michael.dehaan (his spelling, not mine!) posted something that you can take or leave (I don’t want to start a flame war on my own blog):

michaeldehaan.net | Popularity Contests Are So Junior High School.

But what is intriguing are the ideas that develop in the comments.   Please take some time and read those first, and then come back here. 

What I wanted you to read were the ideas floated in the comments regarding raising awareness of the Freedom of Free Software for the common people, and the analogies made to such programs as NOVA & Cosmos on PBS.  This touched me personally because of how important such programs were to me and to nurturing my love & interest for Science & Nature.

These programs, it seems, were designed to take what may have been seemingly esoteric topics that were originally avoided by regular people and make them accessible.  People like Carl Sagan devoted their lives towards making deep topics such as the universe accessible and understandable by common people.  In no small part, I think they were successful.

So, if success can be had in such an area as Science, then why not also for Freedom?  Why not devote time to “marketing” the advantages that Free software and software freedom bring, both practical and social?  But the noveleity I found was in pointing towards the successful (if not “American Idol” successful) models of Public broadcasting, which did succeed in reaching  intended audiences and affecting them positive ways that brought about positive changes, in my humble opinion.

What’s the next step, then?  Let’s at least foster the idea that we should be working on producing media that fun, easy to understand and follow, and serves to promote what we, the users of Free software, feel is important about it.  I’m going to think some more about this and get back to you all, in shaaʾ Allaah.

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.

#!/usr/bin/php
< ?php

define('PRIME_START', 2);   //  One, by definition, is not prime

if (isset($argv[2])) {
    $start = (int) $argv[1];
    $max = (int) $argv[2];
} elseif (isset($argv[1])) {
    $start = (int) PRIME_START;
    $max = (int) $argv[1];
} else {
    $start = PRIME_START;
    $max = PHP_INT_MAX;
}

if ($start < PRIME_START) {
    $start = PRIME_START;
}

if ($max < PRIME_START) {
    $max = PHP_INT_MAX;
}

echo "Using $start as start value and $max as max value\n";

$int = $start;

while ($int < $max) {
    $start_time = microtime(true);
    if (is_prime($int)) {
        $total_time = round((microtime(true) - $start_time), 2);
        echo "$int is prime (calculated in {$total_time}s)\n";
    }
    ++$int;
}

echo "All possible primes lower than $max have been calculated!\n";

/**
 * A very naïve test to determine the primality of a given integer
 *
 * @param int $int
 * @return boolean integer is prime
 */
function is_prime($int)
{
    if (! is_numeric($int)) {
        return false;
    }

    $int = (int) $int;

    $test_divisor = PRIME_START; //  By coincidence, the first divisor to determine prime numbers is also the first prime number

    while ($test_divisor < $int) {
        if (is_divisor($int, $test_divisor)) {
            return false;
        }
        ++$test_divisor;
    }

    //  If we are here, then that means no divisors were found
    return true;
}

/**
 * Very simple function to determine if one integer is the divisor of another
 *
 * @param int $dividend
 * @param int $divisor
 * @return boolean $divisor is divisor of dividend
 */
function is_divisor($dividend, $divisor)
{
    if (0 === $dividend % $divisor) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

Alhamdulillaah, I was able to take some pictures on the beach near our home here in Kuala Terengganu (KT).

Beach Panorama

Kuala Terengganu "Island"

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to make some major- and sorely-needed-upgrades to Audio Islam.  Interestingly enough, for the vast majority of people, these changes won’t really be that visible as they are all behind-the scenes.

The desire to upgrade Audio Islam has been around for a long time, and I still have many more changes, particularly in relation to the code, that are pending.  But I decided to focus on performance due to the vast surge in visitors that will come during the month of Ramadhaan, in shaaʾ Allaah.  Therefore, I had to polish some things, upgrade others, and in some cases, fundamentally change them!

Prior to today, Audio Islam was running a typical LAMP setup - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database server, & PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.  Also typically, at the behest of the PHP developers, my Apache HTTP server was configured to operate in prefork mode, which, to put it simply, causes the web server to assign one process per web request.

For a site like Audio Islam, where currently the programming logic is rather limited and the bulk of the action involves downloading of large files, the cautions that call for using the prefork mode, as opposed to the more performant multi-threaded worker mode, are less urgent, so I opted for the more efficient mode due to Audio Islam’s need for very high concurrency on rather modest server hardware.  I’ve had to set the maximum number of clients in my webserver to over 700 and also offset the more popular mode of download to be FTP just to keep the website accessible, so I am very keen to seek out as much optimization as I can until I can move to another server that will sustain the site as well as this one in terms of bandwidth (currently, 20Mbit/s unmetered is keeping the site afloat, alhamdulillaah).

However, here is where the multi-threaded madness of PHP reared its ugly head.  In truth, I am not entirely sure that I can lay the blame solely on PHP here, but as PHP is not generally multi-threaded enabled and intends to stay that way, I don’t feel so keen on removing them from the blame completely, either.

Before going further, here’s a summary of the specific versions of each package (before/after)

• Apache HTTP Server: 2.2.0/2.2.9
• MySQL database server: 5.0.16/5.0.67
• PHP Hypertext Preprocessor: 5.1.6/5.2.3

As I install all my servers from source on my aging Red Hat platform in order to get the latest versions easily, that means I have the pleasure of compiling all my packages from source (I haven’t figured-out how to make my own RPMs yet…).  So, my first step was to compile Apache HTTP server, ensuring I enabled the worker MPM mode to enable multi-threading (a simple mistake I noticed when I saw the config summary included the old prefork MPM).

My configure command was as follows:

./configure --enable-modules=all --enable-mods-shared=all --with-mpm=worker

This went along very well. My next step was to compile MySQL, as I needed access to the client library in order to compile PHP with support for the database backend.  Note that the coming of PHP 5.3 should obviate this as it will feature a native MySQL driver for PHP which shares the same license as PHP, which sparked the whole problem of the separation between PHP the MySQL client library.

Before I show the MySQL configure command, let me present the PHP one:

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-mysql --with-zlib --with-bz2 --enable-mbstring --with-mysqli --with-pdo-mysql --enable-zip

This is a pretty basic PHP configuration script, rather slim, but sufficient for what I needed.  However, the configure script complained about a missing library for MySQL named “libmysqlclient_r”.  I looked for it on my system, and while I found it, it was the wrong version.  This is when I realizzed that I had to enable the thread-safe client in MySQL.  So, I did this, using this configure command:

./configure --enable-thread-safe-client

After a rather lengthy make & make install process, PHP was still complaining.  I looked for libmysqlclient_r and found it, but PHP still kept complaining that it wasn’t under “/usr/local”.  It didn’t matter that I explicitly instructed it to look at the install directory of my MySQL installation.

Anyway, after spending several hours trying to figure this out by researching online and trial-and-error, I decided enough was enough, and I was going to follow PHP’s recommendation of running it under FastCGI.  However, I do not have a lot of experience getting Apache to run under FastCGI.  Morever, as I didn’t need Apache’s power & flexibility for Audio Islam, I decided now was the time to go where I’ve wanted to go for a while - to host Audio Islam using lighttpd.

lighttpd (pronounced lighty) is a lightweight yet powerful HTTP server that is designed for low overhead and high performance. Despite these goals, it still hosts a slew of features that sufficed it to be the backend for Audio Islam, alhamdulillaah.  Once I realized that I was going to go through with it, I stopped all my efforts at getting Apache HTTP working and focused on installing lighttpd.  Amazingly enough, I discovered that the latest stable version, 1.4.19, was already available via yum for RHEL4!  I quickly went ahead and install it and its fastcgi module.  And, a short while later, after some configuration, I had Audio Islam up-and-running on lighttpd!  Alhamdulillaah!  It was rather surprising to see how it worked perfectly out of the box once I redirected it to my newly-fastcgi-compiled PHP.  For reference, here’s the final configure command I used for compiling PHP to ultimately work on lighttpd:

./configure --enable-fastcgi --enable-discard-path --enable-force-cgi-redirect --with-mysql --with-zlib --with-bz2 --enable-mbstring --with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --enable-zip

The first three arguments are from the lighttpd documentation, and the rest are what I wanted in the first place.

So, there you have it! Audio Islam is now running on top of lighttpd, alhamdulillaah.  In shaaʾ Allaah this setup will enable the server to sail through Ramadhaan far smoother than previous years.  I guess we’ll find out in a couple of weeks, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve returned “home” to Kuala Terengganu (KT), which is my wife’s hometown, and I’ve taken it to be my home-away-from home.  It’s a beautiful place, especially because we actually live in a kampung, or village, not to far away from the main part of KT.  Additionally, compared to Kuala Lumpur (KL), the air here is so much cleaner, fresher, and easier to breathe, alhamdulillaah.

I haven’t gone anywhere notably picture-worthy yet, but I hope I will get a chance to soon, in shaaʾ Allaah.  The weather today (after a fierce storm last night) is outstanding, and made me want to shoot some photos with a crystal-clear blue sky background.  Maybe another time…;)

If you want to see some photos of KT, just view the Malaysia category and there are plenty in previous posts.

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.

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.

Kuala Lumpur Downtown Time Lapse

VGA

720p HD

Balcony Sunset Time Lapse

VGA

720p HD

VGA

720p HD

VGA

VGA

720p HD

VGA

Quick links to all video downloads

• kuala-lumpur-downtown-time-lapse-vga
• kuala-lumpur-downtown-time-lapse-hd720
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-vga-24fps
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-720p-24fps
• balcony-sunset-time-lapse-vga
• balcony-sunset-time-lapse-2-hd720
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-3-vga
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-interrupted-vga-30fps
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-interrupted-720p-30fps
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-interrupted-epilogue-vga-30fps

Enjoy!

Alhamdulillaah, I just caught the news that Nokia is planning to buy Symbian and subsequently plans to open-source Symbian OS last this year or at the beginning of this year.  If this all plays out and is true, then this is a great boon to world as a high-quality mobile operating system will be free from proprietary encumbrances.

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!

Just yesterday I purchased a tripod specifically so I can take more steady shots.  It will also help me in taking more clear & even panoramas, because with a tripod I can have a more even axis of rotation - as opposed to the rotation happening due to me twisting my waist with the camera held in front of my face.  I think this will yield even better & more accurate panoramas, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Look to a future post where I explain how I created these images.  It’s amazingly more simple than it seems, alhamdulillaah.

Alhamdulillaah, after finding the wpLicense WordPress plugin on the Creative Commons website, I’ve been able to completely license all my work released through my blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.  This means such world-changing works as my essay on Social Networking & online projects, my tirade against anti-userism, a heart-warming story of love, loss, and & hard disks, the possible (at least, then) merger of Yahoo! & Google, natural sounds recorded with my H4, and many other things.

This license covers all original work by me posted to this blog, include literature & multimedia (audio, video, & images).  For attribution it is sufficient to link back to the post containing the content on this site.  Since I have chosen the Attribution Share-alike license, this means I simply want to be credited for a work and I would like that someone else shares whatever of mine they use.  I would not mind if someone makes derivative works (keeping in mind the above two points), and if someone makes money from using my content, so be it!  Feel free to share some of the wealth with me if you are so inclined. 

So, at long last, my blog content is shared appropriately.  Let the creativity flow!

Alhamdulillaah, I am back in Malaysia, which means I am also back with my wife.  Words cannot express how much joy the two of us are experiencing being together once again.  More than six months have passed since we’d been together the last time.  In case it is not obvious, the reason we are not yet able to live together permanently is due to the fact that the U. S. Citizenship & Immigration Services has not yet approved the petition for my wife’s immigration visa, and thus, I cannot legally bring her into the country.  Therefore, until such a time as the petition is approved (and the NVC approves the visa, and my wife passes the interview) in shaaʾ Allaah, we will face challenges to living together permanently.

Of course, there is also the question of “why don’t I just move to Malaysia to be with my wife for the duration of the immigration process?”.  And that is quite a legitimate one as well as one I have often asked myself.  And, if it weren’t for the fact that my employment ties me to the US, I would be here with my wife 24/7.  Alhamdulillaah, though, my employer has been accommodating enough to allow me to work for nearly the entire duration of my stay here remotely on a trial basis.

However, for now I am enormously content and overjoyed to simply be physically with my wife, so I need not dwell on extranous issues for the time being.  And, now for what you’ve all been waiting for — rest assured that I have in store some media in the form of stills, panoramas, time-lapse shots, and videos!

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.

Sunset 1

This time-lapse sequence is composed of 900 images, taken with an approximate interval of 5 - 8 seconds (it’s not very precise due to a few factors).  As happened with at least one other sequence, something interesting started to happen just as the sequence finishes…you’ll have to watch the whole thing to find out…

Highlights include seeing the contrails of planes transform into high-altitude cirrus clouds as well as shadows from individual clouds sweeping across the sky!

Bonus points if you can identify the embedded subliminal message about lawn care. 

Lessons learned: Capture more!  If something looks interesting in real-time, then it almost certainly will be more so in time-lapse!

Sunset 2

Possibly my best sequence yet, it is composed of a whopping 1500 images, taken with an approximate interval of 2 - 4 seconds (the setting was 1 “second” in CHDK).  This is cropped to 720p HD resolution after I resized the sequence a bit to make it more manageable.  For an uncropped sequence, see below.

Highlights include very detailed view of cloud structure as well as cloud formation & dissipation.  Additionally, more cloud-shadow streaks are visible.  Finally, there is some interesting stuff happening at sunset that appears to be some very high-level development, such as waves within the clouds.

Lessons learned: Fix the exposure and other settings so that there is a consistent feel throughout the whole sequence, unless that changing exposure settings are intentional (which they are not, in this case, but it’s not so bad, either).

Sunset 2

(VGA resolution)

This is from the same image sequence as above, except the original 4×3 images are resized to VGA (640×480) resolution.  It should be easy to identify where the crop took place (somewhat below the exact middle of the frame, poised just above and between the non-sky parts).

Windy Day 1

Windy Day 2

These two image sequences (Windy Day 1 & 2) are real gems, alhamdulillaah!  I really liked them.  Sadly, they are also the shortest.  And why, might you ask, are they the shortest (and most irregular in length)?  Well, the sequences are titled quite appropriately - they were taken on an exceptionally windy day.  So windy, in fact, that my lightweight plastic tripod (that came more-or-less free with my camera from Newegg) was blown over by the wind…twice (once per sequence, thus the abrupt endings)…with the camera still on it.  The first impact was on concrete.  The second was grass.

Highlights include some stunning sun rays sweeping through the holes in the clouds.

Lessons learned: Have a basic understanding of physics (especially the aspects of mass, force, leverage, and thus, torque) before undertaking photography in averse conditions that lend to beautiful photo ops.  Additionally, should one’s understanding of above-mentioned topics not be sufficient, at least retain the common sense to place the camera in an area where damage from falling would be minimized.

Windy Day 3

Windy Day 4

These last two image sequences were done on a different windy day, but with a heavier tripod (an old, well-built metal one belonging to my father).  There really isn’t as much inspiring about these sequences.  The quality of the images was outstanding, but nothing particularly interesting happened.

Lessons learned: Place the camera in such a way as to minimize unwanted obstructions (in this case, the trees didn’t add much).  Also, a deeper field of view would make for a more interesting shot - more time to see the cloud formations develop and dissipate.

So there you have it!  I’ve been working on these sequences (both making & processing them) all weekend and until today, so I am happy to finally be done with them so I can share them.  Comments most welcome!

Time-lapse sky by Basil Mohamed Gohar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Alhamdulillaah, I have really been engrossed in using ffmpeg, one of the most amazing a/v command-line tools out there, for my various personal video projects.  However, recently I was experiencing a recurring bug where I could not work with some specific codecs when either the input or the output file was on a particular drive (!).  The drive in question happened to have only one FAT32 partition, so I suspect it may have had something to do with it, as using another drive for both input & output would generally work flawlessly.  The particular action I was trying to perform was to encode a sequence of rather large JPEG files (3072×2304) into a single video file using the outstanding (but still somewhat experimental and/or unstable) FFV1 lossless codec.

So, I visited the ffmpeg website and looked at some of their bugs, but didn’t see anything related to this.  Then, after seeing some of their pre-bug report checklist, I decided to check the version of ffmpeg I had on the system, and found it to be from March.  So, I pulled-down a fresh copy of their trunk via subversion and ran configure & make (I did not run make install).  Running the resulting ffmpeg binary from this compile run worked perfectly, alhamdulillaah.

The lesson is, if you’re running into a bug with either ffmpeg or any other package, then give a shot at running the latest code, if available.  It may seem like common sense, but I had underestimated just how easy it would be.  Surely, other packages may not work as simply, but it really was a piece of cake in this case.  Now I guess I need to learn how to package RPMs so I can help out the Livna project to get this latest code into their repository, which I also understand is not simple task, as many other projects rely on ffmpeg…

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”.

Through the script menu, I was able to setup the time-lapse to take one photo every second. As my office is on the 4th floor of large cubic structure in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, I had a nice view that combined parking lot-and-street activity with some nice cloud shows. That both days were signficantly overcast actually proved to make the videos more interesting - so much so that the last image sequence was pointed more towards the sky to capture the natural splendor up above.

Note: All videos are in free and open source Ogg Theora format.  If you do not have a player that supports this already installed, then I recommend the VLC free and open source player.  Most users of a GNU/Linux or other *nix-based systems will probably not need anything special to player, so this note is mostly for Windows users.

Time-lapse view from my office window by Basil Mohamed Gohar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

work-window-time-lapse-1

This was my first image sequence out of my office window. The white balance is really off, unfortunately, because I didn’t attempt to adjust it at all. Subsequently, the entire image sequence has a color hue due to the tinting of the office building’s windows.

work-window-time-lapse-2

My second image sequence came out a little better with regards to color, because I set the white balance to “overcast”. This is still not as accurate as it could be, however.

work-window-time-lapse-3

The third image sequence is the longest, and first one from the second day. This is a sequence of 600 images in total! I manually adjusted the white balance for this and the next sequence, and as such, the color appear much more natural & realistic in these two sequences.

work-window-time-lapse-4

The last & final image sequence for this batch was really just something I did without giving it much thought. Amazingly enough, it turned-out to be the most interesting until the end when it gets cut off (due to lack of space on my SD card) - the direction of the clouds began to change! This sequence in particular encourages me to try to stake-out a day with excellent cloud activity and just setup the camera to capture as long a sequence as is sane.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and these clips as much as I did making & manipulating them. I’ll make another post explaining how I captured the images & converted them into videos. Feel free to post comments and/or questions should you have any.

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

Alhamdulillaah, I’m about to head out from work, and I’m going to have to disconnect my torrent seeds that have been running all day - at least until I get home, in shaaʾ Allaah. Here are the graphical bandwidth charts showing the stats of the seeds from all day.

First, the hidayahonline server (seeding the x86_64 DVD ISO file):

And second, the audioislam server (seeding the i386 DVD ISO file):

Although the audioislam server has twice the tubeage of the hidayahonline server, it is also the one more heavily loaded due to AudioIslam.com. So, they both ended-up serving around 32GB of data to the Tubes before I disconnected them for the day.

Alhamdulillaah, Fedora 9 is officially released! At least, the official torrents are available. The main site doesn’t seem to be updated yet, but then again, it’s not 10 AM, either. I’m grabbing the x86_64 DVD build on one server and the i386 on the other, so I hope to be seeding by midday.

Update: The Fedora Project site now reflects the release.  I should really be getting back to work now…

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!

Unified Dictionary Support

This feature is really nice because I tend to use words that aren’t in the stock dictionaries of Pidgin, Firefox, or OpenOffice.org, including transliterations of Arabic that I frequently throw into the mix (already, above, there are two examples). So, I frequently have to add these customized spellings and/or rarer words (or just plain preferred spellings) to the existing dictionaries numerous times. Fedora 9 now unifies these dictionaries so I should, technically, need only one. Awesome!

Ext4 Filesystem Support

Ext4 is the successor to the successful stable ext3 filesystem. Personally, I’ve been using this on both a fresh install of the Fedora 9 Beta and Preview releases, and I have not had any problems. On top of that, I have actually seen some significant performance enhancements, particularly when dealing with both very large as well as large numbers of files. Of course, ext4 has a laundry list of features to it, so don’t just take it from me, check it out!

Note: As the Ext4 filesystem is not nearly as long-in-the-tooth as ext3, you may consider not using it if you have only one copy of data on the filesystem. I feel comfortable and confident about using it for myself, but as people tend to be very conservative when it comes to their choice of filesystems for good reasons, just consider reading-up on it before you commit to it. And when you do, you’ll probably also think it’s awesome!

Firefox 3

Firefox has long been the poster child for the positive impact that a free and open source model can have on software. Taking the world by storm, Firefox has given a good knock to the stalwart of the Internet Age, Internet Explorer 6, and has driven innovation on the Web to new heights, not the least of which is driving Microsoft into releasing newer versions of Internet Explorer at a previously unheard of pace just to keep up with the pace of the Web.

Firefox 3 delivers yet another knock-out blow with amazingly enhanced performance (especially under GNU/Linux), excellent features (like the…wait for it…AwesomeBar…), and all-around slickness such as better cross-platform native integration (don’t think about the logic of that for too long…it’s good, trust me…).

It seems like Firefox is still in Beta for now, but as I’ve been using Firefox since version 0.7, I’ve grown accustomed to the stability that comes with the positive & productive attitude of release early, release often.

(Mandatory “awesome” reference can be found two paragraphs above.)

Gvfs

One of the beauties that Gnome has brought for us is the outstandingly flexibly and featureful Gvfs. Continuing in Gnome’s tradition of just pushing forward to improve the desktop experience, Gvfs offers a new virtual filesystem interface that allows amazingly easy & flexibly file-level access to myriad new platforms, be they of a network, device, or other type of nature. Read the link to the Gnome website for specifics about this nifty new feature.

jigdo

As one of the mirrors of the Fedora Unity Re-Spin project, I’m sort of proud of this one, even though, aside from hosting, all I’ve really done is impeded the progress of releases by asking inane questions at inappropriate times (note to self: check release schedules before hounding people for assistance). It is largely through the work of the fine folks at Fedora Unity that jigdo has now become a mainstay in the Fedora distribution model.

So why should anyone bother with jigdo when there’s already BitTorrent? I used to wonder the same thing, but then I used jigdo for the first time. To vastly over simplify it, with Jigdo, one need only download the bits they are lacking in order to get a full ISO, be it DVD or CD. So, if you already have a Fedora 9 Beta or Preview release, using Jigdo, you’d need only download the packages that have been updated since then.

Contrast this with BitTorrent, where one would need to download the entire ISO, regardless of what bits you may already have of a previous release. Yes, BitTorrent is peer-to-peer and jigdo isn’t (at least, not yet?), but you still have to download the whole 3+GB worth before you have something to install. Jigdo can save you a lot of bandwidth if you already have a previous release available, whether as an ISO file or burnt directly on a disc.

On top of that, if used intelligently, a widespread adoption of jigdo as a distribution method would also alleviate the burden of hosts from having to hold large ISO files which are really just composed of myriad packages already present on the mirror. As a host myself, I think that is just awesome!

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use Jigdo for getting Fedora, check out Fedora Unity Jigdo howto.

KDE4

Although I do not use the KDE aside from a few choice apps, I think it would be rather rude and inappropriate to neglect the awesome efforts of the Fedora KFE SIG in making Fedora 9 the first major distribution release to feature KDE4

As I am not as familiar with this awesomeum as I am others, I will leave the absorption of the full details as an exercise for the reader (note: their release annoucement page is…yes, that’s right…awesome…).

PackageKit

It has been called the OPMtRTA (perhaps only by me). I’ll admit that PK has had it’s growing pains, but I have to say, Richard Hughes (and anyone else?) has done an awesome job pulling this one together. I think this is something that necessarily will have to continue to evolve as the scope of PackageKit is just amazing. How far it’s come is even more so, and I am really looking forward to seeing where it goes and what innovative solutions are found for the plethora of problems present with package procurement (okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch, I know…).

I would like to take this time to say that Richard has one of the fastest turnaround-times I’ve seen in any kind of a project, whether it is related to bugs, features, or implementation. And, given the amount of heat that’s been thrown his way, his demeanor has always been calm, collected, and courteous (that one was better, wasn’t it?).

100% Free and Open Source

This isn’t new…it’s always been there. Yes, Fedora, by directed and intentional policy, is a 100% Free and Open Source GNU/Linux distribution. While it is possible to get non-free bits into it, you’ll not find one shipped with it. I think this is, by far, the greatest feature of Fedora (at least, as an OS - I consider the community to be the best part of Fedora in general). Take us back a decade or two, and who would have thought that such a functional and polished product could exist free from the enslaving shackles of proprietary softare? Alhamdulillaah!

So, there you have it! A quick view of the upcoming Fedora 9! I’ll be doing my best to mirror the torrents of Fedora, both the i386 and x86_64 releases, in shaa Allaah. Please feel free to share your own comments and experiences with Fedora 9 and/or free-and-open-source software in general!

The command you want is mogrify.

I am working with some images generated from within Windows XP, and they (sometimes thousands) are all in uncompressed bitmap files.  I wanted to find a free-and-open-source application to do the batch conversion easily, and I came across ImageMagick, which I had known about for a while.  In short, ImageMagick is a library and set of utilites for manupulating and converting images formats.

The most common utility is convert.  However, it is designed to work on one file per invocation.  So, without having to learn a little DOS-style scripting, convert comes-up short.  However, mogrify can work on more than one file at a time, alhamdulillaah.

So, for example, if you would like to convert a directory full of TGA images, the command would be:

mogrify -format png *.tga

And, if said TGA images happen to use the alpha channel inappropriately (as they did in my case), then simply disable it with this modified command:

mogrify -format png -alpha off *.tga

So there you have it! Happy converting!