Moving Joomla
10 August 2006
This site is now hosted on two different servers, both pointing to the same Joomla database. All in all, the process of moving the site was fairly painless. I tarred and gzipped all the files from one server and unpacked it on the other. I then modified configuration.php to contain the new webserver information and I left all the database info the same. Within minutes, the front page loaded on the new server.Read more...
Google Image Results
08 June 2006
This week, I have been researching radial lens distortion. I have a simple mathematical model of the distortion and an algorithm for estimating the parameters of the model. Everything works well in simulation so it's time to test the algorithm on real images. I remembered that the camera review site dpreview.com had detailed images of lens distortion for many different cameras. Rather than navigate through their multi-page reviews searching for the images, I did a Google image search: "distortion site:dpreview.com." This search returned over 20 pages of results, more than enough for testing my algorithm. Downloading all the images by hand would be a slow and painful process, so I wrote a python script to do the work for me. This script is coded to the specifics of this problem, but it could be modified to automate the downloading of any set of Google image results.Read more...
Execute Text in Terminal
22 May 2006
Most of the code I've written in the last few years has either been in MATLAB or Python, and both languages have interactive shells. As a result, the way I typically work is to write a few lines of code in my editor and then execute them in the shell to check the results. This is a great way to work if you're doing scientific computing because it's important to know what your data looks like at every stage. But I find myself copying and pasting between my editor and the shell all day long, which takes 3 keystrokes for every text selection: command-c, command-tab, command-v. Using the scripts here, this process can be streamlined.Read more...
Dartmouth.edu
16 May 2006
The webmasters at Dartmouth have decided to force intel mac users to always use HTTPS when connecting to any site at dartmouth.edu. For whatever reason, I can no longer connect to the site, and other people have been reporting the same problem on the discussion forums at apple.com. When we attempt to connect, we get a "client certificate rejected" error. The page does load in other browsers, however.