tech

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I got a new phone that runs little Java MIDlets, and I have one idea: a Sleep Mode that answers calls, announces itself, and lets the caller decide whether to actually wake me. For the cousin who smears spackle in her eyes at night, basically.

Someone at Daimler Chrysler searched for how to convert an OutputStream to an InputStream and landed on my logs. My answer: GinormousBuffer, a FIFO that lives in RAM until a threshold, then pages out to disk, all behind one consistent interface.

Some poor soul found my blog searching for "covert inputstream to string." Assuming they meant convert, here is how to do it in Java, along with all the reasons you probably shouldn't read an 8GB Titanic rip into memory.

Hypothetically, say you need to migrate geometry data from MapInfo SpatialWare on SQL Server to PostGIS on PostgreSQL, and a million monkeys aren't available to help. You might write this Java. Or you might not. It's hard to tell with some people.

With inspiration from ps.c: given a pid, here's C that walks the kernel process arguments via sysctl to determine the full path to the corresponding executable.