Patrick's Blog

I’m nowadays working on three different machines and thus also send emails from all of them. The problem is that I did not find any way to sync my address book in Mozilla Thunderbird across the three workstations, so every now and then I had to be creative to find that one email address. Not anymore! Synckolab came to the rescue, so far this works painlessly and only needs an IMAP folder.

I today found the new blog of Radford Neal. While I have been reading some blogs in the machine learning /statistics community for some time, like for example Hal Daume’s blog or John Langford’s blog, I think Radford Neal’s blog has the potential of being a great alternative to these blogs for two reasons: he is a very senior person and he is more the stats guy, whereas most other blogs are probably on the machine learning side of things.

I’ll be at CVPR in Alaska next week. Looking forward to meet a bunch of people there that I haven’t met in a while.

Recently, I found this incredibly cool picture on digg: There are 74 bands supposed to be in the picture.

Solution can be found here.

One of the funniest papers, I’ve ever read (when I come to think about it, I guess it’s actually the funniest): Ray Tracing Jell-O Brand Gelatin. Not that I would be particularly interested in graphics all of the sudden, but this is just too good, to deny it.

Paul Heckbert’s Jello site

F-spot has a nice feature to browse your photo gallery by some sort of a time-histogram control. This is very handy if you know the date of a specific picture, you’re looking for. But this feature does not help if the EXIF timestamp of the pictures is just plain wrong (which often happens with “old” pictures, i.e. end of 90’s). So I was looking for a way to change the EXIF timestamp of such photos. jhead solves this problem quite nicely (the application is available from the Ubuntu repositories).

Assume in the current directory all pictures are dated 2036:11:06, instead of 2001:11:05, we can then modify the timestamp with a simple:

jhead -da2001:11:05-2036:11:06 *

What makes more sense for the example above is:

jhead -ts2001:11:05-00:00:00 *

Here no time difference computations are involved.

So now the information shown in f-spot reflects the real date, cool!

Update: If the images do not have a EXIF header, one can use the “transplant” function to copy the exif header from another image:

jhead -te image_with_exif.jpg *

Update 2: To rename (more specific number) the pictures inside of a directory, one can use:

jhead -nf%03i *

Warning: This post is mostly about making sure, that I don’t forget about this site.

As a picture is worth more than 1000 words, one often wants to include a photo in a presentation or on a website. But where to take from the pictures? The sites I usually use for this:

• Google Image Search
• stock.xchng
• Flickr

And now a completely unrelated photo from Flickr: