Scott's Blog

In the spirit of High Dynamic Range Imaging here's paper on how to improve digital photographs by taking two shots, one with flash and one without . Just like there are lots of good tools for HDR imaging, I suspect there will be tools for flash/no-flash. Of course there's always:

If you don't use unison to keep folders synchronized you really should, it's great. It's like a two way rsync program. Problem is I end up synchronizing a bunchy of folders in different locations for different projects and I prefer to start unison at the command-line. What I want is bash completion for unison. It's not that difficult to setup. I just created a file in /etc/bash_completion.d called "unison" and it looks like this: _unison() { local cur prev opts COMPREPLY=() cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}" opts=$(python -c 'import glob,os,os.path;x = glob.glob(os.path.expanduser("~/.unison/*.prf")); print " ".join([os.path.split(y)[-1][:-4] for y in x])') COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${opts}" -- ${cur}) ) return 0 } complete -F _unison unison-gtk The python part is all one line and it goes to my ~/.unison folder, lists all the *.prf files and then just gets...

This Monday was a holiday here so I thought it might be a good time to upgrade my Linux, a couple of days before the official release. It took a long time to download all the updates, but it seemed to get everything and then started the installation process. I went inside to finish the last few episodes of Lost, I finally watched all 4 seasons of after beginning about a month ago. I have to say that the 4th season is a letdown so far. I mean seriously, you need to have an emotional "constant" for time travel? That really made me cringe, the writers need to stay as far away from math as possible. When I came back to the computer to see how it was going I was at 1% and got an error already. I spent the rest of the night clicking "OK" buttons because it kept finding problems with the install. After a hundred of these it gave up and it quit the upgrade. But by that time, I had already started noticing that things had stopped working, like Gnome Nautilus, ugh. So...

Evolution of Conditioner Bottles It's happened to me more than once that I got home from shopping and I picked up a bottle of conditioner instead of a bottle of shampoo. Conditioner bottles have evolved to look more like shampoo bottles, and get taken instead. I'm sure some time in the past, some designer created these two bottles of shampoo and conditioner because they looked nice together on the shelf. All of a sudden the sales people noticed a large increase in the sales of their conditioner. Bottle designs that confuse the consumer ended up selling more. These designs end up having more stickiness, until the entire population of conditioner bottles is like their shampoo brethren. Evolution of Microwave Ovens Consoles I remember when we got our first digital microwave oven from Panasonic. To start it up you had to press the "power" button 4 times to get "high", then press the minutes and second buttons, and finally start. I look at microwaves now a...

This Friday I bought a new PC to be used as my Linux Home Theater PC (HTPC). ATX 480W Slim HTPC cabinet VGA 512 GFORCE 8500GT, PCI CPU Intel Core 2 DUO E6750 DDR2 1GB 667 Kingston DVD/CD DL Samsung Gigabyte GA-P35K - LGA 775 SATA 500 Gig HD (Western Digital) Gyration Wireless 3d Mouse and Keyboard . I tried using the beta of Linux MCE, but it didn't work at all (video problems). I used an older version of Linux MCE and got it working a bit. But I didn't like the fact that it picked it's own name for my machine and user name. I gave up on that and am now using the 8.04 alpha (yes alpha, I never learn) of Mythbuntu . Mythbuntu worked reasonably well out of the box except a lot of the configuration screens didn't fit my 480P. The OK or Next button would be off screen and I couldn't figure out how to move the window up so I could see it (Alt+Drag with the mouse is the trick). Other problems I had was that Myth defaults to hiding your mouse cursor so you can't s...

As a regular linux user I have some hints and tips how to setup bash : Create a ~/.bash_aliases file and store all your aliases and functions there. You'll need to source the file in ~/.bashrc, see below. For common directories you visit create an alias that cd's to that folder starting with _. Using the underscore is short and sweet and doesn't pollute your namespace as much. Here are two examples (the latter also changes the window title): alias _mydir='cd /home/scott/my/dir' alias _other='cd /home/scott/src/projects/other;echo -ne "\033]2;Other Project\007"' Use these cd aliases: alias ..='cd ..' alias ...='cd ../..' alias ....='cd ../../..' alias .....='cd ../../../..' Use these ls aliases. (h is for "human" file sizes, F is for adding a trailing / for directories) alias ls='ls -hF --color=auto' alias ll='ls -lhF --color=auto' alias la='ls -AF --color=auto' alias lrt='ls -lr...

My NewYear's Resolutions: Health Have a regular exercise program (3 times a week, tennis or squash counts for at least 8 months). Continue eating healthy, but eat little less meat and dessert (hard to quantify). Loose 12kg over the 12 months. Go back on the Shangri-La diet for at least 3 months. Fix/Build Get a new computer Give my old computer to Victor. Get another 500 Gig of space. Make the practice green It won't be finished this year, but I plan to have the hole dug, the channels and gravel and the first level of sand done by December. Do something with MAME . I have an old computer it may be interesting to get it working as a dedicated MAME setup, if it can handle it and maybe leave it at the farm. Have a commercial printer print up a plasticized design that we draw up for Victor's MAME console I built. Work on my open source programs Have unit tests for all of them. Publish/revive one of my older stuff. Make one new project this year. Make 6 commits on some other O...