"This demo currently uses two different error-diffusion dithering algorithms: Atkinson's and the Floyd-Steinberg algorithm. Error-diffusion means that the algorithm goes pixel by pixel, rounds the individual R, G, and B channels to either 0x00 or 0xff, and then distributes those differences (which the algorithm calls the "quantization error") in differing amounts to pixels further down the line. It being a 3-bit dithering means that your red, blue, and green channels are represented by a single bit (off or on), giving you a total of 8 colors."

"As part of a bigger project I wanted to generate an abstract background image/texture." "Recently the pxl app for iPhone has filtered through my friends. It allows you to apply a variety of abstract compositions to your photos, a popular one turns an image into a collection of triangles, a general effect that should work well, and allow us to create a large background image out of a relatively small source image." Nice work there.

"Have you ever needed to generate some fake polygons to test a geo application?  No... oh.  I have, so I created GEOIPSUM!!!" "I used polymaps for the map, rails for the app, don't go near the dateline, it's a bit crap."

I probably should have made this a proper project rather than just a gist, but: a Python command line script that goes through and subscribes to people with the same username as those in your Delicious network. Almost certainly not perfect, but hopefully usable.

To the question, “what is the next big trend in programming”, Guy Steele said, “Maybe it’s sloppy programming.”

A version of the Substrate Processing code to paper, from Papercamp 2 in London.

"PyEphem provides scientific-grade astronomical computations for the Python programming language. Given a date and location on the Earth’s surface, it can compute the positions of the Sun and Moon, of the planets and their moons, and of any asteroids, comets, or earth satellites whose orbital elements the user can provide."

'Photos from the "Your Best Shot of 2009" group, that are in galleries, a slideshow' Key bits: you can pass a slideshow a Flickr API method, and flickr.photos.search can take an 'in_gallery' argument.

"A quick and dirty command line tool to see what Flickr members most frequently favorite photos of you (or someone else you know!). This uses the People in Photos feature (API documentation coming soon to Flickr!)" The key bit: person_id in the flickr.photos.search method.

"cmon is an HTML preprocessor that adds powerful layout capabilities to your markup. With cmon, you can engineer solid, cross-browser layouts that in CSS would require hours of writing and debugging browser-specific behaviour.

Well, that's handy. I tried doing this for iPhoto (with limited success), but Aperture is probably a better platform for it. If only Photoshop 5.5 hadn't stripped EXIF out of everything I uploaded from 2001 to 2004...

I've never written a badge before, so I have no idea how to go about this. But it's bound to be possible somehow. See also: threads asking for badges of favourites.

kellan explains the base 58 encoding used for turning a photo ID into the hash used in the flic.kr/p/hash/ short form URL for a Flickr page (which might, hopefully, see people using Flickr instead of Twitpic when doing short status updates).

"gae2django is a Django helper application that provides an implementation of Google's App Engine API based on pure Django. The helper makes it easier to re-use applications originally designed for Google's App Engine environment in a Django environment." Handy for avoiding lockin (which seems to be attracting folk to Heroku).

"You’d be able to knock up something like the Guardian BNP map without a second thought." I'd argue that you don't necessarily need to be able to code, but you do need to be able to use good tools; Excel and DabbleDB spring to mind (but aren't mentioned in the comments). (Note megp asking for Dopplr CSV exports so she can do her own visualisations.) Still, interesting thoughts.

Documentation of the various settings for Finder window settings stored in .DS_Store. This might be useful if I ever start itching to programatically fix up various window issues.

Looks interesting, although my geo-using projects are in GAE and I've just discovered geopy, which seems to be working. As you'd expect, over in the Rails world there's a bit more magic involved (like "an option to automatically geocode a model's address field on create").

"Cache, cache, cache." Interesting stuff on large-scale data analysis on Flickr, including recommendation systems based on favourites.

A nice hack, doing something a little less obvious with Flickr and Moo stickers. Complete with source code.

Aaron writes up a new API method, flickr.places.placesForUser, which might be just the thing for me, and reiterates a bunch of other useful geolocation stuff.

Daniel Jalkut argues that, given SquirrelFish and its wider success, Apple should consider retiring AppleScript as the primary choice for the Open Scripting Architecture and replace it with JavaScript. Lots of comments already.

That didn't take long, then. Mind you, this just hands off to the Flickr Uploadr, rather than using web-based upload itself. That'll be a bit harder, I suspect.

What it says on the tin: "A JavaScript shim for HTML 5's offline API and manifest format, implemented using Google Gears under the cover." Useful now there's an HTML5 storage API supporting browser out there.

I need to apply this patch to my local XML::Feed, after I've done a similar patch/test job on the changes I made to get a valid Atom feed out of the module.

Huh, the groupr dev branch had a function like this, except it handled months too. I wish I'd hived it off into a library now.

I spent a bit of the weekend playing about with JavaScript, and jQuery was the nicest of the libraries I was dealing with (and there were a few). Simon Willison's written a nice introduction to it.

"Within a few minutes, I realised that I needed something like URI.pm, in order to resolve URIs into an absolute form." Could be useful for Zimki stuff (and indeed Mark's already looking at it).

Could well be useful code, this. I also need to forward it to the Synergy developer. Both AppleScript and ObjC notifications - nice.

Deep in the guts of Six Apart's own Mac posting tool for TypePad/Vox. I'm hoping I can dredge something useful about the way their API works from this.

Who needs Twitter when you can glance at pictures of your buddies?