Scott's Blog

Content aware image sizing is a method of resizing an image horizontally or vertically by removing pixels. In the picture above we're resizing horizontally and the cyan line is the pixels that will be removed. What's even neater is you can give hints of what parts to preserve or which parts to preferencially remove. Watch the video it explains it all. Here's the research paper .

Looks like the Wii has finally outsold the XBox 360 in worldwide sales, despite the one year lead by Microsoft. Although my favorite site doesn't yet say that yet.

This model follows your cursor with her eyes and is very well done. So well done it's creepy .

I like the really high life expectancy too. Not sure if I can trust this program though, it's not too sure on how to spell "Expectancy".

Why do we have a line of hair sitting caterpillar-like above each of our eyes? Forget such mundanities as dust protection or ornamentation, a new study suggests our eyebrows serve to control how easily other people can tell where we are looking.

I have this recurring fantasy of programming the perfect calculator. I've found two or three very good ones: Frink , is a Java based calculator that I've become very fond of. It nearly has it all: Pros Runs anywhere, including cell phones and other small devices that have Java. Unit conversion including currencies, and timezones. Unlimited precision, interval arithmetic, complex numbers. Really fun tutorial . Cons Closed source. Java ;-) Qalculate! Pros Open Source Auto complete as you type, pretty cool. Pretty prints results, ex. sqrt(2) => √(2) or 2*3 => 2·3. Notion of exact values and showing fractional values. Weird numbers formats like Roman, Sexagesimal Can create your own functions that has dialog boxes. RPN, plotting, history Cons Too many menus buttons. Not fun, a little dry. Missing Brazilian Real for currency! No timezones. wxMaxima Pros Open source Complete computer algebra system. Plotting Cons No unit conversions No timezone conversions If I were to make a...

Python 3000 will be the first Python version which is free to break backward compatibility, a chance to get rid of old problems and cruft that have accumulated over the years. I like most of the changes and agree with their reasons but I'm sad about one thing. Before you could create a program like this: print "Hello world!" For beginners, this is great, no extra semicolons, parentheses etc. Now you will have to write: print("Hello world!") It's not the end of the world, but it just got a little more difficult for beginners. On the other hand it will introduce them to functions a little earlier. Another difference I'm not so sure about is removing the % operator. I like that formatting operator: print "Your are %d years old" % age now becomes: print("You are {0:d} years old".format(age)) sigh.