Gl.ib.ly

Yesterday somebody gave me a USB key with ~1000 JPEGs on it. Each JPEG was a scanned page, ugh, and the task was to find some useful information about topic X. Now each JPEG was about 1-2mb and I needed to do something useful with these images quickly. So what follows is quick walk through of how to do Optical Character Recognition (OCR, that means taking silly image files and ripping out any text identified in them) on Linux or in my case a Mac.

Continue reading "Doing OCR on linux/Mac"

One of the elective courses in the final year of my undergraduate degree course in software engineering was Graphics I (and later followed by Graphics II). For our Graphics I project we were first shown Pixar's famous lamps short. After it had played we were told our project would be to do our own 3d animation greater than 1 minute in duration. The only restriction was that all objects needed to be generated in the program, so no loading up really complicated open source stuff. I wrote a 3d animation of fighting stick men which was way more than I could chew at the time so they ended up shooting each other from a distance :-p. Anyway since then I have been in love with generating all types of images using pure code.

Continue reading "Programmatically creating cool images"