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 video jukebox, albeit with a few compromises. Today you [...]

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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 the standards bodies sell electronic copies of their work [...]

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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 of [...]

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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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The world is full of people making miraculous claims for video compression. For example, the hucksters at Euclid Discoveries have been leading their investors on with tales of incredible video compression for years now. No doubt that somebody, someday, might make a quantum leap in video compression, but for the past 25 years it’s been [...]

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There are a lot of video codecs in the world, and the competition is pretty fierce. Is there any room for a newcomer to claw out some market share? There are lots of pretenders, but few who actually succeed in making a dent in the marketplace. Let’s look at what’s already out there and in [...]

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Richard Baldwin has written a few nice tutorials on Data Compression, with the algorithms illustrated by Java code. Three free articles cover Huffman coding, LZ77 compressing, and the DCT.

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This article gives an overview of how to handle internationalization in your Java program, with samples given for Chinese web pages.

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My home RAID experiment continues, with good success, as I take drastic measures to reduce heat in the inside of my Terabyte disk server. I learn that the most important things about airflow aren’t necessarily just fans.

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