Page 21 of The Tipping Point mentions Gaetan Dugas, the so-called AIDS patient zero: “…the French-Canadian flight attendant, who claimed to have 2,500 sexual partners in North America, and who was linked to at least 40 of the earliest cases of AIDS in California and New York…” Assuming this time line of the AIDS epidemic…
Essex secret bunker
Note to self: if I ever find myself in Essex, I should go along and see the Essex secret bunker, which was a nuclear disaster emergency control center. I discovered it watching the history channel this morning, and it looks quite interesting. But wait… The plot thickens… There seems to be a web site for…
Imaging concepts: Encrypting images
DES in Electronic Code Book (ECB) mode is a particularly poor choice of cryptography for image files. This is because ECB mode implements a look up table between the unencrypted value and the encrypted value. This results in a known input value turning into the same output value over and over. This can have some…
Imaging concepts: Anti Aliasing
Imagine that you are drawing a triangle across an image (or on the screen for that matter). The triangle is sometimes going to cross pixels in a way which makes them not totally turned on. Have a look at the figure below to see what I mean… If we only have a black and white…
Assumed knowledge
There are some things which I assume you know, and which are outside the scope of this tutorial. C This tutorial discusses code. Almost all of the code discussed is written in C. It is therefore safe to assume that if you don’t have a good working knowledge of C, then you’re likely to get…
An experiment in online authoring — my image programming tutorial
I don’t view myself as an author — I’m a programmer. I have however written a few articles and conference papers in my time. Here are the ones relevant to this topic area: September 2001: Australian Unix User’s Group Annual Conference Proceedings, Open Source PDF handling with Panda and PandaLex (not online at the moment,…
Sick Twinkle Tux
Herm. Twinkle Tux just had one of it’s transformers fail. I’m not sure if it was because of temperature (it was a warm day and I had left Twinkle Tux on all day as I got slack), or if it was just due to fail. Luckily I had a hot spare, so Twinkle Tux is…
Bio for AUUG 2004
Michael is an ordinary committee member on the AUUG board, as well as serving in a similar position with Linux Australia. He has been administering networks, systems, or writing code professionally since 1996, and currently works for a major Australian ISV. He is also extremely active in his local LUG.
Bio for OLS 2004
Michael Still released his first Open Source project in July 2000, and has been actively developing ever since. He has had a variety of articles published by IBM DeveloperWorks, and once made a Tux out of fairy lights. Michael has focused recent efforts on janitorial patches to the kernel, as well as the mandocs build…
Bio for LCA 2004
Michael has been working in the image processing field for several years, including a couple of years managing and developing large image databases based on Open Source for an Australian government department. He currently works for TOWER Software, who manufacture a world leading EDMS and Records Management package named TRIM. Michael is also the developer…