Johnny Lee shares a simple but clever approach for implementing finger tracking with the Wii remote:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0awjPUkBXOU 350 292]

A friend at work just showed me this, and boy is it cool. “Seam Carving” is a new algorithm for image retargeting. Image retargeting is an alternative to scaling and cropping, but it is content-aware. Scaled images suffer from the problem that the re-sized content may be too small to see. Cropped images may eliminate important content. Image retargeting solves both problems by keeping the image elements the same size and simply eliminating the “unimportant” parts of the image.

Graphic artists occasionally modify images this way by hand when doing page layouts for magazines–think of it like a visual form of copy-fitting–but an automated approach opens a world of possibilities. The number of of potential practical applications are immense, and include everything from dynamic web page re-flowing to widescreen-to-standard aspect texture fitting for games.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg 350 292]
A better version of the video as well as the research paper can be found on Dr. Shamir’s home page. What’s really neat is how straight-forward the method seems to be. The paper is well worth the read if you are interested in graphics algorithms.

If you’d like to play around with this technique on your own images, someone’s already implemented the algorithm in Flash.

Outlook 2007 has a very cool feature that lets you embed your current calendar in an e-mail and send it someone else. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could e-mail your To-Do list as well? Now you can! This macro shows you how to generate a formatted e-mail that contains all of your current tasks, as well as a list of any messages that you’ve flagged for follow-up.

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One of the shortcomings of Outlook 2007 is that it does not allow you to automatically move deleted IMAP items to the Trash folder instead of marking them for deletion. This functionality is available in most other e-mail clients–and it’s even available in Outlook if you use Exchange–but it’s not available in Outlook if you use IMAP.

This limitation really bothers me, so I wrote this VBA macro to work-around the problem.

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I hear this question all the time: “I heard asm was dead. Do video games still use assembly code?”

The answer? No, but yes. Sometimes. Sorta. It depends.

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