What, why
I’ve been reading up on TDD and it has struck me as particularly useful methodology to achieve “clean code that works”. TDD encourages writing unit tests to cover all the code (because by definition, you write a test before a line of code is written). Because all your code is covered you are freed […]

The MPEG4 video encoding process makes use of block motion compensation to achieve compression. The motion compensation process serves to produce the intra frames which are the frames between keyframes. I’ve always been fascinated by this process and was delighted to find out that my favorite video player, mplayer, allows one to visualize this process. […]

Generating thumbnails/screenshots of a video is useful in many ways. Youtube and many other video sites use this to show a preview of the video as a small thumbnail. Google video captures a series of thumbnails from a video at various time intervals to show a better video preview.

A couple of weeks back, I went shopping looking for a TV tuner card that is compatible with Linux. Googling had told me that “Hauppauge” card was known to be compatible. However, I could not find it anywhere in the market (SP Road, Bangalore, India). On going to one of the shops, I found a […]

I have a bunch of PDF files for which I wanted to generate thumbnails. On looking around a bit, I found “ImageMagick“. Since I have Ubuntu installed, I did

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

It is not too big a download at around 740KB.
To create a thumbnails for all pages in the PDF document (say test.pdf which has […]

I love Gnome and its simplicity and use it regularly. I loathe KDE and its complexity. Although I used KDE about 5 years back, ever since Ubuntu was released, I’ve been using Gnome. However, when KDE4 was announced, I decided to check it out with an open-mind and re-evaluate.

I have been playing around with Wikipedia data and tried doing some byte pushing on my Dreamhost web space. Since this is shared web space, the processing power and memory available are limited. I was able to create database tables in mysql by parsing the wiki xml dump and some extra processing as well to […]

It has been three weeks since I upgraded to Gutsy from the development repositories. Gutsy got released just a little more than a day back. While going through the news from the blogosphere about this event, I wished Ubuntu had released a “non-brown” desktop. I don’t like brown and have seen quite a few […]

I’ve been using Ubuntu Feisty and waiting to get Gutsy when the release comes out. However my curiosity got the better of me and I could not resist upgrading from the beta repositories. The first thing I noticed after upgrade was the amount of polish and attention to detail. Everything looks slick (thanks to Compiz).
Instructions […]

This is related to the previous post and is meant in part to demonstrate how great Linux is for doing “weird” stuff :). This is what we are
trying to do.

The circles in the background have been drawn by the python script below. To get the script running you should have python and pygame installed. […]