off-topic, but this reminded me of an idea i had for a firefox extension: when visiting a questionable url, be able to tell firefox to blur the page/image heavily before rendering it. as you slowly decrease the blur and realize that it's something obscene/gross, you can close the tab before seeing the gory details that your eyes cannot unsee.
But I think you'd get annoyed by blurred pages taking forever to unblur and then not having anything bad on them. I think most people are desensitized anyway, and just look off-image until they can close it.
Firefox 4 at least has scaled-down preview images in the Ctrl-Tab switcher - if you open questionable images in a background tab and switch to it with Ctrl-Tab, you ought to be able to get at least a little advance warning.
When I was a much bigger idiot, I used to read C sources for open source audio codecs, in order to teach myself fixed-point numeric tricks. Turns out, there are entire handbooks of that stuff, with prose. No need to reverse-engineer precomputed tables with bleary eyes.
The URL for this item points to my lightly hacked version, but the real thing is at http://www.quasimondo.com/StackBlurForCanvas/StackBlurDemo.h... . (I just made it update when the slider moved, instead of requiring a button press, so that I could see how FF4 beta did at maintaining interactive perf with it.)
Awesome. I tried to write something like this, but it was way out of my league. Glad to see someone did it. Used correctly, blur can be really neat in UIs.
