Bowdoin students help fight child porn

Bowdoin students help fight child porn

Newspaper coverage of a project I worked on at Bowdoin.

To write clean code, you must first write dirty code; and then clean it.

To write clean code, you must first write dirty code; and then clean it.

Robert C. Martin

http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/Clean_Code_Args.pdf

The Mythbusters illustrate the difference between CPU and GPU processing using robots. To skip to the good parts, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGf0HaW7x4#t=2m42s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGf0HaW7x4#t=7m58s

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These cookies are delicious! – Speech synthesis software retrospective

These cookies are delicious! – Speech synthesis software retrospective

A very interesting retrospective over computer speech synthesis.  The best part is at the end where they demonstrate concatenative speech synthesis, where the computer uses a large database of professionally recorded lines of speech in order to assemble a sentence.  It sounds really good!

Image compression with polygons

Image compression with polygons

A very cool article about how you can encode the information of a photograph by using evolutionary algorithms and overlaying polygons of different colors and sizes to recreate the original image.  The sizes are impressive – a 256×256 pixel image fits in 1028 bytes.

To illustrate the difference between Web applications that don’t use MVC and those that do, think about the difference between Rocky Road and Neapolitan ice cream. Both may be delicious, but if you want to make any changes to Rocky Road, think about how much trouble it would be to switch the almonds for walnuts. The almonds are too deeply embedded in the ice cream to do the switch without affecting everything else. On the other hand, because Neapolitan is cleanly separated into layers, switching one flavor for another is an easy task. Think of Neapolitan as MVC compliant, and Rocky Road as not.

To illustrate the difference between Web applications that don’t use MVC and those that do, think about the difference between Rocky Road and Neapolitan ice cream. Both may be delicious, but if you want to make any changes to Rocky Road, think about how much trouble it would be to switch the almonds for walnuts. The almonds are too deeply embedded in the ice cream to do the switch without affecting everything else. On the other hand, because Neapolitan is cleanly separated into layers, switching one flavor for
another is an easy task. Think of Neapolitan as MVC compliant, and Rocky Road as not.
Jakarta Struts For Dummies Mike Robinson, Ellen Finkelstein
As Seth Glickman puts it, “They were almost definitely high when they wrote that.”