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.

RailsConf - Day 4

Final day! We had to check out from the hotel in the morning itself. Denis, George are seasoned travellers and they were all ready and packed up at breakfast time! I was having some trouble adjusting to the additional 3 hours of lag introduced by travelling from the east to the western parts and arrived late for the breakfast too because of it. Denis then told me to check out of the room in 5 minutes. I made it in time by unceremoniously stuffing clothes, etc into the bag. My bag is a bit heavy. I always commit the mistake of carrying more clothes that I end up wearing on my visits :(.

Denis/George were going to speak about our RubyES - Ruby Enterprise Stack using PostgreSQL. We reached the convention center and prepared some pamphlets to spread the word about our session which was at 10:45 AM. Since it was the last day, the crowd was somewhat thinner at the venue than before. The session went well with a good round of Q & A at the end. Go here if you want to learn more and would like to play around with the stack. And if you want to know what I did in this stack, you can check out my screencast here too. The screencast was created using Jing. Check it out, my voice shouldn't scare you away :)

It was a half day session and our flight was at 9:55 PM. So we spent the remaining time at the bar in the Marriott that we had been staying in. We watched a bit of Shallow Hal, with Jack Black still being funny everytime I watch it. Denis and I also nursed some beers. I also had a shot of Goldschlager (which actually contains pure gold in it!) towards the end to get me into a sleepy mood for the flight :)

Got on to the flight to end my first RailsConf. It was not too bad!

RailsConf - Day 3

Day 3 was the last day for the exhibitions. So we again had good attendance at our booth. One thing that we noted was that all people tend to use MySQL as their database of choice just because everyone else is using it! Many did not understand the difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL and hence why they should use PostgreSQL in the first place. All of us tried to explain as best as we could but here is a link which explains in greater detail as to why PostgreSQL is a much better choice as compared to MySQL.

The breakfast and the lunch facilities during the conf were excellent and the Portland Convention Center is a huge facility indeed. But since there were so many attending the conference, it was pretty hard to get onto the wireless network there. One thing though that gave me some sort of a complex during the conf was that almost everyone who came to the conf were using the Apple Macs! I felt out of place with my lenovo thinkpad there :). Also many companies like Sun, Thoughtworks held a lucky draw and the winners were awarded free Mac Airbooks towards the close of the third day! Yup, I did enter but was not lucky this time around. Maybe next year. I did get my share of free tshirts though ;)

We ended the day by having dinner at a sports bar where I introduced Denis, George to some cool Ultimate Fighting Championship fights :). Denis refused to believe that it is a sport as he likened it to dog fights.

Saturday was also the occasion of the Rose Starlight Parade and Marathon so there were a lot of people out on the streets. It was good for me to see families sitting along side the road waiting for the marathon and the parade to pass by. I stayed around for a while to cheer up the guys participating in the marathon, but as it got a bit chilly later, I prefer to watch some of the action from the comfort of my hotel room before retiring to bed. Final day coming up tommorrow!

RailsConf - Day 2

So the brainstorming continued pretty late from day 1 and eventually I slept pretty late with the promise of waking up early in the morning. Today was the first day of our booth right! Also I along with Denis, George had to record screencasts of the respective things that we had worked on. We had a 5 minute limit and my first recording was a disaster. It was a full 12 minutes long :)

The 2nd recording was agonizingly close to completion but I ran out of a precious few seconds before I could complete it, very frustrating. Eventually on the 5th try I was able to record a decent screencast. George is going to upload it and when its done I will share the url so that you all can check it out and see what I have done :)

We had good attendance to our booth. People were a bit confused about what we do exactly with Postgres and the Oracle spin on it. Also some wanted to know what exactly was the key differentiator in our RubyES stack. We had some interesting conversations with a guy from the Heroku booth who was using Postgres. In general there seemed to be a lot of curiosity and intent to use Postgres with rails app, which is definitely a good thing!

In the evening a company called as FiveRuns hosted HAPPY HOUR at a local pub, it was pretty crowded when we reached there, so we went to another place closeby. I kinda like the American food that I am getting to eat. Am also enjoying the different kinds of drinks too ;). Well they say, in America do as the Americans do! :)

We rounded up the day by dropping Marie off to the airport. She left ahead of us to go back to NJ. Had had very less sleep the last few days, so I snucked into bed at 9:45PM and got up at 6:15 am today morning. On to the oncoming day now :)

RailsConf - Day 1

I am/was kind of getting used to the jetlag back in NJ, but now Portland has added another 3 hours to the mix. Its 6:15 PM local time while I am writing this and am already feeling sleepy here.

In the morning, me and George were quite hungry as our last meals were just the burgers that we have had on the flight from NJ. After the breakfast, we headed towards the Convention Center where RailsConf is being run. We took the Red Train or something to reach it. Was pretty impressed with the infrastructure here in Portland. I mean this is a decent tram which takes you FREE OF COST across major portions of Portland. When does one think this will happen in India?

The convention center was pretty good and we attended some of the sessions/tutorials. The attendance also seems pretty decent this year around. We headed back to our hotel for lunch with Denis and Marie. And after lunch, we have been holed up together in a room working on our rails stuff and what all we plan to do!

The brainstorming is still ongoing as we speak, so I better get back to it, now! (still groggy though...)

Conferencing the Rails!

Conference time is here. I was supposed to go to the PostgreSQL conference, but am going to the RailsConf instead. Actually wanted to go to PGcon, cos that would have been my first and it would have been a great chance to meet up with all the leading lights from the community. Also Pavan was going to present HOT there and we had plans to check out Toronto and Niagara falls after the conference too. But couldn't go as I am working on some cool Ruby on Rails stuff and wanted to see how it shapes out during and after RailsConf. Right now am in my New Jersey ready to fly out to Portland by the evening. Its going to be a 6 hour flight! USA IS a huge country. I think India by flight from North to South tips wont be more than 3 hours. Thankfully jetlag has not afflicted me much and now the trip westward towards Portland might add some more effects :) Lets see.