Liquid rescale feature now available as a GIMP plugin

One month back I had written about a content aware image rescaling technology. And I hoped that this technology will be incorporated in Gimp in the future. Well we didn't have to wait that long.

A liquid rescale GIMP plugin has already been released and you can download the source as well as binaries for a variety of Linux distributions and for Windows at the following location. The download link of the Windows version of the GIMP plugin does not seem to work so I found an alternate location here.

You can download and install this plugin and take it for a run.

Once you install the plugin, you can access it in GIMP by navigating to layer -> liquid rescale.

Fig: Liquid rescale plugin dialog box in GIMP

Possible uses of the liquid rescale plugin

• Rescaling a 1600 x 1200 px wallpaper image to a smaller diamension (Eg: 800 x 600) without losing its clarity.
• Reducing the size of an image without losing any important parts.
  

Social bookmarking explained in plain English

Social bookmarking has literally changed the way people aggregate and bookmark content. Gone are the days when you relied exclusively on bookmarking interesting sites you visit in your web browser's bookmarks menu. Now a days, the trend is to maintain all your bookmarks at a central location online and then share them with like minded people. Thus you have a process where by you never lose track of the interesting sites at the same time get to explore new sites which cater to your tastes but which has eluded your eyes.

One of the premier social bookmarking sites is del.icio.us which is a Yahoo venture. Here you can create an account and then start bookmarking your sites. What is more you can also tag your sites and enter short descriptions about it thus making it much more easier to manage.

Well if you didn't understand the concept behind del.icio.us by reading my short explanation, then I don't really blame you. A better bet would be to watch this Youtube video.

A word about the creators of this video

This video is shot by two enterprising individuals (couples actually) by name Sachi LeFever and Lee LeFever. They run a company called Common Craft and their job is to create educational (or promotional) videos such as the one shown above explaining various concepts related to technology and as you can see, they have done a pretty good job of it.

What I really find unique about the video is the way it is shot, where they explain things using pictures printed on paper with a little bit of animation thrown in and of course using neutral accent English thus bringing it down to the level of a child's understanding. You can also find many other videos on their site. And if you have some spare change, you might be interested in hiring them to do a similar video of your site too ;-).

Firefox reaches 400 million downloads

It is nice to see one of my favorite web browser logging 100s of millions of downloads. When I think about it, I do not even remember the last time I used Internet Explorer. Then again it has been quite a while since I have logged in to Windows too in my dual booting machine.

So a couple of weeks back, Firefox passed the corner stone of being downloaded a whooping 400 million times as tracked by the Spread Firefox website. While the number might be challenged by critics because they don't say if the data is for unique downloads or if it counts all repeat downloads too (Most probably the latter is true). For example, I myself have downloaded Firefox a total of 7 times in the past 6 months.

Fig:Firefox download trends since the past couple of years

I feel happy that this Open Source web browser is gaining more and more patrons as days go by. But it has a long way to go if it needs to challenge the might of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This is because even now, IE is the dominant web browser for the simple reason that it is installed by default on all Windows machines and it is used by a majority of users. While Firefox's percentage is gradually increasing, it still lags behind IE.

As an example, the graph below highlights the browser usage trends of visitors to this blog. I was really surprised that only just over 25 percent of the visitors to this blog use Firefox as their web browser. And a dominant 66 percent of visitors still use IE.

Fig: Web browser used by visitors to this blog.

But I may add that the percentage of Firefox users is gradually increasing as days go by. And one can definitely dream of a day when Firefox will grab the majority user share of the Web browser. Kudos to the Firefox team for giving us this wonderful web browser.

High end Lenovo and Dell laptops for sale at 40% discount

Would you like to acquire a sufficiently high end brand new laptop sporting upto 1 GB memory (RAM), an Intel dual core processor, 120 GB hard disk et al manufactured by a company like Dell or Lenovo for just around 60 % of its street price ? Well you could, provided you are living in the Indian state of TamilNadu and more importantly you are a bona fide student enrolled in a school or college in TamilNadu.

The scheme is the brain child of Electronics Corporation of TamilNadu Limited (ELCOT). ELCOT is a wholly owned Government of TamilNadu Undertaking, registered under the Indian Companies Act(1956). It is the nodal agency for Information and Communication Technology projects for the Government of TamilNadu.

Now this news coming from TamilNadu, I am not the least surprised. TamilNadu government (doesn't matter which political party is ruling) are famous for rolling out people friendly schemes. To list a couple of them which come to my mind, there is

• The Free bicycle scheme for all students studying in 12th standard
• Distributing 20 KG rice per month for just Indian Rupees 2/KG which in US dollars is equivalent to 5 cents per KG of rice.
• Distributing Free Colour television sets [Link]
• And now high end branded laptops at a hefty discount. Wow ... make that double Wow.
  

So people in TamilNadu are getting a fair deal from their government as far as the number of free schemes are considered. Perhaps the the respective state governments in the rest of India should take a leaf from the government of TamilNadu and roll out such people friendly schemes. For example, we could have a scheme of providing $25 computer desktops free of cost for all school students on the lines of the $100 laptop project (er... is it still called the $100 laptop?). But I digress here.

Coming back to our story, ELCOT purchases these laptops at their market price of $1100 each (Indian Rupees 44000) and then is selling it at a massively subsidized discount rate of less than $800 (Indian Rupees 29000 to 32000). Additionally you also get $140 worth extras like a 3 year international customer carry in warranty, an adapter and a carry case. The discounted laptops are available only to the students living in TamilNadu and enrolled in a government recognized school or college there.

Guess what the laptops will be running ? Full marks to you if you guessed it right. It will be running what else but Linux of course. The laptops will be loaded with OpenSuSE Linux and will be fully Linux compliant with all the Linux device drivers made available at their website. Do check out the specifications of the laptops on offer. And here is a list of the software pre-installed on each laptop.I bet you will surely be tempted to accept domicile in TamilNadu and then enroll your children in a school or college there just to lay your hands on the laptops at such a bargain price.

GNOME 2.20 released - some new features

GNOME is a popular, multi-platform desktop environment which focuses on ease of use, stability, and first class internationalization and accessibility support. GNOME rolls out a new version of its ever popular Desktop every six months. And in keeping with its commitment, it has yet again made available the newest release which is GNOME ver 2.20.

This begs the question as to what is new in GNOME 2.20. There are a number of new features. But most of them are subtle in nature and are not conspicuous to the end user. Here is a concise list of the new features in GNOME 2.20.

Evolution enhancements

• Gives an attachment reminder to the user if he tries to send a mail without any attachments but certain words in his mail indicate that he has attached a file to the mail.
• Backup all the mails and profiles in the Evolution client with the click of a button.
• A new mail notification icon and many other tiny miscellaneous enhancements.
  

Epiphany Web browser enhancements - More intuitive inline completion in the address bar

Image viewer enhancements

• Eye of Gnome (EOG) has a menu which allows you to open an image using another software program such as Gimp, Fspot, a web browser or G-thumb while viewing the image using eog. And if the image is modified, the modifications are updated in the eog in real time.
• The new image properties dialog provides easy access to basic information and metadata for your images, and now includes XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) data that your camera or software might store in your image files, along with the existing EXIF data. This might include location, copyright information, license, and tags.
  

Evince PDF viewer

Supports interactive PDF forms. That is forms which allow you to enter data and then which can be send to print. Evince's page rendering features are also noticeably faster.

Great media player enhancement

Totem is the default media player in GNOME. In the new release, totem will search for and install all the required media codecs - even the non-free ones if it finds that the media file requires additional codecs. This is a very cool feature and will do away with all the manual installations required to make Linux more multimedia friendly.

Fig: Totem now offers to install the proprietary codecs

Notes synchronization

Tomboy now supports saving and retrieving notes stored in a remote location via its WebDav framework or SSH. This means that it is now possible to synchronize all your notes say between your home and office machines.

Search integrated in the File chooser dialog

This redesigned dialog now allows you to search for files using Desktop search systems such as Beagle or tracker. This makes it much more easier to open your files.

Nautilus enhancements

• A pie graph incorporated into the Nautilus file properties window makes it much more intuitive.
• File manager can now read EXIF data from digital cameras and will automatically orient and display the thumbnails of images.
  

A new control panel

GNOME 2.20 sports a new appearance control panel which allows you to change various properties such as themes, background images, fonts and such from a single interface. Till now each of these options had their own individual dialogs but not anymore.

Other enhancements
Improved GNOME keyring system providing you with a few new conveniences. I have not used the GNOME keyring yet so can't comment on it.

GNOME help browser called Yelp now sports a much more pleasing style and layout.

Apart from all this there are a number of other minor enhancements all round.

In the system administration side, GNOME offers an improved Lock down and user profile editor as well as incorporating better auditing support and roll based access control in Gnome display manager (GDM).

Having said that, the number one feature which excites me as an end user is the totem's built-in feature of pulling in and installing all the required codecs to play any media file. I guess with this, one can finally say goodbye to poor out of the box support for video and audio files in Linux.

You can read the official news at the GNOME website and also try out a live-cd of Foresight Linux sporting GNOME 2.20.

Introducing a new installation wiki in the neighbourhood

If you ask me to start naming some content management system, I can start with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and so on and then will not know when to stop. Seriously, there are innumerable content management or blogging systems around. Someone told me that he started counting the blogging tools available in order to get an idea in numbers and he was still counting when he reached the number 200.

Now add to this backend programs such as databases and web servers which play a pivotal role in the working of CMSes and we have a whole lot of software on our hands. Keeping this huge mountain of software in mind, Packt Book publishers who are on the forefront in publishing books related to CMSes (they publish books related to other subjects too) has rolled out a new Wiki called InstallationWiki.org which caters to explaining how to install most of these software on your machine either locally or remotely. It has divided the tutorials into 8 broad categories namely "Open Source", "Content management systems", "Web development", Databases, Java, PHP, "Microsoft and .NET" and finally "Networking and telephony".

Already there are a growing number of tutorials and howtos mostly related to CMSes on this site. But considering that this is a Wiki, which anyone can edit, this project shows a lot of promise. Also one should keep in mind that the tutorials listed on the Wiki bear the seal of approval of Packt Books thus one can expect to find quality articles on this site. Do check out the article on PHPMyAdmin for instance to know what I mean... In the past, I have reviewed a couple of Packt books such as the one on Oscommerce ,IPCOP, Wordpress, Drupal and so on and I have found each of them to contain very useful information.

Gimp UI brainstorm - Ideas to help make Gimp better

Gimp is one of the finest graphics suites which is released under a GNU license. I dare say, feature wise, Gimp rivals even Adobe's Photoshop in creating and manipulating images targeted for the web. Before you jump the gun, I did say images for the web.

One of Gimp's weakness is its poor support for CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) color profiles which is the dominant profiles used in the printing industry (read offset printing) . So if you are creating images to be published on a glossy magazine or a flier, then you will do better to stick to Photoshop for now. Again another off repeated complaint that most first time users of Gimp have is its seemingly kludgey interface.

Personally, I have no problem with it as I have grown comfortable with the current Gimp GUI but I guess it could be further polished and made more efficient. So there has been a move by the GIMP UI redesign team to highlight the possible ways in which the Gimp UI could be spruced up and made more user efficient. And the result is the Gimp GUI brainstorm blog.

This blog highlights mock ups of GIMP UI interface which is contributed by the general public. If you have an interesting idea, then you can create a mock up and submit it to the blog and it will be published for all to see.

The rules for submission are as follows :

• Explain your idea in an image or two. Only these images will be published, so make sure any needed explanation is inside them. Images must be in jpg, gif, bmp or png format, maximum 8MB each.
• Your images should show your idea in a clear way, but they don’t have to be glossy and polished. Plain vector drawings or even scanned pencil sketches should also work.
• Send your image to gimp [dot] brainstorm [at] gmail [dot] com , with the word ‘GIMP’ in the subject line of your email.
  

Apart from the blog, the GIMP developers have been busy and have published a set of User Scenarios which will be used in the GIMP redesign project.

Here are a sample of the mock ups which have been submitted by Gimp lovers.

Fig: Red Eye tool - Sorry! Gimp already has one. You can find it in the menu.

Fig: I like this idea...

Fig: Cool eyecandy :-)