More catching up on gift's patches.

I've now sped gift up from 1.9 seconds per image, to .8. (on a P4 2.2Ghz)

The next steps of optimization have more to do with multi-tasking the extraction process, and re-using the extraction program for more than one image at a time. I'm thinking of converting the program into a tool that accepts absolute file paths of all the files to be converted on stdin, and writing to stdout the name of the file dropped to. wolfram's idea, basically. between that, and running multiple feature extraction processes at once, i should speed things up quite a bit more.

Things have been very quiet on the mailing list, I suppose it has to do with the darpa urban challenge having closed last week, and everyone being way too busy to audit my patches. Not that it matters much anyways, as I have commit access, but a second set of eyes is always a good thing.

I really wish there was more than me programming on this, especially because gift is written in C, Perl, and C++, and I normally don't touch C++ or Perl with a ten foot pole.

But, what needs done needs done. *reads O'reilly perl books/Bjarne's C++ book*