• GPGPU

    Comparing SSE2 and GPGPU C++ AMP

    The temporal median algorithm compares the same pixel in consecutive images in a sequence, and returns the median value of the pixel, i.e. the pixel value that has the same number of lower and higher values (an easy way to visualize this is imaging all the pixel values in an…

  • Web

    Spidering Facebook public profiles with C++ and Boost

    Back in 2010, security researcher Ron Bowes wrote a Ruby script that downloads information from Facebook’s user directory, a searchable index of public profile pages. The directory did not expose a user’s entire profile and only exposed information that the user has allowed Facebook to make public. Bowes got the…

  • GPGPU

    GPGPU performance on switchable graphics notebooks

    Many notebooks on the market feature switchable graphics, that is, a notebook with an Intel CPU with built-in HD Graphics technology, as well as an additional AMD HD Radeon GPU or nVidia GeForce GPU. During normal usage, just the Intel HD Graphics is enabled, as it consumes less power, and…

  • Testing

    Unit testing with Visual C++ 2012

    The article related to multi-threading and SSE2 optimizations (you can find it here) uses a quick-and-dirty way to check if the optimized code is correct, i.e. it runs an iteration on a given input image with a reference serial code, stores the resulting output image, runs an iteration of the…

  • Multi-thread

    Further multi-thread processing with Delphi

    In a previous article named “Easy multi-thread programming Delphi“, the AsyncCalls library was used to process multiple images at the same time. However, the processing of every single image was still strictly serial, even if image processing kernels are quite easy to accelerate spreading the load over multiple threads. In…

  • Software

    Facebook authentication with Friend Watchdog

    This article is a description of the integration of Facebook authentication inside Friend Watchdog. It is not meant to be an introduction or a description of Friend Watchdog’s features. Please click here for more information about Friend Watchdog. Why authenticating on Facebook with Friend Watchdog After authenticating on Facebook, the…

  • Software

    Friend Watchdog free software for Facebook and Skype

    Friend Watchdog is now offline. There are several technical reasons for this choice, the first one being Microsoft dropping support for the chat API in Skype, the second one being Facebook changing the behaviour of their chat servers. But the most important reason is that a lot of people finally…

  • Web

    Limiting SkyDrive upload speed

    At the time of writing, the SkyDrive client application on Windows does not support bandwidth throttling on uploads, so if you start uploading a large number of files, it will try to use all the available bandwidth, and this behaviour has an impact on other applications accessing the Internet. A…