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.

GAIM, the multi protocol instant messenger client for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixes. Using Gaim one can talk to one’s friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr.

GAIM has now been renamed to Pidgin. The change in the name was due to a trademark issue with AOL, which has an instant messenger which goes by the name AIM. But change in the name has been quite good and it is extremely nice to finally see the new version which was held up due to the issue with AOL.

Pidgin has a new logo, looks great and functionality is top class. One of the first things I noticed was the new Tango icon set they shifted to. The icon set gives a huge boost to the look and feel of the software. I am just in love with this icon theme. Also the way the contacts are displayed has changed a bit, they are displayed as dots along with the name and photos. The dots/images make it easier to know the status of the user much easier.

Overall a too good of a product, and I recommend it to ever one who uses any instant messenger client. In fact, yesterday when I finally managed to get back to connecting to net via Linux, the first thing I did was download Pidgin and get it working. Also when compared to the other two Internet products which also are in version 2, viz., Firefox and Thunderbird, I would say Pidgin has had more of a significant change from 1.x series to 2.x version.