Before we went away last week to Belgium, I was reading about a technique for removing people from your photos using Photoshop. I think I’d heard or read about it before way back when but had never really investigated the technique properly. This time though, I delved in deeper to see if I could do it myself. I suppose it was prompted by this short video that takes the technique to an extreme (notice how the shots with just the protagonist and no crowds are stationary/static so the technique can be applied). […]
READ MOREA long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away – OK, it was in London in 1993 – I added a DateEaster function to my personal Dates unit, written in Borland Pascal 7. So: 16-bit DOS for all you oldies. For a bit of fun, I shall present it here with some commentary. […]
READ MOREA quick one, more for my benefit next time I have to set this up in the future. Sometimes, I’m writing some JavaScript that can be divorced from a web page. Maybe it’s a weird bit of code, maybe I’m experimenting with (say) functional programming, maybe it’s just a small self-contained function, but I’d really like to test it right there and then, rather than copy/paste it and use the developer tools in my browser. […]
READ MOREBack in January, I pulled the trigger on a new theme for this blog. I recognized some time ago that I am not a very good web designer (I can do small tweaks to CSS but not comprehensive composition) and it would be far better to buy something that’s well designed and then spend the time wrapping the output from the blog engine to this new look and feel. […]
READ MOREIn a week where I am about to tread the boards again for the first time in over a year, my sister was sorting out some of our parents’ documents, found this page and scanned/sent it to me this morning. It is nothing less than the “script” – if I may call it that – of what I had to learn as announcer (or perhaps, more accurately, narrator?) for a production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves that our school was putting on. The wrinkle is, we were living in France at the time so it’s in French. Even better, we had only been living in Le Havre for a year, so I was still learning the native language. […]
READ MOREA week or so ago, the SlySoft website was suddenly replaced by a terse announcement that “[d]ue to recent regulatory requirements we have had to cease all activities.” I’m willing to bet that most of my readers haven’t heard of SlySoft or their main product, AnyDVD. In essence, AnyDVD is an app that circumvents the DRM present in all DVDs and Blu-ray discs, at the driver level. […]
READ MOREA bit abrupt a headline, no? Well, it cost me a couple of hours by doing so. […]
READ MORELast year, having tried out a Surface Pro 3 and disliking it, I bought a Dell XPS 13 ultrabook as my “travel” computer. This year? Well, Dell refreshed the range, added more memory and and a bigger SSD and suddenly I was looking at my 5-year-old Dell XPS 15z and thinking it was time to replace that. And what better way to replace it by having a single laptop that I used all the time? […]
READ MOREIn continuing this series of posts about functional JavaScript (one, two), I whimsically wondered if we could apply the SOLID principles of object-oriented programming. We took a look at S last time (the Single Responsibility Principle), and were fairly successful. The principle I introduced there was not only that the functions we write should do one thing and do it well. If we can embrace global immutability, so much the better (in other words, the function should not have side effects). Small functions of this type are also well worth writing since they help document the code via their names. It’s now time to look at O, the Open/Closed Principle. […]
READ MOREToday so far has been a comedy of errors with some web programming I wanted to do. A confederacy of dunce issues, one after the other. […]
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