Author Archives: Ammon

Imagemagick: use montage to proof images

The following command will create an image called montage.png that is a collection of all the .png files in the current directory. Images larger than 150px on a side will be resized, but aspect ratio is preserved. The images are separated by a 2px offset.
$ montage *.png -geometry 150×150\>+2+2 montage.png

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Tile images in Imagemagick to create CSS sprites

The Magick
This will stack two images to create a CSS sprite. Very handy for flicker-free image rollovers:
$ montage -background transparent -tile 1×2 -geometry +0+2 image1.gif image2.gif result.gif
You could create a taller or wider stack by adjusting the -tile option. For example -tile 2×10 would stack 2 images across and 10 images down. [...]

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Fun for Friday: Steve Jobs tells Flash to go screw

In an open letter published on the Apple website, the venerable Mr. Jobs has thrown down the gauntlet:
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low [...]

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Webfaction, seriously, I love you

Webfaction has been my hosting provider for a couple years now. I’ve set up prolly six or so clients with them as well. I am absolutely in love with them.
I’ve never had a single problem with them or a second of downtime (that I noticed anyway). Their cPanel interface is great to [...]

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What to do when your javascript only works with Firebug turned on

It makes sense, but I don’t ever turn Firebug off so I never would have noticed. That is, until I’m sitting in front of a client trying to show off a new website. That’s when I decide to turn it off. Yep.
Turns out console is undefined when Firebug is off (of freaking [...]

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Image Magick: Resize a batch of images so they all come out square, and preserve filenames

The following command will shrink all .jpg’s in the current directory that are larger than 500px and center them on a square 500×500px canvas. Since the aspect ratio of the original images will be preserved and not all of the originals are square, the left over space will be filled with an off-white color. [...]

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Image Magick: Resize a batch of images and preserve the original file names

The following command will resize any and all .jpg’s in the current directory that are larger than 500px on either side and put them in a file called ‘resized’. Aspect ratios will be respected, and the same filenames will be used for the modified images.
mogrify -path resized -resize 500>x500\> *.jpg
Yes, you have to use [...]

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Ubuntu Anecdote

So the other day my boss brought over a computer for me to fix. Turns out he never partitioned this new hard drive he had installed. I fixed it but we didn’t have a copy of Windows around, so I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 9.10 on it. After years of subtle [...]

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Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is coming!

You can get the beta right now; I’ve played with it and it’s completely sweet. There’s some really bold design choices they’ve made with this version (window controls on the left!?) that I’m excited to explore.

Ubuntu is Important
You know, along with Ubuntu, I use Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OSX every day. [...]

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Slickr gallery for Thematic

Slickr Gallery is a sleek little WordPress plugin for displaying Flickr albums on websites. The themes included in the plugin don’t work with Thematic based themes so I made one that does.
Download

Download slickr_thematic_theme.tar.gz
Installation
Just download this file, un-tar it ($ tar -xvzf slickr_thematic_theme.tar.gz) and copy the extracted folder to wordpress/wp-content/plugins/slickr-gallery/themes. Then you can [...]

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