OddThinking

I recently purchased some new flashgun-related camera equipment. I am out of my depth. I need to have mastered it in two weeks for an event, and so I have been practising, with rather mixed results. This is a brain-dump to help me think through the issues.

Inspired by a post there, I wrote a simple web-crawler that looked at the age, membership length and reputation of the users of StackOverflow.

I describe the method below, for people who like hearing about software. I graph the results below for people who like looking at colourful graphs. At the bottom, I have a quick conclusion for people who just want the summary.

What is the best cleaning solution for glass in my bathroom? No, seriously!

I take a science geek view.

I unnecessarily answer the ambiguity issue in the Circuit Puzzle, in living colour.

Another puzzle solved with the same architecture as before, but this time, with added code re-use.

In this article, I introduce another puzzle game, talk about some variations that are possible, provide a glossary (and then fail to use it, for now), discuss how the puzzle is solved, and then promise more in a future article.

I have a Object-Orientation question, related to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. I suspect it will have a simple “here is the idiom everyone uses for this situation” type answer, but I haven’t found it. Here’s a fictional piece of software that demonstrates my problem.

So, I have lots of photos, and some are duplicated on several web-sites, with no reference to the original source. I want to detect matches, so I can move them (and their associated meta-data) all to a single yet-to-be-determined destination.

But here’s the snag. Some of the photos have been made into different sizes and qualities for web-viewing. It would save me time if I could automatically detect this. I need an equivalent to SoundEx that works on images, so images have the same hash even if they are resized.

How would you do that? If you answered “Google it, and find what the standard solution is”, you might be smarter than me. This article is about what I did instead.

In which Julian stumbles over the concept of Chemical Word Ladders, and proceeds to generate them.

Which requirements does SmugMug meet?