Archive for December, 02007

Griswold Family Christmas Tree

Saturday, December 22nd, 02007

This year, Elisa and I went into the wilderness with a National Forest Christmas Tree Permit to cut down a tree. We were assisted by Elisa's sister, her husband, and Elisa's parents. We went to the Cibola National Forest, near Magdalena, New Mexico, where we could see the VLA radio telescope in the background:

Christmas Tree Hunting
In the Cibola National Forest, looking out onto the VLA. Click on the image and view a large resolution version to see the telescopes.

Christmas Tree Hunting
Elisa finds the tree - a Piñon Pine.

Christmas Tree Hunting
I start to saw it down.

Christmas Tree Hunting
Larry finishes cutting it down, as everyone watches.

Christmas Tree Hunting
I drag the tree to the truck.

Christmas Tree Hunting
Into the truck.

Christmas Tree Hunting
Up in the house.

Christmas Tree Hunting
Aftermath.

Christmas Tree Hunting Christmas Tree Hunting
Decorated.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Lossless JPEG rotation on the command line

Saturday, December 22nd, 02007

When processing JPEG images taken with a digital camera, you often want rotate the images that were taken in portrait orientation, so that they appear "right side up" on your computer monitor.

For example,



This is easy enough in a many GUI image manipulation packages, but it tends to be tedious for a large number of images. Further, if you're not careful to use the right options, the rotation process will uncompress and recompress the images, degrading their quality.

Thankfully, there's an awesome command line utility called jhead that does lossless JPEG rotation and a whole lot more. Here's an example. Quick, easy, and scriptable: 

$ jhead -autorot *
Modified: IMG_1007.JPG
Modified: IMG_1037.JPG
Modified: IMG_1038.JPG
Modified: IMG_1039.JPG
...

jhead's author has a very interesting home page, including information on a home-made mechanical organ and a link to Raphi Giangiulio's Homemade Pipe Organ, which is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Posted in Photography | No Comments »

Semester Wrapup

Sunday, December 16th, 02007

I got an A in my Neural Networks class, keeping my cumulative GPA at 4.04:


screen shot of grades

Here's a screen shot of me working on the final project:


screen shot of of me working on the final Neural Networks Project

I enjoyed the class's back propagation learning assignment. My solution was implemented with Ruby, which resulted in a very elegant implementation (IMHO).

Posted in School, Ruby, Programming | 2 Comments »