The eminently quotable Samuel Johnson had a very pragmatic view about writing, and was quoted by Boswell as having said: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. Personally, I think Johnson is pretty close to the mark on this one, but I will add one caveat. Ask any writer about their first [...]

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Ownership of the Zip file format has always been a tenuous thing. Back in the day, PKWare’s founder Phil Katz (shown) didn’t publish an official document or specfication, but hobbyists such as those with the Info-ZIP project did eventually have the Appnote.txt file that shipped with PKZip to provide a pretty good road map to [...]

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Data compression is of course more than just a hobby of mine, it’s a way of life. And now I have an inspirational poster that I can frame for cubicle wall or use as wallpaper while I engage in my passion. Thanks to the photoshop pranksters at b3ta.com for helping!           [...]

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A recurring question that I see in my inbox, or in a comp.compression post is: “Can’t I write a program that figures out in advance what the best compressor will be for a given file?” Of course, what the question implies is that there ought to be a good way to do this without actually [...]

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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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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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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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Forgent has made a lot of money from the ’672 patent – forcing camera and PC manufacturers alike to sign licensing agreements that included payments for back royalties. Now that the US Patent and Trademark Office has invalidated several key points of this patent, things aren’t looking quite as good for the Austin, TX trolling firm.

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