2007 October

I’ve decided it would be worthwhile to develop a Photoshop plugin for Tint. While adding nicer GUI features and tools such as a desaturation brush to the standalone program would be useful, it does feel like reinventing the wheel, and an enormous wheel at that. Obviously I could quickly find myself adding a bunch of standard features already available in the most simple of image editors, let alone top of the line products like Photoshop!

The plugin should facilitate a wealth of options above and beyond the simple monochrome and colour mixing currently available. Hue changes, progressive desaturation, object recognition and image segmentation will all become a possibility. Combined with this will hopefully be some improvements to the clustering algorithm that underlies Tint, in particular focusing on improved spatial clustering.

In theory at least, the plugin should also be compatible with Paint Shop Pro and the Gimp under Windows. A specialised Gimp plugin for Unix machines is a future possibility. The idea will be to design the plugin in such a way that a standalone Tint program is still available, albeit without the further possibilities that Photoshop and other editors can provide. This will ensure that users without these commercial packages are not excluded.

I’d like to thank everyone for their comments and suggestions regarding Tint so far, and for the small number of donations that have been received to help with the hosting of the site. It truly is fantastic to have had such a response, and it has motivated me to spend some more time in developing the idea. A few rough calculations across the many software download sites where Tint is now available gives well over 50 000 downloads in the relatively short time it’s been available.

Future donations will be put towards the purchase of Photoshop and Visual Studio (required by the Photoshop SDK for developing plugins), as well as hardware upgrades to support these. Any donations, however large or small, are much appreciated to help with these substantial costs. To donate, click the “Make a donation” button on the Tint page, or visit the SourceForge page and click the “Donate” link there.

Early days yet, but I’ll keep everyone posted on how this development progresses!

A minor update to the fmrii fMRI Modelling Library has been released, bringing it up to date with the latest version (1.1.0) of the dysii Dynamic Systems Library.

Version 1.1.0 of the dysii Dynamic Systems Library is now available. The primary feature of the new release is an overhauled implementation of the parallel particle filter and smoother, with new distributed storage capability. Serialization of distributions is also now available, working towards a more sophisticated framework for data management.

Specific changes include:

• Overhauled parallel implementations from master-slave to SPMD.
• Improved particle smoother with further parallelisation.
• Added distributed storage of mixtures.
• Added Gaussian mixture distributions.
• Added serialization of probability distributions.
• Fixed Wiener process variance bug.

See the updated documentation and VERSION.txt file in the new distribution for more information.

I’ve added a few new photos taken during a recent trip to Geneva for the Kasahara Cup 2007 (Kendo).