tech

I finished revamping the bitmap-to-line-segments algorithm to deal with "branching" ... where a horizontal line has multiple "columns" descending below it. A little bit of state-saving and recursion made it all work magically. The algorithm needs a couple tweaks though; nothing major. Next, instead of simply depicting

I spent most of today consuming far more calories than I ought to have, and only a little bit of time improving the rectangle-ish-area-detection algorithm. What I've got now is the ability to find horizontal lines which start anywhere directly under the base line (where the first base

I should be working. But I'm not. This Word Verifier thing is so much more interesting. First, I opened the url for the Word Verifier image on the comments page, and refreshed it until I found a very simple example; and my lucky letters were eiifv. I decided

Okay, so, Randal had some good things to say (and they're incoporated into the code, below). One bug was pointed out: a state could arise where the last recipient is also the last giver, and that'll make the program go into an infinite loop. However, that

Back in the days of the Internet Bubble, when stocks of which I owned none were doing so very well, it was expected that everyone in the family would buy at least one gift for everyone else in the family. n * (n - 1) gifts. Ridiculous. When the word budget

Apparently that's supposed to mean something to me. It sounds pretty funny. I guess I need to keep reading the manual. I just a got a new phone, you see, and it'll supposedly run little Java programs ... they call them MIDlets. Like Applets. Only smaller. Stupid.

According to statcounter, someone at Daimler Chrysler (who was using Windows XP and a screen resolution of 1024x768 ... eek) needs help "converting" an OutputStream to an InputStream. The exact question was phrased, convert outputstream to inputstream. I think that there could be at least a couple fairly legitimate

According to the log file, some poor soul stumbled across my blog while searching for covert inputstream to string on Google. And sure enough ... second site. Sweet. Anyway, going out on a limb here, I think he was probably meaning convert. For the benefit of Google indexing, I'll

Hypothetically, let's say that you didn't much care for high school, begrudgingly (and briefly) attended college, slavedaway as a salariedminion for years, turned free-lance, and found yourself in the position of needing to migrate geometry data from MapInfoSpatialWare running on SQL Server to PostGIS running on

With inspiration from ps.c ... given a pid, determine the full path to the corresponding executable. #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <limits.h> #include <sys/sysctl.h> int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) { if (argc != 2) { printf("usage: