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I did something similar for my blind dog, which it used for a year before it died earlier this year. I a circuit like this one as starting point: http://www.kerrywong.com/2011/01/22/a-sensitive-diy-ultrasonic-range-sensor, and a cheap vibration motor like this one: https://www.dealextreme.com/p/repair-parts-vibration-motor-for-iphone-4-73348, but you can use a parallax PING module or something similar.

Basically, a controller (I used an atmega chip with an arduino bootloader) that sends pings and moves the motors stronger as the obstacle is closer. Mounted it on the head of the dog, and had the two vibration motors on two sides of the chest. The dog had it figured out in less than a day.

The only "hard" part is that if you go DIY all the way, you'll need an oscilloscope to build the ultrasonic sensor thing, otherwise it is rather simple.

I wonder if out of focus or blue detection methods will give you a metric which varies with the level of jpeg artifcats, after all the jpeg artifacts should make it more difficult to do things like edge detections etc which are the same the things that made more difficult by blurry and out of focus images

A google search for blur detection should bring up things that you can try, Here is series of posts that to do a good job of explaining some of the work involved

There is nothing new to the fact that the power factors of the fluorescent lights are less than ideal. I wrote an article on this a few months ago. From a consumer's perspective though, he/she is not paying more due to the poor power factor, as we pay the utility companies by KWh not VAh. For the power companies though, it is desirable to have the end users' power factors as close to 1 as possible since otherwise electricity is wasted on the power line.

From the version number it looks like Windows 7 is just a minor update to Windows Vista (6.1 versus 6.0).

I would agree as well, see a post in responding to the HEC here http://www.kerrywong.com/PermaLink,guid,f4326447-d f20-4dcd-993e-69da5a4956da.aspx