Beginning

During the weekend I started work on my first programming project: an image viewer. My first task was to begin researching image codecs and file formats. Where do you think I looked first? Fifty points to those of you who said Wikipedia.

Specifically, I read through the article on the JPEG codec. I had researched this codec a little during a signal processing course at university and it was good to refresh the neurons. For example, I was aware that after the discrete cosine transform has occurred, a lossless compression algorithm is run over the coefficients. The article pointed me to the specific algorithms defined for use in the JPEG codec: Huffman coding and arithmetic coding. So, to implement the JPEG codec I first have to implement one of these algorithms. I will implement Huffman coding as I am not completely sure that arithmetic coding is free of patent issues. Huffman coding is also used in the bzip2 data compression algorithm which I plan to implement at some point.

However, before I get into the weeds of design and coding I want to take two sidetracks to explore some tool functionality. Specifically, I want to look at creating my own templates or snippets for TextMate that will insert appropriate licence comment blocks in my source code, and I want to read and experiment a little with Scons to be used as my build tool.