Posts matching tags 'code'
2005/3/1
My latest gift to the world's collection of marginally useful software: x64spriterip, a quick and dirty Python script which pulls sprite images out of Commodore 64 emulator memory dumps and writes them to PGM files. Just in case you ever felt like grabbing some graphics from your favourite childhood computer game for a chat-room avatar or T-shirt logo or somesuch but couldn't be arsed writing the software to do it yourself.
2004/11/28
Two former WW2 codebreakers from Bletchley Park have turned their attention to a coded message on a garden monument in Staffordshire. The 18th-century inscription, on a garden monument, reads "D OUOSVAVV M". Oliver and Sheila Lawn have examined 48 hypotheses about the code, with the two leading categories being those connected to the Knights Templar/Freemasonry and the Holy Grail, pointing right into Holy Blood Holy Grail/Da Vinci Code territory. Other hypotheses involved UFOs, Nostradamus, Turkish maritime maps and occultism. Then again, it could have just been a dedication from the estate owner to his late wife. (via bOING bOING)
2003/12/26
My latest contribution to the corpus of GPLed code: jfifextract, a quick-and-dirty POSIX command-line program which goes through a file/disk volume (of arbitrary size; it uses mmap(2)), finds spans that look like JPEG files and writes them to a directory. This was not a dry academic exercise, mind you, but was necessitated by a dodgy memory card that somehow "misplaced" a directory full of photos somewhere between Sydney and Byron Bay.