The NZ government declared that they want to merge three ministries, including Science and Innovation (MSI), into one super ministry. The last merger for MSI took more than a year to implement and during that time no funding proposals were accepted. I truly hope that this merger will not set research grants back by another year.
Author: Christoph Bartneck
Best Video Award at HRI2012
Our video entitled “Demonstrating Maori Haka with Kinect and Nao Robots” has received a Best-Video-Award at the HRI2012 conference. Congratulations to the team! The trophy is a gold painted KeepOn robot!
![](http://www.hitlabnz.org/images/stories/news/hriAward.jpg)
Importing matching images in Filemaker
I wasted a whole week on a Filemaker problem when trying to re-import images. In my database, I had several thousand images as links to the original files. The images were in JPG and now I wanted to replace them with PSD versions that were located at the exact same location on the hard disk. For each image I had meta information that I did not want to loose. I created a new field called “path_correct” in which I substituted “jpg” with “psd” from the image path field to get an accurate match with the PSD files. You can also get the path by using the GetAsText function on the image container.
In theory, you could import the folder that contains all the PSD images and select “import matching records” and use the path_correct field as the matching field. What happened during the import was very confusing at first. If, for example, I had four images in a sub folder, then all those four images would receive data from only the last image in the folder.
The problem is that although the field “path” or my “path_corrected” shows that whole path, including the file name,
file://hardDisk/Users/bartneck/Documents/photos/minifigure-01165/minifigure-01165-01.psd
the matching worked only up to the folder level, excluding the image file name, in this case minifigure-01165-01.psd. During the import, Filemaker found several matches in the database for
file://hardDisk/Users/bartneck/Documents/photos/minifigure-01165/
and imported the data into all matching records. This is a true bug with Filemaker. The path field shows the path including the file name, but during import only the path excluding the file name is being considered. This is also not documented at all.
The solution is to use both the path and the filename field as matching fields for the import. Then each image in the database has a unique identifier that matches the images on the hard disk. I hope that this post helps others to avoid the same problem.
Facetree software wins award
Our Facetree software has been awarded third prize at the RootsTech Developer Challenge. Ellie Rasmus, lead developer, presented the software at the RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City and received the honour, including a cash prize of 1500 USD. We are very proud and excited about winning this award.
Firmware update for Drobo FS repairs Time Machine support
The release of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) made it difficult, if not impossible, to use a Drobo FS as a backup destination for Time Machine. The forums were full of frustrated users that had bought the Drobo FS in the believe that the marketing was actually true. Drobo released a firmware update (2.1) but this did not work for me and many others users. I already suspected that Drobo had given up supporting the Drobo FS, but today I noticed that a new firmware (2.1.1) appeared. I updated both the firmware and the desktop client and this fixed the problem. After six months of having to use an external hard drive for my backups, I was finally able to use the Drobo FS again for what I intended it to be.
But I am still disappointment by the lack of updates for Firefly and Fuppes. Both apps do sound very nice, but they are so outdated that they do not play nice with the latest release of iTunes or other media streaming clients. Again, the Drobo marketing does not live up to reality.