Le blog de ghamrouni

While we have been developing a website that displayed user uploaded images in fixed size regions, we have encountered some interesting problems. And this have led to some questions: Should we resize the image to fit the fixed size region ? Should we crop the image ? Maybe we should mix the two ?

After some tests we found that resizing the image is not the optimal solution, since the fixed size region is quite small. Then I tested the second and the third solution by cropping/resizing manually the images. The tests were convincing !
Needless to say we are not going to crop manually all the images ! we should automate this task. The no-brainer solution is to crop the image by focusing on the center. This naîve solution gave amazingly acceptable results, but sometimes it fails badly if the interesting region lies outside the cropped zone. Our algorithm should be able to somehow locate automatically the interesting part of the image.

You must already have spent a lot of time searching for THE suitable title your project should have. The main problem with this task is that usually the names you chose already exist, the best way might be to have a lot of good sounding names generated automatically and then all you’ll have to do is choose. This paper describes how this problem could be described by a stochastic markovian model which automates the task of generating good sounding titles given a set of chosen words.

NLinear is a generic linear algebra library for .NET. Probably It’s not the most complete nor the most efficient open source .NET linear algebra toolkit. But the library has a distinguishing feature: genericity. In fact NLinear isn’t bound to a specific scalar type (for example matrix of float or of double) instead it can operate on any type satisfying some requirements. 

“The Free Lunch Is Over” Herb Sutter.

Les processeurs à cœurs multiples et hybrides arrivent à la tête du classement établi par Gartner pour les technologies de rupture pour 2008 à 2012. Ces technologies sont depuis entrées dans le mainstream. Ainsi, le défi de supporter les processeurs de nouvelles générations est devenu une nécessité. Ceci nous amène à nous interroger sur les possibilités de migration pour les applications existantes. La migration  pour les processeurs modernes peut poser plusieurs problèmes aux développeurs. Nous avons donc choisi de mettre l’accent sur les erreurs communes en développement 64 bit et les techniques les moins intrusives pour paralléliser son application.

Cet article a été publié dans le numéro 130 (Mai 2010) du magazine «PROgrammez». La version PDF de l’article est mise à votre disposition en téléchargement gratuit.