brainwagon

I’ve been reading papers lately about using image processing techniques to remove artifacts and damage from old motion picture film. Some old films are remarkably pristine, but some, like my copy of Douglas Fairbanks’ 1924 version of Thief of Bagdhad show lots of wear and tear. I think it will be possible to write an [...]

Kevin Kelly had a very nice New York Times Op-Ed piece entitled Making My Own Music, which clearly elucidates the way that I’ve come to think about copyright issues and the value of the public domain. One small quote: Given the benefits of digitized films, there is little question that film buffs, powered only by [...]

Metafilter had a link to Bob Metcalfe’s 1995 article Predicting the Internet’s catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996 (InfoWorld). It’s always incredible to look back on historical predictions and see how they panned out. For those of you who don’t know who Bob Metcalfe is, he is the inventor of Ethernet and founder [...]

Before I discovered Python, I enjoyed a brief period of experimentation with Lua. I even went so far as to use Lua to add a simple shading language to my old MTV raytracer. You could write Lua functions that would compute the results of certain shading operations. It was pretty slow, but was really quite [...]

In the decade to come, it’s clear that the Internet will face two related challenges: Increasing volume of spam, and Increasing sophistication of viruses. These two are related because spam is being increasingly used to spread viruses, and viruses are increasingly used to subvert security measures on computers and to turn them into spam relays. [...]