Scott Hanselman has a series of posts about source code he's reading to become a better developer. I think this is seriously cool and have been inspired to pay more attention to other people's code as well (recently: Quantlib, NHibernate.)

This morning I happened on a video demonstrating a Seam Carving plugin for Gimp. This gets me really excited.

A long time ago, I used to do graphics-y (games and educational software) programming. We had time to work on stuff we liked. I remember working with a library Intel developed for analyzing images and using it to develop a video sketch demo - turning a video into a simulated pencil-sketchy style animation. I had seen this at SIGGRAPH in 1998 and felt this same sense of inspiration I feel now - I just want to know it / do it / be it. I was able to kind of fake my way through it without any code sample, just a video showing a demo and giving an explanation of the underlying theory.

I am reading the source to the gimp plugin now, but it is hard to follow. I might just try half-assing this myself first to get a better idea of the problem, then comparing my code to theirs. That worked for me in 1998, why not now?

Wish me luck!