Hi,
Some links to things I heard mentioned last night, probably the odd
repeat from other nights. But first, a bit of cross-fertilisation.
DotDorset are having a pub meet in Wareham on Wednesday 20th.
http://dotdorset.org/
http://groups.google.com/group/dotdorset/browse_thread/thread/20fa5e5daa1229f1
There's also Meetdraw that has the occasional large-scale get
together in Bournemouth. http://www.meetdraw.com/about-meetdraw/
Techshore, interested in Tech start-ups along the south coast, first
meeting in Southampton. http://techshore.co.uk/
Lastly, HantsLUG across the border to the east.
http://www.hantslug.org.uk/wiki/
Arithmetic coding beats `optimal' Huffman coding by using fractions of a
bit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_encoding
Markus Oberhumer's LZO compression, a speedier alternative to LZW.
Btrfs can use it, and he also did one of the data compressors on the
NASA Mars Exploration Rovers. http://www.lzop.org/
Robert Morris, of Bell Labs and the NSA, died recently. In the 70s he
came up with a way of having a counter take just a byte yet
approximately track way more than 255 occurrences of an event.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_counting_algorithm
Another probabilistic algorithm is a Bloom filter, a means of often
avoiding an expensive look-up for non-existing items by having a cheaper
data structure that gives a good indication of whether the key exists,
saving the bother. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter
Linus Ã
kesson generates video and sound from a 1.6MHz ATtiny15 that has
32 bytes of RAM, AKA registers.
http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/bitbanger/
HMRC have moved away from web forms for online filing towards
interactive PDFs. They suggest Adobe's Acroread by used to complete
them, after ticking boxes loosening the sandbox the document's running
in. GNU have their PDF project attempting to support these latest PDF
1.7 files, and a planned GNU Juggler viewer. http://www.gnupdf.org/
Back to Bob Morris, a brain-teaser; what's next in this sequence? It's
quite well known, so some may know it already.
1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 13112221 1113213211
Cheers, Ralph.
--
Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2011-08-02 20:00
Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/
How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
