Author Archives: Oran
Removing background from icons, OR, “Hey that worked!”
What do you do if you have a flat jpeg image containing an icon against a background, and you want to create a png of the icon on its own with a transparent background? You could use an “intelligent” selection … Continue reading
A Little Confidence Booster
It’s nice to know that qBox does better than Facebook when it comes to accidental repeated texts! Continue reading
PHP Interactive CLI Autoload Substitute
Class autoloading doesn’t work in PHP’s interactive CLI. So you can rule out running interactive tests on your code if you are relying on your autoload function to load the necessary classes. But, here is a script that can recurse through a directory and include all the class files, in the right order! Continue reading
Calculate Next Birthday with MySQL
Today I thought I’d fire off a query to get customers next birthday, to send them a birthday reminder if it’s coming up. I quickly became aware of some caveats. Continue reading
C# Integer Bug: yes I went there!
What values could ints a and b take to make the following C# snippet throw an ImpossibleException?
if (a > 0 && b > 0 && a + b < 0)
throw new ImpossibleException();
In other words, what two positive integers add to a negative number? Of course, there is no such pair. Unless you ask C#... Continue reading
Programmer-Available Software Development
As a programmer, I have the luxury of being able to create software by myself, for myself. I cash in on this a lot – I use my own accounting software, graphics software and framework for PDP networks. But when … Continue reading
Building a Ray Tracer
About six years ago, I wrote some BASIC code which did the maths to rotate points in a 3D space, and the bare minimum to render them. Lately I’ve made some additions to the system so I’ve decided to report my progress as I go. But first, the history so far.
Filtering input in a complex environment
In my last post I touched on the idea that to be successful in a complex environment, any AI system would need to filter its input, essentially throwing away irrelevant information at a very early stage in order to keep … Continue reading
Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
This is a book about the first moments of any encounter. It explains the amazing ability of the subconscious mind to infer a wealth of information from even the thinest slice of experience. Experts can spot a fake statue within seconds of seeing it, predict the success of a marriage by watching a couple chat, or identify a bird after a sighting of only a few seconds at great distance. We can all tell if we like someone in the first few minutes of talking with them, and we can tell what a person is thinking by looking at their face. Continue reading