Feed-forward neural doodle

https://likemo.net/?iframe-mode=1

Sometimes you sigh you cannot draw, aren’t you? It takes time to master the skills, and you have more important things to do :) What if you could only sketch the picture like a 3-years old and everything else is done by a computer so your sketch looks like a real painting? It will certainly happen in near future. In fact several algorithms that do the thing very well were proposed recently, yet they take at least several minutes to render your masterpiece using a high-end hardware. We make a step towards making such things available for everybody and present...

In Memoriam - Mozilla

Today we look back to the life of Mozilla, a company that was best known for creating the Firefox web browser. I remember a company that made the web better and more open by providing a browser that was faster and more customizable than anyone had ever seen, and by making that browser free and open source.

I expect many of my readers will be older than I am, but my first memories of Firefox are back in high school with Firefox 3. I fondly remember my discovery of it. Mozilla gave us a faster and more powerful web browser to use on school computers. The other...

State of Sway - April 2016

Since the previous State of Sway, we have accomplished quite a bit. We are now shipping versioned releases of sway, which include support for window borders, input device configuration, more new features, and many bug fixes and stability improvements. I’m also happy to say that Sway 0.5 has landed in the Arch Linux community repository and I’m starting to hear rumors of it landing in other Linux distros as well. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s happened in the past four months:

How to write a better bloom filter in C

This is in response to How to write a bloom filter in C++, which has good intentions, but is ultimately a less than ideal bloom filter implementation. I put together a better one in C in a few minutes, and I’ll explain the advantages of it.

The important differences are:

I chose C because (1) I prefer it over C++ and (2) I just think it’s a better choice for implementing low level data types, and C++ is better used in high level code.

I’m...

Please use text/plain for email

A lot of people have come to hate email, and not without good reason. I don’t hate using email, and I attribute this to better email habits. Unfortunately, most email clients these days lead users into bad habits that probably contribute to the sad state of email in 2016. The biggest problem with email is the widespread use of HTML email.

Compare email to snail mail. You probably throw out most of the mail you get - it’s all junk, ads. Think about the difference between snail mail you read and snail mail you throw out. Chances are, the mail you throw out is flashy flyers and spam...

Comment on Why another kymograph ImageJ plugin? by Wenzhang Wang

Really nice work!

Integrating a VT220 into my life

I bought a DEC VT220 terminal a while ago, and put it next to my desk at work. I use it to read emails on mutt now, and it’s actually quite pleasant. There was some setup involved in making it as comfortable as possible, though.

Here’s the terminal up close:

First, I have several pieces of hardware involved in this:

It took a while to get all of these things, but I was able to get a nice refurbished terminal and a couple of crappy LK201 keyboards. Luckily I was able to eventually remove the need...

Coming back from FOSDEM 2016

In the good tradition about writing a blog post on my way back from a FOSDEM (see earlier installments e.g. for 2012, 2010, 2008, and 2007), here is this year's take. No issues with transportation this time (I'm still in the train, but it looks good so far), other than road construction works at the venue, which itself seems to establish a tradition now ;) This year I stayed in the Be Manos hotel – near to Gare du Midi – which was quite nice. Since I find myself being too old for the pre-FOSDEM beer event, I did not...

Towards the end of 2015

'Tis the season to let the year pass by and make plans for the next one. 2015 was what I'd call a "transitioning" year. Although LaTe App-Developers had been shut down in 2014, we still had to spend most of 2015 to work on some things our clients already paid for. This is now finally done and I can move forward looking for new endeavors. Here's a bunch of my plans for 2016: First off, I'll attempt to bring three iOS-apps in the AppStore. These apps will be completely new versions of those that I did while working with my...

State of Sway - December 2015

I wrote sway’s initial commit 4 months ago, on August 4th. At the time of writing, there are now 1,070 commits from 29 different authors, totalling 10,682 lines of C (and 1,176 lines of header files). This has been done over the course of 256 pull requests and 118 issues. Of the 73 i3 features we’re tracking, 51 are now supported, and I’ve been using sway as my daily driver for a while now. Today, sway looks like this:

For those who are new to the project, sway is an i3-compatible Wayland compositor. That is, your existing i3 configuration file will work as-is on sway, and your keybindings will be the...