Perusing ArsTechnica a couple of weeks back, my eye was caught by this article about a recent dump of emails and password circulating on hacking forums, referred to as Collection #1. Collection #1 is a collection of 773 million unique email addresses and 21 million unique passwords thought to be an amalgamation of several historical hacks but also containing around 140 million email addresses not previously seen in dumps like this.
Loading a text file, processing the contents, and outputting a processed verssion of the file is a common task in Perl.
Sometimes it's light processing: rearrange the order of parts of each line. Sometime's it's heavier processing: collect a bunch of statistical data from the file and output a summary of the data with averages, mins, maxes, etc. In either case the following template is a handy starting point that shows the loading, some light processing, and writing the results to the output file.
If you work in a Cygwin Bash or other Linux terminal regularly, it's handy to have short hand for certain commands you execute a lot. E.g. you can navigate to the path "C:/cygwin64/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.26/x86_64-cygwin-threads/Text" by typing cd followed by that entire path. But what if you need to do that 100 times a day, or just keep forgetting the full path? Wouldn't a shorthand for that be great?
Histograms are one of the simplest and handiest data visualizations tools. They give you a quick view of how tightly or loosely your data clusters, whether it is normally distributed, and whether it has outliers.
Do you need to buy a replacement square taper bottom bracket for your (possibly somewhat older) bike, but you're not sure what spindle length you need? Here's a quick way to check. You just need a set of calipers and the correct allen key for removing your crank arm bolts. No need to actually remove the crank arms.
Castelo dos Mouros (Castle of the Moors) is a scenic 8th century Moorish castle overlooking Sintra, just outside Lisbon, Portugal. It was my second favorite part of my visit to Sintra after the Quinta de Regeleira, mostly because of the great hike up and down.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) images of real world scenes often suffer from ghosting artifacts caused by motion in the scene. We address ghosting by performing change detection on exposure-normalized images, then reducing the contribution of moving objects to the final composite on a frame-by-frame basis. Change detection is computationally advantagous and it can be applied to images exhibiting varied ghosting artifacts. We increase the stability of our approach by using recent superpixel segmentation techniques to enhance the change detection. Our solution includes a novel approach for areas that see motion throughout the capture, e.g., foliage blowing in the wind.
Update for MikTeX 2.9 below.
I've been working on my thesis for a couple of months now, and frequently I have to look up ways to tweak certain Latex components, so I'm going to start posting about these tweaks, even if it's just to link to another page about how to do something. If I end up having a good collection at the end of my thesis, then I can write a final post aggregating them in a logical order so they can serve as a guide to formatting a thesis in Latex.
I'm using TeXnic Center (TXC) 2 Alpha 3 to edit and MikTeX to build. I originally installed both using ProTeXt which packages TXC1, MikTeX, Ghostscript, and Ghostgum. I later installed TXC2 which provides a much-needed overhaul to the interface so that toolbars don't shift all over the place whenever you resize the window.
I recently found myself having to do a few interesting conversions in C++ to pass images between different formats and/ or libraries, including OpenCV, MATLAB, and some unusual custom formats. I'm going to post some code snippets here that do some of these conversions as I suspect they may be useful for others.
Keep in mind that, generally, image data is always stored in one long array, and you have a pointer to the beginning of that array. So, the question is, as you increment your way through the array contents, in what order are you traversing the image's data? E.g. are the first three elements the RGB values of the first pixel in the top left corner of the image? Or are they the R components of the first three pixels moving right along the top row of the image? Or something else entirely?
The dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has existed at least as long as Windows, and baffles even fairly advanced computer users. It is usually triggered by low-level errors in the CPU, which in turn are usually caused by driver problems (e.g. illegal pointer references and such) or hardware problems (e.g. deffective RAM or CPU overheating). Usually the errors listed are not very descriptive, just one of the problems in actually making use of them. Whenever I've begun experience frequent BSODs, I've always just formatted my computer and reinstalled Windows, thinking that whatever is happening is probably a software or driver issue so obscure I'd never track it down. However, during the most recent outburst of BSODs on my new laptop (a 10 month old Dell), I decided to take a serious crack at analyzing the BSOD details.
