It has been nearly 11 months since Boston's best rock station, WBCN, went off the (analog) air. Since then, Free Form BCN has gone from robotic to occasional tests to now a regular program from 11 am to 2 pm weekdays. It's an entertaining relaxed DJing style with an eclectic mix of rock music.

Give it a listen: Go to wbcn.com and click on the Free ( Read more... )

I love C++ for a lot of reasons, but I completely accept that I still learn new things about it, mostly because it supports so many paradigms that some features go unused. Here's an interesting performance OO feature, that seems crazy, but potentially useful:

Derived makeOne ( Read more... )

After much fumbling, I figured out how to convert a pile of JPGs into a video. The magic line was this:

convert -delay 20 -resize 800x600 IMG_{1840..1922}.JPG ~/foo.mpg

where -delay is a number in centiseconds (so 20 is 5 fps).

The thing is, Ubuntu's install of ImageMagic (which provides convert) doesn't come with mpeg2encode, which is what it ( Read more... )

After a Quixotic goose chase involving many many mensware stores, I finally found someone who sells ascots in person! (Had it gone on much longer, the quest may have needed an ascot mascot.) After asking but finding none at JoS. A. Bank, I was directed to a place called SYMS which is kind of like a wearhouse-sized T.J. Maxx focusing on dress ( Read more... )

Over the past year and a half I've incorporated Matlab into my daily work. It's a tremendously useful tool for experimenting with image processing and linear algebra. It's got a nice array-slicing syntax, so the second column of a matrix, M is M(:,2), and every other row in reverse order is M(end:-2:1,:). It also has some very useful easy graphing ( Read more... )

So I stumbled upon this useful page: list of strange units of measurement and learned a very interesting fact: One mile is within 0.5% of φ kilometers. The golden ratio is 1.61803399; a mile is 1.609344 kilometers. So if you ever forget how many km to a mile, that's a good way to remember (or conversely if you forget the golden ratio or forget the ( Read more... )

It appears that two seemingly colorful expressions, balls out and balls to the wall are actually perfectly innocent expressions no more crude than the expression petal to the metal; all three expressions basically mean the same thing and appear to have similar origins just for different machines. As far as a I can tell, balls out refers to steam ( Read more... )

Today I was burned by a very surprising behaviour of std::istream. If you print out a double that happens to contain infinity, you get inf, but when you try to read in the string inf you get... well in the case below, the double didn't get written to at all, it stayed undefined. I can see treating NaN weird (more on that) but what's going on here? ( Read more... )

FYI: Death Magnetic, which just came out, is awesome. I couldn't stand the previous album, St. Anger; it was reminiscent of a raccoon stuck in a garbage can. I'm all for crazy time signatures, but at some point, it's just middle-aged boys making smashing sounds randomly ( Read more... )

Local Dentist Uses 3-D Imaging For Accuracy