I .NET Rock!

I'm on .NET Rocks this week talking about concurrency -- a sure sign that Carl and Richard have run out of interesting people to talk to. Nonetheless, I try to not make too many mistakes when explaining Shared Memory Parallel, Software Transactional Memory, Message Passing, etc.

more ...

Good Post on the Byzantine Generals Problem

If you are interested in concurrent programming, you'll eventually come across the Byzantine Generals problem. Mark Nelson has a good post explaining it.

more ...

Writing A Technical Article, Pt. 1: Background

I thought I'd try blogging the development of a technical article; it might prove interesting to, I dunno', 3 people in the world.

I've been contracted to write a 2,500-words-plus-listings article on using AMD's CodeAnalyst profiler with Eclipse, especially relating to multithreaded / multicore development. So that's a pretty beefy …

more ...

I've Issued a DMCA Takedown of the NBA

Following the lead of the SFWA, which issued a takedown to a fan site based on nothing but the existence of the strings "Asimov" or "Silverberg" in a text file, I've demanded that NBA.com remove all pages that refer to "Larry O'Brien." Those bastards have been distributing my source …

more ...

Seam Generation Using A*

The key to content-aware image resizing (and other recent image algorithms) is the discovery of "seams" -- paths of pixels that don't differ much from each other. Such seams are   places where the picture can be "pulled apart" gracefully. In image resizing, the seam is discarded and the two remaining pieces …

more ...

Content-Aware Resizing: Looks Like C++

The good news is that I got a contract to write an article in which to discuss content-aware resizing (or rather, I got a contract for an article on performance tuning; I'll use the resizing algorithm as the sample).

The bad news is that the profiler I'll be discussing is …

more ...

Implementation of Content Aware Image Resizing

Regular readers will not be surprised to hear that I spent the morning working on an implementation of this.

Figuring out the "next" seam is simple enough, but coming up with an optimal sequence is going to take more time. Stay tuned...

Now, would you be most interested in seeing …

more ...

That's Annoying: HTTP Meta-Refresh In Feed Ads

I just glanced over at my RSS aggregator and was surprised to see a full-page Web ad for something I obviously wouldn't be interested in. I clicked the "back" button and saw the normal newspaper layout and a nondescript blogpost that had a Feedburner-supplied ad at the bottom.

Which, in …

more ...

Apology: Difficulty Commenting

Several people have let me know that comments often fail to post / validate. I'm planning on updating to the latest das Blog in a few weeks, after I do some traveling. Until then, I cannot afford to turn off CAPTCHA and I know that not every comment fails. My suggestion …

more ...

Content Aware Image Resizing: OMFG

This video of an image manipulation algorithm shown at SIGGRAPH is jaw-dropping. They calculate paths through an image that have low entropy and either delete or interpolate them, creating images that shrink or grow while not distorting the "interesting" elements. (via John Lam) Here's \<a href="http://www.faculty.idc …

more ...