Be forewarned, I’m having an “I’m so happy I work in linux” day. A quick example why. My wife’s a photographer and while she’s relatively technical, she’s no nerd. I have to give her respect though as she now works fully in linux and is slowly mastering the gimp. [Insert bad jokes here…]

In any case she has to resize a large volume of images very often. Basically, fill a dvd full of low resolution images that are passed onto her client to review for the purposes of eventually ordering prints. Clearly you can use photoshop, gimp, etc for this purpose. Open up the images, scale them, save as, etc. As well, photoshop and others have batch tools for repeating actions like these often.

Another option for people working in linux is the appropriately named ImageMagick. ImageMagick allows you to do almost everything from the command line. Personally I’ve hardly scratched the surface on this but some quick examples I’ve played with…

Convert from a jpg to a png

Lower the resolution 50%

Add a border

Add a watermark

Of course you can now mix, match, and combine all the commands. In my case I need to write a simple script that took a directory full of jpg’s and tif’s, lowered the resolution to 30% and dropped them all into a destination directory in jpg format.

It took me about 15 minutes to write this script which does just that. My wife can now drop a whack of images into the source directory, click an icon I put on her desktop, and then burn the dvd directly from the destination directory. Come on. I know I’m a nerd but that’s cool isn’t it?

I’m test driving google analytics on this site using this plugin. I’m not sure I’ll keep it around but I’m interested in how it works as we’re using it on some of our client applications.

All I can say is that if someone starts doctoring like this in my area I’d try it in a heartbeat. He’s a doctor in NY who’s combining old school house calls with new technologies such as email and IM to create something truly unique.

According to Guy Kawasaki, me and all my friends are better suited to be the next big thing than that wildly successful guy.

“Guys under thirty who are building a product that they themselves want to use.”

Ok maybe I blew the age requirement but at least I’m not wildly successful.

“It is better to have your preliminary work critiqued by your colleagues while there is still time to do something about it – no matter how difficult the criticism might be – than to have the finished project torn apart by strangers in public.”, Bill Buxton

Your last reminder that we’re running our third DemoCamp here in Guelph tomorrow night (Wednesday), details here. We should have lot’s of free food this time around so join us if only for the free grub.

There was a common thread across a few speakers at The Business of Software. That was the idea of software as a social object or social entity.

Hugh McLeod‘s talk focused on this idea of social objects. He defined a geek as a person who communicates via objects.

“Hey man, check out this new cell phone.”

“You have to see my new table saw.”

Bill Buxton touched on his idea of social entities. In his book he further explains “they are social entities. As with people, they have different properties and capacities when viewed as a collective, with a social, and physical context, then they have when they are viewed in isolation, independent of location or context.”

Jennifer Aaker talked about personifying your product or brand. Ie, if your product was a real person, what are the real conversations they would be having with your customers?

Iphone…”You’re cool, wanna come to my party?”

Vista…”Quit bugging, cripes I wish you didn’t have to be here.”

How would your product fair if it turned up at a party?

Bill Buxton spoke at The Business of Software about the use of sketching in the design process. Okay there’s more to it than that but that’s why he spoke for an hour and wrote a book titled Sketching User Experiences.

A quote from his talk, and his book, that I love is that “The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday”.

What the hell does that mean? Get your hot rod up to 88 MPH and head to the future? Well sort of but not quite. Utilize an effective design process in order to ‘visit’ the future. A key for software nerds is that this does NOT mean prototyping. Design is a process separate and distinct from prototyping.

The quick story…I was in San Jose at a local downtown pub when this hit. For those who don’t know how to use links, this was an 5.6 earthquake. Sure it only last about 10 seconds but when the walls and floor are moving like you’re bouncing around in the back of a panel van it seems a bit longer. That was a trip! I decided another pint was in order, then went back to my cozy hotel room on the 16th floor and went to bed. Insanity….

Dave Winer explains why he doesn’t like facebook or “Why Facebook sucks”. I’m with him on the “Why exactly do I need Facebook to get in between me and my address book?” and he does a good job of explaining it. I don’t use facebook for one-to-one messaging but instead quickly bring conversations back to good old email. Why? Email works, why hand everything over to an app like facebook?