Dilate is a function that accepts a black and white image. It is also known by the names "grow", "bolden", and "expand". It turns on pixels which were near pixels that were on originally, thereby thickening the items in the image.
A singly linked list is a common data structure familiar to all computer scientists. A singly linked list is made of nodes where each node has a pointer to the next node (or null to end the list). A singly linked list is often used as a stack (or last in first out queue (LIFO)) because adding a new first element, removing the existing first element, and examining the first element are very fast O(1) operations.
When working with singly linked list, you are typically given a link to the first node. Common operations on a singly linked list are iterating through all the nodes, adding to the list, or deleting from the list. Algorithms for these operations generally require a well formed linked list. That is a linked list without loops or cycles in it.
A good friend of mine from college, Andy, has been programming music visualization software for many years now. He started SoundSpectrum, a company based on his work. Recently another friend of mine, Anton, joined him. They just released their newest version of G-Force on June 8, 2005.
I'm a fan of the Bugzilla bug tracking system that came out of the Mozilla web browser project. It is a web based system that makes it pretty easy to track issues with pretty much any piece of software. Furthermore, it isn't that hard to set up, so I have used it in more than one employment setting.
At work, we have a private Bugzilla installation that is only visible to employees. Given that everybody that can enter bugs should know how to fill in even the more complex fields, the enter bug form seemed a little inadequate. Our QA department really wanted to be able to specify the target milestone for a new bug to be for the next release when they entered a bug for a regression during the full quality assurance check a few days before a release.
If you have ever programmed using Java IO, you will quickly run into a situation in which a class creates data on an OutputStream and you need to send it to another class that expects to read the data from an input stream. You'll soon be asking the question, "How do I convert an OutputStream to an InputStream?"
Nowhere in Java will you find a OutpStreamToInputStreamConverter class. Luckily, there are several ways to go about this.
If you have ever programmed using Java IO, you will quickly run into a situation in which a class creates data on a Writer and you need to send it to another class that expects to read the data from a Reader. You'll soon be asking the question, "How do I convert a Writer to a Reader?"
Nowhere in Java will you find a WriterToReaderConverter class. Luckily, there are several ways to go about this.
Many text editors have advanced find (and replace) features. I recently wrote an article about finding C style comments in source code. A similar technique can be used to find comments in HTML files.
Anybody who has worked with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) quickly learns that they are a very powerful tool for adding presentation to web pages. Cascading Style Sheets change the fonts and colors in HTML documents easily, a feature that any good webmaster will now employ. The specification for CSS also allows for elements to be positioned on the page so that CSS can do layout with the same advantages as font and color.
Many text editors have advanced find (and replace) features. When I'm programming, I like to use an editor with regular expression search and replace. This feature is allows one to find text based on complex patterns rather than based just on literals. Upon occasion I want to examine each of the comments in my source code and either edit them or remove them. I found that it was difficult to write a regular expression that would find C style comments (the comments that start with /* and end with */) because my text editor does not implement the "non-greedy matching" feature of regular expressions.