a view from afar

In a mission to get Sven Fuch's Mephisto plugin Tag Cloud working, I decided to upgrate to Mephisto-trunk (revision 3005). Ultimately it was successful (this blog is now being served by the Mephisto-trunk), but here are some things you should know...

Don't know how widely know this is, but I was amazed by this video on YouTube of Image Resizing by Seam Carving. I searched and found a Mac OS X implementation called Seamus by Wim Lewis. (There's a few of my own notes about compiling if you read the rest of this article.)

UPDATE: I e-mailed Wim, and while he has no plans to update Seamus (although he has added the ability to save the shrunk image if you grab the latest source), he did point me at rsizr which is a great implementation in Flash (wow, never thought I would say that).

Here's a sample of what seam-carving does (using Seamus, photo is somewhere on the Dorset coast):

Before

After

Now, it is a widely known fact, among possibly half of my six subscribers, that I'm working on an ORM and database migration package for Rubyists that will kick ActiveRecord into the floor. Not that I don't have some respect for the library - it has, after all, seriously raised the bar in terms of user (ie webapp developer) simplicity. But it suffers some serious architectural faults, and has begun to outgrow the spirit of the ActiveRecord pattern (obligatory Fowler link). I am not the only person who thinks so either, some people such as Matthew at PlayLouder are far more frustrated than me.

Seeing as it's the theme for today...

Nothing like a good dose of cynicism. No idea where it came from. I'm pretty sure it's not a screenshot of my profile, but I'd be hard pushed to tell it apart.

Oh, and is it me, or is that Jennifer Aniston on the left, taking a different sort of modelling contract?

WARNING: the following post is not suitable for anyone who has left high school, unless (like me maybe) your sense of humour didn't

I'm working my way through From Bash to the Z Shell. I thought it was time I became a command-line guru because I'm sure I'm missing valuable tricks.

Here is a simple bash script I use to get the latest RSpec gem and update the TextMate bundle: