Kushal , kD & FOSS

Google video chat plugin for Fedora

kd — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:01:48 +0000

Wait is over, you can try the rpms from here. Before installing don’t forget to remove nspluginwrapper. Working perfectly on Firefox.

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.

Speed , Vala, Sqlite3 and optimization

kd — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:07:50 +0000

All started as just another stupid idea, writing an image indexer (reinventing the wheel ). The code should do the following things:

Index images for any given folder with user provided tags
Extract and keep EXIF information from the files
Extract or generate image thumbnails for all files
Should be able to provide the thumbnail even if the original file is missing (may be in a usb hdd)

Wrote some test code to see how much time it takes to do the above for a folder with 36GB+ in size and 5044 images (both JPEG and NEF )

1st run

real 30m39.178s
user 0m45.561s
sys 3m42.557s

2nd run with out thumbnail generation but with EXIF information

real 10m14.281s
user 0m58.208s
sys 0m45.969s

3rd run with out thumbnail generation and with out EXIF information

real 14m40.503s
user 0m1.585s
sys 0m7.535s

Here I am confused, managed to find out that transaction in sqlite can cause delay, so changed the code to do everything in single transaction
4th run with out thumbnail generation and with out EXIF information

real 0m1.032s
user 0m0.216s
sys 0m0.134s

5th run with out thumbnail generation but with EXIF information

real 3m1.191s
user 1m2.525s
sys 0m34.524s

6th run with everything

real 16m47.241s
user 0m43.652s
sys 3m21.640s

So the major bottleneck is thumbnail generation, which I am currently doing Gdk.Pixbuf , for EXIF information I am using beautiful gexiv2 from awesome yorba guys.

Now to optimize I have to use some other library to generate thumbnails, which other libraries I can use ?

On the side note, I am not saving the thumbnails on disk but creating base64 encoded strings of them (I know I am bad, not following the thumbnail spec).

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

Yet another Sunset in Pune

kd — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:47:01 +0000

Timelapse using Fedora and D80

kd — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 18:48:28 +0000

My first timelapse movie: /me trying to clean the kitchen

ogv or in youtube

Shot in a Nikon D80 using entangle (#yum install entangle ) and a small python script.

Resized using imagemagick and video created using mencoder.

Comments are welcome :)

lekhonee-gnome 0.10 released

kd — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:42:13 +0000

lekhonee-gnome 0.10 is just released. You can download the source from here.

This release comes with new translations for languages like Gujarati or Punjabi, also spell checking option is not anymore under right click menu ( something changed in webkit)

Here is an image of the right click menu used to look like.

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