Menhardt

wido_skiing

Mon, 12 May 2008 02:36:03 Z

Carson Pass May 2008

Sonora Pass May 2007

Roundtop 2006

Leavitt Lake 2005

Carson Pass May 2002

Sonora Pass - Ski Nazi

wido_surfing

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:06:32 Z

Wido

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:04:10 Z

Wido Menhardt

wido_trips

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 22:58:01 Z

Nicaragua 07/08

Canada Summer 06

Mexico 05/06

Nicaragua 04/05

High Road to Taos

Baja 2002

bio

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:43:41 Z

Wido Menhardt

Wido Menhardt is an experienced technology executive with a passion for taking technology ideas from scratch to market, and to then scale them to volume deployment.

Mr. Menhardt is Vice-President, Engineering at Philips Healthcare Informatics, responsible for a global informatics infrastructure organization of close to 300 engineers in Silicon Valley, the Netherlands and Bangalore.

As CTO of his last start-up, he managed to drive a cancer detection software product from proof-of-concept to successful FDA submission in only 18 months. After acquisition by Kodak, he stayed on as General Manager for another 2.5 years to launch the product in the US. At Eastman Kodak, he drove business development activities to broaden the product portfolio inorganically, and he initiated organic business growth in China.

After leaving Kodak, Dr. Menhardt focussed on products in the field of data mining, mostly using Ruby On Rails. He built a document classification and clustering engine for a personalized information discovery start-up, and designed several Web 2.0/Ruby on Rails websites for applications such as geo mash-ups, social networks, and wiki indexing. He is one of the organizers of the 2006 Bay Area RubyOnRailsCamp.

Previously, he served as CTO and Vice-President Engineering for Cedara Software, first in Toronto and later as the General Manager of Cedara’s Silicon Valley offices. He was responsible for Cedara’s (then “ISG”) flagship 3D visualization product at the time of the IPO, and as VP Engineering played a critical role in building a successful engineering consulting practice with a global customer list including GE, Siemens, Philips, Toshiba and Hitachi. As CTO, he provided technology leadership to close to 500 software engineers, and initiated several innovative incubator products including a domain-specific application framework and embeddable high-performance imaging software components.

Dr. Menhardt started his career at Philips medical systems in Hamburg (Germany) and Eindhoven (Netherlands) where he authored more than 50 papers in journals and at conferences on topics ranging from MRI physics to Fuzzy Logic. In his capacity as research leader he also started the highly acclaimed multi-national COVIRA project with 1M Euro of EU funding and participation by IBM and Siemens.

Wido Menhardt holds a PhD in Computer Science from Hamburg University, and an MSc in Physics from the Technical University of Vienna. He lives in Los Gatos, California with his wife and two children.

trixi_miata

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 02:19:26 Z

Miata Times Two

trixi_xmas_parade

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 02:15:42 Z

Los Gatos Christmas Parade 2007

Trixi

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 02:13:59 Z

Select on left...

wido_technical_problems

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:09:15 Z

Home Webcam Problem - November 06, 2007

I have a Panasonic BL-C10A webcam at home. It has an integrated webserver, which allows interactive control and real-time viewing.

Before this week, I had Covad DSL without a fixed IP. I used my netgear router for uPnP to broadcast my current IP for port forwarding to the webcam. Panasonic has the xxx.viewnetcam.com service that discovers the current IP and lets others on the internet point their browser to the current IP, and via port forwarding to my webcam. The webcam itself is password protected, so I put the camera controls on menhart.com/Cam, and it would then ask for credentials.

This I can check on "driveway status" from away from home, and family overseas can, for example, watch jumping house birthday parties on the driveway in realtime.

Well, Covad's DSL has become incredibly bad - it will cut out (disconnect) every couple of minutes. This is after it worked flawlessly for six years. I've paid for their technicians to come out and check things out, and they exchanged the DSL modem, rewired the internal phone lines, all to no effect. Of course when I told them these should not be the problems, because the same setup worked fine for six years, they would ignore that. So time to give up on that.

So we had surfnet installed. This is line-of-sight wireless (wifi, actually) - from our house we can see one of their base stations on the other side of town (up on Montevina). Surfnet primarily caters to the Los Gatos and Santa Cruz mountain communities, but since we're far enough up we see the signal. We got the 1M service, and it delivers as promised. Ok, occasionally, the download is "stuck" for a minute, but this does not happen often, and the connection/session is not interrupted.

BUT, surfnet has a strict "no webservers" policy, and the whole uPnP/port forwarding/xxx.panasonic set up does not work.

Luckily, the Panasonic webcam has another useful feature, which is ftp. So I set it up such that every minute, the webcam uses ftp to upload the latest image to a hosted webserver, and that is now what www.menhardt.com/Cam points to. It works quite well!

MyISAM Fulltext Search Problem - June 10, 2007

(I posted this at http://lists.mysql.com/internals/34720 and it has been submitted as a bug report to MySQL http://lists.mysql.com/internals/34786)

I have a MyISAM table "movies" with a fulltext index on the title column. In there, I have among many other titles:

"City Of God"
"An Unreasonable Man"

I do a query like:
select title from movies where match (movies.title) against ('+city of*' in boolean mode);

This query NEVER RETURNS - it results in a locked table and a bogged down mysql, even ^C out of the commandline client does not make the query go away (the table has less than 300 entries at this point, it's not big!).

('+city of') or ('+city') returns the right thing, and to tell you the truth, the '+city of*' was a programming error (not mine :-), but still, why does it lock up mysql?

Ubuntu-Vista Dual Boot Problem - April 26, 2007

(I posted this at http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-425328.html)

My son has a Vista dual core machine, and I thought that I'd put Ubuntu on it so I could use it as a server from my office when he's at school. And if I need it, he could be playing his on-line games in Firefox (actually, not, because I failed miserably to install Java so he could play runescape on Firefox/Ubuntu, but that's another story).

I had recently installed Ubuntu 6.10 as dual-boot on an XP machine in our kitchen and that works very well (after some issues with the graphics card, where garlik42 on this forum helped me out, thanks).

So I put the Ubunto CD in, and it did not give me the automatic repartitioning option - just reformat and manually repartition. This is a Dell machine, and it already had 3 partitions (one of them has the recovery on it, I guess). So I added another partition, but wait... you need 2 (swap and /), so I added an extended partition, and within it, those two. Then I let the installer do its work - 160GB disk, so it took a but of time, but all seemed to go well, and Ubuntu works... except for that it is really not all that fast - it's actually slower than a vmware virtual machine with debian that I run hosted on an XP machine with lesser hardware. I need to check whether Ubuntu takes advantage of the dual core or not.

Anyway, all was well until my son came back to play a game and wanted to boot to Vista. It complained, and suggested some sort of repair operation, and when I agreed, it went away... for hours.... overnight... nothing happened. My son was in tears, and went around shouting I HATE UBUNTU !!! I HATE UBUNTU !!! Not only can he not play his games, it's his birthday tomorrow (11th), and his grandfather's present is a new PC game!

I reverted to on-board graphics, and I had the same behavior. There were three disks that came with the Dell box. One was a pretty cool hardware test utitilities DVD, and I ran through many of those, all was fine. There was a Vista recoveryDVD, and it would boot from there, but quickly go to the good old black screen, and sit there. For reasons unknown there was also a Vista upgrade DVD, and it would boot from there, and go to the black screen, again without return. Nothing worked.

Then I popped an old XP Upgrade CD in there, because I had used its repair facility once before. This got me a step further - it never got to repair, just to the stop screen with error code 0x0000007B.

There is a Microsoft knowledge base about it. One of the suggestions was to put the drive into another computer. So I did, and of course at first the computer didn't recognize the drive at all, apparently this SATA thing had to be enabled in the bios of the other computer, but when I started it up after that, Windows (XP in this case) started chkdsk on it, and repaired some stuff, and I could read the drive fine. I then put it back into the other computer, and now Vista and Ubuntu both boot and work as advertised.

I am not sure there is a lesson here - Ubuntu is great and free, but it definitely still requires some doing - the two times I tried a dual boot install so far (which allows me to recklessly generalize) resulted in problems that even a smart but non-engineering person like my wife would not have been able to handle.

Most important, though, my son will actually have a Happy Birthday !!! :)

Ruby UTF8 to HTML converter - April, 2007

I needed to put utf8 multibyte characters into a webpage. I forget the details, except that I think I tried everything, including iconv, etc., so I looked up the definition of utf and multibyte characters on wikipedia, and also how funky characters are encoded in HTML, and wrote a little Ruby helper.

def utf8_to_html( str )
    outstr = ''
    i = 0
    while ( i < str.size )
      # ASCII character
      if (str[i] & 0b1000_0000) == 0
        outstr << str[i]
        i += 1
      # UTF-8 2 byte character
      elsif (str[i] & 0b1110_0000) == 0b1100_0000 && i < str.size-1
        x1 = str[i+1] & 0b0011_1111
        x2 = str[i] & 0b0001_1111
        x2 = x2 * 0b0100_0000
        outstr << '&#' + (x1+x2).to_s + ';'
        i += 2
      # 3/4 byte character? (unlikely, so ignore for now)
      else
        i += 1
      end
    end
    outstr
end

Innodb Rollback Corruption and MySQL Recovery - March 3, 2007

It seems that our database on MaxWiki entered a corrupt state today.

Here is how I recovered from it:

I was able to bring the database up using
```
innodb_force_recovery = 5
```
in the MySQL config file my.conf ( see http://www.mysql.org/doc/refman/5.1/en/forcing-recovery.html).

We dumped the tables using:

mysqldump -       mysqldump --database typo -uroot -pROOTPASSWORD > typo.sql

shut down the database
move all files out of /usr/bin/mysql elsewhere

re-install the database:

mysqld_safe --user=mysql

mysql_install_db --user=mysql

mysqladmin -u root password ROOTPASSWORD

reload all the tables from the sql files
reset the users

In summary, this actually quite simple and quick... but it was pretty scary at first.

acts_as_attachment Problem on Windows - January 30, 2007

(I posted this at http://beast.caboo.se/forums/2/topics/801)

acts_as_attachment would not work for me (using a windows box for this), while it did work for others on the project (who use linux or macs).

After some digging, I found that the attachment_data was much shorter than the file, and what happens of course is that one windows you have to use "rb" instead of "r". Tempfile does noÂÂÂÂÂÂÂ™t do that.

So what worked for me was to change in instance_methods.rb

#uploaded_data=  self.attachment_data = file_data.read

self.attachment_data = File.open( file_data.path,"rb").read

And that seems to work, but it broke the Mac solution. So I made it conditional on the Ruby platform variable.

honey_do_list

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 20:15:04 Z

High Priority

~~Unser Badezimmer: Rahmen von Oberlichten abnehmen~~
~~Eingangstuer: Winterabdichtung~~
~~Kinderschwimmbad auslassen~~
~~Teich: Abfluss abdichten (ansonsten wird das wieder so versifft wie jedes Jahr, wenn wir keine Fische hineintun)~~
Fahrradabstellplatz : nachdem das in der Garage ein Problem ist wegen der Gefahr dass die Autos zerkratzt werden, sollte es eine Alternative geben, zb koennten wir bei Homedepot ein Plastikshed kaufen (Keleigh hat solche vor der Garage stehen, die sind sehr haesslich aber wir koennten sie neben dem Buero verstecken.)

Also High Priority

Kinder Badezimmer: Stange fuer den Duschvorhang befestigen
Unser Badezimmer: Tuerstaffel
Playroom: Vorhang "stange" fuer die Aussentier (entweder Holz oder Metallseil)
Wohnzimmer: Jalousietuer im Durchgang zum Vorzimmer (letztes Jahr hattest du dem zugestimmt aber dann nicht gemacht)?
Abstell/ Materiallager neben dem Buero: Sichtbarriere, zb die gekreuzten Latten mit Schanier an Pfosten befestigen ?

test

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:35:58 Z

geotest1

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:30:55 Z

map

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:27:57 Z

Google Map With Street-Level Photos

Link to Photo Map

Good Old Map (the best)

Google Map (wrong)

<%= gmap :gmapid => 'gmap', :marker => false, :height => 200, :width => 400, :address => "17706 Blackberry, CA 95030" %> <%= gmarker :gmapid => 'gmap', :address => "17706 Blackberry, CA 95030", :content => "This is where Google thinks it is" %> <%#= gmarker :gmapid => 'gmap', :lat => 37.2125, :long => -121.9522, :content => "This is where it really is" %>

fischer

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:02:16 Z

Powerschool

http://www.powerschool.lgusd.k12.ca.us/public/

user 200733 password

Mr. McCormick - Math

EMAIL <%= email 'kemccormick@lgusd.k12.ca.us' %>

HOMEWORK http://www.rjfisher.lgusd.k12.ca.us/Staff/kemccormick/index.htm

Mrs. Zumbiel - English

EMAIL <%= email 'bzumbiel@lgusd.k12.ca.us' %>

HOMEWORK http://www.rjfisher.lgusd.k12.ca.us/Staff/bzumbiel/index.htm

Ms. Baham - History

EMAIL <%= email 'sbaham@lgusd.k12.ca.us' %>

HOMEWORK http://www.rjfisher.lgusd.k12.ca.us/Staff/sbaham/index.htm

Mrs. Tsakiris - Science

EMAIL <%= email 'ntsakiris@lgusd.k12.ca.us' %>

HOMEWORK http://www.rjfisher.lgusd.k12.ca.us/Staff/ntsakiris/index.htm

Mrs. Vickers - Skills for Adolescence

EMAIL <%= email 'cvickers@lgusd.k12.ca.us' %>

HOMEWORK http://www.rjfisher.lgusd.k12.ca.us/Staff/cvickers/index.htm

wido_patents

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 23:16:37 Z

Issued Patents

7,237,199	Architecture for an application framework
6,661,869	Image reconstruction using multiple X-ray projections
6,587,541	Three dimensional image reconstruction from single plane x-ray fluorograms
6,473,488	Three dimensional image reconstruction from single plane X-ray fluorograms
6,470,070	Image reconstruction using multiple X-ray projections

(Published) Pending Patents

20060222228	Bone density screening and mammography CAD system
20060122467	Method and system for computer aided detection (cad) cued reading of medical images
20060000884	Patient identification method for x-ray film user-interfaces
20040234125	System and method for assigning mammographic view and laterality to individual images in groups of digitized mammograms
20040181412	Medical imaging analysis using speech synthesis
20040024292	System and method for assigning a computer aided detection application to a digital image
20030118151	Image reconstruction using multiple X-ray projections
20030043969	Three dimensional image reconstruction from single plane X-ray fluorograms
20020106052	Three dimensional image reconstruction from single plane X-ray fluorograms
20020106051	Image reconstruction using multiple X-ray projections