Bring out the Gimp
The GIMP is a free Photoshop alternative, according to people who have never actually used Photoshop. For its tenth anniversary they ran a splash screen contest called Gimp Splash 10, and the Slashdot comments wrote themselves.
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Concoctions of Caliginosity #3
Delta pilots took another voluntary paycut, so maybe my eighty-five-cent shares will be worth something yet. Plus this year's leap second, which you will need to remember to adjust your clocks for. Good luck with that.
Word Verification Reader, Update #3
I revamped the bitmap-to-line-segments algorithm to handle branching, and it works magically with a little state-saving and recursion. If this ever works reliably, I may end up inventing my own Nobel Prize to quiet my conscience.
Christmas Mayhem
I hate shopping, and I really hate it at Christmas. A tale of a Toni & Guy gift certificate, an outrageous haircut price, and a Batteries For Life watch deal I can no longer cash in because I lost the tiny little card.
Word Verification Reader, Update #2
Progress on the Word Verification reader: horizontal-line detection under the base line, plus branch detection where multiple lines descend from one. Includes my still-unformed theory on why everyone drives like a homicidal maniac this time of year.
Word Verification Reader, Update #1
I should be working, but defeating the comment Word Verifier is far more interesting. I grabbed a simple image (my lucky letters: eiifv), decompressed it with libjpeg in C, and started separating letters from background. Fun, fun, fun.
'Drawing Names' for Christmas, Revisited
How I'd revisit the 'drawing names' program: a Lisp-loving colleague who blindly copied my infinite-loop bug, then doubled his code to hide it. Version 2.0 of my Perl creation, may it bring you a merrier Christmas.
Concoctions of Caliginosity #2
More thinking on Word Verification parsing, and I think it's doable without a Ph.D. Reduce each letter to line segments, match left to right against tolerances, and handle naughty letters that touch. Plus a beautiful piece of art: free cat.
Unions are Evil; Stand on Your Own, Whiny Brats
Do the striking MTA union workers even understand the issues, or are they blindly following their leaders? Either they walked off the job knowingly, or they're dumb. Either way, fire them all; plenty of people would be grateful for the work.
'Drawing Names' for Christmas
Back in the Internet Bubble days, everyone bought everyone a gift. When budget returned to the vocabulary, I was called upon to write a program to draw names. December 2000, behold my creation.