Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

Photos….Photos…and more Photos…..ever since I bought the digital camera I have been clicking photos of anything imaginable. I have been on a few trips as well, hence I thought of putting some of the good ones on the web and share it with a few friends, and the best solution for these for me turned out to be Picasa.

So off I went about putting together the photos I wanted to upload to Picasa Web, that is when I realised that I am in a bit of trouble. With each photo being 1.8MB, it was very obvious that I needed to resize the photo’s to a more web appropriate resolution of 1024×768 and at a lower image quality.

I did not directly recollect any software available in Linux which has batch resize options, hence I quickly did a google search and the results surprised me. The solution was a really simple one, that of making use of the package which is by default available in most Linux distro’s - “ImageMagick”, which provides the ‘convert’ command.

Here’s the simple script:
for k in $(ls *.JPG); do convert $k -resize 1024×768 -quality 100 re_$k; done

The working of the above script is simple, here is what it does:
1. Loops through all the JPG files in the current directory.
2. Then for each JPG file in the directory it calls the ‘convert’ command telling it to resize the images to the size 1024×768 and without an quality loss (i.e. 100, means no compression) and saves the resultant file with the prefix ‘re_’.
3. The done statement tells the script to end once all the JPG files are processed.

How is that for a simple and effective solution. Three cheers for command line….who needs bulky and resource hungry GUI programs…? And if you are waiting for the photos…sorry…that is available only to a few select friends and relatives…..but I have posted some of them at the following link http://flickr.com/photos/knithink.

Want that document urgently, but don’t remember which folder you put it in…and thousands of files are littered all over…..Search! Search!….but how…..???

Well over the last year or so the desktop search, an area which has been a sore point in Linux desktops is finally seeing light. Initially we were offered Beagle, which I liked but had to do away with because of it hunger for cpu and the ram. And more recently Google announced its offering. And this time not a wine implementation of the Windoze version like Picasa, but a complete port of Google Desktop Search.

So I thought I will give it a try. Installation was simple as every, just downloaded the file and the installation went on without any issues. After installing, the next time I restarted the machine the search agent appeared in the system tray panel and it began indexing.

The good thing was that it installed the required extensions for firefox and thunderbird itself, so I did not have to do anything. And the indexing was getting done during the idle time, and not when you were using the machine, though I would feel the system crawl How?? Well, I have just 256 megs of RAM ;-( and too much thrashing and swapping was going on, also thunderbird began to slow down, since the indexing was getting done real time rather than offine.

But Google being Google delivered a good product, though with fewer features than the Windoze version. The search result are accurate and it even has a cached copy of the search result.

Over all a good product with good search capabilities, I keep it on most of the time, but sometimes when the things get slow, I do turn the ‘pause indexing’ option on. So no more struggling to find that document, google is here.

You can find more about it here @ features page.

You can download it from the download page.

After successfully getting my CDMA modem to work in SuSe 10.2, I am really happy and enjoying browsing the net on SuSe. But all of the sudden for the past two to three days I experienced a strange problem when trying to connect. I got this message, after the connection was made:

–> Script /etc/ppp/ip-up run successful
–> Default route Ok.
–> warning, can’t find address for `www.suse.de`
–> warning, address lookup does not work
–> Nameserver (DNS) failure, the connection may not work.
–> Connected… Press Ctrl-C to disconnect

Now I was in a fix, how every I tried I could not get the it working, I rebooted and tried in Windoze :-), there it worked fine. So I was hell bent on finding out the cause of this problem.

To find the solution, I turned to the internet, but the results were disappointing. All of them suggested to check the /etc/resolve.conf (for nameserver line) and the /etc/wvdial.conf (for Auto DNS line). I was sure this was not the problem as it was connecting before.

Finally, after much struggle I found the culprit, it was ‘dhcpcd‘ - DHCP client daemon, I was really feeling stupid for not identifying it at the first point when DNS failure message came up.

So just started this and immediately I stopped getting the failure message. Enjoy currently, do you have an other alternate solution, do write back in the comments.