Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

GNU arch

GNU arch is getting so important to me that I have to create a special post for it with all the links. I’ll update it in the future too.

There are also few pages that describe how to use GNU arch with some specific project repository, like Vim and Garnome, but there is nothing particularly interesting there.

Fai – is the only arch frontend I’ve seen so far.

If you know of any other GNU arch resources, please, let me know via comments or email.

timestamp_image

This is yet another script to deal with images from digital cameras. It will scale (resize preserving the width to height ratio) down the image to the size you’ve specified and annotate (write on top of the image) it with date time taken from EXIF header of the image. Font face, size and color are configurable. Modified images will be saved with different name (as specified by the prefix variable inside the script).

This script is written in perl. It works with Image::Magick module and jhead program (since Image:EXIF failed to compile on my machine).

timestamp_image.pl

All About RSS

RSS is one of the most common abbreviations on the web today. Yet, not too many people fully understand what it is, how it can be used, and why would someone want to use it. There is an excellent document here which tells the story of RSS from a non-technical point of view. I would really suggest everyone, who is not already deep into RSS, to read the article.

dump_photos

I am using dump_photos.pl script to copy (or move) images from my Canon EOS 300D to my computer. Canon’s in-camera filesystem is not very convenient to copy files manually, because images are distributed across a number of folders (100 images per folder thing). Canon original software is for Windows only and is way too complicated and slow for such an easy task.

My script uses standard Perl modules (Getopt::Long, File::Copy, and POSIX) to copy or move files to specified or default (date-based) directory. It also mounts the Compact Flash before processing images, and umounts it after everything is done. It also uses jhead to optionally rotate images based on the information in EXIF header.

Run “dump_photos.pl –help” for a list of options. Although it was tested only with my Digital Rebel, I think it should work fine with most of Canon cameras.

dump_photos.pl

Updated Mozilla Firefox to 1.0PR

I have updated my Mozilla Firefox to version 1.0PR. It does appear to be faster than the previous version that I had. Also it has a couple of nice features. When browsing through sites which provide RSS/Atom feeds, a small ‘RSS’ icon appears in the status bar. By clicking on this icon, one can subscribe to RSS feed. It will appear as a Bookmark folder which will contain items of the feed as separate bookmarks. Very neat. Another nice feature is Autoupdate. When enabled, it will check for new versions of installed themes and extensions, and optionally update them. It can even update Firefox itself. I was missing this for a long time now.

Playing around with extensions, I found the options for the GoogleBar extention. Don’t laugh. I had it installed for years, but never bothered to check the key bindings. It turned out I was doing too many clicks. It is extremely easy to bind ‘Alt+Enter’ to run queries on http://images.google.com and show results in a new tab without switching focus to it. There is much more, of course, but this is what I was missing the most.