Year: 2004

GIMP guru

For those people that need minor or midium image manipulation I do often recommend Gimp. Unless you are an Adobe Photoshop fan or a professional designer with some very specific needs, Gimp can do the job for you and save you some money along the way.

While Gimp itself works great, there is a lack of documentation (in terms of tutorials, tips, and tricks) compared to Adobe Photoshop world. There are a few at Gimp’s website, of course. But there are few other resources if you know what I mean.

Gimp guru is just such a resource. It has a few tutorials, links to mailing lists/forums where people can talk and even provides a “Ask your question” section. The site is oriented towards the photographers mainly, but it can prove useful for other artists too.

Superstar

Watched “Superstar” on TV. This is a rather average comedy with a few laughs which is mostly for teenagers. It covers the regular topics of school, dating, and coolness. It has some religion stuff in it too. Will Ferrell is the ultimate Jesus – the best I’ve ever seen so far.

This movie is based on a very regular story. How an ugly girl can get the dating attention of the coolest guy in school, while he is dating the prettiest girl around? And than, how comes that the coolest guy is actually a sucky date and the actual love strikes from someone who has been a friend for some time now. The good part though is the setup. All happens in a catholic school with church personalities shown pretty good. The ugliest girl is actually so desperate for date that she kisses every other tree and talks to every other traffic sign.

The long story short, 5 out of 10 does this movie justice. If you’ve been on more than 5 dates with a total of more than 2 different people, go watch some romance if you are a girl or porn if you are a boy.

Picture of the day

KiwiToday’s submission to ‘Fruit Picture of the day’ project is kiwi. I had the idea of shooting a couple of them together – one cut and one untouched – for a couople of days now. When I started the session I realized that I have eaten all of them but one while thinking about composition. Putting just one fruit in the frame wasn’t interesting anymore, so I decided to cut it in two. Then I realized that it is pretty difficult to:

  • adjust your brain to two halfs after thinking about two wholes for a couple of days
  • places items of round forms in exact positions
  • cover up ugly parts of the kiwi fruit when all you have are ugly parts of the fruit

I have taken a total of 18 shots to produce this one picture here. It reminds me of my early computer days when I was making syntax errors in the if … then … else statement every other day for a few month in a row.

Don’t Be Afraid to Drop the SOAP

Ok, I know that linking to two articles from the same source in a row is bad, but I don’t do it so often, so here it goes…

Perl.com has this article called “Don’t Be Afraid to Drop the SOAP” where Sam Tregar (the guy from about.com, the author of HTML::Template, HTML:: Pager, Inline::Guile, Devel:: Profiler and few others) explains why he had to drop SOAP from the application and go for something handmade. That is an interesting story that shows a number of goods and bads of SOAP as a part of solution to one specific problem.

FMTYEWTK About Mass Edits In Perl

There is a very usefule article on Perl.com – “FMTYEWTK About Mass Edits In Perl“. It is about making changes in a bunch of files using a simple Perl script, or a one-liner, or even straight from command line. All the information is old, but it is nicely collected in one single article, which can come handy pretty often.

FMTYEWTK stands for Fare More Than You Ever Wanted To Know, by the way.