wiredfool

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Echoes of a life lived.	I heard the news today, Oh Boy!

 

 

 

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Updated here

This is a perl script that I whipped up to rapidly turn lots of images into thumbnails. It will drive imagemagick (default install in redhat, availiable for nt/win and other platforms) to produce thumbnails, medium sized images, and full resolution.

For this to work with NT, you will need to change path characters to “\\”. You also need to set the path to your imagemagick installation.

Command line examples:

thumb.pl /var/dropbox/photos /home/erics/photos
thumb.pl /var/dropbox/photos /home/erics/photos-r "-rotate 90"

That’s thumb.pl – source dir – dest dir – options

Watch line wrapping, some of the lines are really long.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Copyright (c) Eric Soroos 2000
# Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software 
# for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that
# the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that
# copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting
# documentation.  No representations are made about the suitability of this
# software for any purpose.  It is provided "as is" without express or 
# implied warranty.

$targetExtension = "(jpg)|(tif)|(bmp)";
$thumbnailExtension = "jpg";
$thumbnailSize = "133x133";
$mediumSize = "400x400";
$thumbnailName = "-tm";
$mediumName = "-md";
$lgName = "-lg";
$pathToIm = "/usr/X11R6/bin/";

($startDir, $destDir, $options) = @ARGV;

opendir (START, $startDir) || die "Couldn't Open Start dir: $startDir";

@files = readdir(START);

closedir (START);

if (not -d $destDir) {
	mkdir ($destDir, 0775);
}
	
open (OUTFILE, ">$destDir/index.html") or die "Couldn't open index.html";
open (OUTFILE2, ">$destDir/index2.html") or die "Couldn't open index2.html";

foreach $file (@files) {
	($fname,$extension) = split(/\./,$file);
	if ($extension =~ /$targetExtension/i) {
		`$pathToIm/convert $options -interlace NONE \"$startDir/$file\" \"$destDir/$fname$lgName.$thumbnailExtension\"`;
		`$pathToIm/convert $options -interlace NONE -geometry $mediumSize \"$startDir/$file\" \"$destDir/$fname$mediumName.$thumbnailExtension\"`;
		`$pathToIm/convert -interlace NONE -geometry $thumbnailSize \"$destDir/$fname$mediumName.$thumbnailExtension\" \"$destDir/$fname$thumbnailName.$thumbnailExtension\"`;

	print OUTFILE "\n";
	print OUTFILE2 "\n";
	}
}

close OUTFILE;
close OUTFILE2;

Just noticed on Mac OS 9.04

1) You effectively can’t put the trashcan in the bottom right corner. If it overlaps the corner of the screen, anything you drag down there has to go to the corner, then come off a couple of pixels before the trash registers mouseover.

Other aliases work on the lower border of the screen, just not the
trash.

2) The Control-Strip doesn’t take advantage of the bottom pixel of the screen. Nor does the control strip tab take advantage of the pixels on the edge of the screen.

This from the company that realized that the menus work better if there is a hard barrier at the top. Then again, it’s also the company that gave us the hockey puck, the half height function keys, and the OS X dock.

With a sun setting behind the winter grey clouds, so ends the 24 hours in the life. Sunday during the day to monday at sundown. Ok 28 hours, but I napped and slept for a bunch of it.

Sunday was leisure, Monday frustration. 3 System reinstalls chasing down a crashing bug that reliably hoses my development system, till I realize that I can debug while booted off the system install CD. And that it’s really hard to corrupt a CD. (now where is that os x beta cd?) Made me want to apply The Cluestick. You’ll see.

In a happier note, I heard NPR’s Top 100 for the week, Jimi’s Purple Haze. Hendrix’s work has always amazed me, so I did the only thing I could. I put on the audiophile vinyl version of ‘axis bold as love’ and cranked it. So it doesn’t have Purple Haze on it. It has Little Wing and Bold as Love.

Scanning through the top 100 list I’m actually sort of surprised at how many of the songs I know well enough to sing a few lines. I do have a knowlege of the highlights of jazz, and a bit of showtunes, but I wouldn’t call my cultural grounding deep.

Another night, another concert. This time, the Paperboys CD release party at the Tractor Tavern. I’ve been going to their shows for 5 years now, long enough to see 3 of the 6 members move on to other projects. Of course, they’ve got other musicians filling out the spots now.

This is easily one of the best concerts I’ve heard from them. In the top three. They were obviously jazzed to have the album out, the audience was into it, and they played 5 songs as an encore. It was tight, and it was live, it was incredible.

They snagged the rhythm section from Omar Torrez (Tom Johnsen and Aurturo Rodriguez) for this show. Their bassist (Tobin Frank) played with speed and authority, always key for me. Lolly showed up for a guest stint on the drums.

And how can you not like the second band of the weekend that uses the term ‘Sociable!’

So yesterday a coworker says, ‘I’m going to see Jason Webley tonight – You interested? ‘

So 45 minutes later I’m done listening to an album (Against the night) that I can only describe as solo guitar / accordion and an occasional drummer singing songs about the darkness, drinking, vegetables, and drinking. In a voice that resembles gargling with gravel. Or Tom Waits. There’s some blues influences, some rhythms that seem like Squirrel Nut Zippers, and a general feeling that we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Of the album, my favorite track is probably ‘Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder’ (listen). After you’ve been dealing with all the songs of devils, death, and drink, this is a tender song of lost love.

So I wind up at a Dive of a bar (Blue Mooon, former haunt of the beat poets, always some Harleys out front now), to listen to a guy with gravel for a voice sing drinking songs. And it’s incredible. The audience is singing along, and drinking to drive away the night, the fears, or just the rest of the week. And he was singing from 10pm until closing time, at 2am.

And singing and singing over and over his favorite drinking songs.

	When the glass is full,
	Drink up! Drink up!
	This may be the last time,
	We see this cup.
	If god wanted us sober,
	He'd knock the glass over,
	So while it is full,
	We drink up!

Oddly enough, during the night, his beer was spilled twice during this song.

Overall, a highly recommended way to spend a night forgetting about the rest of the week.

Sunday and Monday.

Oh well, I guess I’m not doing the digital camera thing, unless I can beg/borrow/steal. I don’t have time to find one that I’m willing to live with for the next couple of years in that time frame. Or maybe not, I guess I do have Saturday.

I guess I’m back to the old APS Point and Shoot that has fallen off the roof of my car. (after driving 10 miles. I saw it fall. I retrieved it. It’s better if you drive a convertible, you don’t leave things on the roof.)

It does some pretty cool pics, but it’s a pain to get developed.

I’ve been looking for this for a while to work with Frontier for source code control and management of changes. I needed a solution on the mac, since that’s where the majority of my development occurs these days.

It turns out that there is a port of Gnu Diff to the mac that ships with the Alpha text editor that is scriptable by applescript.

The essential command is a doScript applescript event, with the desired unix command line as the ‘script’ argument.

More examples to follow.

Weblogging for 24 hours, in pictures. Looks like a fun way to build more of a community and see what all these people that I know as websites and email addresses really are like over the course of a day.

Which leads to the inevitable question: What is a weblog? Which I would answer, ‘A website run for no other purpose than to entertain and amuse people who need a steady stream of things to visit on the web. Aka: a microportal, peer to peer web production, dynamic database backed buzzword compliant grassroots internet play’

Is this one of them? ‘From time to time, when I feel like it.’ Other times it’s just a vanity thing.

I’m not normally one to expose website problems in public, but this one is a coffee spewer.

The Seattle Times classifieds are losing the first letter, so that there are a lot of yard sales in allard and rown Hill. And the pet listings too, so that there are frican Grey Parrots.