One More Visit Blog

As you may have figured out by now, I use Linux. But I do not use Linux solely. I am not a zealot in any sense of the word and use Windows primarily, due to occupational requirements (I am a Windows system administrator by day..) but I do disagree with many of the Microsoft policies, ideologies and business practices.

One ideology which was installed into the companies roots by one Bill Gates himself (read his letter to hobbyists from when MS was still a baby), the anti-anything-open-source ideology, I disagree with because there are huge pros to the open source movement.

I am a software developer to be and would like to think that my degree, time and skills are worth something and software I develop will in some way compensate me for my time, but the open source movement is far more than just FREE software. It is about education, sharing ideas and networking. It is about community involvement. The open source movement is about looking past petty differences and creating a better future for the world of technology.

So to that end, an ex Microsoft software developer has written a book about his experience with the Redmond based software giant. And in the spirit of open source, the book is available for free download in full!

Check it out:

http://www.lulu.com/content/4964815

My wife and I take a fair amount of pictures and to keep them in the highest quality we use the cameras RAW image setting. This saves the image in .NEF format. Not many applications can read .NEF and it isn’t as simple as changing the extension to convert them to .JPG format if we want to post them online or something.

I am also a Linux (debian based distros) user so I tap into the awesome power of the Linux command line to convert the images in bulk. The applications necessary to do this are imagemagick and ufraw. To install these do the following:

sudo apt-get install ufraw imagemagick

They are actually installed by default on many modern distros. Once they are installed, there are a few ways to work the conversion magic but the way I choose to do it is this; First I will list the directory contents (all the .NEF images) and pipe the output into a file

ls > listnef

Then I will copy that file to make the list of jpg image names

cp listnef listjpg

Then I will edit the jpg file and replace all the .NEF file extensions with .jpg extensions

vi listjpg

while in vi:

:%s/NEF/jpg/g

This will replace all instances of NEF with jpg in the file. Save the file with
:wqa

Then I will run the converter on the list of files. I use the verbose switch so I can see whats going on. The way the conversion works, it converts the files and stores them in a temp directory, then when the entire list is in the temp directory, it finishes the conversion and moves the jpg files to the original directory so if you cancel the conversion (Ctr +C) before it is finished, there won’t be any jpg’s converted.

For some reason, the converted jpg’s will all be named after the last file in the list plus a counter, for example if you have a list of files like: pic1.nef pic2.nef pic3.nef pic4.nef all the jpg’s will be named pic4-01.jpg through pic4-04.jpg I don’t know why the conversion does this but in my process it really doesn’t matter so I haven’t read the man pages extensively or anything.

I wrote this up because there are plenty of forum posts asking about this, but none of them have much of an answer.