Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland

Google's underground army of PhDs is secretly cranking out huge numbers of really useful and interesting libraries and tools. Within the next few years, these tools are going to drastically change the landscape of much of the software industry. The reason: Most of these tools are available as open source with very non-restrictive licenses. Things that were once hard to implement and expensive to buy will be commoditized.

A great example of this is a little known project called Leptonica. Managed by Dan Bloomberg, Leptoncia is an image processing library which gives away some really amazing features. The most notable of these features are color segmentation, deskewing, line removal, and least-cost path finding across an image. However, it's all written in C, which could provide a barrier to entry for many higher level language users.

Also, the Leptonica website is loaded with all kinds of information. It's worth checking out if you are interested in learning about image processing, software engineering or particle physics.