Christian recently wrote a technical post on his blog about demosaicing of images captured with Fujifilms new X-trans sensor. He tested some methods to perform the demosaicing, wrote a first pass of his own demosaicing code and then posted about it all on the blog. That kind of thing is pretty interesting to guys who work in that area and/or have cameras. He got a couple of nice comments on the blog post itself, but what boggled my mind was that some guy wrote this over on Hacker News where his article got some coverage:
[sic] someone is wasting a [sic] phd scholarship to solve a problem that only [sic] exist because people keep dumping money on a company that damages their own product by now releasing source or specs?
What a tool. That is like saying people are wasting McDonald’s, Amazon’s or the local donut shop’s money to solve a problem just because the guy solving the problem happens to work for that company. PhD scholarship students are not slaves. Some of their time is their own. Beside that, Christian is not on scholarship. He is a Research Fellow and A Dean’s Fellow, so he is an employee, just like if he were working at McDonald’s, Amazon or the local donut shop. And who cares how the problem was caused. People have the problem and it an interesting problem. Why not solve it? What kind of a waste of oxygen writes a comment like that?
I spent much of the day today trying to figure out how to use CSS to control the way the web pages look in the 
I had a little bit of a breakthrough on my EKG project last night. I actually had the idea when I was completely away from the project for a few days. It caused me to re-read the manual where it said the readings from the EKG are sent down the serial cable in 
One of the most painful aspects of the work I do is that I need to learn to work with new software libraries on a regular basis. The pain is associated with learning new syntax, parameters, and usages. One generally knows what the libraries are supposed to do, but cannot get them to work until all of the nuances, idiosyncrasies and minutiae are well understood. For extensive libraries, that just takes a lot of time–at least for me. There are some libraries I have used for so long (OpenCV, Boost, Qt, etc.) that I can rapidly do the vast bulk of what needs to be done in a new application because I am intimate with the minutiae. But there is always something that changes and requires the use of new libraries–obsolescence, license changes, functionality changes and that sort of thing that require the adoption of new libraries. I actually kind of enjoy learning new stuff, but it is a lot more fun when there is no schedule or budget to create stress.
I have had little time to work on the 
There are opportunities to learn everywhere. I look back at my somewhat misspent youth and realize that all of that time when I was an angry and miserable ingrate, I could have spent learning new stuff. The funny deal is that I enjoyed learning new stuff, even back then. I just did not understand that the confusion and frustration of learning hard stuff eventually translated in joy-filled understanding. And, just as important, it built on the stuff learned previously.
The “scratch and dent” computer I bought from the 
The picture to the right is of an old, piece of trash Dell Vostro 200 desktop computer that was cheap and incapable the day we got it. As can be well attested over the years of this blog, I have pieces of projects in various stages of completion and a ton of software to go with them. Now, I have a partner in crime. My buddy John, from my last job and I are embarking on a project that includes the new little 
