December 2008 Archives

Rosetta Code Mediawiki and Wordpress installs have been updated to latest stable versions.  For the curious, the wiki database backup weighs in at 129MB.  Please email me if something's broken.--Short Circuit

The Rosetta Code wiki and blog will be going down Sunday, December 28th for maintenance and upgrades at 1AM Eastern Time.  Hopefully, the down time will be brief.Short Circuit

ActivityShinTakezou is a new user who has been adding examples in a couple of different languages (mostly C and Objective-C). Rahul added a lot of Icon examples (Icon is new to RC, see below). C and Icon received most of the new examples this week.New Tasks and LanguageMore image-related tasks have sprouted up:

• Image histogram -- Find the number of pixels in an image with the same luminance.
• Image convolution -- This task doesn't have much of an explanation, so any examples may have to come form someone who already knows what it is or knows how to translate from the existing examples.
• Median filter -- A noise reduction algorithm from images.
• Read image file through a pipe‎ -- Similar to PPM conversion through a pipe from last week, but reversed.

Other regular tasks have also been created:

• Trial factoring of a Mersenne number -- An algorithm using binary conversion to see if a Mersenne prime candidate is composite.
• Yuletide Holiday (most of the edits near the end of the week) -- A task which asks the programmer to find the years in a range where Christmas falls on a Sunday. This task was created to complete our task alphabet, and even though it's a little bit of a stretch, we'll go with it.

Icon came to RC this week and already has more than 20 examples written for it. It looks a little like Pascal to me, but with some extra "new language"-type features like the swap operator (:=:).Still NeededMore general volunteers for the admin assistance call. A list of jobs should be coming soon. It's being made by the people who do the admin work right now, but the reason they're calling for assistance is that they're too busy, so it may still be a little bit until it's finished. The list will probably include jobs as simple as spam removal and as interesting as Bot Master.

ActivityThere were a lot of pages created on the 1st by what looks like a bot clicking on broken links. RCSNUSP picked up JavaScript and C. There were Perl and Python examples added throughout the week, with C and Ada added lately (mostly in new tasks). There was also a lot of talk going on in Column Aligner, Palindrome, and Top Rank Per Group.New TasksA lot of image processing tasks were added in the last couple of days. Before that, there were several other tasks added. Here are the regular computing tasks:

• Knapsack Problem -- a classic computer science problem to determine the best total value of items that will fit in a knapsack.
• Top Rank Per Group -- a database-ish task to find the top N rows in a table based on a column.
• Palindrome -- write a function to determine if a string is a palindrome (case-insensitive).
• Constrained Genericity -- a language feature demonstration task, show how to put some rules on generic classes.

Here are the image processing tasks:

• Basic bitmap storage -- create a way to store an RGB bitmap in memory and manipulate it in some ways.
• Quadratic bezier curves -- implement the quadratic bezier algorithm (important in imaging for creating scalable smooth curves).
• Bresenham's line algorithm -- implement an algorithm that determines which pixels need to be on to display a particular line.
• Write ppm file -- write an image to a file in a particular format.
• PPM conversion through a pipe -- convert a ppm image to a jpeg image from an input pipe.
• Midpoint circle algorithm -- similar to Bresenham's line algorithm, but for circles.
• Cubic bezier curves -- Similar to the quadratic algorithm, but with an extra term.

A task beginning with Y is still needed to complete the alphabet.Still NeededWith these new tasks come opportunities for new examples. Don't forget about the old tasks, though. Check through the task category (organized or unorganized) for tasks that you think you can do, not just new tasks.

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