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Comments on some of the odd stuff which comes into my life.
I honestly don't see why people find this interesting, but clearly they do.
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Thu, 09 Aug 2007
A neat new open source image processing application (07:37)
I have been playing with an image regularization program which is a free program implementing such features as removing objects (demos of shooting through a wire fence on the demo page), making small images larger, and reducing noise in noisy images. It's free, available for download and there are many demo images there.I did extract one thumbnail image blown up 500% and compare it to the best software I have to do the same thing. the images produced by the greyc program were clearly the best, although a 500% zoom produces images which are pretty fuzzy in any case. I intend to see hom well it takes noise out of scans of printed pictures and returns the color dots to smooth images.
A note of warning on the documentation Look at the examples unless you're a math major or calculus is fresh in your mind. Happily you can get good results without having your head explode.
Fri, 09 Mar 2007 There was an article in Business Week on how the MP3 standard was created. Although the trigger for the article was the 1.5 billion settlement levied against Microsoft for patent infringement, the history is interesting as well.
This is a prime example of Chaos Theory, when little things make a large difference in result. In this case, MP3 was modified to faithfully preserve the music on a single artist, who's work happened to sound particularly bad after compression.