Late too soon

 
I don't remember the dream.
Its colors have faded; It never had much.

The idea was that I lost you,
.. forever, in a way that I can never get you back.
And then, I, alone and lonely,
- perish.

Before I was completely non-existent,
I woke up from my sleep.
The first thing I did was to check my phone, and I found your message.
I replied you. I wanted to make sure you'll be okay.

I waited for your reply with childish eagerness; No sooner did I realize it was too early in the morning for any response from you.
Then i slept in an unconscious reality.
When I woke up, I found I've lost you already-

The idea was that I lost you.

Tweet

Tip of the ICEberg

During the last 4 days, I was all away from home - travelling, meeting people, attending a nicely done FOSS meet, and of course, having a hell of effing fun!

ICE FOSS is a national level FOSS meet organized by FISAT. After attending a FOSS meet for the first time at 2K10 NITc FOSS meet, I was so thrilled about the concept of open source software and such techy meets. This one proved no less wonderful.
During this vacation, I was hunting for any possibility of a fairly long travel. Things came out quite correctly when there was the news of the ICE FOSS programme which was to be held at Ernakulam. It guaranteed a great travel experience together with a great deal of informative stuff.


The open source factor
ICE FOSS featured a hand full of high spirited talks and friendly(sometimes a bit too techy) workshops and camps based on the concept of open source software(teh Linux, folks!). It radiated much inspiration through the fact that FOSS is the future. Yes, it is going to take over every major sector in a matter of few years. May be its time you looked beyond your (Microsoft) Windows^TM ;) .
The best part of it is certainly that, at the end of the day, we're ready to create and contribute to the FOSS community. Unlike the usual Linux awareness talks you hear every other day these days, it was noticeable that people were not much interested in Windows^TM bashing. The game has reached a whole new level, and now it is all about making things better and bigger.

The travel
Yeah it *was* a long long journey. And there was, along with me, my friend Jo. He makes the perfect companion exactly because he can be as random as it gets. On reaching new towns we got intentionally lost, walking through random ways with our backpacks under the scorching sun. Well that was crazy. :D
The rendezvous with Hari occurred at Angamally, a small town away from the uber urban areas of the district. The geography of the place is kinda weird. At one point you're surrounded by bright green farms and small ponds and birds flying in the clear blue sky. You walk some 5 more minutes, and now you'll be amidst the concrete jungle of luxury buildings and all elements of a township. Development in the place was so irregular and scattered.

A peep out of the train

The awesome times
One important factor which makes the entire experience seem so nice is the utterly serene accommodation we received along with the tasty food. There were new people around, and new things to talk. I felt really nice when we were discussing about every crazy stuff on earth. The topics of discussion even included algorithms and a heated debate on the financial side of open source software.

Getting out from our temporary home : iceFOSS Day 1

Now this, was something I always missed at my own college. Back there, we're too free that we enjoy every moment and everyday is a celebration. The big loop hole here is, there's no particular effort or any particular achievement behind the celebration. We simply amuse ourselves everyday, but we do nothing worth it. This is an approximate picture of the collapsing industry of professional education in Kerala.


The return
On the way back, we could spent a nice little time at Hari's home. This is where I saw the movie Time Machine for the first time(which was a totally un-logical movie!). The return was a pretty exhausting bus journey, but it had its own lessons to add to our experience.
I want to use this opportunity to tell you all about the importance of getting started with FOSS. It all comes free, and sooner or later, you *are* gonna fall in love with it. At the least, try out the charming Ubuntu :)

Try some change!

Tweet

Bulk image resize script in Python

This is a simple python script I wrote for mass resizing large collections of digital images. Its one of my first python scripts, but does a lot of good work. I can just tell the script which folder contains all the images, then sit back and relax while the processing goes on.

Why resize my Images ?
Most of the images from your digital cam will be around 3MB. Their dimensions will be approximately 3000x2000 pixels. Now that is waaay bigger than the size of your monitor!
Even if you have a 21" monitor, your image needs only a size of 1600x1200 pixels for best view. Of course, if you have some special images out there, bigger dimensions enable more zooming and cropping-the-favorite-part and stuff.
Still you'll find that majority of the images are not worth their huge sizes. If you have a 15" monitor and you resize an image to 1024x768 pixels, you'll not even feel any difference in the quality. But then its size on disk will reduce from 3MB to atmost 500KB - that's only 20% of the original size! Doing a little math, if you have 5GB of images, it will all reduce to a simple 1GB with no perceivable loss in image quality!
And that's what this script is all about.

Working how to
This script now works in linux platform. You can install it run it from the terminal.

Here's a screenshot of the process: (click to enlarge)


The script displays the progress, currently processed folder and file etc. Note that this is intended for large scale image processing. But I won't mind if you use it for processing small amount of data. Actually you can use it beautifully for generating thumbnails and so.

Download script

Download source (in case you want to dig into it)

Refer the read me file in the downloaded archive to install.
After install browse to the required folder and type imageresize --start and the scaling process simply starts!
The script comes with a few custom options. Too see them type imageresize --help
Caution: The script replaces the original image with the resized image. So take care to move your special images before you call the script. Also, note that all the images in the sub-folders are also scaled down.

Dependencies
You need Python imaging libraries installed for this to work. If the program exits with such an error, you should install these modules first. Get it here.

Alternative way
The program can work also with Imagemagick, an awesome command line image processing tool. This results in slower image processing. The output images are bigger in size than the above script, but its quality is slightly better.
(In Ubuntu, install the program as sudo apt-get install imagemagick )
Get Imagemagick here, and the corresponding script below:

Download script

Download source (in case you want to dig into it)

Enjoy the free space in your hard disk!

Tweet

On Air

I haz been interviewed ageen!

After the last interview, et comes into spotlight with yet another interview.
This time around, et answers some witty questions from the Pakistani Spectator.
Watch him talking about blogging, comics, life and the world!

Click here to read the interview

Tweet

Moments to Sunshine

Here's the poem I wrote for our Fine Arts programme, on the topic 'A Silent Reply'. This poem has elements from many of my earlier blog posts. However, see for yourself!


"Why did you leave?", she whispered
In the silent reply, I've a sea of words.

And then I could hear the flap
Of the feeble wings in air
To my mind, like a clap
To my heart, as solemn and fair

The ebony of its self so loud
The swiftness of action so keen
Floating aloft in its thickened mould
The beetle, in the air, was seen

The length of the void spread;
It struggled for recognition
But even the feeble being dread
To point out the contradiction

I smiled, as I remembered
The times when we smiled
In the foolish play that staggered
Where our minds were killed.

In a frozen shell in a static world
Will our smiles become more beautiful?
Or will it lose its hold
And break into distorted curves?

Inevitable it was to run away
From that world of lies
To a new light faraway;
In the unseen turns, a new path lies.

"And why did you leave?", she whispered
In the silent reply, I've a sea of words..
Its our dreams transformed
In a reality where none intrudes.

Now grab my hand
And lets fly away, my love
There remains only, moments
To the sunshine we hoped.

Tweet

Moments till sunrise

When you don't waste a minute of your time in vain,
What you gain?


When you find yourself asking the same questions again
While nothing has changed
Understand, the answers can't be different


Don't cling those rusting hooks to your delicate heart
Hold 'em at the tip of your arched finger.
When the wind blows strong enough, let 'em fly
And feel okay


In the wonderful time of your life,
Never slip your chances and never skip your moments
Do the wonderful things that you are and
Make sure to leave a proof to point at


When there remains only
Moments till sunrise
Remember the words of action and
Make your happiness happen

Tweet

An evening of Chirps

Thus occurred the 1st ever tweetup at Kannur !
Today, April 4^th 2010, marked the beginning of tweetups (or twitter meet) in my district, ie, Kannur. The meeting was held at the beautiful spot of Kannur lighthouse near the Payyambalam beach.
The simple occasion was attended by 8 Tweeple around the place. As for me, I could also meet two of my blogger/online buddies in real for the first time. :)
We sat around discussing a few intellectual things, thus for two hours, at the end of which we had plans for more, fully featured tweetups with a lot of twitter guys and girls around.

I'm in the middle Woooo!

Tweet

Python!

Who wants to talk about Python ?


Python, is Beautiful!
Well, both the snake and the programming language that is.
Now, who wants to talk about the latter? :)

As a student of Computer science, I've been playing around with C, C++, Java and stuff all this while. It was then I wanted to do something different and I started learning python. Just two days into this awesome programming language, and I totally fell in love with it!
There's a lot to talk about python. But in brief, its simple, feature rich, and helps you get all creative. Whatever your favourite programming language is, its just a matter of time until Python claims the place.


The following popular comic perhaps is the best way to sum up the beauty of python:
The interesting trivia is that later Python *actually* included an import antigravity module.

Python for me, has become real handy. It helps me to automate many daily tasks on the computer. It feels real. Throw away the other programming languages! Its time that we stopped doing matrix operations and adding n numbers; lets see what a real programming language can do!

Python opens up your way to a lot of interesting opportunities. Here are some best guides to get started with python:

* A Byte of Python
"The aim is that if all you know about computers is how to save text files, then you can learn Python from this book. If you have previous programming experience, then you can also learn Python from this book"

* Dive into Python

Wishing you happy times with python :)

Tweet