Talk Teaser: Image processing with Mono.Simd

The facts:

Processing time using gdk_pixbuf: 431ms
Same method ported to Mono.Simd: 66ms
That means roughly 6.5 times faster !

Some explanations:

• The gdk-pixbuf is an unoptimized standard gdk operation (gtk+ 2.18.1), but I don't think a lot of them are optimized either using mmx or SSEx for this platform (x86-64). Feel free to prove me wrong here.
• Times are averaged.
• Loading and saving times aren't taken into account here, but both are using gdk_pixbuf operations.
• The Mono.Simd method acts on vanilla pixbufs, and results are plain old usable pixbufs, not some kind of memory buffer or whatnot.
  
• The image attached to this post is not the result of the processing.

This is only a teaser for the short talk I'll be giving at FOSDEM on Sunday Feb 7. Be there if you want to learn more, see the code, or question my sanity for doing this in Mono and not directly as a gdk-pixbuf patch.

News from the F-Spotters

Some news, in no particular order:

F-Spot 0.6.1.2 was released a couple of minutes ago. It fixes db upgrade for the people who went in holidays in the far future. Now F-Spot can update a db with photos taken (or reported to be) after 2038. It also fixes a crash while running on gtk+ 2.14.

The LiveWebGallery extension is now merged into the main tree, and installable, from the Manage Extension dialog, on any F-spot > 0.6. The extension crashing on gtk+2.14 is part of the past too.

Ruben is MIA. Last time we heard from him, he was "in a park near a pond near a museum".

A new extension, allowing finer control over the BlackAndWhite conversion process is coming soon. It leverages the expensive CPU you paid big bucks for via Mono.Simd. Mandatory screenshot:
That's it for today.