process – Made by Mikal

“Other than the fact our child will be bright, text-based and sarcastic, we will otherwise be a normal family.”

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 15, 2008
Post category:Link

Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix. Our child will be introduced to computers at a young age, and will be setting emacs mode before any other child can even read. I earn a sufficient income to support a family in modest comfort. Other than the fact our child will be bright, text-based and sarcastic, we will otherwise be a normal family. We will even go to Disney World and see Mickey Mouse. http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/485967082.html Via IRC.

Ruby sample source code

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 13, 2006
Post category:Imagemagick

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

The book process continues

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 8, 2005
Post category:Imagemagick

Despite my lack of posting here in the last couple of weeks, and the death of my laptop (which I believe is traditional when you write a book), the book process continues. This is the first time I've written a book, and the process itself is pretty interesting. At the moment I'm looking through edits from the copy editor for the first chapter (previously this chapter has survived technical review, a review from the acquisitions editor, and review from the project manager). The copy editor is providing comments on my writing style and how to make the chapter easier to read. I guess that I could take the comments as hurtful, but to be honest it's fun. It's kinda like having a personal coach trying to teach you how to write better. I like that. One interesting thing that has happened is that the chapter title was tweaked to "be more active", which I like. I guess that means some of the chapter descriptions I have already posted might actually be wrong. Oh well.

Some details about the publication process

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 8, 2005
Post category:Imagemagick

Pascal asked in the comments to a previous post about the book about how I was going about writing the book and how the publication process works. It's a good question, and something I meant to cover here anyway, so now seems like a good time. I'll start from the beginning with a brief summary of how I got started with this writing thing. I started off by writing a number of articles for IBM DeveloperWorks. DeveloperWorks are actually really good to work with, all I did to start writing from them was fill in the proposal web form within a couple of hours we'd sorted out what was happening, and off we went. The ImageMagick articles I wrote turned out to be quite popular with the ImageMagick people. I suspect that's why the editor for Apress, a lovely guy named Matt contacted me. He pitched the book to me, and I was originally hesitant. He spent a fair bit of time (a month?) discussing the project with me, and I ended up deciding that because it's fairly closely aligned with the imaging work I'm doing for my PhD, I ended up saying yes. Along the way I wrote a…