Morgan Skinner's written up some nice stuff on color quantization, mapping using both a palette based approach and an octree based algorithm which is also very nice.
This follows on from work I did with him back in 2002, and adds to it.
I've been a fan of Alan Cooper for some time, having picked up his book About Face in 1995 and read it cover to cover in just a few days.
But having been working with eXtreme Programming, and having the customer as part of the team, it seems to me XP may have forgotten some of the lessons Cooper espouses.
Dave Fellows, one of the guys I work with, has been banging on about this thing called XP, eXtreme Programming. Emboldened by a very smart guy called Baker he's persuaded us to try it out.
I have to say it looks pretty good - lightweight specs in the form of short user stories; always having the customer on site to answer questions and specifics and having all of the development disciplines in one place, sharing what they're doing.
The team I've been leading for the past six months has been developing new stuff in C#. The tools are great, we like the language and the .Net framework is full of useful and well-organised classes. Having said all of that it was inevitable Microsoft would want to print it, so they did. Online Bank Increases Developer Productivity and Improves Performance by Switching from Sun/UNIX to .NET
It's full of mis-quotes, several things I said are attributed to Dave Fellows, and vice-versa. Still, nice to do.
The .Net Framework has, like many frameworks and class libraries before it, some natty little features for drawing images and for saving or streaming them in different formats.
As part of getting to grips with C# I decided to put together some image generation routines for web based buttons, but discovered that it was not all as simple as it should be.
Morgan Skinner put me onto a very nice little toy today called .Net Reflector.
Basically, it uses reflection to scan through assemblies and list the namespaces, classes, methods and properties therein. Incredibly useful for scanning through the framework classes and finding the bits you need.
We've been working on some proposition prototypes here over the past few weeks, based on Apache, PHP and MySql. We decided to run it on one of our win2k servers in the lab and get everything up and running before putting out onto the public Internet for testing.
We had some problems with one of the PHP extensions under win2k, libmcurl, so after much digging around newsgroups decided to switch to Linux - where we knew it worked. And lucky we did... When we came to put the box public, we set up a NAT address for it and opened port 80 only for that address. Within 30 seconds it was taking requests, not for our work, but for Code Red and variants.
When looking at the future of the Internet, through information from ISPs, Analysts, Telcos and Thinktanks, it is clear that one thing will change everything. The widespread availability and adoption of Broadband.
Here are a few basic thoughts on what the people in the know say is happening when...
Found this:
I was talking earlier this month about Entrust's latest purchase, GetAccess (formerly EnCommerce GetAccess), at their SecureSummit conference in San Diego. It was great fun and we had a great turn out of people wanting to hear all about Egg and what we've been doing.
I managed to get some of the humorous bits from our adverts in which lightened up the topic a bit and even got a few laughs from what was a very friendly audience.
But it still strikes me as odd that Entrust have gotten so big on, essentially, PKI.