My Technophilic Musings

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I’ve known about ImageMagick tools for quite some time now but never dabbled with it. A couple of weeks ago I played with it for some time (notice the new cascaded polaroid pics header above) and was amazed even more. Few of its shining features:

• It has almost unlimited features to manipulate your images through its tools like convert, montage, mogrify etc and their long list of options.
• It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac as well.
• Runs on web servers also (most of those nifty image sites use it for run time image manipulation)
• It is amazingly fast.
• Runs on the command line, which means batching of operations can be done and is also good for butter fingered people like me who are clumsy with GUI based image manipulation programs
• Has modules for interfacing with C, perl, php, C++, C#, java, etc. So, you can create your own applications around it.
• It’s FREE (as in speech and as in beer)
• It has an amazing documentation over at imagemagick.org and also a very thriving community, so help is just a few clicks away.

As a very rudimentary sample of what it can do for you, take a look at my blog’s header above. I just gave it a few pics and ran a command, and it resized them, turned them into polaroid pics, rotated them at random angles, made the background transparent, strung them together to make a webpage header/banner.

Since the command was specific for the number and names of images, I made a simple perl script to automate the command making process so you can also download this script (link at the end of post) and run it to create your own header. (You might want to tweak the $w and $h variables in the script to specify your header’s width and height). Running it would be like

After I made this script, I came across Stas Bekman’s photo gallery which has a much better and cool stack effect with photos. And he generously agreed to share his script (much more sophisticated than my my few lines) with me. His script is also attached below.

Polaroid web header Creation Script

Stas Bekman's Image Stacking script

Let me know if you use any of these scripts (as it is or after modifying them) to create any cool effects.

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Quote of the day: Trust no one. Question Everything. - Deus Ex

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: cli, convert, Effects, ImageMagick, images, linux, mac, mogrify, montage, Panorama, perl, Photo Manipulation, scripts, Stack, Stas Bekman, windows

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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I came across this post on lifehacker today (original post and solution here), which talks about a method of retrieving files from a remote computer through e-mail. Pretty archaic, I know, but again, it is a very simple method and works behind all the firewalls and stuff . But, the catch is that it is only for mac’s. Thought of creating something similar for the PC and mashed together some code during lunch time at office to make our dear old outlook remote-file-sending-capable. So, here it is, head over to my project page “Remote File Access Through E-Mail” to read more about this and download it.

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Quote of the day: Ralph: Me fail English? That's unpossible.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: lifehacker, mac, outlook, outlook 2003, remote access, remote file access, remote file access through e-mail, windows

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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Introduction:

This is a (proof-of-concept) outlook macro that you can use with an outlook rule to retrieve your files from your home/office PC by sending it a mail with a subject having a predefined special keyword and the body containing the names and paths of the files. The remote PC will then mail you the files on a predefined e-mail ID.

This project came into being after reading this post at lifehacker (original post and solution here). It listed a method to retrieve mails on your home/office PC by sending a "magic email" to it, but it was only for mac's. Seeing that people wanted it for windows as well, I thought of making something up during lunch time at office.

Usage:

1. Download the attached zip file (shantz-outlook-remote-file-access.zip) and unzip it. It has a VB module "shantz-outlook-remote-file-access.bas" (can be opened with any text editor)

2. Create a new macro in Outlook. Copy the code contained in Module1.bas to the main source file of the macro.

3. Edit the code to change the e-mail ID to which the files will be e-mailed. Save the macro.

4. Create a new rule in Outlook. Choose to run the rule when a specific word is found in the subject. e.g. use "SendMeMyFiles".

5. The action part of the rule should be "run a script". Here you can choose the macro that you just created from the list shown by Outlook.

6. Save the rule and you are done.

Now try, sending a mail to the account that your outlook is configured to receive mail for, with the special keyword in the subject and a list of files (with their complete absolute paths on the remote computer) separated by semicolons (";" without the quotes), and watch magic happen :).

e.g.: To: myemail@email.com

subject: SendMeMyFiles

Body: c:\path\of\files\file1;d:\second\path\file2

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• For this thing to work, outlook has to be running on the remote PC as this depends on a "client-side" rule.
• This is just a proof-of-concept as of now, so there is no error handling right now. Plus the e-mail body parsing is finicky and so the e-mail body should not have anything other than the file paths and names. This might change in future if I decide to update it.
• Don't use it if your life depends on it. Use it for basic purposes and modify and improve it appropriately before you decide to use it seriously (You may submit your modifications here as well)
• It has been tested only on Outlook 2003, but might work on others as well.

Let me know of any thoughts you may have about this.

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written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: lifehacker, mac, mail, outlook, outlook 2003, outlook macro, remote access, remote access of files, remote access of files through e-mail, remote computer, SendMeMyFiles, vb module, windows