A few days ago, I found a really great place, full of excellent math and programming problems: Project Euler.

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

I was long looking for this kind of place, to get my brain do some serious thinking :) It's a great way to improve logic and math/programming skills.

The problems can be solved by using any programming language, so as I just started learning Python, thought that this is a great way to start with it. As I suck more in math than in programming, my solutions are brute-forced, but I always go back to the explanation of the problem (can be viewed only after you gave the right answer to the problem), to understand the math behind the problem.

There are currently 214 problems and I'm on number 6 right now. If you into this kind of stuff, be sure to check it out, it's a lot of fun :)

Happy hacking!

I just found a nice web site where you can “smush” your images — Smushit.com. SmushIt takes an image and removes all unnecessary information about it: when was it last edited, what image editor was used etc., but keeps the quality of the image! This is more than useful for sites where there are lots of images.

The result of smushing

There are several ways to provide images to SmushIt:

• Upload an image
• Provide an URL to the image
• Use the Firefox SmushIt add-on

The first two ways are quite obvious; provide an image and it'll process it in a few seconds.

The Firefox add-on is pretty cool: open up a web page where are the images you want to smush, click the SmushIt add-on icon (it'll be in the right corner of the status bar), it will take you to their site and process all the images found on your web page.

When the processing is complete, there will be a table showing details about the smushing. Also a download link will be provided, to download the smushed images in one zip file.

Now run little lurker and smush your images :)