Archives for March 2011

March 24, 2011

ImageMagick: Mogrify

ImageMagick® is a software suite to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images. It can read and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. Use ImageMagick to resize, flip, mirror, rotate, distort, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

ImageMagick has a command-line tool called Mogrify that’s quite powerful. Mogrify will resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. This tool is similiar to convert except that the original image file is overwritten (unless you change the file suffix with the -format option) with any changes you request. I recommend to create backups of your images.

Resize Images

If you want to resize a hundred large images into smaller images with a width of 800px, you can use Mogrify to resize all images using this single command:

mogrify -resize 800 *.JPG

Convert Formats

Mogrify will also convert all .jpg files to the .png format found in the current directory in this example.

mogrify -format jpg *.png

And Much More

These are just two examples of what Mogrify can do. There are dozens of effects that you can do with Mogrify. Just view Mogrify’s list of commands. ImageMagick is available for the PC, Mac and Linux desktops.

March 15, 2011

Twitter Will Be More Secure With HTTPS

Twitter announced today that it is adding HTTPS to their service to make it more secure. Twitter users should be able to go their user’s setting and choose a box to always use HTTPS. Twitter says HTTPS is recommended for users who use public Wi-Fi where network connections are less secure.

HTTPS is a combination of HTML and SSL/TLS protocols. HTTPS are often used for payment and banking transactions on the web. HTTPS usually displays a locked key on some browsers, or a modified or certified address bar in some browsers.

Twitter hopes to have HTTPS as the standard setting in the future.

March 14, 2011

AT&T To Cap DSL and Uverse Services

AT&T plans to impose limits on its DSL and Uverse services. It will cap 150GB on its DSL service and 250GB for Uverse. This is based on this morning’s article by Ars Technica. This affects me and family. We are big Netflix users.

AT&T says the move will affect “less than 2 percent” of customers and that it is necessary to address congestion in the network.

The cap structure is not currently set up to squeeze extra fees out of most users. Subscribers who exceed their monthly allowance will pay an additional $10 for each 50GB over the cap, but AT&T tells Ars that “customers will hear from us directly numerous times before they exceed usage and before they incur any additional fees.”

The company will notify users when they hit 65 percent, 90 percent, and 100 percent of their monthly caps, and will also provide historical usage reports and a monthly usage tracking tool. (AT&T says that an average DSL user on its network currently transfers 18GB each month.)

It gets better.

Claims of congestion are notoriously hard to validate from outside the network, but industry analyst Dave Burstein does extensive writing about and consulting for various ISPs; he fired off a tweet this morning saying that AT&T “lied” to the Wall Street Journal. “Congestion is minimal,” Burstein said.

Capping is now a reality.

It comes at no surprise that AT&T wants more money. It posted $20 billion of net income last year, although more than half came from its wireless service. AT&T will cap use of its DSL, Uverse and wireless services. Comcast already caps its customers at 250GB per month.

Competition squeezed.

What’s even more interesting is, AT&T’s Uverse IPTV and VOIP usage is exempted from the cap. That doesn’t look fair to me. Companies and services like Vonage, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, considered as over-the-top providers are getting squeezed by AT&T and Comcast.

Read the rest of the article.