Kushal , kD & FOSS » Community

More on thumbnailing and optimization

kd — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:42:43 +0000

Following my last post, spent most of the of the time on different imaging libraries to find a faster way of doing thumbnails and optimization.

I tested the following libraries to create image thumbnails, GdkPixbuf, imlib2, ImageMagic, epeg. Pixbuf gives somewhat nice timings , imlib2 is fast but was leaking too much memory. ImageMagic seems to the slowest among them. Last try was with epeg which can only handle jpegs and it came out as the fastest. So wrote a C function and using it from inside vala code using extern.

Next target was to find better way to get thumbnails from RAW images, tried libopenraw and LibRaw for that. But with help from yorba developers found the way to do it using gexiv2 only.

In between tried few tools for profiling the application, sayamindu told me about sysprof which seems to be the easiest for my purpose. Using it I found gexiv2_metadata_open_path is taking around 67% of time, inside it Exiv2::TiffImage:readMetaData is taking 51% of time.

Now coming to the point of speed , 1st run is on 1GB of RAW files

real	0m2.946s
user	0m2.542s
sys	0m0.116s

2nd run is on same 36GB of images , among them around half is RAW.

real	4m0.807s
user	0m54.283s
sys	1m24.789s

Now this is fast in my textbook :D I should not forget to tell about the great help I got from #vala and Adrien Bustany in the whole work.

lekhonee-gnome 0.11 released

kd — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:28:18 +0000

I just released lekhonee-gnome 0.11, you can download the source from here, a yum repo for Fedora 13 can be found here.

Release Details:

Add new category button is re-enabled and it works :p
Updated translations
About dialog bug fixed

How to use lekhonee-gnome for multiple blogs with the same wordpress account ?

kd — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 10:23:06 +0000

I was looking into this feature request yesterday, good news is lekhonee-gnome already supports this. Lets say your wordpress username is foobar.

So, in the accounts in Preferences window you add the first account with your username and password and Wordpress as service.

Then add another account with same username and password but service as other and type the full url of your 2nd blog following /xmlrpc.php (example: http://secondblog.wordpress.org/xmlrpc.php).

Now you can access both the blogs from lekhonee-gnome

FAD PUNE 2010

kd — Mon, 31 May 2010 11:18:37 +0000

So this weekend we had FAD Pune 2010. Being organizer the main issue was to get inside the office before everyone else :)

Among the things done:

Packaged accessx ( with help from Sayamindu to patch it for Fedora)
Updated code in Pony so that it works with new flickrapi API (committed but not pushed yet)
Now we have cover images in Pathagar , the digital library system.
Helped people with packaging

Yesterday in the last hours almost everyone were busy with packaging and helping each other. Had fun with all other contributors for 2 days, now getting back to the normal routine. Photos will come up later this week. I also recorded Sayamindu’s talk on OLPC as a downstream of Fedora project, you can view it here (111MB).

I Know What You Are Going To Do This Summer 2010

kd — Tue, 18 May 2010 10:25:29 +0000

Hi all,

We are happy to announce “I Know What You Are Going To Do This Summer
2010″,[1] a free (as in freedom), online (IRC-based) [2] training
sessions for wannabes to Free/Libre/Open Source Software at #dgplug on
irc.freenode. net [3].

If you are a mentor, or trainer, or prospective enthusiast who would
like to participate in this years’ sessions please go through last
years’ IRC logs:
http://www.dgplug.org/irclogs/

We will have a review or Q&A session on last years’ sessions before we
proceed into new topics, this year.

The session timings are mostly varying, usually after 1900 IST every day.

To participate you need a good internet connection and any latest
linux installed (Fedora 12/13 preferably ). Anyone can participate.

If you are interested in participating, please confirm your
participation by sending an off-list mail to me (kushaldas AT gmail DOT com).

URL: http://dgplug.org/intro/
Planet: http://planet.dgplug.org/
Wiki: http://wiki.dgplug.org/
Mailing list group (for queries, discussions) :
http://lists.dgplug.org/listinfo.cgi/users-dgplug.org

[1] http://wiki.dgplug.org/index.php/SummerTraining10
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat
[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/IRCHowTo

lekhonee-gnome 0.9.1 is released

kd — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:29:22 +0000

I am happy to announce the release of lekhonee-gnome 0.9.1 . You can download the source or check for koji builds for F12 or F13. New features are like:

Supports multiple Wordpress accounts
Tabbed UI for different modes
Now supports adding
tag using tool button
Preview mode (more details on this below)
Advertisement message is disabled for this release
Stopped segfault(s) in couple of corner cases
Supports and tags in Visual and preview mode (you may have to write the details in HTML mode)
Can watch youtube videos in Preview mode (not an actual feature :p )

So the main two new features are multiple account handling and Preview mode. In the preview mode you can see how the post will look like in your blog with the theme you are having. To fetch the blog style please click on the small download style/theme button in the toolbar (this button will only come in the toolbar if you don’t have cached theme downloaded in your system), though you need internet connection for this mode to work.

New release of lekhonee-gnome

kd — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:18:06 +0000

I just released lekhonee-gnome ( desktop client for Wordpress ) v0.9. You can download the source from here or look for the rpm F-12 or F-13.

This is a complete rewrite of lekhonee-gnome in Vala. So, it is not anymore a gtk frondend to the previous python based one.

Around 2 weeks back mether pointed me to Vala and I started porting lekhonee-gnome. The developers from IRC room #vala helped me a lot to learn and understand the basics of this new language and solving issues while I was working on it. Later siddesh , rakesh and paragn helped me to do the autoconf/autotool things fixed.

Changes/Features:

By default it will open WYSIWYG editor mode , people can still edit raw HTML by clicking the “Edit HTML” button in the right hand corner.
Added option for of extra HTML tags (HTML Tags menu) if one is editing HTML
Save/Open blog posts in the local computer in plain xml format , so that you can edit them in any editor
the configuration file is now a keyfile
In the WYSIWYG editor one can do Spell check by right clicking into ”Spelling and Grammar” submenu
While editing HTML one can use Spell Check box
There is a progress bar in the statusbar area which will give visual feedback to the user whenever it will connect to server for any task
The “Add Category” button is disabled in this release, will come back in the next release :)

We need more testing and please file bug reports according to that.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee-gnome v0.9

GNUnify2010 and my python workshop

kd — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:53:02 +0000

GNUnify2010 was the first for me. Started a bit early to the venue, Rahul was along with me. His talk was in top of schedule. I slowly moved to the lab where my python workshop was scheduled.

The main target of the workshop was to show/teach the basics of the python programming language. I hear mostly students asking “How to start working on a project?” but as the learning curve is not so easy in most of the things, they run away. The only students we have from India who are contributing to any FOSS projects are the people who came in their own interest. I found programming with python can be an easy entry point for the general students and they can become better programmer in life. This is the main reason behind my python workshops in different places.

No need to buy books, great online community, projects working on different dimensions, all of these can generate interest in the students.

Coming back to my workshop, I generally try to follow my own book (which I have to update). Slowly going through simple examples and showing that it is not difficult. I ask the students to solve the lab works they do in any programming lab in python. This will help them to understand the basics of the language. The workshop lab was supposed to have 30 students, but many more came so I had to ask them to seat in groups in the computers (most of them was running Fedora ). The basic feedback I got, states that it was easy, but how the students are going to use this, I have no clue. Btw, most of the students in my workshop were from Pune University Maths department, I told them to attend Ramki’s workshop in the second half as his workshop was about explaining how to solve mathematical problems.

At the end of the workshop I showed few applications written in python and talked about job opportunity in market. 2 students contacted me after the event.

Full set of the event photos can be found here.

Coming month, I will be in Durgapur, doing another python workshop , I will also conduct a Django workshop.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8

New Fedora buttons

kd — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:12:58 +0000

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8

Fedora logo in LED

kd — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:43:46 +0000

While it is off

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8