These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
I came across this rather useful and practical tutorial on Huffman Coding in JPEG images. It looks at a very small and basic black-and-white image, and how the size of the data and overhead changes between different image formats, and then in more detail, how the Huffman Coding helps make that happen.
Unless you are dealing with compression, image formats, and binary trees on a daily basis, this tutorial is a good memory refresher of those college days.
Boostnote is yet another alternative for taking notes. This one is an Open Source and is built for developers. Some of the features – Markdown support, search, cross-platform, works offline.
There is also Boostnote Team edition for, you know, teams.
Here are some exciting news from the BitBucket Pipelines blog: Bitbucket Pipelines now supports building Docker images, and service containers for database testing.
We developed Pipelines to enable teams to test and deploy software faster, using Docker containers to manage their build environment. Now we’re adding advanced Docker support – building Docker images, and Service containers for database testing.
History of Icons looks at the evolution of icons used for desktop, mobile, and web. There are plenty of nostalgia triggering screenshots from a variety of systems. Given that nobody could ever afford having all of those systems, I’m sure you’ll find interesting screens from computers you didn’t have or didn’t see.
CSV, or comma-separated values, is a very common format for managing all kinds of configurations, as well data manipulation. As the linked Wikipedia page mentions, there are a few RFCs that try to standardize the format. However, I thought, there is still a lack of schema-type standard that would allow one to define a format for particular file.
Today I came across an effort that attempts to do just that – CSV Schema Language v1.1 – an unofficial draft of the language for defining and validating CSV data. This is work in progress by the Digital Preservation team at The National Archives.
Apart from the unofficial draft of the language, there is also an Open Source CSV Validator v1.1 application, written in Scala.