convert: Non-conforming drawing primitive definition `image’.

confessions of a pixel pusher internet

ImageMagick is a nice collection of image manipulation routines. It’s free, and somehow it should be. It’s powerful, but also works and fails in miracolous ways. It just wasted twenty minutes. My Minutes. It would have taken the person writing the code probably 2 to make the error message a little bit more meaningful. To cut to the chase: When ImageMagick tells you:

convert: Non-conforming drawing primitive definition `image'.

then it’s probably only telling you that it can not open the image you like to draw. In plain command line that would be:

convert -size 700x500 xc:black -draw 'image Over 0,0 400,300 directory/image.jpg' output.jpg

This will fail. It turns out that ImageMagick needs to have a local file NOT with a path component. To sucessfully do what you wanted to do you would have to:

cd directory ; convert -size 700x500 xc:black -draw 'image Over 0,0 400,300 image.jpg' ../output.jpg ; cd ..

Possible, sure. But a hint like “can not open file directory/image.jpg” would have been nice. The best would be path support as suspected. It works everywhere else.

Of course it turned out that this is supposed to be a feature. In the end things start to work when you quote the filename, like in:


convert -size 700x500 xc:black -draw 'image Over 0,0 400,300 "directory/image.jpg"' output.jpg

Otherwise a filename like 123_3x4.jpg would also get you in trouble.

iPod touch compatible with Interdubs

Apple interdubs technology

Good thing that the new iPod touch from Apple is compatible with Interdubs. Quiet a nice player for all those commercials being made that are hosted in Interdubs. And, upside: you get to see how things will look on this player from day one.

at&t is a waste of time

Apple marketing

So, trying to talk to AT&T about those outragous data charges is a complete waste of time. Their client service is as nightmarish as it always has been. I will now start telling Apple at all possible moments how badle AT&T sucks. After all, they forced me to deal with them. AT&T does not care. They never did, and will never. But Apple got where they are by caring. One would like to think.

monkey business

misc

read
or
watch

The advantage with reading is, that you can do it without stuttering. What a shame that one of the better virals (a bad word in itself most of the time) has such a poor delivery and encoding. Flash still sucks. I hate that stupid stuttering effect. Quicktime used to do that as well. 1999.

born in 1989

history internet

Of course everybody has seen Miss South Carolina. Here she is a week later on TV Skip to 3:46 to find out what her future plans are. If she should ever work where I do, I will make sure to wear this.

Nothing wrong with stupid people. But when they start to be on TV or try to do jobs that they are not fit for (like Prez) then they are a problem.

usb necktie cooler

daily life free of any reason

innovation has no limits

out there

history technology

Voyager still has contact with earth.

It looks like there is all sorts of stuff flying arond out there.

The other day I saw an image of the Pioneer Plaque and wondered if Nasa would be free to send almost authentical depections of naked people into space these days.

I thought this day would never come

confessions of a pixel pusher history technology

NAB 2006 Red announced a new camera, and I wrote that it would never be a reality. Well, not quiet that, but I thought it would not go anywhere. I was wrong. Cameras up to serial number 25 have been shipped and there are an amazing number of orders. Fxguide has anice article about the delivery of Red Camera #22.

I find it very impressive that a couple of dedicated people were able to pull this off. The deadlines announced during the launch of the brand did slip. But keeping those would have been a miracle. It seems that the way RED handled the delay and other modification to their initial plans was what saved the day. People are still happy and excited about the device.

Now comes the interesting part: How will the images intergrate. How much of difference does the real life existence of the RED camera actually make.

Of course I can not resist to follow a failed prophecy with another one: It’s not gonna change that much. It’s not only the camera that makes a movie a movie.

fivehundred!

interdubs internet technology

Interdubs hit another milestone: I just pushed code update number 500. One of the beauties of an internet application that you host is that the code can be changed easily. All clients always run the current version. Since all information of interdubs exists in a database it is pretty easy to update and change code. Users suggest things, and it is often quicker to just write the feature and see how it is been used. If it is not gets used then it will go away again. That is the other beauty of a web application: you can see exactly how people are using the application. When I develop the interdubs code I usually develop it in a test segment. Once it works, or at least I have convinced myself that it would, I publish or ‘push’ it all client segments. I wrote a little version control system for this, and one of the features is that it does count the updates that went live. And just now I did update number 500. Five hundred times I put my results out there to make Interdubs better. It’s fun. For me and for the people that use Interdubs. Seing your suggestions and ideas getting implemented is encouraging users to think what could be better. Most of what makes Interdubs so useful resulted from user feedback. I just put a platform out there that worked with what I thought would be good feature set to start with. The plan always was to develop Interdubs around the needs of the users. With thirteen different customers right now I get a very healthy mix of feature requests: The rule is that if two people from different companies ever asked for a feature or have a similar issue with an existing function the task instantly bubbles up in priority and gets done as quickly as possible. The other nice effect of those five hunderd updates is that new users have a much better time with backend interface then they used to a couple of months ago.

now there are 12,000 people with 20% obligations

history internet technology

Back in the day it was widely mentioned that you had to spend 20% of your worktime at Google at an project that you personally care about and that is not directly your ‘day job’. Rumor has it that gmail got started that way. I could guess that the google earth flight simulator was such a thing. It must really really suck to work for Yahoo and having to observe how your competition runs circles around you.

On the other side people are guestimating that the average google employee gets up to half a thousand emails originating at google. A day. It is interesting to see how Google will do in the future. It’s history and application are truly unprecedented. It’s impact is quiet astonishing. My daughter, being 7, never was on the internet. Try to keep it that way for as many years as possible. But she is a curious person. The other day she wanted to know what I am doing. I explained that I added another internet server. She wanted to know how many I had and what they were used for. The next question she had after she heard me talk about my current and future setup was: “And Google, how many servers do they have?”.