Well, I must confess my picture library is really growing and I need a software to manage it. Certainly, well laid out directory structure and some silly little software in Python could help. Hmm, Python! So here I was off searching the net for a library in Python which I could build on. I knew Python Imaging Library was pretty cool and I had seen a script for making quick thumbnails of directory using it and Python. The nice thing is that PIL is included in Mandrake unlike in RedHat where I had to get it separately.
So what did I write? Well, when I found imgSeek a cool PyQt application. Not only does it match images, its search technology is pretty impressive too. You can just give it a sketch or another similar photo and it will use its impressive search technique (based on wavelets and all) to find similar images.
I need to learn to use this application and also learn more about its search algorithm. Interesting! One more thing for after exams!
If you visit the site, don't forget to see the screenshots ;)
Taking a small break from the exams I installed Mandrake 9.1 on the system. Earlier I had done an upgrade from Mandrake 9.0 on a Dell Inspiron 8200 which had been pretty smooth.
Clean install was much quicker. While Mandrake 9.1 supports partitioning NTFS, I still went ahead and create a blank space on the HDD with PartitionMagic. I knew it works and didn't want to loose data.
All went pretty smooth. Quite nice and clean. Well the new desktop with its TFT LCD doesn't do more than 1024 * 768 so missed the higher resolutions in the laptop. The new control center is pretty impressive. I must say now there is very few reasons to look at the console or configuration files for most normal users.
Haven't done much yet. But what I had a problem with in the new version was compiling Gaim 0.62. I was doing it quite effectively in Mandrake 9.0 and still doing it correctly after upgrading it to Mandrake 9.1. However, on the clean Mandrake 9.1 I didn't know. I know Mandrake renames the GTK and GLIB libraries differently. It is quite logical but unfortunately, none of the other distros follow it.
The best I could do was get Gaim 0.61 rpm. Even that was quite a hassel because few of the dependencies were not satisfied so spent quite some time having Gaim running.
If any provide info on compiling GTK and GLIB apps on Mandrake 9.1 or specifically Gaim do let me know :)
Another thing I need to checkout. Linux on Linux. Setup some Linux virtual machines on my Mandrake 9.1 installation and try out Debian :). Should be quite useful for a lot of things. Give each user a virtual machine so they can "fool" around with it to learn stuffs, virtual hosting and all. Need to look at all the potential. Custom hosting with full access: quite a nice potential!
So here we go with User Mode Linux, one more thing to check out.
Here's an interesting article on speech recoginition. Using video to aid speech recognition. It always benefits that you use more processing power ;) Still, just the idea of working with audio is too complex for me and here the guys work with video too. Hmm, with my range of probabilities, digital signal processing and all that I think I need to learn a lot before I can do anything useful.
Here's the link to the project at Intel's site: http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/research/avcsr.htm