There are plenty of people in our industry (software development) who advise to fail early and fail often. This is a story of such a project. The OSTD is a really cool idea: get free translations, or at least get started on them. I never pushed it too hard but I developed it to the …
Continue reading OSTD: an experiment that didn’t workOpen Source
Crap that’s happening in the open source world.
For our research project we needed to use pHash to do some operations on a lot (tens of thousands) of image files. pHash uses ImageMagick internally, probably for simple operations such as resizing and changing the colour scheme. I am pretty familiar with errors such as these coming from convert or mogrify: convert.im6: no decode …
Continue reading Using ImageMagick without running out of RAMI’ve been considering a project idea for Seneca’s partnership with Creative Commons. For that idea to work I would need a tool to create perceptual hashes from images that: Give true positive results when comparing images that were resized, and/or their colours changed. Give very few (near zero percent) false positive results. Too many false …
Continue reading Perceptual hash comparison: pHash vs Blockhash: false positivesI’ve done this work to help out with the open source programming course at Seneca (DPS911). The goal: see if it’s possible (and realistic) to use XMP in an Android app. I’ve spent about 20 hours working on it, mostly going round in circles. The XMP library is shit developed by idiots and Android Studio …
Continue reading Using libXMP with the NDK in an Android appFrom the CentOS FAQ: CentOS-6 updates until November 30, 2020 I was always suspicious about this claim, but I figured it’s based on RedHat, which is a serious company, and they can’t afford to screw with their customers too much. I don’t know how (if at all) this story is related to RedHat. The problem …
Continue reading Centos LTS my assDisgusting: for L in `cat lang.txt | cut -f 2,3,4,5 -d’ ‘ | sed ‘s/^.//’ | sed ‘s/.$//’ | sort`; do echo -n “$L “; done More disgusting: cat lang.txt | sort | awk ‘{ a=substr($2$3, 2); sub(“)$”, “”, a); print ” \””$1″\”, \””a”\”, \”The <a href=\x27http://littlesvr.ca/ostd/\x27>OSTD</a>\”,” ; }’ It reminds me of when I …
Continue reading I’m ashamed I wrote thisI finally had enough of the old theme on this blog. I would have kept it but with WordPress 4 the fonts looked even smaller than they did before. I tried to fix it but found so many problems (starting withe a default font size set to 62.5%) that decided replacing it entirely will be …
Continue reading How to stop using webfonts from Google without breaking your wordpress themeNext week I’m going to the Free Software and Open Source Symposium. It’s always worth going, and especially so this year, there are several great speakers for sure and many more with potential. One of the things running during the symposium is a Robots competition. My humble contribution to this competition is the design of …
Continue reading Fritzing for FSOSS: Designing a PCB in LinuxIn a previous post I described my frustration with the fact that it’s so difficult to find documentation about how to connect to a server using HTTPS if the certificate for that server is self-signed (not from a paid-for certificate authority). After a while I found that someone at Google noticed that because of their …
Continue reading Android programming: connect to an HTTPS server with self-signed certificateThere are times when the most of the world goes into a frenzied argument for something without thinking it through. This happens with many kinds of issues from (recent news) geopolitical to (since the beginning of time) religious to (what this post is about) technical issues. Effective means of reason and deduction are forgotten, research …
Continue reading Why hate self-signed public key certificates?