Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, while reading about integers and, subsequently, prime numbers last night, I decided the time had come for me to write a primality calculator in PHP. The test I use in my implementation is about as a naïve as one can possible get, but it was fun, nonetheless.
Interestingly enough, I discovered that there already exists a primality calculator for *nix-based systems - primes. It comes with the bsd-games package for Fedora. I assume the same is true for other distributions. Mine isn’t quite as fast yet…but it does accept, optionally, one or two arguments. If there are two arguments, then it will calculate all primes starting from the first going until the second. If there is only one argument, it will calculate from PRIME_START (defined to be 2) through to the largest integer PHP can handle on your platform (usually the maximum value of a signed int on your machine).
There are loads of potential optimizations that can be performed, and this was just something written on a whim as a proof of concept. It seems to be accurate, however. The code, released under the GNU GPL v. 3.0, can be found below.
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Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, my good friend Belal Khan of Leechon Films fame has started (a while back, actually) a program called Message Mastery. You should get the full explanation from the website, but the basic gist of it is that it is a training seminar focused on developing masterful messages through the medium of video.
He’s released a few videos that are freely available that are samples of what the entire program entails. I found the one entitled “Three POWER Principles of Filmmaking” to be quite refreshing in how simple, yet effective, such techniques can be. Even more beneficial is that the tips he provides, while framed around the production of video media, are general enough to be beneficial in almost any context.
Give his site a check-out and leave some comments as he’s very keen on getting & responding-to feedback from his visitors & members of his program.
Disclaimer: Belal is just my friend - I am neither associated with Message Mastery nor am I enrolled in the program…yet.
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to take an enormous amount of pictures during my stay here in Malaysia until now. And while the actual yield of shots with any value may be low, the sheer volume of photos means that I have plenty I would like to share.
The sheer amount of work to upload these and present them in anything close to an appealing way through WordPress has made me decide that I am going to seek an alternative method for disseminating the videos. I am hoping I can leverage my Gallery installation, in shaaʾ Allaah, but it’s support for alternative media types has not impressed me to date. And don’t even dare suggest that I use a Flash-based solution…
Read on for the feature presentation(s)! As usual, make sure to get a copy of the free-and-open-source VLC player if you don’t have it or another media player that can play Ogg Theora videos.
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Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulilllaah, there are some outstanding opportunities for views of the downtown Kuala Lumpur skyline from the roof of our apartment here. Some of the shots are clearer than others due to the conditions at the time I took theme. These are my first attempts, as well, so keep that in mind. Click the link to see them!
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Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Okay, so I have an addiction. Here are some more time-lapse sequences I took this past weekend and Monday. I’m now dabbling with alternative frame rates and sizes, including, by “popular” request, HD resolution videos.
I’ve learned a few lessons from these sequences, and I’ll elaborate a bit more on each one.
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Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake!
One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts which take the enabled features of your camera and do interesting things with them. One such script enables one to take a sequence of images of a fixed interval over a period of time - i.e., time-lapse photography! So, over the past two days, I’ve gone-ahead and played with this feature a bit by just collecting images from my office window while I diligently “worked”.
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Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been playing around with CHDK, which is a free firmware add-on (note: it does not require flashing your camera’s firmware) that enables a multitude of features on your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot digital camera. In short, it’s amazing. I haven’t had enough time to truly “unleash the POWER” yet, but I’m already amazingly pleased with what I can do so far that I was unable to do prior to this.
Amongst its amazing features includes the ability to save images to a RAW format, full control over shutter speed & exposure settings, fine-grained control over video quality settings, HDR photography, and an amazing BASIC-based scripting language that enables, among other things, time-lapse photography (examples in an upcoming post, in shaaʾ Allaah).
Expect myriad future posts relating to images & videos I’ve been able to capture with these new features, especially in combination with
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Okay, I know that title is a pretty pretentious statement by itself, as much of Fedora 9’s awesomeness isn’t unique to it. So, I’ll grant that much of the coming awesomeness is related to Gnome 2.22, which is not limited to Fedora 9, nor is Pulseaudio, Upstart (props to the Ubuntuees for that), or a plethora of other things. So, in reality, Fedora 9’s awesomeness is a celebration of Free & Open-Source software and its universal community.
The following is pretty-much ripped from the wiki. The witty banter is added by me. Also, I know I’m not the first (actually, I hope I’m quite close to the last) to have done one of these things. What follows are the features that I consider to be cool and important, but this list is obviously by no means exhaustive or even appropriately representative of Fedora 9. It’s simply a list of what I think will make Fedora 9 so awesome, in shaaʾ Allaah.
Okay, that should be enough flame retardant for now…onwards!
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Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) - while an IEEE 1394 link is definitely fast, any tape-based camcorder usually only transfers the video at regular playing speeds by actually playing the video.
Having said that, here are a few that have caught my eye:
The important issue, of course, is how easy is it to work with the video once it’s recorded. Most of the video formats are MPEG-4-based, usually the controversial AVCHD. There are some advantages & disadvantages, of course, but ffmpeg really helps with most of the issues. I’ve been playing a lot with it (ffmpeg) this past week, and the sheer flexibility of it is astounding. I think the woes of multimedia flexibility under free operating systems is slowly going away, as even the GUI applications (avidemux, PiTiVi, Kino, etc.) are at a level of refinement I wouldn’t have expected.
Naturally, I am loath to use nonfree versus free solutions, so I am pleased to let you know that there are many free software codecs available through ffmpeg - that is the topic for another article, perhaps.
Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but I’m really excited to dive into open-source content creation!
Updated with relevant linking and a few spelling fixes.
Since testing brains seems to be all the rage amongst Fedora users, I decided to give it a go myself. Results follow. Continue Reading »
