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I like Christmas

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  • Post category:Christmas

I spent some time this morning wrapping the presets for the kids. They get two Christmases you see -- the one in Australian, and then another smaller one when they get to the US. Now, it might be the nostalgia speaking, or the fact that I haven't seen my family in nearly a month, but it occurred to me that I really like Christmas. Or to be more precise -- I really like giving my kids stuff. Although, it turns out that I am crap at wrapping. There is something really cute about the kids being excited to be moving to the US -- because daddy said there were presents waiting for them. That's cool. Oh, and next time I'm only going to buy rectangular presents so I stand a chance of being able to wrap them. Ever tried to wrap a stuffed toy? [btags:]

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Errata from the book

The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick arrives in bookstores 26 December 2005, but Apress has already started sending out PDF versions of the book to some reviewers (let me know if you're interested in doing a review and I will see what I can do), and there is a sample chapter available for download from the Apress site. We worked hard to make the book as good as we could, including having a technical review team, several layers of editors, and me reading all of the chapters more than I would like to admit. That doesn't mean that it's impossible that errata slipped through though, so if you see something like that then please send either me an email, or even better send an email to the address reserved for such things. Each error found, if I agree with it, will result in a thank you email, the error being corrected in any future editions, the error being listed online (I don't know where yet though), and a credit in future versions of the book.

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Building a stack of images from thumbnails

I have a directory full of thumbnails of the rental tour I went on the other day while looking for a new apartment, and I want to put them online. Instead of putting each photo online, which I thought might be boring, I wanted to build a stack on images on a background. I'm not really describing the effect well, so here's the output so you know what I mean: This was remarkably easy to create with a simple script that uses ImageMagick. Here's the code: #!/bin/bash # Setup the random number stuff LOBOUND=1 HIBOUND=600 RANDMAX=32767 # Create a white image to start with convert -size $HIBOUND"x"$HIBOUND xc:lightgray output.png for img in img*jpg do echo "Processing $img" # Rotate the image if needed rotate="" if [ `exif $img | grep Orientation | grep bottom | wc -l | tr -d " "` -gt 0 ] then convert -rotate -90 $img img.png else convert $img img.png fi imgwidth=`identify -ping img.png | cut -f 3 -d " " | cut -f 1 -d "x"` imgheight=`identify -ping img.png | cut -f 3 -d " " | cut -f 2 -d "x"` # For more information on bounded numbers with bash, see # http://www.stillhq.com/bashrand/…

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Example 2.1 from Dive Into Python

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I've just started working through Dive Into Python, so I don't really have an opinion of the book yet. I did notice that Example 2.1 produces different output on my machine than from the example... The example says I should get: server=mpilgrim;uid=sa;database=master;pwd=secret I get: pwd=secret;database=master;uid=sa;server=mpilgrim It's interesting that this is exactly the reverse of what the book says I should get. I have no idea why, as I can't read Python yet, but there you go.

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What do you do on days as a bachelor in a strange country?

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Well, for me it was a cooked breakfast before getting the house work done. Instead of writing an exciting blog post about the fact that the bed here comes up to my belly button and it's sheets needed washing, I thought I would comment on American bacon. As the people who I hang out with will know, my wife is allergic to all forms of pig. In a no longer breathing way. I happen to love pig, so when she's not around I tend to go a little wilder with it than I probably should. So, when I went shopping for the first time here the other day I picked up some eggs and some Safeway bacon just in case my arteries needed hardening. It was a good thing too, because I have a medical need to eat bacon to help me with the after effects of the Coronas this morning. I'd already done one cooked breakfast here, so I have already discovered that American bacon (based on my extensive sample of one) appears to be 50% fat. It took me about ten minutes to trim off enough fat to approximate Australian bacon quality. After that it was quite nice.…

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