I started my website in 2003. At the time it was hosted by the University of Michigan, where I was a graduate student. They gave all students some space for a personal website. It was really great, though it did come with some limitations, like no php or cgi allowed. I managed to kludge some server side includes and javascript together to get a fairly decent food website. I also had some other stuff on my site like some academic […] (Read more)

Last Christmas my parents got me a Canon FS100 video camera. I had asked for a video camera to take videos of my son. I honed my video editing skills a bit before he arrived, but am still working on it. The camera uses flash memory, and records videos in .mod files, which are basically just .mpg files. Although the camera is not HD (the HD version was more than twice as expensive), it does have the option of recording […] (Read more)

Rob and Spencer with zebras Once again I found myself needing to use imagemagick to do something, and was overwhelmed by the many options. After much fiddling around, I found out some options that worked for me. In this case, I wanted to extract iptc captions from images, so that I could then insert the caption in a webpage with php. I use Picasa to edit photos and add captions. Picasa adds in the captions in the iptc information, which […] (Read more)

thanksgiving collage I upgraded to Picasa 3 a couple weeks ago. I didn’t upgrade right away, because it took awhile for the linux version to come out. I can happily say that Picasa 3 works great under linux from my experience. It was easy to install (they had an rpm available), and it runs very nicely. It seems like it even runs a bit faster than Picasa 2.6. But best of all, it has some really cool new features. One […] (Read more)

I am currently teaching a course on programming for linguists. We are using python, but for the first few classes, I have been going over some standard UNIX utilities like cd, ls and such, plus using regular expressions with grep and sed. I actually don’t use sed that much. I tend to reach for perl, since I know it better, and it can do pretty much all the same stuff that sed can plus much more. But sed is simpler […] (Read more)