Photo Compositing with the GIMP

Basing from my previous <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/gimp" title="GIMP" rel="homepage" href="http://www.gimp.org/">GIMP article titled Creating Pseudo-3D Imagery with GIMP, you learned how to do some basic selection manipulation, gradient application, faking <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/depth_of_field" title="Depth of field" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field">Depth of Field, etc. In line with that, I’m following it with a new article very much related to the concepts discussed therein but we’ll raise the bar a bit by having a glimpse on <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/compositing" title="Compositing" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing">compositing, where we’ll use an existing <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/image" title="Image" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image">image or <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/photograph" title="Photograph" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photograph">photograph and later add in our <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/dimension" title="Dimension" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension">2-dimensional element seamlessly with the said picture.

Recursive Regular Expressions

<img src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/yo-dawg-regex.jpg" alt="Yo dawg, I heard you liked regular expressions, so I put a regex in your regex so you can match while you match!" align="bottom" /> The <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/regular_expression" title="Regular expression" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression">regular expressions we use in our daily lives are actually not that “regular.” Most of the languages support some kind of extended regular expressions that are computationally more powerful than the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression">regular” regular expressions as defined by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language">formal language theory.

bash – change theme for gtk in gnome and take screenshot from script.

I wrote a blog on bash script to change the icon/cursor theme using a bash script. Lets extend the same concept a little more and use the script to change the gtk theme for gnome and at the same time take a screenshot also.

#!/bin/bash
path=&#8221;/tmp/screenshot&#8221;
[[ &#8221;$1&#8221; == &#8221;&#8221; ]] && time=5 || time=$1
[[ &#8221;$2&#8221; == &#8221;&#8221; ]] && (
cd ~/.themes
cont=&#8221;y&#8221;
echo &#8221;Select one of the icon themes&#8221;
echo &#8221;When you like some theme just press Ctrl+c&#8221;
for i in *
do
[[ -d $i/cursors ]] || (
echo &#8221;Now trying …. : $i&#8221;
gconftool-2 –type string -s  /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme &#8221;$i&#8221;
sleep 1
j=$(echo &#8221;$path/$i&#8221;).jpg
import -window root -quality 95 &#8221;$j&#8221;
sleep $time
)
done
) || gconftool-2 –type string -s  /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme &#8221;$2&#8221;

Continue reading

Add a image to the list of background files in gnome

In Gnome, when you right click on the desktop background you will get a menu for &#8221;Change Desktop backgound. The images displayed in this menu are quite a few but if you want to add your own (read: more than some 5-6 files) then it takes really some time in using the GUI to add them. And if you want to add a few 10&#8217;s of file, like say 50 then you are done.

unbound variable – bash completion not working and having issues with other stuff like command not found.

I generally use vi/vim for all my practical purposes of working with text files. And I have all the vi/vim plugins required to work with the files. This causes the following to be in the skeleton for all the bash scripts that I create:

set -o nounset                              # Treat unset variables as an error

With this all the unbound variables as errors and was problem with all the shell scripts that was being sourced in the startup of bash. So all I had to do was remove this from all the startup scripts and then from the skeleton of the bash script in vim :).

Just days wait to a great operating system.

Was thinking about writing this for some time now.. but guess someone already did that <a href="http://www.junauza.com/2009/05/fedora-11-leonidas-is-almost-ready-to.html" target="_blank">here.

To get the list of features you can check out this <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList" target="_blank">page.

Here is a brief from the page:<table border="0">A simple, modular system service to manage devices and designed to partially replace

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      hal
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

. Users gain a graphical disk management application called

More windows Microsoft like openoffice and keet it working.

Some people say that <a href="http://www.openoffice.org/" target="_blank">OpenOffice doesn&#8217;t completely suit their requirement as compared to the Microsoft Office. Though most of the times I do not have that problem 🙂 But there are still couple of things that do not work with OO seamlessly and thus if you want better OO (with respect to working with MS files more seamlessly) here&#8217;s something worth a try.

You can try the <a href="http://go-oo.org/" target="_blank">go-oo OO.