creative blog

As you probably noticed(if you have viewed some of my photos), I use jimmac’s O.R.I.G.I.N.A.L for my web gallery. The one big disadvantage of this gallery was that it did not have any utility for generation of directory and file structure for MS Windows operating system. Yeah, you can say that I use mainly GNU/Linux so I do not have to take this as such a big disadvantage, but sometimes I have to use MS Windows on my laptop, so that is why.

Well, after an hour and half of reading python manual, asking Geon and HanzZ about image library and one string conversion problem, here it is! A python script called ofr.py that converts images in its directory and creates directory and files’ structure for the webgallery.

Usage is simple, you need Python with PIL and a directory of images. After succesfull installation of both, python and PIL, copy the ofr.py to the directory with images and run it. It will create directory structure which you will then upload to the “galleries” directory of O.R.I.G.I.N.A.L on your server. Of course before upload you have to change /webgallery/info.txt file with description about photos and if you want, you can also edit description of single photos in /webgallery/comments/ directory.

So what to say at the end? I hope this script will help somebody and also that I will make it to be real GUI frontend for O.R.I.G.I.N.A.L gallery generation

For a last week or so, I had a chance to have some influence to development of YsInfinity launcher application deveolped by Arnaud Vallat. The application is still in early stage of development (the version number is 0.01) but this does not mean that it is highly unstable and unusable, the oposite is the truth.

What does it have that it differs from other applications’ launchers? Well, on the first sight it can look as any MacOS X like looking launchers/docks(this one is not a dock) but there are some differences. Main advantages/difference I see in

• grouping of similar applications into individual groups. You can have several groups around your screen and open only those you need = space saver.
• Another one is low resources’ use, it has even more quick responses than my favourite RK Launcher.
• The third advantage and difference is keyboard navigation. You can use your keyboard to navigate through group of items if you do not have a mouse with scroll wheel which is usually used to choose the launcher when you have mouse.
• And the last, it looks good You can watch some videos about special effects it has on its project page. How it can now look you can see on the screenshot below.

Of course this, let’s say, alpha version has some serious bugs/annoyances sometimes. Those the most important I see are:

• It does not run on Linux(yet )
• It does not even run on every Windows machine(the solution of this is yet unknown because the reason is also unknown.)
• An application is launched by clicking the group’s name or the red button. This is probably not a disadvantage in some cases but if you do not have YsInfinity allways on top and want to raise it above some windows by moving your mouse over it. But it sometimes does not raise and you click it(I’ve launched VideoLanClient 7times because of this )
• It lacks Drag’n'Drop support, for now, so you have to add launchers manually in the shortcuts editor. (It is planned for future versions)

On the other hand, after solving some serious problem and segfaults in even earlier stage, it did not segfault on me yet, probably I am lucky guy

Why did I wrote all this? I think that this piece of software will grow into a nice application, and to speed up this, all possible suggestions and bug reports are important for author of it. So the more users test it the more soon developer can focus on adding new features and solving really important bugs. And the second reason is that the icon of YsInfinity and the red button are my work

There was a partial lunar eclipse visible on european continent last night with maximum at 20:52 GMT+1 summer time. Of course I’ve been out and taking photos! Before I process all taken photos to a webgallery, here is one composition of all phases(1600×1200) of eclipse and also one animation of this eclipse.

Photos has been taken with these settings:

• Manual exposition
• S: 1/125s - 1/165s
• F: 3,7
• Correction: -0,7ev
• Camera: Olympus C-745

Animation of eclipse

These photos and animations are released under Creative Commons 2.0 - By licence.