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Entries tagged "images".

Are you sure you don't mind me going without you?

17th March 2010

Recently I received a small flurry of patches to my blog compiler, from Chris Frey. These patches significantly speedup rebuilding a static blog when using Danga's memcached.

The speedup is sufficiently fast that my prior SQLite based approach is no longer required - and (re)building my blog now takes on the order of 5 seconds.

On the topic of other people's blogs I've been enjoying David Watson's recent photo challenge. I was almost tempted to join in, but I'm not sure I could manage one every day - Although I can pretend I recently carried out my my first real photoshoot.

I'm still taking pictures of "things/places" but I'm starting to enjoy "people" more. With a bit of luck I'll get some more people to pose in the near future, even if I have to rely upon posting to gumtree for local bodies!

ObFilm: Love Actually

Tags: chronicle, debian, images. | 2 comments.

 

You seem uncomfortable.

6th February 2010

I've been trying to remember to post the pictures I like online for the past few months. So this is a reminder to myself.

This image below didn't turn out quite how I wanted it to:

  • I was hoping for a nicer sihouet upon the lady's face.
  • The tree-branch on the left irritates me.

But that said I keep on coming back to look at it. I like the lighting, and I love the way that the brick wall on the right hand side angles towards the building on the horizon.

Enjoy. Or not.

Sunset

A similarly "not perfect" image is this outdoor shot. I have only one irritation with this shot - and that is that the trees are clipped at the top. Meh, such is life.

(I have two styles of photography; semi-random where I snap what is in front of me, and staged where I try to construct a particular picture - the two images above? One of each.)

ObFilm: Bound

Tags: images, misc, photography, random, soul-stealing. | No comments

 

I feel a hate crime coming on.

6th December 2009

Recently I've been spidering the internet, merrily downloading content for the past few days.

The intention behind the spidering is to record, in a database, the following pieces of information for each image it stumbles across:

  • The page that contained the link to this image. (i.e. the image parent)
  • The image URL.
  • The MD5sum of the image itself.
  • The dimensions of the image.

I was motivated by seeing an image upon a website and thinking "Hang on I've seen that before - but where?".

Thus far I've got details of about 30,000 images and I can now find duplicates or answer the question "Does this image appear on the internet and if so where?".

Obviously this is going to be foiled trivially via rotations, cropping, or even resizing. But I'm going to let the spider run for the next few days at least to see what interesting things the data can be used for.

In other news I'm a little behind schedule but I'm going to be moving from Xen to KVM over the next week or ten days.

My current plan is to setup the new host on Monday, move myself there that same day. Once that's been demonstrated to work I can move the other users over one by one, probably one a day. That will allow a little bit of freedom for people to choose their downtime window, and will ensure that its not an all-or-nothing thing.

The new management system is pretty good, but I have the advantage here in that I've worked upon about four systems for driving KVM hosting. The system allows people to enable/disable VNC access, use the serial console, and either use one of a number of pre-cooked kernels or upload their own. (Hmmm security you say?)

ObFilm: Chasing Amy

Tags: images, kvm, kvm-hosting, projects, searching, xen, xen-hosting. | 15 comments.

 

Big change. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad.

20th October 2009

Over the weekend I bit the bullet and purchased a new camera, a Canon EOS 1000d (many page revie).

I've taken a few hundred shots with it so far, trying to get a feel for what it can do, and what I can do now that I couldn't before </Lady Teldra>.

As my first DSLR its a pretty significant upgrade and I'm enjoying it a lot - especially since I've managed to persuade a few local people to pose for me.

Now is the time to wonder how to store, share, and organise the pictures I've taken and will be taking in the future. Currently all my pictures are beneath ~/Images, replicated across a number of machines for redundancy. As a sample I have:

skx@gold:~$ ls /home/skx/Images/
Computer  Flat  Misc  Parties  People  Pets & Animals  Travel

Beneath these top-level directories I have more directories for specific items, such as ~/Images/Travel/2009/York, or ~/Images/People/kelly.

I think that I should probably be looking at using some image-manager application to allow me to tag, date, and export images more easily though.

Right now I'm not really sharing anything except a few sample shots:

Those are quite nice shots, but I suspect sooner or later I will have pictures I do wish to share properly. So I need to come up with an URL scheme, or a library tool which will export specific shots and keep the rest of my archive private by default.

Any suggestions are welcome ..

ObFilm: The Dark Crystal

Tags: cameras, images, photos. | 10 comments.

 

Things are more moderner than before

21st September 2008

Every now and again the topic of SELinux arises locally.

I still believe it is:

  • Theoretically interesting.
  • Not ready for the prime time.
  • Not something I ever consider using.

I kept quiet when the Should SELinux be standard topic was recently raised. But I personally believe the answer should be emphatically "No".

Anyway, change of subject. The recent "What do you look like right now" meme. I looked like this a couple of days ago. Today I have no hair.

In other news my mail scanning service has now reached a new record. Over the last 30 days it has rejected/archived ovr three million SPAM messages.

Three million messages over a month averages out at about 100,000 messages a day. Sustained. Nice.

Finally I really owe Runa a new letter. I will write it today.

ObQuote: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Tags: images, letters, mail-scanning, meme, pictures, selinux, stats. | No comments