Jarosław Szmigielski's techblog

My personal adventure with IT

Comcute – volunteer computing project

March 30th, 2014

Recently I’ve found out that my alma mater had created a volunteer computing project called Comcute. It’s first distributed computing project in Poland. It has been made as an real alternative for BOINC system. The project got a financial grant from polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

Comcute has some unique features that distinguish it from other projects of that type. It works with any modern internet browser – you don’t need to install any additional software to start. The computation algorithms are implemented in JavaScript. Selected usage of the system:

  • Genetic Positioning of Fire Stations
  • Image Processing Techniques
  • Mersenne Number Finding
  • Distributed Detection of Selected Features in Data Streams

There is also a Wikipedia article about the system. It can be found here.

Official website: http://comcute.eti.pg.gda.pl

Kinect gesture recognition

January 20th, 2013

Recently, together with my friends, we’ve finished our engineering degree work  entitled “Controlling Windows OS using trained gestures with Microsoft Kinect.” at Gdansk University of Technology. I’ve prepared simple not-so-technical presentation of our solution on the YouTube

IDE for Python

October 28th, 2012

Python hasn’t got any official IDE (besides IDLE which we cannot call complete Integrated Development Environment, it’s rather Python graphical shell). The most popular environment for Python is probably PyCharm. It’s very complex in functionality but quite simple to use IDE, I use it in Intel and I can say that it’s very enjoyable. It’s biggest disadvantage is price and that excludes PyCharm from the private use on my laptop.

I must’ve find some replacement to develop applications in Python. My colleague helped me with this problem and proposed me extension for Visual Studio called Python Tools for Visual Studio. I was very surprised by a level of support for this language. It gives a full handling of autocompletion with IntelliSense and provides us debugging mechanism known from Visual Studio – the basic and most fundamental functionalities for programmers 😉 There are lots of other minor features that help coding in python with Visual Studio but I give you a free hand to discover them 🙂

I can definitely recommend you Visual Studio with the extension mentioned above as a primary IDE for Python for private use.