havemurci

When I read, I hate to be distracted. I found that using most online dictionaries is frustrating because you have to mentally block out ads, pronunciation info and etymologies, Google results, etc. I wanted something with as few words as possible. The Mac's built-in dictionary was OK, but when I switched to PC I knew it was time to make something. I'm just getting into programming / web design, so I know it has some bugs. Namely, it has a problem with plurals and pronouns. Here's the link - I hope someone out there finds it useful!

www.eaisy.com

The Lytro Camera's engineering (and especially marketing) teams freely use technical jargon to describe their invention. However, what they do can be distilled into much simpler terms. So after reading through the founder's Stanford thesis, and other online resources, here's my take on how the Lytro works.

Just like any camera, the Lytro has an optical lens that focuses to any distance. It has a relatively large aperture of f/2.0, which allows for a relatively shallow depth of field.

The only bit of hardware that's special or unique about a light-field camera is its 'micro-lens' array. The array is a repeated pattern of 3x3 matrices. Each of these 9 different microlenses focuses the light slightly closer or slightly farther away than the others. When you take a picture, the camera records data on the sensor that is then processed into exactly 9 pictures, each corresponding to a slightly different focal length (and therefore a slightly different band of the photo that’s in focus).

The software then uses contrast detection to make a 20x20 sub-matrix indicating which of the nine images is in focus at the chosen point in the image. When you click on a point on a ‘living image’, it looks up that point and loads the image for which that point is most in focus.

The Lytro contains an 11 megapixel sensor. But because it takes 9 photos at once, the effective resolution of the final photograph is 1080x1080 pixels.

It’s not a very complicated design: A microlens array that adjusts the focus on a small scale to produce 9 different images, each with a slightly different range of focus.

Thinking about ‘rays’ of light isn’t necessary to understand how it works.

Here’s a video of the founder getting tripped up when a reporter pinpoints how his technology works (1:05)

http://video.forbes.com/fvn/sxsw-2012/eric-cheng-lytro-lightfield-camera

Email sent directly to me from the Meteor mailing list:

[Summary: Huge launch, caught by surprise. Big license announcement FRIDAY.]

A week ago we posted meteor.com to Hacker News. We thought a few hundred people would see it, maybe a thousand if we were lucky. Then, the theory went, with the veil of secrecy lifted, we could start in on the hard part -- convincing anyone to look at what we were doing, or care.

Five minutes after clicking the submit button, it was already clear that we had miscalculated by three orders of magnitude. No, the dashboard wasn't broken, there were 5,000 simultaneous users on the website. (And the single-process Meteor app running the site was doing fine.) We expected a few dozen deploys but got ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED. Vimeo says that 70,000 people watched the screencast. What fraction of all living JavaScript developers is that?

"Makes me want to build things." "Blew my mind." "Is this the future of web development?" (Yes, Alex, it is.) "I think I just saw the future." "crazy voodoo magic" "dark sorcery" "This is completely bananas." "I am falling in love."

Even as I write this, 100 people are active on docs.meteor.com and a new app is getting deployed every three minutes. 150 people are hanging out in IRC, and people are answering each other's questions on Stack Overflow and Quora. It's like a perpetual, international Meteor hackathon.

It's all happening much faster than we thought. It's going to be a wild ride, and I'm so happy that you've decided to ride with us. We have some hard work to do now, though. We have to turn this excitement and energy into a real community, and we have to implement the rest of the roadmap and ship a 1.0.

LICENSING UPDATE

Licensing is the first order of business. Many people sent comments. There were three kinds:

1) People who were frustrated because they wanted to use Meteor for a project, but couldn't tell if it was allowed or how much it would cost.

2) Detailed analyses of legal, strategic, and technological implications of every possible choice we could make. This was AWESOME and was incredibly helpful. Some of the people who wrote in are smarter and better informed than any license attorney I've ever talked to.

3) "You suck, you really screwed this up, you are bad people." These comments weren't as helpful, but we're still glad to have them.

I really apologize to everyone who was frustrated. We thought it was going to be months before anyone was interested enough in Meteor to care about the license. Clearly that was wrong.

Licensing is tricky. We're working hard to fix the problem. ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, we will announce the options for using Meteor in closed-source, commercial software. I think nearly everyone will be happy with the solution. We'll post the announcement on Hacker News, and we'll also send an email to the list. I hope you'll upvote and redistribute as you find appropriate, because even though there are 6,000 people on this list, that's still only 5% of the uniques we've seen on meteor.com.

See you on Friday :)

-- Geoff, Matt, Nick, David