As a kid playing my Gibson SG in a rock band, I had dreams of being a rockstar. I used to practice for hours with a friend, Keith Howland. Keith was far better than me, his fingers moving across his Les Paul like liquid lightning, playing “Freebird” to the swaying masses. I’d [...]
We tell the story of migrating a live site with 50 million streams to the Amazon cloud from Rackspace and Akamai. This is a loose transcription of the talk I gave at Amazon Web Services meetups in Boston and New York in September.
I’ve long been an admirer of Maxmind, a company that provides a free database for mapping IP addresses to geographic locations. Its more than sufficient for most applications, and I use it frequently in side projects as well as my day job at companies like Heavy and Photobucket.
Yesterday I paid $15 to buy a [...]
I’ve admired Perez Hilton’s amazing rise from rags to riches. He entertains millions of people, makes them feel giddy or warm for a few seconds, providing enormous value (in aggregate) for people during tough times. He deserves every penny.
But now he’s jumped the shark. I went to his website today. It [...]
Here’s another ImageMagick hack inspired by PhotoBooth on my Mac. Create a file named “pinch.fx” with the following content, without line numbers:
kk=w*0.5;
ll=h*0.5;
dx=(i-kk);
dy=(j-ll);
aa=atan2(dy,dx);
rr=hypot(dy,dx);
rs=sqrt(rr*200);
px=kk+rs*cos(aa);
py=ll+rs*sin(aa);
p{px,py}
As with the fisheye effect, we first compute the polar coordinates of the current pixel in lines 1-7. Next, I compute a scaled radius as the square root of the current radius. [...]
ImageMagick is my favorite tool for messing around with images. At PhotoBucket, we dedicated dozens of machines to “mogrify” uploaded images into thumbnails and appropriate sizes for user accounts. I use it on my pet projects like an image zoomer and a youtube clipper.
Recently I discovered the “-fx” or special effects options of the ImageMagick [...]
This is a blog about building software. Its what I do for a living, for a hobby. To me, great software is still an art form, finessed through solid engineering practices. Yet it seems to be lost in the corporate world of outsourcing. If I hear another executive say, “its just coding,” I’ll cringe.