Fitting the battle of life

Merry Christmas to all the internets out there.

My sister asked me, frustrated with her own attempts, to resize a batch of images so they’d be small enough to upload to Bebo. How long did it take? Two seconds, and here’s how.

I suppose I had an unfair advantage: the laptop she was using runs Windows XP, compared to my far more powerful (in terms of OS) Ubuntu installation. After a quick question in the #ubuntu-uk channel on freenode (where other UK Ubuntu users just sit and help each other, in the spirit of the community), I found out there was a simple tool that would do this for me, included in the ImageMagick package. A simple ’sudo apt-get install imagemagick’ later, and I ran the following command (the files were all jpegs, all in the same folder, and I was working from the folder containing them):

mogrify -resize 75% *.jpg

A short while later, and all the original files had been replaced with versions 25% smaller. It was as simple as that. How would I have done it on windows? No idea, but I wouldn’t have come up with a solution that was that easy and did all the photos in one batch, at least not without expensive tools.

It’s days like these I smile smugly.

If there’s one thing I hate more than bendy buses trying to run me over in London, it’s the train from Liverpool Street to my home town. The mainline bit is ok; it’s when you get past Ipswich and the train stops at every little village on the line that it gets frustrating. That said, it’s good to be back. (more…)

Our debating society has possibly the best URL of all debating societies the world over; I was telling people about one of our competitions this weekend in Birmingham, encouraging them all to come down to London in February, and mentioned my e-mail address - iv at debating dot org. Afterwards, I was asked if we really had the domain name www.debating.org by someone obviously impressed by its simplicity and ease of memory (far better than, say, www.ucluniondebatingsociety.co.uk or some other such lengthy ramble). (more…)

Well, I’ve finally done it; I’ve broken to the semi-finals of a debating competition, after numerous attempts ending in failure. (more…)