These are graph-cut or similar algorithms. There are several free alternatives which have been out there for years. Two spring straight to mind - the resynthesizer plugin for the GIMP and GREYCStoration image inpainting.

• http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer/removal
• http://cimg.sourceforge.net/greycstoration/demonstration.shtml

CS5 seems to have made this easier to use but the functionality has existed for ages.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

The link you supply is for a strictly-Windows-only solution. Supporting DirectShow codecs is fine for Windows (maybe) but it doesn't help for cross platform. GStreamer DOES exist for Windows and MacOS X and would be a better starting point.

That a patch has been accepted for Fennec already suggests that there may be more movement here in the future. Don't assume that all patch acceptance is politically driven. Mozilla is trying to ensure it doesn't end up on an expensive hook if the licensing for H.264 turns sour. There is nothing technically blocking this sort of development - legal issues are sadly more convoluted, move at glacial pace and subject to all sorts of wrangling.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

You make it sound as though there are only two video codecs out there. Mozilla will give you a choice of any of the unencumbered video formats as they get them implemented. However, right now any implementation of H.264 in the core of firefox is not going to happen. It would do us all no good if Mozilla did implement H.264 and then got hooked for megabucks when the H.264 licensing agreement suddenly requires dollars per instance of software decoding H.264.

The chances of the H.264 LA not charging for this codec in the long term is effectively zero. The only debate is whether how it will charge for encoding and decoding implementations. Maybe it will be possible to have a pluggable video decoder for Firefox for the HTML5 Video tag so you can hook up your own solutions. That might solve the issue for everyone.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

I subscribed at US$3/month to last.fm and it's probably the best value I get out that three dollars. On the other hand, its the thin end of the wedge as far as the finances go - I've heard artists and music I would never have discovered otherwise. Bad news for the big media companies though - I try and buy CDs direct from the band or as close as I can get. No point paying $30 on amazon.ca when I can order it direct from the artist for $15 including shipping.

One last point - I have become very sensitive to bullshit in quotes.

That's an assertion, not a fact. And I suspect that it is totally wrong, at least if we are talking about the music industry as a whole. If we are talking about the increasing democratization of available music on the web and the reduced reliance on megamedia to provide music for the masses, then maybe he has a point. Sadly for Warner, I'm more interested in good music than I am in the lining of Warner's quarterly statements.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

The big win for increasing the number of cores compared to raising the core speed is power consumption (i.e. Watts). A 1GHz four-core chip consumes the same power as a single core 2GHz chip.

Now that is no use if all your apps are single-threaded. The PS3 has forced many game developers to address parallel processing for games and PC developers are routinely targeting dual core systems.

A large fraction of CPU-intensive tasks can be spread over multiple cores easily enough. The most obvious of these is web browsing as epitomised by Google Chrome. Add in music playback with visualization and a OpenGL driven display interface and it's easy enough to keep three or four cores busy.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

For myself, I'd give it another 6-12 months to see what shakes out of the market. The Cortex-A9 quad core looks like it is the perfect chip for high performance, low power consumption tasks, and the Tegra 2 SoC looks like it will provide a moderate-performance GPU on top of that. There are a number of different form factors that look like they will hit the shelves over the next year, from single screen netbooks, dual-screen touchscreen folding books, a mix of tablets and tablets with removable keyboards. Hey - even Google is supposedly building a tablet based on this sort of tech.

The iPad is likely to find its niche suddenly becomes a crowded space by the end of 2010.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

That just shows that you haven't used a version of Emacs since the GNU - Lucid split. Lets see - I have language aware parsing (including context-aware tooltips) and completion (ala intellisense), automatic indexes into each file, class browser, helper wizards, version control awareness and integration, fully programmable interaction with the editing buffer to cope with work-specific stuff, electric expansion (and fully modifiable expansion tables), dynamic completion and the ability to work seamlessly with remote files.

And that doesn't touch on all the other features that I use day-to-day, like highlighting, source code comparison and patching, recursive directory comparison and debugger integration.

Anyway who claims that Emacs isn't a useful editor hasn't learned how to use it.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

This meme about Firefox memory fragmentation just won't die! Firefox 3.0.x you could still claim that Firefox was sucking down more and more memory as pages got visited. With 3.5.x, you can kiss that problem pretty much goodbye - Firefox returns more memory back to the system than any competing browser.

And Firefox isn't the largest memory consumer here either - that prize probably goes to Chrome, simply because one-tab-per-process is inevitably a heavier memory requirement.

Firefox stability is still a minor issue. However, it's stable enough that I get about 1 crash every three days, which is well within my tolerance level (14 extensions, 11 plugins). Tools like abrt provide a decent mechanism for informing the necessary bug trackers.

Speed-wise, Firefox devs know they are in a race with Chrome. 3.6.x looks like it will be faster than 3.5.x by a fair margin. Project Electrolysis stands to improve matters further. I'm all for competition - keeps everyone working on the issue.

Give me a plugin sandbox so that Flash trapping doesn't take out the page and I'll be content.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Been abusing the old #include directive in C again?

#define _FUNCTION_NAME hello
#define _OUTPUT world
#include "function.skel"
#define _FUNCTION_NAME brave
#define _OUTPUT new world
#include "function.skel"

File: function.skel
void _FUNCTION_NAME()
{ printf "_OUTPUT\n"; return }
#undef _FUNCTION_NAME
#undef _OUTPUT

Voila. Templates in C! *cough*

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

... you have will have to break through that wall at some point.

Maths is not a memory-based subject - you have to build the manipulation skills that Math requires. The only way to acquire that ability is to keep doing the maths problems until they start to click. You need to build a set of tricks to change problems from ones you don't recognize into ones you do. Be prepared to grind it out. Find a set of problems that increase in difficulty and hack at them until they make complete sense. Don't rush and don't attempt to do them all at once.

You also need to find some Math tasks that are fun or interest you. If you are learning about complex numbers, go look up some fractals and look at the formulas. Picks some starting values and play with the numbers. Get a sense of how the numbers move around and a firm underpinning about what is going on. If you are doing calculus, play with the equations of motion and work out what a canon ball does under constant acceleration. Try modelling a N-body system of planets moving around in 2D on a computer. All the time, you will be building an internal model about the way that all this hangs together.

Maths can be extremely rewarding once you grok it. But if you don't get past the struggle phase, it will never give you any pleasure and you'll miss out.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

If you think Firefox uses a lot of memory, don't use Chromium.

With an identical set of 9 tabs open, the total Resident memory:

• Firefox = 124.3Mb
• Chromium = 317.1 Mb

And that's not really a fair comparison - Firefox has 15 extensions and a 12 plugins installed.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

That looks awfully like something I would expect your version control repository to tell you. For ages we used to labouriously indicate the problem being fixed and included the "blessed" initials of the developer doing the work. Then we got a real VC and this practice stopped. Life got better.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes