Richard A. Johnson

After reading Jorge’s blog post titled Amazing open source image resizing technology, I decided to download and install the new plugin into Gimp and give it a try. The outcome, not to shabby, but not even close to great at the same time. Take a look at the before and after images below:

Before

After

The things that stick out graphically after using the liquid plugin is the set of weights in the background, one is considerably smaller than the other. The other thing is look at the collar the dog is wearing, looks like he chewed it up. Yet, the dogs head looks fine visually. Another downside, a 1600×1200 jpg file before using the plugin, is 484k in size. After using the liquid plugin and knocking it down to 1024×768, the size almost doubled to 836k.

Still pretty cool, and I am sure after further tweaking and playing around it will get better. One thing to note, is that I haven’t played with all of the available settings when using the plugin either. The main reason for this plugin from the previous videos I had seen, was say you want to keep the width at 1600, but wanted to shrink the height to 768, this plugin would allow you to do it without skewing the image to bad. Which that impressed me, however the increase in size was a little bad. I want to see some cool panoramic images of the ocean, or mountains, or rolling hills and see what the outcome is.

This post is just a quickie in response to Mike Hommey’s recent blog post titled “Javascript performance in browsers“. His post was in response to a Javascript Speed Test ran by CelticKane.com. So far, they have listed all of the browsers that I don’t use. So I decided to test my preferred browser, Konqueror, with this speed test. And without further ado, here are the results:

As it stands, and taking into consideration the results displayed by Mike, Konqueror would roughly be in 4th place. I must say that, Opera is damn fast, and it looks as if the GdkWebKit is looking fairly impressive in speed results.

Now I know that Javascript isn’t that big of a deal, and if anyone knows of some other browser speed tests, let us know. It would be kind of cool to test different browsers on my same machine here to see just how fast the free software browsers are in comparison to the proprietary ones.

You’ve got to be kidding me: During my first session, the PS/2 mouse I’m using locked up, and I intuitively went for the Ctrl-Alt-Delete smartbomb. Nothing. Whatever your feelings about Task Manager, asking Windows users to do without an “oh crap” screen at Ctrl-Alt-Delete is unreasonable. That’s about as fundamental a comfort blanket as most of us have, and certainly a fair concession if the Linux community expects Microsoft users to switch.

Absolutely hilarious. I found this quote in this great review of a first time user of Ubuntu, and he says he is a non-techy. He installed Ubuntu on an older Compaq desktop, which admittedly I have had similar issues as he states with almost the same exact computer, however it isn’t an Ubuntu thing, because if I remember I tried SuSE back in the days as well as Debian and Slackware with the one I had. Anyways, he gives it a fair shake, and even though he had some minor quirks here and there, he seemed to fix them and get the system working. The lack of a Ctrl+Alt+Del, or a “Oh Crap” way out of a crash, yielded the opening comment, which I think was great.