Well, given the book is now in stores, the figures online, and the sample code available, I think I am basically finished with the project (barring future editions, which may or may not happen depending on demand I suppose). So, if you have questions about the book, the process of writing an open source book, or ImageMagick, feel free to drop me a line at the magic ImageMagick alias and I will see what I can do.
This is the source code for the sample graphing code demonstrated in Chapter 11 of ImageMagick, the Definitive Guide. This is a small PHP script which demonstrates how to use a stock background image and some images stacked on top of each other to make quite nice bar graphs for a fictional website. Extracted source Tarball Zip file
Chapter nine of ImageMagick, the Definitive Guide includes a C program which acts as an ImageMagick delegate. This means it demonstrates how to implement support for a new file format with ImageMagick. Extracted source Tarball Zip file
Photomagick is the sample application from chapter eight of ImageMagick, the Definitive Guide. It's a simple perl CGI script which manages my photo collection, including the publication to my website. Extracted source Tarball Zip file
This is the source code for the imwizard application demonstrated in Chapter 10 of ImageMagick, the Definitive Guide. This is a small Ruby script which demonstrates how to build an interactive program which builds a list of commands to apply to images, and then applies those commands to many images as specified by a regular expression. Extracted source Tarball Zip file
Random updates on cycling... Water: apparently water is wet. Specifically, I hadn't realised how wet fog was until I rode to work yesterday... Visibility was down to about 150 meters, and I ended up having to take my glasses off to ride so that I could see where I was going. When I got to work there was water beading on my eyelashes. Today it rained just before I rode to work (but not during the ride thankfully), which was more the water I am used to. Wheels and tyres: which brings me onto wheels and tyres. I have basically bald tyres on the mountain bike. I suspect that the current tyres, which came with the bike, are very soft rubber. They only lasted about 1,500 km which I suspect is a bit low. I'm thinking that it's time to get new tyres so I can actually stop in the wet, but I need some advice... Here's what I need in tyres: Good wet weather performance on hard surfaces like concrete Ok performance on sand / very fine gravel (10% of my commute is on such a surface) Not too knobbly, as I am riding mainly on those hard surfaces…
After years of resisting Lycra, I've given in and bought my first pair of bike shorts. I know I can get pairs that look like real shorts, but I figured that given the reason that I wanted to change was because of fabric rubbing, I should go with something which isn't likely to move around on me when I ride. I've now done the morning commute, and they were certainly more comfortable than normal shorts... Although the padding does take a little bit of getting used to. No rubbing though, which was nice. The big question though -- do I look sexy in these? Oh, and how come bike clothing is all so expensive?
I've done the commute three times now (it's been really wet the last couple of weeks), and now have the ride down to 21 minutes, which is nice.
I'm thinking of going on a road trip with the family to Santa Cruz this weekend. The drive doesn't look too bad: Mountain View to Santa Cruz. There seems to be a fair bit to do there. Been to Santa Cruz? Want to suggest something I should do while there that perhaps kids would like too?
My first python script involves doing some DNS lookups (for TXT records if that matters), and I am currently working through using the pydns module for this. Is this really the best DNS module to use for python though? For a start, it was last released in May 2002, and the documentation is somewhat sparse...