Blogging from StarOffice 7 and the awesome speed of a V20z

Friday Jul 30, 2004

The Sun blog redirect site appears to be inaccessible from Ireland at the moment so I'll try writing this blog offline. One recent blog complained about the dearth of good blogging tools and a comment suggested OpenOffice. A full featured word processor might be overkill, but what the heck I'll try blogging in StarOffice 7 and see how pretty its XHTML export is. Hmm, it looks kind of weird, not as pretty as plain text but I'm going to publish it anyway, for the sake of science. I'd forgotten that StarOffice now has the option to save a document as simplified docbook xml. That could be useful someday.

Wow!

O.K. maybe it sounds like I'm trying to hype something again, but I really am enjoying having a 2 CPU Sun Fire V20z all to myself! Actually there are a couple of users logged in but they don't appear to be be doing much. Give me a couple of 2.1GHz 64 bit CPUs each with 1M level 2 cache add a few gigs of RAM and I won't even touch the 6 gigs of SCSI swap space, unless I'm editing 32000X16777 images for a GNOME Jumbotron theme or working on my daughter's 8960X6720 photo mosaic. How long would a 90 degree clockwise rotate of this image take? How about a 5 pixel IIR gaussian blur or a bicubic scale down to a 500X375 web sized image? About this long:

Yes, my wife and I do take a lot of photos! Who came up with this 4095Mb limit anyway? Was it the same person who came up with the limits of 1.99G, 504Mb, 640kb, 64k... In any case you won't run into many limits with this box and it's really snappy and not too pricy. Unfortunately, we don't have room for a rack in our living room so if I were in the market for a new computer, I'd probably buy one of these slick new Sun Java workstations instead. My wife did notice that the V20z is quite a bit faster than any machine we've ever used and my daughter was most impressed by da's keyboards, monitors and swivel chair, but it would be difficult to convince them of the absolute necessity at the moment. So Scott, can I have one of these for iWork? Does it come in a laptop?

Fun Image Processing and Mosaic applications

Duncan asked me what program I used to create this photo mosaic. I used an excellent free application called MacOSaix Thanks Knarf! MacOSaix sorted through about 5000 photos on our 400mhz pismo powerbook. I don't remember how many hours it took, but I started it one evening and my wife was still watching the computational tetris the next afternoon. Poor little powerbook, if only I could run the mosaic building application on this V20z!

Well it turns out that there is an alternative mosaic sourceforge project called Jimage-mosaic Jimage-mosaic is written in Java so you should be able to run it under Linux, Solaris, Windows or MacOSX. I should be able to run it on the V20z if I have time before I have to return it :-(

Another favorite scientific and medical image processing utility is ImageJ ImageJ is also written in Java and I've successfully run it on MacOS, Solaris, Windows and Linux.

Last but not least in my 2D imaging pallete is a free open source multiplatform imaging and retouching program called The Gimp. This was included as the image editor in Sun's Java Desktop. Videographers and cell animators would appreciate a branch off the Gimp project called CinePaint. Along with the usual gimp/Photoshop features, CinePaint has up to 32 bits of color per channel! (up to 128-bits RGBA) A frame manager (with an onionskin overlay feature for cell animation!), motion picture file formats and a flipbook player.

That's not writing, that's just typing. 
 -- Truman Capote's critique of Jack Kerouac's poetry.