Sydney Australia in Google Maps
Sydney, Australia is in Google Maps. Satellite imagery only, but it's a start. Via the Unofficial Google Weblog. [icbm: home]
Interesting technique for finding leaks in code
So, your code leaks and you need a technique for finding what object you're leaking, so grab a couple of addresses at random and dump them. Chances are, they're the object your leaking. This technique is so sexy in it's beauty. [icbm: home]
Ministry of re-shelving
Re-shelve copies of 1984 under "current affairs" or "politics" in your local bookshop. [icbm: work]
Random segue: how I came up with the original table of contents
One of the problems I grappled with early on with was how do you come up with a table of contents for a book? It's a complicated process, and it's really important. If the book doesn't flow, then people are left confused about what goes where, and the book is a lot less useful. Additionally, when you sit down to actually write, then you need to know what is covered where so that you can refer the reader to the right place to find out more about a specific topic -- even if you haven't covered that topic yet. So how did I come up with the first cut of the table of contents for the ImageMagick book? Well, I started by looking at all of the command line options to the various ImageMagick commands. I wrote this down on a stack of old business cards, and then distributed those cards in logical sounding piles on the floor. Those piles pretty much became the chapters that I originally submitted. That's the card mound. Anyway, once that was done, Matt (the editor) and I sat down and worked on the table of contents description until it flowed nicely, covered everything we…
The Apress page for the book
I just noticed that Apress has a page up for the book as well. Perhaps I should stop pointing these things out, but I find it exciting. There's something deeply weird about reading about yourself though.
Working on review comments for Chapters 2, 3 and 4 tonight
Michael Carden asks in a comment to my previous post to the book if I had considered making draft chapters available for public comment before printing. To be completely honest it hadn't occurred to me until Michael suggested it, and it does fit well with all the open source stuff I have done over the years. It's a hard call though, because there is already a review team of four or five, and there isn't much spare time in the process because we really want the book published in time for Christmas. This is why I'm going to say no this time to the offer of a more public review, and I'll do my best to take that on board next time when I know more about how long this sort of thing can take (I'm actually only about two days over schedule at the moment, but I really don't want to slip any further). Sorry Michael. Anyways, I'm working on review comments for three chapters tonight, which is one of the things that made me think about this more. I'm really rather surprised about how positive the review comments have been so far given how I feel about the…
ImageMagick book – Chapter 3: Compression and Other Metadata
Writing the summary of Chapter 2 seemed to work as a warmup for me the other day, so I thought I would write about Chapter 3 as a warm up for working some more on Chapter 7. I also need to look at reviewer comments for Chapters 2, 3, and 4 sometime today, so it seems like a good idea as well because it will help me remember what I am trying to cover in the chapter. Chapter 3 is all about the different things you can do with compression with ImageMagick, as well as other forms of image metadata. So, I start out by talking about lossy versus lossless compression (there's an interesting tangent to this discussion which I need to add as a sidebar to the chapter during this editing process, but I'll leave that to another post here), I give some examples of the accumulative nature of the loss from lossy compressions. We then move on to compare the size of a bunch of images using different compression algorithms, which gives a good introduction to discussing which image format is the right choice for given scenarios. (As an aside that I will follow here, that was probably…
Why Debian?
Why do I use Debian? Well, one of the reasons is the bug reporting. I think I just found two bugs in ImageMagick, one a simple documentation bug, and the other a functionality bug. With Debian, I can just run the reportbug command from the command line with the name of the package, and walk through the simple bug reporting process, instead of having to fight my way through mailing lists for the dozens of different packages I have installed. It's nice.
ImageMagick book – Chapter 2: Basic Image Manipulation
I'm meant to be writing the rest of chapter seven tonight, but I thought I would warm up by continuing with my promised series of posts about the content of the book. The next chapter in the list is chapter two, which covers simple image manipulations. The idea was to get the stuff which everyone wants to do and cover it as soon as possible so that people can get some runs on the board (so to speak). In chapter two you will find an introduction to the bits of imaging theory that we need for the book (rasters, vectors, bitmaps, pixels, you get the idea). Then I move on to talk about ways to change the size of images. This includes resizing, sampling cropping, scaling, thumb-nailing and so forth. We also discuss some interesting transformations like trim. Then we move onto making an image larger, before finishing up with how to process many images at once with ImageMagick. It's an interesting chapter in that it's immediately useful, and goes through some interesting theory matters. It also sets the stage for the later coverage of all the other cool stuff you can do with ImageMagick. As a point of interest,…
Nice introduction to Fourier Transforms
From Wikipedia. [icbm: dcs]