2016-12-30

The Trump Tweet Twist

Click to enlarge
Lots of fun guaranteed for 2017!

2016-12-29

Retrospective 2016

  • Ada PDF Writer. First release in 2016. Link here.
  • AZip 2.0. First release with standard Deflate compression format and a recompression tool for squeezing Zip archives smaller. Recompression uses an automatic algorithm picking method depending on data types. Link to AZip here.
  • Excel Writer. Internationalization and zoom factor added. Link here.
  • GID (Generic Image Decoder). Maintenance release. Added a chart reverse-engineering tool. Link to GID here.
  • GLOBE_3D. Added multi-texturing (specular textures added for shiny effects). Uses GID for decoding textures (broad choice of image formats). Added Wavefront object format importer. Link to GLOBE_3D here.
  • Mathpaqs. Maintenance release. The Copula package can use a vector of pseudo-random generators instead of a single generator. Link to Mathpaqs here.
  • Zip-Ada (#1). Added a "true" - and original - Deflate algorithm which scans the LZ-compressed data stream for setting up compression blocks, but without losing too much time doing so (Taillaule algorithm). Link to Zip-Ada here.
  • Zip-Ada (#2). Added an original LZMA algorithm which uses floating-point calculations for probability estimates of encoding variants. On some data formats (such as raw camera image data or mobile device data) this algorithm outpaces all existing LZMA-based compressions on the SqueezeChart benchmark! Link to Zip-Ada here.
Oh, perhaps it's worthwhile to remind it: all of this software is fully in Ada.
With the exception of AZip, it builds "out-of-the box" on at least two independent Ada toolsets: AdaCore GNAT, and PTC ObjectAda.

Gold pricing 2024-03-16

Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my financial articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. An uptick coming out of nowh...