Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:58:00 GMT
I've been looking around at refreshing my current photo gallery to make it easier to update, since I'm around 1000 photos behind over the last year. Part of making it easier to use is to adopt an Aperture-based system of marking the metadata directly in the image itself, and figuring out how to render so many pictures more effectively in my gallery.
The best library I could find to do the job is Exiv2 and its associated Python bindings pyexiv2. They use the rather complex Boost.Python bindings, which are a total pain to compile on MacOS X Leopard.
In order to get it to work:
- Use the latest Fink to install:
python25boost1.34.python25libexiv2scons
- Download the latest pyexiv2 distribution, extract it, and drop in my exiv2 Leopard Makefile into the extracted directory.
- Type in:
- Test it out by running python2.5 and experimenting with importing pyexiv2 (see the pyexiv2 developer guide for more information.
I'll tidy this up into a fink package sometime, but for now I want to press on with finishing my Django experiments.
Posted in hacking | Tags macosx | no comments
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:21:00 GMT
So I'm hanging at the XenSource Redmond office for a few days, and munching on delicious sushi at Flo, and it turns out that the dude behind us was none other than Matt Hasselbeck! It seems like only two years ago that I was cheering on the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Bus as they owned the Seahawks.
Unfortunately, I only realised my brief brush with celebrity on our way out of the restaurant, which also probably saved me from saying something stupid to him. As if! But anyway, the, err, moral of this post is that you must check out Flo Sushi if you're in Seattle and eat the spider roll, it's awesome.
Posted in travel, usa | 2 comments
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:57:00 GMT
It's been a wierd exercise year; I went from hard-core powerlifting (go 220lb bench!), to playing a lot of badminton and tennis, and then ending off the PhD era with breaking my knee (details not suitable for blog publication).
As anyone it's happened to knows, a knee injury is really annoying to recover from as it feels really "wobbly" for ages and can't quite be trusted. I've been doing physio on it myself for about half a year now, and can finally run around for 5km or so without too much discomfort, although yoga and Capoeria are perhaps a few more months away.
But then, the Forrest Gump-class runner and ex-officemate Alex Ho pointed out these amazing exercises by the captain of the CUH&H running team in Cambridge. They all emphasise smooth movement and core strength without the need for heavy weights, so can be done while travelling as well. So highly recommended, that even little Ajay (right) is trying them out!
Posted in family, gym | no comments
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:28:00 GMT
Had a great evening out in San Francisco on Friday, when we visited the Red Poppy Art House on Folsom Street to check out a really unique Jazz experience.
The boys from VidyA recently took up an artist-in-residence position there, and performed their fusion of traditional Indian Karnatik music with modern Jazz pieces. They've been making some waves in the SF Jazz scene already it seems, and to top it all of, the owner of the art house did a live painting session during the performance. The audience passed out random bits of stuff, and he incorporated it into a piece done over the course of an evening. Talk about artistic overload!
Love the area as well; there's a nice friendly coffee-house down the road (which is pretty much my only criteria, apart from not getting shot and such).
My school was never this cool. |
The area was a mix of Latino and African, it seemed |
And in the Red Poppy Art House, eclectic art abounds |
Posted in art, india, travel | no comments
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Mon, 02 Apr 2007 10:15:00 GMT
After loads of reports that the Melange site keeps going 505 and crashing, I took at look at why. Turns out several spam crawlers were going mental and repeatedly adding tickets with spam links. Around 600 tickets and thousands of comments later, the process decided it had enough and terminated.
I've deleted all tickets (even the valid ones were spammed into oblivion) and turned off comment creation and modification for anonymous users. A look on the Trac Wiki shows that there are some SpamFilter extensions being developed which I'll investigate at some point.
Posted in recoil | no comments
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:36:00 GMT
Having coffee with AliB and discussing lecturing reminded me of one of the best presentations I've ever seen: Hans Rosling at TED and debunking myths about the developing world.
Even if you're not interested in the subject, it's worth checking out just to see how cool his presentation of otherwise rather boring statistics is. His company, Gapminder also got bought by Google a few weeks ago, so chances are Analytics will get more interesting soon.
Posted in politics | 1 comment
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:12:00 GMT
It's been a busy old March (release management of the new XenEnterprise sucked up most of it). I did take a break and go over to EuroSys 2007 in Portugal to present the language and compiler I implemented as part of my PhD work (read it here).
Although the talk I gave was was a bit underwhelming (more preparation and time-practise next time!), I met a whole bunch of really interesting people. My argument about rewriting whole applications also didn't get laughed out the room as I thought it might, as people recognise that retro-fitting safety enhancements on existing languages is a bit of a dead-end road to go down. It has definitely inspired me to make more time to spend on polishing up the Melange applications for a proper release in 2007.
In a pleasant surprise, it also won the Best Student Paper award of the conference as well!
Posted in research | 2 comments
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Sat, 30 Dec 2006 01:11:00 GMT
Inspired by finishing my PhD corrections (!) today, I decided to hook up the DNS server from our Melange project up to the Internet. The authoritative server is called deens (since the co-author is one Tim Deegan, geddit?), and is written in pure OCaml.
This is all rather experimental, to put it mildly, but I stuck in the zone file below, hooked it up as a delegate to our main name-servers, checked it against the DNS Report, and it all seems to be working!
$ORIGIN deens.recoil.org. ;
$TTL 240
deens.recoil.org. 604800 IN SOA (
deens.recoil.org. anil.recoil.org.
2006122401 3600 1800 3024000 1800
)
IN NS ns1.deens.recoil.org.
IN NS deensns.recoil.org.
ns1 IN A 194.70.3.132
dynamic IN CNAME dynamic.recoil.org.
static IN CNAME static.recoil.org.
anil IN CNAME dynamic
stats IN CNAME dynamic
I also modified stats.recoil.org to be an alias to stats.deens.recoil.org, so all the requests for that domain will go via the deens setup. You actually need a user/pass to access the site, but that doesn't matter; if it gets that far, the DNS bit has worked.
There's still an awful lot of tedious work to get the server into a production-ready state, such as proper logging, more error handling and recovery, etc., but I really hope to find the time in 2007 to polish this up somewhat. Performance is excellent already; faster than BIND by quite a lot, and it can optionally use more memory to cache responses to shoot up to crazy levels.
Incidentally, the dig replacement utility also seems to be working fairly well, and David Scott has been messing around with a Bonjour implementation that will get finished sometime in 2007 as well (honest!).
Posted in hacking, net, research | no comments
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