I worked for Don Killen at Greenleaf Software for quite a few years in the late 80s and 90s. Don was a pioneer in the world of commercial C and C++ libraries, and I received the sad news that he passed away this week.

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Marcus Hutter has put up a 50,000 euro prize for anyone who can break the existing record for compression of a 100 MB extract from the Wikipedia. Although the prize is ostensibly about data compression, the Hutter Prize seems designed to spur work in the field of Artificial Intelligence, based on the notion that superior compression of written text will require some understanding of the semantics of the text.

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Dr. Dobb’s Portal August, 2006
Article on DDJ site

Over the years I’ve spent quite a bit of time and money experimenting with the best ways to implement networked music and video in my home. Back in 2004 I showed you how to build a home […]

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Dr. Dobb’s Portal August, 2006
Article on DDJ site

International standards are good, we all love them, sure. But if you aren’t lucky enough to be employed by a big company or a university, getting your hands on these standards can be a real pain. Typically […]

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We all know that the denizens of the GooglePlex are all good, not evil, and I think this press release serves to drive the point home. As part of their ongoing work crawling the web, Google Research has created a database of of word sequences, or n-grams, accumulated from processing over a trillion words […]

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Incredible video compression claims are a morbid fascination of mine - usually it’s obvious that the claims are going to go down in flames, and it’s just a matter of watching for the inevitable disaster. I’m using the term incredible in its literal sense, a synonym for unbelievable, which comes in to play when somebody […]

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