danvk.org blog

Over the past few months I’ve been working on mapsnap, a program to automatically georeference old insurance maps.

Over the past two years I’ve quietly rebuilt major parts of the OldNYC photo viewer.

For me, 2025 has been the Year of Boggle.

The original motivation to revisit my Boggle project back in January was that I wanted to experiment with mixing Python and C++.

It’s been four months since I announced my big Boggle result.

Exciting news!

My last boggle post presented an exciting insight that yielded a 30x speedup.

At the end of my last post on Boggle, I’d achieved perhaps a 10x speedup over my 2009 approach and run my code for 8-9 hours on a 192-core machine to definitively prove that, with 1,651 points, this is the highest-scoring 3x4 Boggle board for the ENABLE2K…

Over the past few weeks I’ve revisited a 15-year old project of mine: trying to find the globally optimal Boggle board.

Over 15 years ago (!)

Over the past few weeks, I found the time to work on webdiff, an open source project of mine that I built over a decade ago.

I was dimly aware of the ongoing competition between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, but I hadn’t paid much attention until I saw this chart on reddit: It’s hard to read “Lee Sedol’s brilliant attack (78th)” and not get curious!

I recently added around 1,000 new photos to the map on OldNYC.

I’ve just wrapped up my trip to NIPS 2015 in Montreal and thought I’d jot down a few things that struck me this year: Saddle Points vs Local Minima I heard this point repeated in a talk almost every day.

I haven’t written a substantial blog post on danvk.org since January.

Two weeks ago I launched my latest side project, OldNYC.

Here’s the video of my talk from PyCon 2015, Make web development awesome with visual diffing tools: Here are the slides for the talk: The two tools referenced are: dpxdt for generating screenshots webdiff for viewing image diffs I used comparea and dygra…

In the last post, we walked through the steps in the Ocropus OCR pipeline.

In the last post, I described a way to crop an image down to just the part containing text.

As part of an ongoing project with the New York Public Library, I’ve been attempting to OCR the text on the back of the Milstein Collection images.

I recently switched back to iOS after a few years using Android.

I recently read Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts.

I’ve released webdiff 0.8.0, which you can install via: pip install --upgrade webdiff The most interesting new features are GitHub pull request integration and expanded image diffing modes.

It’s been almost exactly six months since I ended an eight year run at Google.

My danvk.org site is now fully hosted on GitHub pages.

There was a spike of traffic to Comparea over the weekend: Awesome!

The data store for Comparea is a giant 23MB GeoJSON file.

I’m going to try hosting my site and blog on GitHub pages.