Search Recursion

Something funny happened today. All of us google - ummm to search. Even I was doing it. I was trying to use the "screen" utility on my test machine, so that I could start my test and log out and get back later to it. When I gave the "screen -r" command to reattach, I got the following error:

Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/0' - please check.

Some permission issue I guessed, so I thought I will search for the solution by googling. I searched by entering keywords like "screen, terminal, cannot, open" etc. etc. and clicked on the second link that came in (As as aside, which search link do you open from the search results? Should do a poll I guess :)).

I got on to that specific page and instead of getting the answer I get the following blurb:

"This is a common problem. Googling will help here"

Hmmm, scratch-scratch, I just googled didn't I? But I think instead of giving out solutions, people have actually started to say "google out and get it" nowadays. Will there come a day when all results we get be like the one above :P

Btw, a simple chmodding of the pts entry seems to help here for non-root users above..

Batch Image Resize on Linux

Isn't it the same case always. You go out on a trip somewhere. You become trigger happy and click loads of pictures. You come back and want to share it with friends and need to upload them to either picassa or flickr. Now typically if you use a 6 plus MPixel camera, the pictures generally come out to around 1.7MB in size. Uploading a lot of such pictures is a big pain.

I recently discovered the convert utility on Linux. Using it is pretty simple. Here is a small script that I use to batch resize my pictures before uploading them:

for file in *.JPG;
do echo "Resizing file $file ...";
convert -resize 640x480 $file $file ;
done

Check out some pics (Portland visit for RailsConf) that were uploaded after the conversion above here.

iPhoney!!

Hmmm, if you go to techcrunch, the last 15-20 posts have been about iPhone. The hype, the apps, the wait and the likes. Seems to be some sort of a frenzy out there in the US for the next 3G phone from Apple. I even watched the somewhat funny video at this posting for waiting in line for 5 plus hours without any results.

I was trying to compare this with whats happening back in India. Vodafone did some adverts about launching the iPhone in India and I did contemplate for a second or two about sending them an sms about wanting to be one of the early users. But thats about it, I guess. I think people in America tend to have this ME FIRST mindset a lot. Long lines for the Wii, new star trek movies. Camping out for some new game launch etc. etc. I guess South Indian movie fans do this ;), but generally I do not find such fanatical single mindedness happening for such kind of stuff around in India.

Guess most Indians have more pertinent things to think about..