Just copy the following code into a script file and run it at your bash. Please remmeber to “d2u your_file_name” otherwise you would have the error “syntax error near unexpected token $’\r’ “.

—————————————————————————————————-

n=900 #image number

for(( i=0; i<n; i++))
do
montage -label ‘%f’ “xrCor$(printf “%04d” $i).png”  “xrSag$(printf “%04d” $i).png” -tile x1 -geometry +4+4 “montage$(printf “%04d” $i).bmp”
done

ffmpeg -b 7000k -r 10 -i montage%04d.bmp -b 7000k -r 10 -vcodec mpeg4 -vtag DIVX montage.avi

One of the problems we often meet when submitting papers is that the size of our pdf paper is beyond the space limit. For graphics and vision conferences, it is very common for us to generate a ~50 MB pdf while the size limit for the paper and supplemental materials together is about 20MB. That is necessary for the conference to guarantee its submission site is still functionable at the last seconds before the deadline.

To reduce the pdf size, you could reduce your eps/png figures manually before you include them into your tex file. There is also a very easy way if you have Adobe acrobat. You could use  “Advanced->PDF Optimizer”.  In the opened dialog, you can set the compression of figures, fonts, and other staff to reduce your pdf size. I just managed to reduce the size of my paper from 20MB to about 400KB.

An alternative way is to use PrimoPDF. It has several predefined settings for generating PDF best for screen, ebook, print, and prepress. It also supports customized settings.

If you already have an eps file, and still want to reduce its size. You could run the following code: (http://electron.mit.edu/~gsteele/pdf/)

> gs -r300 -dEPSCrop -dTextAlphaBits=4 -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=fig.png -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE fig.eps
> convert -quality 80 fig.png fig.jpg
> convert fig.png eps3:fig.eps

Instead of using LaTex, you could also use PDFLaTex. In this case, you can use the following code to convert your figures to PDF files.

> for i in *eps; do ps2pdf -DEPSCrop $i; done
> sed -i ‘s/\.eps}/}/g’ *tex

Need to read raw images for my project. I found lots of open source packages on line, but it still needs many efforts to read and incorporate the code. Then I remember that TIFF has 16 bit version, maybe I could convert raw to 16bit tiff, which could still give me enough information about the scene, since normally raw images have 12 or 14 bits for each pixel. This sounds convenient and effortless. However, after a few experiments, I found that 16 bit tiff still loses lots of information about the scene. Mainly because when you convert raw to tiff, you have to do demosaicing, white balancing, sharpening and gamma correction for viewing (maybe). This process will inevitably truncate some head room gained by using raw format when comparing with jpeg. That is why people says “stay in Lightroom for as long as you can” (or the equivalent “do as much in ACR as you can)”), as all edits in Lightroom are nondestructive and non-cumulative.

For a detailed investigation, please check out these posts,
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2742439
http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/raw.html
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/RAW-file-format.htm
http://osp.wikidot.com/raw

Long time ago, I tried to set up a blog website on my desktop, since I have static IP at school. Now this could be done very easily by some content management systems. The three most popular CMS are wordpress, drupal, and joomla. Drupal is developer friendly, and hard to setup. WordPress is perfect for me. Easy to setup, and the functionality is enough for my use. It only took me several hours to set up it, although I still haven’t figured it out how to upload images. Anyway, it works fine to me. One good article about the difference between these CMS could be found at: http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html. Actually you could also use pmwiki, the one used by our department.

A very good detailed svn tutorial for linux.
http://artis.imag.fr/~Xavier.Decoret/resources/svn/index.html

I found it is very easy to setup svn repository in Linux if only one person is going to use it. Under windows, I have to configure apache+subversion server on my desktop, and use TortoiseSVN to commit/update from my laptop. While in Linux, you just need to type a couple of commands. From laptop, you can access the code repository by using “svn+ssh://url.of.desktop/home/user/svn project“. It is super convenient, no surprising as usual.