I have made a tool, that indexes Flickr Creative Commons photos and performs some mathematical analysis on same. The results are stored in a database.
It then takes an input image, slices it up into tiles and matches these tiles with the closet image in the database. Due to the nature of the analysis done up front, large tiles can be used rather than individual pixels.
The entropy of the tiles is much greater than individual pixels, this yields a more realistic image in a smaller size than matching …

Digital ID World [LINK] is going on currently in San Francisco. The timing is no surprise but I’m excited to read that Microsoft has announced integration of Cardspace with Windows Live [LINK].
I have been playing with Cardspace, .NET 3.x and the ID meta system for some time now. Probably 18months. In March of this year I got the chance to demo an interesting proof of concept with this technology at the IDA conference in Redmond. That was fun and is one of the last memories I have of life …

Design Patterns are great and you’ll always hear "architects" throwing words like "pattern", "model view controller", "factory", "singleton", "observer" and "command" around to give their statements a little more weight.  It’s rare you hear anti-patterns discussed however.
A while ago someone made the claim that there was only one way to implement a pattern. This struck me as a remarkable statement as the very word "pattern" implies no specific implementation. A pattern is an abstract notion that has potentially many implementations, that’s what makes it so useful. Most people start …

Despite all the claims that Blu-Ray is winning the format war based on current disc sales, I just bought a Toshiba A20 1080p HD-DVD and DVD up-converting player. That’s where my money is and here’s where my mouth is… Blu-Ray marginalized in 3 years, HD-DVD alive and well.
Here’s a synopsis of the/my arguments against Blu-Ray

Disc manufacturing is heavily prone to errors, some say the actual yield of good discs for a given batch is as low as 10%, meaning 90% are discarded. This leads to missed deadlines and high manufacturing …

In Pulp Fiction, there is a deleted scene in which Uma Thurman’s character asks John Travolta the following:

MIA: In a conversation, do you listen or wait to talk?
VINCENT: (pauses, thinking deeply) I wait to talk — but I’m trying to listen.
 
I’ve long held the belief that a good sign of intelligence is the ability to imagine yourself in another’s position. Not just see their side of the story but to actually imagine and predict their responses based on assuming their thought process.
 
To do this effectively you really …

Great debate has been made over HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray and the issue always comes up that Blu-Ray can store 50GB of data wheras HD-DVD tops out (currently) at 30GB. A 45GB disc is in the works. Regardless, it begs the question, how much data is actually in a high-definition movie to begin with? I took out all the interactive content and menus etc and made some back-of-the-napkin calculations just focusing on the movie and audio to see where I’d end up…
Assume average movie length is 105 minutes and a screen …

Yesterday for the first time in my life I completed 10 chin-ups* in a row. It doesn’t seem like a lot but 10 chin ups is surprisingly hard. 10 legitimate all-the-way-down and all-the-way-up chin ups (for me) has been a long time coming.
As a kid in Tipperary, we used to do chin-ups in the cow-shed on my grandmother’s farm. Again, I never recall being able to manage 10 in a row. Even then the few I could muster were not legitimate but mostly "gimmes" to compete with my cousins.
In …

This website is primarily for my own gratification and rarely do I presume to think that it’s a valuable source of information. On the other hand, I do occasionally put forth the odd interesting nugget of information that you won’t generally find elsewhere.
Hence it’s always gratifying to come across websites that link to mine as a point of reference. Today I came across two such instances. The first is Wikipedia on their Live USB page [LINK] referencing my post on how to install and boot Linux from a Creative …

About a year ago I began thinking of buying a new high-def TV. That triggered a huge home-improvement odyssey.
We wanted to put the existing living room stuff in a large family room adjacent to the hallway. That family room was last decorated in 1970 and badly needed updating. I figured we’d tear off the wood panelling, get the thing dry-walled and be done in a couple of weeks.
I tore off wood panelling to reveal not studs but unfinished drywall. Time for some math:
An 8′ X 4′ panel (32 square feet) of sheetrock/drywall …