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 RAMOur school moved to PeopleSoft for.. I’m not going there.. but that’s where everyone’s timetables are now. I thought maybe this big fancy company has an API to let me access the data but no, it’s basically impossible to access the API directly. So I was left with screen scraping, which I always wanted to …
Continue reading Screen scraping timetable data from a PeopleSoft Faculty CenterI’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’m going to Moscow in a couple of months, and we bought the tickets a while ago. More recently I’ve randomly discovered that I need a visa to travel to Russia. I’m glad I know people who know these things, it would have been very annoying to arrive there and be told we’re not allowed …
Continue reading How to get a tourist visa to travel to Russia from CanadaI’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 assI figured at some point after heartbleed (after sites had time to get themselves patched) I should change all my passwords for valuable services. I’m doing that now and I was shocked by a couple where it wouldn’t let me change my password because the new one was too complex :) The last time I …
Continue reading Your password is too… hard to breakI was looking for some tire repair stuff and happened to come across this: It doesn’t matter whether you know anything about tires or not, it’s the back that’s interesting: “This product contains chemicals known […] to cause cancer and birth defects” But that warning only applies if you’re in California. Or else why did …
Continue reading This causes cancer and birth defects, but only in CaliforniaDisgusting: 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 theme