Huffman Coding

Chris, to challenge an otherwise bored first grader, bought Marissa a math book for home. To encourage her to do the work, Chris promised Marissa a computer game if she finished forty pages in the extracurricular text book.

It came time to pay up this weekend. I took the girls Best Buy and Marissa picked out SeaWorld Adventure Park Tycoon 2.

The girls have been inching towards taking over my desktop machine as their own. And this was another game that required my beefier machine. They now run it, Disney Princess Magical Dress-Up, Brother Bear and Zoo Tycoon 2 on there.

Both SeaWorld and Dress-Up require Administrator rights to run, so I have given two 7-years-olds reign over my machine. This irks me to no end. I felt uneasy enough to backup the system tonight. I hope they don’t figure out how to change my password.

Katie plays the Dress-Up game. You build a doll, picking a body shape, hair, eye and skin color and then you layer on clothes. Just like the old paper dolls without having to resort to messy analog scissors.

Even before she could speak, we have made Katie aware that she was adopted from China. She hasn’t always known what that meant though. When she was four she asked when her hair would turn yellow like mommy’s. We told her it never would and that almost everyone from China had black hair. A few months later she asked at what age her nose would “pop out.” We let her know that, just like most Chinese people, her nose will always be small.

The Dress-Up software allows you to import a digital picture so your daughter can dress up a doll with her own face on it. With the girls gone to bed tonight, I imported Katie’s beautiful China doll face from a recent birthday picture.

This takes a bit of effort as you have to indicate with an oval where the face is on the image. This allows the image to be cropped properly. Then you have to mark where on the face the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth are. This is allows the software to shade the face to make it look 3D.

The software makes some unfortunate assumptions on the range of real skin colors and facial shading. You can make some crude adjustments to the skin color, but you cannot adjust how much it shades the indicated features.

This is the picture I started with:

Katie Before

After a several attempts, this is what I ended up with (warning: not for the squeamish).

At least she’ll never wish for a Western nose again.