You’ll see on the sidebar the photo section which will display the latest uploads and clicking on the photo will use the lightbox plugin to display the photo on the same page…which is pretty cool if you ask me…clicking on the Photography link above or the View Gallery link on the sidebar you’ll be taken to the new photography page which you can view the albums and the photos without leaving this site or the page you’re looking at.

The gallery also has links to the Flickr page and also a direct link to the Slideshow on Flickr. There are still some glitches that I want to get fixed but I’m no guru on this whole website development so that migth take a while longer. As for now I’d like to inform everyone that the photography gallery on this site has changed from http://www.codebeta.net/photos to http://www.codebeta.net/photography so you’ll have to update your bookmarks accordingly…and I do apologize for the inconvenience that this may cause

Lets hope that this one works better than the past…

-LM

Post tags: CodeBeta

© Code|Beta 2008.

In other news I’m moving to a new position within the company and it’s a change from what I’m doing right now…which is still great…but that’s pretty much all I’m telling about that…

I’m trying to get objective number 11 from my 101 to-do list completed so I’m actually submitting photos to contests to get some exposure and hopefully a change to win a prize on that…or something

Some of you might remember me talking previously about my cellphone being dropped in a puddle on the side walk well the phone hasn’t been at it’s best since then and though it’s still working apparently the keypad got damaged in a way that it causes it to sometimes light up the 4, 5 and 6 keys for prolonged periods of time at different intensities…even when powered off which is a bummer. Apparently the phone loves the ground a lot or gravity enjoys playing with it that recently it once again fell from my hand, bounced on the table and hit the floor…luckily this time there wasn’t any puddles around and it was at the office though the sad part was that it caused for four keys to stop functioning so I attempted to reflash the firmware of the phone as this often resolves it but to no avail so I had a coworker that is known to be quite handy with cellphones to open it up and see what could be done.

The good news is that there’s no water damage internaly and no visible sign of damage so the phone was put back together and something fixed the issue with the four keys that stopped working but not with the strange lighting issue. Well the phone aquired a new issue which it causes for it to apparently loose the SIM and display the message “Insert SIM” or even cause it to reboot all by itself. Rebooting it usually resolves the issue though sometimes taking out the battery and SIM are needed.

Well this hasn’t been the best phone I’ve had and has been by far the most delicate one I’ve had. Sure people would say that if I didn’t drop the phone it wouldn’t have those issues…but seriously…who can honestly say that they haven’t dropped their celly at least once?………………Ok you can lower your hands now

My previous phones were subject to this or even worst treatment…that last Nokia phone is still working and it was even neglected…lots of missed calls…yet it’s still working. My Z610i phone had been dropped and went across the living room of a friend’s house once…and it’s still working. So needless to say the SE T650i has been the worst phone I’ve had so far and even the supposedly scratch proof screen got scratched…wait…what? yes…there is a scratch on it…though you need to have the phone under certain light or at an angle to be able to see it.

I want a smartphone next but I still haven’t decided…though the Z610i was pretty good and must be quite cheap now. It’s sad to see that the Japanese phones made by SE can’t really be used anywhere outside of Japan because those are really cool and sexy but lack GSM in some, if not all, cases…sigh. We’ll see where this takes me…as for now the T650i will have to survive until I’m able to buy another phone that will work…

Finally…last friday night I went out with some friends to go partying and woke up the next day with a headache…and yes I remember the night quite well. I didn’t have my Nikon D60 with me but did manage to get some shots of the night…so I’ll post those tomorrow and talk a bit more about it…

-LM

Post tags: phone, SonyEricsson, T650i, Z610i

© Code|Beta 2008.

Most people who post photos online have some sort of watermarking so that their images aren’t easily stolen. Some watermarks are annoying and simply ruin the whole image because they’re intrusive and all over the image so to those people all I have to say is why post them on the internet?

There are other watermarks that aren’t intrusive and are either artistic or minimalistic. I’m currently using a minimalistic watermark which basically is just a black line on the bottom of the image with my name, year and blog url. But how exactly do we add the watermark onto the images? Well there are multiple ways to do so and I’m pretty sure that there are programs that will do it for you automagically but I’ll talk about my method so you can choose whether it’s the best or not

I wrote a bash script that will recieve the images via parameter and will watermark those images after resizing them to a certain size that has been established. The script calls the identify, convert and composite tools from the ImageMagik toolset in order to determine the size of the image, resize the image and to add the watermark.

The script has several variables which contain the information necessary to do the resize and the watermarking and they are:

• WATERMARK=”/home/lmurillo/Documents/photography/photomark.jpg”
• ISIZE=”1024″
• WLOCATION=”southwest”
• WTRANSPARENCY=”65″

The WATERMARK variable is the location of the watermark and can be any image file supported by the ImageMagik toolset but I’ve choosen to use a JPEG file. The dimensions of this image is 1024×12 which means that the watermark fits nicely on any image that has a width of 1024 pixels or less so if I were to add the watermark to an image bigger than 1024 pixels in width you would see a black line that doesn’t cover the whole bottom width of the image which is not good in this case.

The ISIZE variable is the pixels to which the image will be resized on it’s longest side. In this case the image will always be 1024 on it’s longest side or at least it should be ;). I don’t only take horizontal images so I had to fix the original script so that it detects whether the image is vertical or horizontal and resize the image on the longest side accordingly.

The WLOCATION variable is the location in which the watermark will be applied and it takes the same parameters that the composite tool takes for the gravity option, which means that it’s the cardinal points (if that’s how they’re really called), for example south, north, southwest…so on and so forth.

The WTRANSPARENCY variable is the level of transparency that the watermark will be applied with. The lower the number the more transparent it’ll be. I’ve found that at 65 is good enough for all of my images.

The script goes on to check to see whether there are images specified or not and exits if there aren’t any. If there are any images then it enters a loop which will determine which images are bigger than 1024 pixels so that it resizes the images and adds the mark since I consider that the images that are 1024 pixels or smaller either have the watermark already or are simply not fit for the watermark. At first I didn’t add this check and it turns out that if the image is smaller than that it will actually strech it to that so the image is pixelated so it wasn’t useful. To be on the safe side anything smaller or equal to the size that I have established on the ISIZE variable won’t be watermarked but I need to find a way to force the watermarking which is most likely going to be something like adding an option that can be passed at run time.

If you want to download the script or take a look at it you can do so by going to:

http://files.codebeta.net/addmark

You can change the value of the variables to change the size that the images will end up with and other information. The watermark can be of any size you want. I use this script to apply the watermark in a batch of photos though I’m looking into the possibility of creating a more artistic signature that can be added though I’m wondering about the transparent background so that it’s not a box in the image.

-LM

Post tags: bash, imagemagik, linux, script

© Code|Beta 2008.

Google Reader appears to not have any issues with this change so if your RSS agregator is having issues please let me know.

-LM

Post tags: CodeBeta

© Code|Beta 2008.

A view of the hospital before arriving

The back of the hospital

Read the rest of Sanatorio Carlos Duran

Post tags: Abandoned, cartago, Costa Rica, hospital, photography, Sanatorio Carlos Duran

© Code|Beta 2008.

So…hopefully the change in the settings will prevent it from happening…if you did get the cut down version on your RSS reader then it means that it did work…

-LM

Post tags:

© Code|Beta 2008.

This is a pretty long post that will contain several images so you’ll have to click the read more link at the bottom to view the rest of the images…this is because I don’t want to annoy our friends over at the NYLUG group who pull our RSS feed for their NYLUG Planet page

Well like I mentioned on my last blog post last weekend I took a trip with my family to the Irazu Volcano in Costa Rica. It’s been a very long couple of years since I’ve been there and the last time I was there…well it was when I was a baby so it’s really quite difficult to actually tell if it was any different…or I could ask my parents

I don’t exactly know what it is about volcanoes that attracts people so much since all they are is simply a crater filled with water, not always though, and in some cases smell really bad…not to mention the cold weather one isn’t used to though it’s really due to the windy conditions in those high altitudes.

Spectators of the crater

I’m not much of a historian but it appears that the whole fencing was redone since you could see what appears to be remains of a fence and also some remains of walls.

What remains of the wall

Rusted remains of what appears to be the old fence

In most places there are some signs that explain the history of the place but it appears that this is not the rule and that it doesn’t just apply for the tourist places but to the roads as well since there are hardly any road signs that point the roads that can take you to the tourist attractions.

Read the rest of Volcan Irazu…the road trip

Post tags: Costa Rica, irazu volcano, photography, Road Trip

© Code|Beta 2008.

The textbooks that we will be using on this course

-LM

Post tags: Course, Japanese, Language, Textbook

© Code|Beta 2008.

I’m currently processing the 100+ photos that I took today so they should be up this week. But for now I leave you with the below photo of the abandoned hospital:

-LM

Post tags: hospital, photography, Road Trip, Sanatorio Carlos Duran

© Code|Beta 2008.

First let me wish everyone in the US territory a happy 4th of July. Today was a slow work day because of this holiday and this happens with similar holidays that ocurr in the US and Canada since most of the people go home to spend time with their families.

Second there are exciting new things coming in my life but I’ll let you know when they’re official. On Sunday we are planning a road trip to the Irazu Volcano and the Sanatorio Duran so there will be another objective completed this weekend…hopefully

Last but not least I’ve upgraded my network to a GigaLAN and though it’s not all of the systems in my network it’s the part which I work with all day and that’s pretty much what matters.

I purchased a couple of weeks ago the Linksys SD2008 GigaBit switch which has only 8 ports but that’s more than what I need right now and lets face it I could have a 10GB network that my internet connection will be the bottle neck not to mention the fact that currently only two machines actually have GigaBit NICs.

Some may say that I haven’t actually upgraded my whole network but I say well you’re right but I did upgrade the Windows PC and the file server to have a faster connection between the two since I store my photos on my file server and have Lightroom and Photoshop pull the photos from that server.

So there it is…

-LM

Post tags: freenas, GigaLAN, network, photography, windows

© Code|Beta 2008.