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i say cunt. a lot. 90% of the time it is said about somebody who is, in fact, being a cunt. and about 10% of the time it’s about something totally frustrating, like peeling a pomegranate or having to ‘register’ on a website just to buy something you really don’t need anyway. it’s weird that i say cunt so much because i try not to use any other profanity, like, ever, and i go so far as to never even using the lord’s name in vain. for someone who is pretty adamant about replacing all of her ‘gods’ with ‘gosh’s’, i’m totally liberal with the c word. while day drinking with ryan last week, he brought to my attention how weird it is that in my late 20’s i have had, pretty much, only girl friends, where in my teens and early 20’s i had only guy friends. there is a direct correlation to why my usage of ‘cunt’ grows exponentially with each new girl friend i accrue…it’s because they are cunts (i am too, i promise). with guys, in my experience, the conversations are about similarities, interests and shitty childhoods. mike and i used ride the train together from our first jobs in the city and talk about books for an hour and a half (when i wasn’t hiding from him because he talked way too much…about books). jeff and i would swap stories about awful step-families while smoking parliament lights at the diner for 5 hours straight. i believe this blog is proof positive that ryan and i talk about anything and everything all the time, but if i’m to solely look at what we were doing 7 years ago, it was drinking at spruce street grill, talking about and listening to 1970s singer songwriters. when i moved to hoboken, my neighbor matt and i would watch yankee games and 1980s teen movies about 4 nights a week and actively try to reach out to corey feldman ‘just for fun and because he prob has nothing better to do’. you get the picture. it was easy. it wasn’t complicated. it wasn’t cruel.

now, i only really have girl friends. i’m not entirely sure how this happened, but i have some ideas. i lived with a whole bunch of ladies for about 5 years and have made and maintained some pretty great friendships because of it. i also slept with almost every single one for my guy friends, which, tends to put about a five year ‘weird strain’ on the former platonic friendship, therefore, i am forced to hang out with people i haven’t woken up drunk and naked next to (small pool). lastly, once a dude friend gets married, single lady friends are off limits because their wives are insecure cunts. there, i said it. 

so for the past year or so i am hanging out with my bff’s, all of my bff’s, from high school bff’s to roommate bff’s to beach bff’s—there was a lot of bff’ing going around. as of late, not just because i’m chilling with ladies all the time, but also because of the nonsense of facebook, twitter, texting, gchat, etc., being a bff feels like a full time job at a day-care with super cranky and judgey two year olds that vie for your attention 24/7. everyone is so preoccupied with whatever anyone else is doing and their preoccupation then doubles when they spend time relaying this preoccupation to 3 other people all.day.long. everyone needs to be invited everywhere, included all the time. everyone has an opinion that they won’t give or else they wait to give it at a very drunk inopportune time that comes across as immature and unkind. its gotten to a point where we are just so wrapped up in ourselves that we don’t have time to talk about books (we need to set up a club just to do this, fyi). friday night, i was on the phone with another ryan talking about gluten (gluten!), thoroughly enjoying the conversation. v came to pick me up, and i quickly had to get off the phone with him, and immediately hopped in her car and start gossiping about a mutual friend. it was instant. and it was prefaced with ‘ugh, so and so, i cant even’ and v goes ‘tell me everything’. and whole i’m totally judging someone else for being just who they are, i realized that a majority of my conversations start this way. my gchat pings, and without even looking at it i know its going to say something like “can i vent for like 5 min??” vent is a bullshit ‘nice’ way to say you’re going to spend some time shit talking someone for not acting the way you’d like them to. i do this all the time. 

this weeks three weeks ago, i was thinking about my ‘goal’ for getting better in 2012 which was ‘start spending time with the right people’ and during my few days of tuning in and paying attention to my relationships, i realized that i am pretty terrible at being friends with girls. its exhausting. i love my girl friends when we are acting like guys (guys who love a great sale at anthro).  i, truly, have some of the most inspiring, hilarious, giving and unique women in my life that i feel so blessed, often, so often, but we need to chill, girls. big time. we are the right people…when we aren’t being cunts. we have good hearts that get caught up in the cattiness.  ive always considered luck in friendship, in any relationship, really, to be when you are so genuinely happy for the other persons good fortune that you never ever feel twinges or pangs of jealousy. ever. and i am so thankful that i have had a solid handful of these friends in my life. friends where when i have lost my job and lost boys and lost hope, i can still be over the moon smiley for them when they are gaining. and i know the feeling is mutual. and that is a great dynamic. IN CONCLUSION**-‘start spending time with the right people’—let’s work on us being the right people (im on my way to scoop up miss v to go to a garage sale and talk about old records and books). let’s forgive everyone else for not being what we want them to be (whenever i’m being the worst person ever, ryan calls me a selfish cunt and vows to hate me forever, then gets over it when there is a new episode of portlandia on that he wants to discuss. and neither of us views this as ‘caving’ or ‘crawling back’), if we aren’t enjoying one another, lets take a time out, and wait until we are all set to enjoy a night of living room dance parties rather than bar shit talking sessions. i’m going to be a better friend to my better friends. and i’m going to hang with my boy buds* more often. and i’m going to ignore all the nonsense that comes from everyone else.

*the good news is, the five year ‘weird strain’ is almost up for most of them. 2008 was a crazy year.

**it takes me forever and a day to conclude. 

let’s get better 2012 inspired by this really great website. 

I found that mds and mdimport were constantly running, and often taking up to 90-100% of my CPU when it was otherwise idle.

These processes are used by spotlight to index the hard drive and make files searchable. It usually runs when the system is idle and should run instantly whenever files are updated. My CPU usage seemed excessive though, and detrimental to battery life.

So I dug around to see if I could reduce the idle time CPU usage. This is mostly for me to refer back to later.

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In our office, we have a pretty amazing paper shredder. Seriously, the thing shreds just about anything. It even has a special slot for credit cards (why anyone would want to regularly shred credit cards is beyond me, but I digress…).

One day, after shredding some paper, I thought to myself: shredding paper is a pretty insecure way of destroying important stuff. I figured, it’s a small set of shreds that are all relatively uniform in width and could be pieced back together algorithmically in a fraction of a second.

So, I sat down and though about what approach I’d use to piece the document back together. It’s unlike a regular puzzle in that all the pieces are exactly the same size, so you can’t rely upon the spatial domain to solve piecing shreds together. However, if you think about it, there’s a pretty simple approach that would allow you to find matches in a different domain. That is, imagine you’re sitting there trying to find a match between two pieces. What are you looking for to decide whether they’re a fit or not?

Anyway, we got really excited about writing a script to take in an image of shreds of paper and piece them back into an original document. It’s an interesting challenge that marries image processing with an interesting algorithmic challenge as well.

THE CHALLENGE

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to write a simple script that takes a shredded image in as input:

and outputs an unshredded and reconstituted image. That is, imagine if you took an image, divided it into an even number of columns and shuffled those columns randomly to produce a shredded image. Then, take that image into the script and output the original image:

We tackled this, and our solution took a few hours plus another few hours for the bonus challenge (more on that later).

THE REWARD

Due to overwhelming response, we’ve run out of our entire stock of tee-shirts! With future challenges we’ll be offering a reward for the first group of people who respond.

GUIDELINES

1) Choose a scripting language of your choice. We chose Python for its relative ease prototyping and availability of the Python Imaging Library (PIL) that allowed us to do the image stuff we wanted to do. You can easily use something like C++ or Ruby for this as well.

2) Produce a script that reads in a shredded image (like the one below) and produces the original image. For this image, you can assume shreds are 32 pixels wide and uniformly spaced across the image horizontally. These shreds are scattered at random and if rearranged, will yield the original image.

Use this image as the source image - it’s 640 pixels wide and 359 pixels high.

3) Your solution should algorithmically unshred the image. This means it should work on arbitrarily shredded images we feed your script that are shredded in the same manner.

4) BONUS CHALLENGE: We went the extra mile and made our script even spiffier by auto-detecting how wide the uniform strips are. Extra bonus points to anyone who works this into their solution. But first, we’d recommend getting your script to work assuming 32 pixel-wide shreds. For this you can assume shreds will never end up next to each other correctly in the source image.

5) The key to this problem is being able to access pixel data in the image. We used Python Imaging Library - PIL (http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/) which made it very easy to parse. See the PIL tips below. If you’re using Ruby, check out RMagick (http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/) which is a gem that serves the same purpose as PIL. C++ has the boost libraries and included is “GIL” which will help you. If you’re using another language, there are most certainly equivalents of PIL, RMagick, and GIL.

SUBMIT YOUR SOLUTION

We’re no longer offering the tee-shirt reward but if you’re still interested in working with us, please submit your information & a link to your solution here: http://bit.ly/unshredder

PIL TIPS

from PIL import Image
image = Image.open(‘file.jpg’)
data = image.getdata() # This gets pixel data

# Access an arbitrary pixel. Data is stored as a 2d array where rows are
# sequential. Each element in the array is a RGBA tuple (red, green, blue,
# alpha).

x, y = 20, 90
def get_pixel_value(x, y):
   width, height = image.size
   pixel = data[y * width + x]
   return pixel
print get_pixel_value(20, 30)

# Create a new image of the same size as the original
# and copy a region into the new image
NUMBER_OF_COLUMNS = 5
unshredded = Image.new(“RGBA”, image.size)
shred_width = unshredded.size[0]/NUMBER_OF_COLUMNS
shred_number = 1
x1, y1 = shred_width * shred_number, 0
x2, y2 = x1 + shred_width, height
source_region = image.crop(x1, y1, x2, y2)
destination_point = (0, 0)
unshredded.paste(source_region, destination_point)
# Output the new image
unshredded.save(“unshredded.jpg”, “JPEG”)

TIPS

1) Don’t overthink it. Use of really complex algorithms isn’t needed. Our solution WITH the bonus exercise comes in at just over 150 lines of python.

2) Think about how you would quantify whether or not two shreds ‘fit’ together by using pixel data

3) Assume you’re using the source image, or other normal photographs without edge-case patterns.

4) There are edge cases where the script we wrote with our approach will not work because of repeating patterns. This is OK in your script as well. Don’t worry about special cases – focus on making the sample images work that we’ve provided.

4) Bonus Challenge: If you decide you want to auto-detect how many columns there are in an image, you should remember that there are a finite amount of columns that are possible given an image of a certain width if you assume columns are evenly distributed and uniformly sized.

SHREDDER

If you’d like to produce your own sample images, you can use our simple script here to generate some:

from PIL import Image
from random import shuffle

SHREDS = 10
image = Image.open(“sample.png”)
shredded = Image.new(“RGBA”, image.size)
width, height = image.size
shred_width = width/SHREDS
sequence = range(0, SHREDS)
shuffle(sequence)

for i, shred_index in enumerate(sequence):
    shred_x1, shred_y1 = shred_width * shred_index, 0
    shred_x2, shred_y2 = shred_x1 + shred_width, height
    region =image.crop((shred_x1, shred_y1, shred_x2, shred_y2))
    shredded.paste(region, (shred_width * i, 0))

shredded.save(“sample_shredded.png”)

something strange. four months ago i had a great boyfriend, a job i adored and a dreamy dreamy apartment. now, i have none of those. but, this past month especially, i am happy. happier than i was then, it seems. and it’s making me second guess if the ‘4 months ago’ happiness was somehow not as genuine because my ‘reasons for being’ happy were a-typical, ‘the norm’ and because i was doing what i should have been doing at 29. i’m not sure if what i’m doing now will ‘de-rail’ a life of ‘perpetually moving forward’…but i’m pretty sure life does that anyway without someone to share your bed with, a desk to sit at from 9-5 and a key to your overpriced studio.