Brain-Feed

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I’ve got a lot of stuff to get out of my brain and onto the blog, so please bear with me and read these following not-necessarily-related blurbs: (Now separated with —- in case you want to skip to the next one)

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Disk-space usage is getting better, thanks to two developments:

1) I’ve written up a couple of perl scripts. The first script looks at each of our photo album directories, lists the number of files in each one, and then calculates the total amount of space each of those is taking up. It then calculates a ratio of total bytes over number-of-files, and then prints out a list of the directories sorted by the ratio. In effect, this shows me the directories that have relatively few, relatively large files. Once I’ve got that list, I use my second script on the files in the directory to reduce them using ***ImageMagick|http://www.imagemagick.org/***. Using this technique, I’ve saved a few hundred megs of space on my account. I can probably save more, but I haven’t gone through every directory as of yet. While it would be very easy to combine the two scripts so that my entire list of albums would be processed at once, I’d rather have the manual control that the current arrangement provides.

For the technically inclined, you can view those two scripts:

***PhotoRatio|http://prwdot.org/code/PhotoRatio.txt*** — calculates and lists the file-count to file-size ratios in a given directory
***PhotoManip|http://prwdot.org/code/PhotoManip.txt*** — takes a list of files as standard input, and runs given commands on each one (in this case, setting quality to 80)

These were done rather hastily, so they do work, but aren’t terribly refined. Feel free to mess with them if you like, as long as you know that if there any improvements that could be made, I have probably already thought of them… just haven’t implemented them because of time. 🙂

2) The second reason is that our web hosting provider, ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/***, has once again revised their ***plans|http://www.site5.com/services/comparison.php***. We can now get even more storage space (2 GB) for LESS than we’re already paying. They just keep getting better and better!

By the way, if anyone is looking for a TERRIFIC hosting company, check them out. If you sign up right now, you can get an account with 1 GB of storage space for only ***$9.95/month|http://www.site5.com/services/specials.php***. I highly recommend them.

No, I get absolutely nothing from Site5 for mentioning them here! I just had to share this because after being a customer for a year and a half, I can say that they are a great company to work with, they really know their stuff, have great support, and great prices to boot.

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Out of code and into books. I’ve had an on-and-off relationship with libraries during my short 25 years. I spent many hours in my childhood at the library, browsing for and finding new books and periodicals. I took advantage of the ***Mount Vernon Public Library|http://www.knox.net/*** quite frequently up through High School, finding fun and interesting books to read, both in the fiction and non-fiction categories.

After high school, my next library experience was ***Jenks|http://www.gordon.edu/library/*** at ***Gordon|http://www.gordon.edu/***. While in college, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to read for pleasure, and most of my time in the library was spent on research. The library came to be associated, for me, with work, study, and general unpleasantness.

After I graduated Gordon, I didn’t set foot in a single library. Perhaps there has simply been too much on my mind (graduation, moving in and out of apartments, starting jobs, getting married) to think about it. Or perhaps it was a latent aversion to walking through stacks of books, engendered during my time at college. Whatever the case, that was three years ago.

Then, a month or two before today, Becky signed up for a library card at the ***Beverly Public Library|http://www.noblenet.org/beverly/***. I’d always been curious about the local library, but never took the time to venture over there to check it out. Finally, on March 30, I took a trip to the library with Becky and signed up for my very own library card. I’ve reconnected with the forgotten joy of being able to browse books at my leisure, and take as many as I want for free, as long as I return or renew them within three weeks in good condition.

The BPL is just a short walk from our apartment in downtown Beverly, and it’s surprisingly very nice. At the moment, I have two books checked out, “Crypto: How the code rebels beat the government, saving privacy in the digital age” and “Rocket Boys: A Memoir” (later remade as the book and movie “October Sky”). I’m reading Crypto at the moment, and enjoying it a lot. I may or may not get to Rocket Boys before it’s due, since I’d like to read the ***book|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives/001685*** Becky just finished reading. Maybe I’ll read Rocket Boys first… or not. We’ll see.

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While we took our walking trip to the BPL, I also shot some photos for those of you who haven’t been to visit us. This walking photographic tour shows the ***route from our apartment to the BPL|http://gallery.prwdot.org/our_neighborhood***. I hope you enjoy this little peek at our current city of residence.

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In other local news, Becky and I were excited to find that a new ***Subway|http://www.subway.com/*** franchise has opened up in Beverly, at 386 Cabot Street. The closest one, previously, was located at a rest stop on Route 128 north of Beverly… to get to it, we had to drive across town, get on 128, go to the rest stop, continue north on 128, take the next exit to turn around, and come all the way back. Now we just have to drive less than a mile! There are TONS of sandwich shops in Beverly, of varying quality. ***Quizno’s|http://www.quiznos.com/*** is certainly superior to Subway in terms of taste, quality, and variety, but it’s more expensive by a couple bucks on average, and the closest Quizno’s is in North Beverly, more than three times further away. The mom-and-pop stores have good quality subs and very reasonable prices, but don’t have the same variety as Subway, don’t accept debit cards, and don’t offer any types of incentives, special deals, etc.

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Now that my mind is on food, I should also mention that yesterday we had a wonderful time in South Boston with the Lowe family. This is the fourth Palm Sunday in a row that I have spent with the Lowes, and the second since Becky and I have been married. There was a lot of great food to be had there, and very good company. We had fun playing with the twins, talking to the family, and looking at lots and lots of photos courtesy of my laptop and ***iPhoto|http://www.apple.com/iphoto/***. In fact, we were there for almost seven hours. 🙂

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Tonight we’ll be driving down to Hyannis so that Jeremy and I can continue our weekly ritual of watching ***The Shield|http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/the_shield/***, taped from the previous week, while the the wives hang out. Maybe it’s crazy to drive two hours down and two hours back just to hang out for a couple of hours, so call us crazy if you want. Some friends are just worth being a little bit crazy for. 🙂

Nicky and Alicky

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Over the last few months I have done a considerable amount of reading. These novels were great reads, but the historian in me was aching for a good work of non-fiction. Enter “***Nicholas and Alexandra:|http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345438310/qid=1081047035/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-3544245-8267202*** The love that ended an empire” by Robert K. Massie.

I purchased this book at ***Bunch of Grapes|http://www.bunchofgrapes.com/*** bookstore, in Vineyard Haven, with a gift card just after my college graduation. It has stayed on the shelf the last few years due to its intimidating size (613 pages). As luck would have it, upon closer examination I discovered that the last 80 or so pages were all footnotes. Silly me.

Having decided to put in the time to read I settled in for what would be a very rewarding three weeks. I have always been interested in Russian History, and especially the story of the the last Romanov Emperor, Nicholas. Massie seemlessly intertwines his biography of the Romanov family with Russian political and social history at the turn of the 20th Century.

The book is full of names you may recognize; Lenin, Trotsky, Nicholas II, Alexandra, Kaiser William; Anastasia and Rasputin. Their stories are set with the backdrops of World War I, the March Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. Not only did I learn the dates and facts of many historical events, but I was privy to the thoughts and personal journals of many main players.

Although the book was a “dense” read (meaning that there was alot of information packed into small spaces) I never felt as if I was reading a text book. If you like politics, conspiracies, history and a bit of mystic healing, you might want to check it out.

Take a Survey

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Take a few minutes and fill out our ***survey|http://www.createsurvey.com/c/17069-xHckEX/***. This is the same free service that ***Michelle|http://mikao.blogspot.com/*** used for her ***Christian Blogging|http://exchanging.blogspot.com/*** survey, so thanks for that idea. 🙂

There are only 12 questions, and they’re not terribly in-depth, but the answers will be interesting to us nonetheless.

I’ll summarize the results here within a month, since that’s how long the free trial of the survey website lasts.

Thanks!

Photo Quality

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Out of all the ways to save space in our photo gallery, it looks like the greatest and most obvious savings will come from using increased levels of JPEG compression.

We already reduce our photos to a pixel dimension of 640×480, both to save disk space and screen real estate. But that reduction alone is not enough.

Currently, the photos that iPhoto exports are close to 100% JPEG quality, which entails a very minimal amount of compression. On the up-side, this produces very good looking, sharp images. On the down-side, this takes up a relatively large amount of space.

So, I can easily use a program called ***ImageMagick|http://www.imagemagick.org/*** to batch-convert the files in our gallery to use higher levels of JPEG compression. This will result in photos which look slightly less sharp, but which take up dramatically less space on the server.

The real issue is: what level of compression is acceptable?

To that end, I have whipped up a very quick page of comparison which I would like all of our readers to take a look at:

***Three Guys Photo Comparison|http://prwdot.org/3guys.html***

The photo is a pic of Me, Bob, and Jeremy, and I have it shown at compression levels all the way from the original down to 5% quality. I also have notes on the side to indicate the size of the file, the quality level, and the percentage of space saved.

Let us know via the comments what you think the cutoff point should be as far as when the photos are no longer pleasing to view. There are a few obvious conclusions you can come to based on the rate of change in savings percentage, but I’d like to hear what everyone thinks.

Thanks!

Update: I’ve created a couple other samples for you to take a look at:

***Becky Photo Test|http://prwdot.org/becky-pic.html***
***Colors Photo Test|http://prwdot.org/colors.html***

These should give you a better idea of how the compression level varies based on the actual content of the photos. Images with more colors tend to compress less, where images with few colors compress a lot more.

Road Wonders

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During my drive home from Boston today I witnessed several interesting things:

1. 1 cab, 2 cars and 1 bus zipping through the red lights at the same intersection. Yikes!

2. Two unrelated cars with bumpers wearing identical “South of the Border” bumper stickers.

3. My windshield wipers, which after 2 years, finally decided to work perfectly. It’s a MIRACLE! If they had only left an image of Mary, mother of God I might have made a few pennies in the deal.

Photo Overload!

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Oh no!

It seems that my web hosting provider has not been able to accurately gauge my disk space quota until now. I am alotted 1500 megs of space on their server, and I was under the impression I was using less than 500 of those megs.

Well, they’ve fixed their quota, and it now appears that I’m actually using 1249 out of the 1500 megs, and thus have only 250 megs free!

I’ve done some checking of my own and I’ve verified that I am, in fact, using up that much space on my account. A little over one third of this space is being used up by the photos in ***our gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/***. The rest is being used by our email which is stored on the server, random content on our own website, and content from the websites of other folks who are hosted at prwdot.org.

Individual albums in our gallery take up anywhere from less than 1 meg to over 18 megs, and most photos range from 100kb to 300kb in size. I feel like we’re doing pretty well as far as keeping the size of individual photos under control. It’s just that we have SO MANY PHOTOS — 3532 to be exact!

I guess it’s time to start looking at strategies on how to save some space… getting rid of photos, re-compressing photos so that they take up less space, etc. We’re already using our web host’s largest hosting plan, in terms of disk space, and purchasing additional disk space is a bit pricey.

Gil and Sully

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A while ago I heard about the movie ***Topsy Turvy|http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151568/*** and had wanted to see it. Now, four years later, I finally had my chance.

This film is the story of the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta “The Mikado”. It was a thick, witty and entertaining film. The beginning and the end were kind of (sometimes extreemly) slow, but the great Mikado production numbers and songs in the middle make up for it. All in all it was a fun movie.

iPhoto Nirvana

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I’ve found the perfect plugin for iPhoto:

***iPhotoToGallery|http://zwily.com/iphoto/index.xsl*** by Zachary Wily

It integrates seamlessly into my existing ***iPhoto 4|http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/*** application, allowing me to resize and export photos directly into the ***Gallery|http://gallery.menalto.com/*** web application.

It takes care of resizing, exporting, and uploading the images, as well as creating and naming the new album on the website.

This is the essence of the Mac OS – software that lets you forget about messing around on the computer, and spend more time doing what you love. In my case, shooting photos and showing them to people. So, so easy.

The only way this could be easier is if the images were sent straight from my digital camera to the website immediately after they were taken. And, since I can already do precisely that with my camera-phone, it shouldn’t be too long until something is possible with a digital camera. Or a camera phone with really good optics and a 3+ megapixel sensor.