, emu, baby, etc. :)

I've literally posted hundreds of photos of Tiki (737 as of this posting). I upload new pics as I download them from my camera (about weekly or bi-weekly).

Volleyball

Toronto Warriors 9-man Volleyball (San Francisco tournament pictures: here and here)


Coed Volleyball Intramurals


Men's Volleyball Intramurals

FaceDown

A program I made to download photos from facebook

Tribal Wars

I have a lot more free time since quitting this game

New TV show obsessions

(I didn't find this funny until I realized that Colbert was a fake character, at first, I just thought he was an idiot)




(I liked the video game)

Toilet Training.... my cat

Hint: it ends in a stand-off between a cat refusing to use the toilet and me fearing that she'll use my pillow as her new litter box

I've been tying garbage bags and shoelaces wrong this whole time

I recently discovered that knots are really cool (and useful!) I collected my findings on the most useful knots into a single illustrated document.


Real-life practical uses for the taut-line hitch, timber hitch, clove hitch, buntline hitch, sheet bend, and others

Happy 2nd (Real) Blogoversary!

I totally forgot about this (Oct. 14). Maybe I'll do a special post over the holidays about my blog, not that I've written too much here since the 3rd Blogoversary...

Canada Day 9-Man Tournament Day 2

Playoffs: Warriors vs Phoenix A

Men's finals: Connex "B" vs Phoenix A

Various clips of the Warriorettes

More Pictures

The tournament ended on Sunday, but I have been too lazy to upload the pics and videos and write about it until now. Most of my pics are of the girl's team b/c it's difficult to take pictures while playing :p

The guys didn't play as well the second day. We couldn't get fired up during the first game and had to split sets, when we should've taken both. We finished 8 out of 12, which just qualified us for the championship playoffs (instead of the consolation playoffs). The way that the rankings were done were kinda strange since it only counted the 2nd round robin after the re-pooling and was based first on the number of sets won, and then the point spread. I feel that we could beat teams that were ranked higher than us. For instance, we beat Outtahand the day before and they were ranked 4th. I think they had an easier pool than we did. Anyways, being 8th, that meant we had to play the 1st place team, which was Phoenix A and we didn't fare too well. They're a good, seasoned team. It was single elimination, which meant that we were out.

The finals was Connex "B" vs Phoenix A. I say "B" b/c it was really a mix between their A and B team. Note the numbers of the Connex players in the picture at the top: 4, 4, 8, 2, 2. There are duplicates b/c there are players from both the A and B teams playing. The backcourt had A players as well. Connex won. Yes, the same team that we almost took a game off. Not bad for a new team :)

For the guys, we felt that we did pretty good overall in the tournament. It was a good learning experience for the team, we managed to beat some seasoned teams, and made it into the playoffs, not bad for a new team. There are things we need to work on and playing real games helped show us what we need to focus on and watching 9-man games shows us what we should be doing. I'm confident that with our hard work and consistent practices, we'll be in good shape for the big tournament in San Francisco! Here's my list of things that I personally want to concentrate on:

1. Pass more with my hands. I'm doing more than I used to, but could be doing more.


2. Serve more accurately, more difficult, more consistent, and adjust better to wind conditions.


3. Stay fired up backcourt and really dive for the ball (yes, diving on concrete). Need to learn how to roll better as well.


4. Learn to read the hitters through the 3 sets of hands blocking my view. I noticed that the players on other teams were better readers than I am and were in the right position at the right time.

The girls did really well in the tournament! They went into the playoffs in first place! They basically rolled over anyone in their path after their first game of the tournament. Unfortunately, they lost to Connex B in the semi's, a team that they had beaten in the round robin earlier that day. The finals was Connex B vs Phoenix A, coincidentally, the same as on the men's side :), except that Phoenix won.

The club is off to a good start and things are only going to go up from here!