Vote for Liushuo Wan. Right now, he’s losing, 305 votes to 559. But you can reverse that. He’s on the right side. Go vote now, it only takes a second. Here’s that link again:
Zinch March Madness - vote Liushuo Wan.
Here’s why:
- He has USC listed under his Shout Outs.
- He’ll do anything to win this scholarship, but even if he doesn’t, he’ll “tip his hat out to the winner.”
- He has done many things to shape his community, such as volunteering his time to tutor elementary school children.
- He currently tutors a person with a mental disability, hoping to have a positive impact on the person’s life.
- He has realized the need to grow up and mature.
- He knows the importance of world-awareness and that he has the ability to leave a positive legacy for his peers.
- Not only does he realize this, but he lives it out, too.
- He cares about world issues and problems with society.
Now, I’m not fully convinced by those points. For instance, what really makes him unique, and what has he accomplished? But the ease of voting for him means that you can do it in literally 2 clicks, so give him your vote. I know him in real life, so I know he’ll appreciate it 
Here’s the story: Continue reading ‘Liushuo Wan (Randy) Needs Your Vote’
I’m very proud of myself tonight. You see, I’m a programmer at heart. Yet it has been a long time since I just programmed something for fun. Not a contest, not a class. Just out of pure usefulness and interest. Here’s the story.
I setup a webcam to watch my room for the day, and some software that uploads the webcam’s image to my server via FTP, 6 times per minute. The software is Active Webcam, and I just used the free evaluation version. Over the course of the day, it generated 6,522 images - way too many to view at once. So I decided to script something to make looking at the images more interesting.
The first obvious problem is that most of the images look exactly the same. Nothing happened during the day, so the images have no easily visible distinction. Yet they are not the same in terms of bits: the brightness has slight variations, the JPEG compression differed, etc. So doing an md5 comparison (which will be the same for files which are the same) doesn’t cut it. I need to actually look at the image data.
Fortunately, PHP has a great built-in image library known as gd. You have to have PHP compiled with it, but my host does, so I suspect most others do, too. After much trial and error, I managed to do the following: Continue reading ‘Comparing Images and Measuring their Similarity in PHP’
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