"Your program is stupid. It doesn't work," my wife told me
I didn't know you could mix and match (comic)
Posted 16 years ago
STARTUP INK
Steve Hanov makes a living working on
Rhymebrain.com,
rapt.ink,
www.websequencediagrams.com,
and Zwibbler.com. He lives in
Waterloo, Canada.
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5 Ways PowToon Made Me Want to Buy Their Software
Even though I saw through their tricks at every step along the way, I am now a customer and proud of it. It is worthwhile to look at what they did, because these are simple things that you can do to improve your software business.
cairo blur image surface
This really should have been included in cairo. Instead, everyone that wants to have shadows has to roll their own blur function. Here's my take on it. I'll even release this into the public domain.
The PenIsland Problem: Text-to-speech for domain names
Recently, I was contracted to run a list of domain names through the custom-built pronunciation engine that powers my rhyming web site. On the first attempt, I found that the results were embarrassingly bad. A quick inspection revealed the problem: most domain names are severalwordsstucktogether.Zero load time file formats
When your app needs to be fast, you can't afford to load things fro disk. In this toy example, an on-disk data structure helps you instantly look up lists of related words.Succinct Data Structures: Cramming 80,000 words into a Javascript file.
jQuery creator John Resig needs a little help storing lists of words in his side project. Let's go overkill and explore a little known branch of computer science called Succinct Data Structures.
VP trees: A data structure for finding stuff fast
Let's say you have millions of pictures of faces tagged with names. Given a new photo, how do you find the name of person that the photo most resembles?
In the cases I mentioned, each record has hundreds or thousands of elements: the pixels in a photo, or patterns in a sound snippet, or web usage data. These records can be regarded as points in high dimensional space. When you look at a points in space, they tend to form clusters, and you can infer a lot by looking at ones nearby.
Exploiting perceptual colour difference for edge detection
Think colour isn't important in image processing algorithms? Let's try it both ways, and see for yourself.