Tech

I decided I needed to follow more people on twitter, so I added several people, including the three presidential candidates. Within minutes, Barack Obama started following me, too, although I'm not sure why.

Several years ago, Jason suggested that it would be interesting to compare the techno-friendliness of our politicians by looking at their sites and how they use various other online outlets like blogs and now flickr & twitter, etc. I'd imagine that sooner, rather than later, this will be a moot point as they're all starting to embrace these things. It'll probably just end up being a race to see who can adopt a particular tech first.

Although, maybe that's not so true. There's definitely levels of adoption, so to speak. I'm not going to dig into this right now, but let's just take twitter for sake of argument and for sake of easiness as I have all three candidates' twitter pages up already).

Stats in alphabetical order:

Clinton:

• Following 0
  
• Followers 4,165
  
• Favorites 0
  
• Updates 172
  
• Last 2 updates: 5 hours ago & 2 days ago
  

McCain:

• Following 1,470
  
• Followers 1,112
  
• Favorites 4
  
• Updates 324
  
• Last 2 updates: 5 days ago & 7 days ago
  

Obama:

• Following 35,978
  
• Followers 34,958
  
• Favorites 0
  
• Updates 128
  
• Last 2 updates: 21 minutes ago & 2 days ago

Now that I've got them all laid out, I'm not sure what they mean. They're certainly not what I was expecting. I assumed Obama would have the most people following him, which is true. But, I also assumed that he'd have the most posts, which isn't. So, what can we learn from the stats above?

...and why is Barack Obama following me?

So, I've started using twitter. I'm not sure exactly why, though. It's just something I felt I should try. I've added a sidebar item showing my 5 most recent tweets (they're called tweets, right?).

If anyone has any further insight as to why I'm doing this, please post a comment.

I think Rrrob & I discussed it, but I think I still don't quite get it.

Anyway, if you want to follow me, here you go. I'll post again if I figure anything out.

Update 5/14: If you're not a twitterer yourself, you can follow me with my twitter rss feed.

Here's a couple videos I thought I'd pass on.

As a recent fan of Guitar Hero on the Wii, this first one made me laugh:

(via DCist)

This other video shows the 'Big Dog' quadruped robot. The parts where they kick it to try to make it fall, when it slips on ice and when it jumps like a goat are simply amazing.

(via Digg)

There are sometimes that I find something interesting and consider blogging about it. But then, I remember a conversation I had with my friend Jason in which he discussed his disgust with people who post a link to something with no comment or other original content. Today, I stop feeling bad about this due to some of the recent entries on his blog (example 1, example 2).

Side note relating to example 1 above: it's great that OSX is finally getting virtual desktops (although, I dislike their calling them 'spaces'). It's one of those things that I could never go back to not having and OSX, being a UNIX and all, should really have them. OSX's lack of virtual desktops has been one of my major complaints. Now, if they would just open the source...

Anyway, the real reason I started this post (and had the associated Jason-induced guilt) was to point out this great shirt in the latest batch of Threadless tees:


It's called 'Best Mime Ever.' Genius!

p.s. Genius is one of those words that I have to look up every time I type it because it never looks right to me. Even now, having just looked it up for the preceding paragraph, I'm fighting the urge to do so again--it just looks wrong. I think that I want it to have an o somewhere.

another p.s. I posted an entry with some photos from a recent wedding over on my biz blog.

Note: This entry probably won't be of interest to most of my normal readers. I'm putting it here in hopes that others using the GIMP will find it and find it useful.

I was recently introduced to the idea of using LAB color mode to give a little boost to the colors in a photograph. It really makes a huge difference if your photo looks a little flat. There are a few different ways to do it, but I mostly use the technique described on this page:

Punch Up Those Photos (Gimp Style)

That page has some sample photos, but here's the relevant steps:

1. Open Image
2. Go to Image>Mode>Decompose
3. Check LAB, Check Decompose to Layers, hit OK
4. Open Layers dialog. Make only the B layer visible.
5. Duplicate B layer, set "B Copy" to overlay (Opacity is 100%).
6. Merge both B layers (Image>Merge Visible Layers/CTRL-M) Choose Expand as necessary (though other options don't make a difference in this case) Hit Ok.
7. Repeat steps #4 through #6 for the "A" layer.
8. Select "L" layer, apply a slight S curve, mostly adjusted towards the dark end of the curve. (GIMP's overlay is calculated a bit differently)
9. Image>Mode>Recompose and Make sure you select LAB with the correct layer order.

I find that the results can be a little much, so I usually copy the resulting image into a new layer of the original image and then play with the layer opacity until I like it.

I wanted to work this into my whole photo workflow, so I wrote a GIMP script to perform this action on a directory of images and then save .xcf (GIMP's native format) and .jpg files. It also applies the unsharp mask to the image before saving the jpg.

It seems pretty handy, so I'm releasing it under the GPL:

batch-lab-colorboost.scm

Basic usage:
$: gimp -i -b '(batch-lab-colorboost "PATTERN" RADIUS AMOUNT THRESHOLD OPACITY)' '(gimp-quit 0)'

Example:
$: gimp -i -b '(batch-brp-process "*.ppm" 5.0 0.5 0 30)' '(gimp-quit 0)'

If you just want to apply the effect one image at a time, from within GIMP, you can use this script, which provides a menu item under Script-fu > Decor and lets you set the options in a dialog:

lab-colorboost.scm

To install either, just put the file into you GIMP scripts directory. Mine (Debian Lenny/Sid) is ~/.gimp-2.2/scripts and yours should probably be something similar (maybe ~/.gimp/scripts). I've only tried it on Linux, but I think it should work with GIMP on Windows, too.

p.s. I'm planning on writing an entry on my Linux-and-GIMP-based RAW-to-jpg photo workflow soon.