Well, I had to perform a bunch of resizing for my digital images a few minutes ago. Then I remembered seeing “ImageMagick” when installing Inkscape on Jasper days ago. I’ve used ImageMagick for my first ever development project with my first employer. It was a business card generator, which, fortunately and unfortunately and unsurprisingly didn’t went live. But anyway, I vaguely recall that you could do command line image manipulation with it. So I searched and, yes, there is a command to easily batch resize pictures. So on Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) do a:

• sudo apt-get install imagemagick
• cd Pictures/ (cd to folder of your images)
• sudo mogrify -resize 800×600 *.jpg

And that’s it! Well at least I don’t need to go Windows XP just to batch resize pictures. Microsoft PowerToys’ Image Resizer is convenient for batch resizing on a Windows and ImageMagick’s mogrify -resize command is equally convenient for batch resizing on Linux (and on any other OS, I guess).

I just got the simplest of an Android application running on an emulator on Jasper. Finally! But not after changing the skin from the default HVGA to QVGA-P. And not after waiting for almost 10 minutes… maybe more. It was great it finally worked but that long of a wait time just wouldn’t do when I start experimenting with Android programming. So I guess I really must be upgrading Jasper’s memory… Or maybe hope I’ll get a new laptop this Christmas. ;p

If I’m lucky, the emulator would stop on this screen displaying the Android image.
Most of the time, it stopped on a Android text with a blinking cursor.

My Hello, Android application finally running on the QVGA-P skinned emulator.

I resigned to the fact that maybe, my non-success on setting up my Android development environment was indeed due to the fact that this ole’ laptop is not up to par with the needed hardware specs; all this laptop got is a 256mb ram. I already tried uninstalling and re-installing the SDK and my Eclipse IDE. I tried moving it to another directory. The emulator just wouldn’t launch my application.

Sad though that this laptop was able to persist through college Java projects. I was able to run a Java ME from Jasper before! O well, I’ll try all other approach. I’ll let you know once I get this running.

Ever since I started using frameworks for my J2EE projects here at work, I cannot help but appreciate how it cuts down the development effort than doing without one. It forces you to observe the best practices. It helps you avoid doing again and again those non-trivial stuff such as escaping the apostrophe when saving to the database.

I also tried learning Ajax before but just did not have enough patience to understand it and then build so-and-so functions from the ground up. Well, there are Javascript frameworks now out there, thank goodness! It helped build Javascript libraries that allows me to write less yet do more.

While link surfing this morning, I was quite surprised that even CSS has a framework. A CSS Framework? That’s something new, well, at least for me. Interesting… So I guess that’s another new thing to read up and try out.

Earlier this year, I was looking for an open source vector graphics tool. Unfortunately, I was not able to find one so that mini-experiment that I was planning to do was set aside and forgotten.

Well, guess what, I have stumbled upon this open source vector graphics application, Inkscape. So that is another want-to-learn recalled from the depths of my sandbox.