Author Archives: Donncha

Linux Raw Image Management

I’ve steered clear of RAW photography for some time. Maybe it’s the extra few steps required to get a finished product, or the very large file size, or just that “it’s not jpeg!”
I changed the quality mode on my 20D to RAW this afternoon and was shocked when it told me that I could only take 79 shots! *gulp*
I fired off a shot, of an old Honda parked in front of my car and as I was in a hurry, forgot to do any more.
Later on I went searching and found a number of sites:

  • Raw Digital Photo Decoding in Linux – Dave Coffin’s dcraw seems to be the basic library that everyone else builds their GUI tools on. He went to the trouble of decoding the various RAW formats in existance.
  • Nikon D70 under Linux – plenty to read here, including a section on noise removal and links to a few GIMP noise removal plugins I must try out!
  • RawPhoto – the author says it’s beta quality code, but it works. I haven’t tried it yet however.
  • UFRaw – you can install this in Debian with apt-get install gimp-ufraw. I tried it. It works, now I have to read the user-manual to figure out what all those controls mean!

I’d post an example RAW photo but the only one I have is nothing to write home about so you’ll just have to wait in line like everyone else!

T-Engine: Ubiquitous Computing

That T-Engine sounds mad! Computers everywhere talking to each other!
I could bring home my camera after a hard day taking shots only to have the photos transfer by wireless comms to my desktop PC when I drop my bag next to my desk!
When I’ve been working too long at my PC it could order the kettle downstairs to turn on and then chime a bell when the tea’s made!
Ah yes, interesting times ahead!
The slashdot discussion has a few more bits, including a better explanation of why i-Tron is better than past attempts at ubiquitous computing.

Simple MySQL Backup

If, like me, you have a database full of small tables, but all amounting to a large amount of data then dumping the data from it into a single file is handy, but not very useful when it comes to retrieving a backup of one single table.
Instead, wouldn’t it be easier to dump each individual table into it’s own file? What about keeping a week’s worth of backups? Here’s one way I backup my WordPress db with a little Bash script:

export d=`date +%u`
mkdir -p backup/$d
for i in `echo "show tables" | mysql -u username -ppassword database|grep -v Tables_in_`;
do
  echo $i; mysqldump --add-drop-table --allow-keywords -q -a -c -u username -ppassword database $i > backup/$d/$i.sql
  rm -f backup/$d/$i.sql.gz
  gzip backup/$d/$i.sql
done

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