http://geekblog.nl/cat /proc/minden-ushttp://geekblog.nl/entry/25 In a few weeks this year's edition of the two-day event Free And Open Source Developers' European Meeting will start. During the last weekend of February (23d and 24th of February), open source software developers from all over Europe and the rest of the World will gather in Brussels to share their thougths with others. This year I have been invited by the Mozilla Corporation to visit this event. I am really looking forward to this event. According to the schedule there will be a lot of interesting talks about several open source projects. Apart from these talks and presentations there are some other events too: keysigning, LPI exams, the Beer Event on Friday etcetera. Erik van KempenSat, 09 Feb 2008 11:29:25 +0100http://geekblog.nl/entry/24 As promised in the previous article about blob detection, I would describe an better and faster algorithm for detecting and finding blobs in an image. This algorithm uses a more intuitive approach for finding the blobs: growing the interesting regions. Erik van KempenMon, 14 Jan 2008 18:20:26 +0100http://geekblog.nl/entry/23 In Blob detection II - Tracing edges, I have already described in a nutshell the algorithm I have been using for my multi-touch project. In this article I am trying to give a better and more understandable description of the used algorithm. I will not only describe the algorithm, but also show the pros, cons and encountered problems. Some of the information can be already found in the previous article. The blobs are being detected in a stream of grayscale images. These images have already been preprocessed, by converting them from 24-bit color to grayscale and by blurring to minimize noise and false positives. These grayscale blurred images are fed to the blob detection algorithm. Erik van KempenThu, 10 Jan 2008 23:34:28 +0100http://geekblog.nl/entry/22 Just a day after I posted my wish for 2008, a new and innovative email system, Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror posted an interesting article about the trouble with PDF. I proposed Adobe's Portable Document Format to be the defacto new standard file format for email messages, but maybe another new or existing packaged format would be better. Jeff describes the fact that a lot of documents that are published as PDF could be published using HTML and CSS, because they do not really need the formatting possibilities of PDF. He also makes clear that PDFs are quite difficult to search through without special software. As HTML is plain text, it's easier to scan the contents. Erik van KempenFri, 04 Jan 2008 15:49:03 +0100http://geekblog.nl/entry/21 While preparing the night of the yearly countdown, we should not think about what happened during the past 365 days. In my opinion, we should think about what we are going to do during the coming days. The more time you spend thinking about history, the less time you have left for the future. So, I thought about what my wishes for 2008 are. One of them is a new e-mail message format or system. Erik van KempenMon, 31 Dec 2007 14:10:41 +0100