Satya's blog - 2004/12/

Dec 26 2004 20:40 Mary Poppins
Is it just me, or does Mary Poppins (the movie) bear a certain resemblance to Cat in the Hat (the movie)? Two semi-bored kids, a magical person appears from nowhere, and measures them (tape/phunometer).

The boy's from Willoughby house. No, I don't expect anyone to get that. And it's nothing to do with Harry Potter, either.

The "Spoonful of sugar" tune sounds familiar. Of course I've seen the movie before and may have heard it then.
Dec 24 2004 16:34 New models
Sigh. I just dropped more money on aircraft models -- an F18 Hornet (1:48) (because it was cheap) and paints for it (which weren't) and a gratuitous (but not free) 1:44 F16, just because. This is in addition to the N scale train crap (track and a couple of coupler/truck kits) I bought a few (2? 3?) weeks ago. The 2 locomotives I have don't even run so well -- I think I need to clean the wheels.

Oh yeah new pictures of various models in my picture galler slash album: http://www.thesatya.com/albums/. Random train pictures, including couplers/trucks:

the X-Wing:
and the steam locomotive model (follow the links, you know you want to).
Dec 17 2004 11:09 Firefox is the new emacs
Someone just commented that you can do X (never mind what X is, I had a small question for the lab today) in emacs, probably with a plugin or whatever it's called in emacs.

I said yeah, so can Firefox, and boom, here's the idea: firefox is the new emacs! You can do almost anything with an extension, pretty soon I'm sure it will do word processing and email (all programs evolve until they can send email -- except Exchange).
Dec 17 2004 10:58 Yay, food!
Yay, thanks to amblin for bringing bags of... stuff. Hmm. Hard to describe but tasty. Basically a bag full of chex cereal, cheerios, mixed with Gems/M&Ms, peanuts, pretzels, all coated haphazardly with white chocolate. Mmm!
Dec 05 2004 12:29 Smaller JPEGs
Found out about this from someone's blog. It seems that JPEG files can have application blocks, which are extra information about the file. These are useful for photo editing and cataloging applications but add nothing to the image. Removing these blocks makes no difference to the displayed image.

Since my albums are produced from a source archive, I can remove the blocks from the processed album (leaving the sources as they were) and get a significant saving in file sizes. How significant? The albums/ directory went from about 68MiB to about 52MiB after doing this: for i in `find . -name "*.jpg" -print`; do convert +profile "*" t.jpg;mv t.jpg $r;done

(I had to escape the quote marks because I redirected the output of this command, after adding echos, to a file and ran the file. Be careful if your filenames have spaces or non-lowercase .jpg extensions.)
Dec 04 2004 09:31 A geeky joke
GJ was eating some Thai food and went "Yum!" so I said "Apt!"