Compressing the compression
February 17th, 2024
I just reformatted the compression article and included a little trick to optimize PCX files. That aside, I've been very busy at work, crafting macros in VBA for Microsoft Excel and I was pondering my orb in regard to VBA and how fun/desperate it would be to write about that. I mean, who would want to learn how to code Minesweeper in a spreadsheet? Or Battleship. Or Picross... Now that I think about it, there's plenty of other games that can fit in a spreadsheet. BRB, gotta work overtime. Oh, and a happy New Year too!
FAX-ME!
December 15th, 2023
If you ever wanted to learn more about binary representation, boolean operators, and how this knowledge can help you program cool stuff, I got just the thing! In the article section, you'll find FAX-ME: Let's Write Tetris, a simple black-and-white page packed with illustrations, code, and step-by-step instructions so you (hopefuly) never get lost while writing your very own Tetris! Alternatively, send me your fax number and I'll call you back!
The less you know...
August 15th, 2023
Today I'm going to teach you how to cook Chicken Tikka Masala. First, search for restaurants in your area. Make sure they do delivery. Write down the phone number and contact them to place an order. And voila! Within fourty to fifty minutes, it's ready! Subscribe to my Patreon for more cooking advices!
On an absolutely unrelated note, I wrote an article on quantization of color images with extra dithering on top... the old-fashioned way, without resorting to some third-party library powered by some cutting-edge machine learning tech. It's in the article section.
It's me again!
March 26th, 2023
I updated the Lossless Compression article again, this time including a very quick overview of LZW. It brushes over the most difficult aspects of it, but provides two routines to compress and decompress streams with fixed-length codes... what a cop-out.
Ways to decompress
March 21st, 2023
It is increasingly important to learn how to decompress in those rock hard times we live in... in fact, it's also very important to learn how to compress. That's why I began to write an article about classic lossless compression algorithms: Run-Length Encoding (easy) and Huffman Encoding (not easy.) The article could use a few illustrations and probably a few more routines here and there, but what's there is functionnal. Why does it take some much time to do stuff? Damn you, stuff!
EDIT: just rewrote the whole stuff from scratch, enjoy.
Oh wow
March 16th, 2023
I just added a new article titled "Everything in its right place" which covers binary search and hash tables, two neat ways of retrieving data entries in large arrays. It's a pretty random idea for an article, sure, but the other candidate was "Your hamster, you, and the education board of Canada, a transversal approach to boiling eggs" which was equally pretty random, especially for a QuickBASIC-oriented web page.