Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Linux

Hello Java 8

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Java 8 has been released!

The Oracle build is available online while the OpenJDK variant will be available very soon. I have just downloaded the Oracle JDK on my Fedora Linux laptop and, lo and behold, here is my first encounter with it:

avinash@laptop02 ~ $ java -version
java version “1.8.0”
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0-b132)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.0-b70, mixed mode)

avinash@laptop02 ~ $ vi HelloWorld.java

avinash@laptop02 ~ $ javac HelloWorld.java

avinash@laptop02 ~ $ file HelloWorld.*
HelloWorld.class: compiled Java class data, version 52.0
HelloWorld.java: C source, ASCII text

avinash@laptop02 ~ $ java HelloWorld
Hello World

Coming soon: my opinion on the Stream API and, being a lover of functional programming, my take on lambdas.

Two powerful Gimp plugins: Liquid Rescale and Resynthesizer

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Whether at home or at work, I rely on Gimp a lot for my image processing needs.

Out of the box, Gimp has a lot of powerful features but, as it is an extensible software, people can add plugins to it to make it more powerful. Yesterday, I came across two excellent Gimp plugins, Liquid Rescale and Resynthesizer, which I would like to share with you.

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Liquid Rescale: this open-source plugin resizes pictures non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts. In the example above, the picture has been enlarged while the lady has been preserved. I’ve spent some time with the plugin last night resizing some of my pictures in both the x- and y- directions and the results are impressive.

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Resynthesizer: this other open-source plugin restore missing parts in an image. In the example above, the image was rotated and, consequently, some parts were missing (the lower left portion for instance). Resynthesizer can create the missing part from surrounding pixels very quickly. I’ve done some tests last night and the generated portion seamlessly flows into the existing part. Here is an excellent tutorial.

Installation

I run Fedora and both plugins are in the official repositories. For me, this command did it:

yum install gimp-lqr-plugin gimp-resynthesizer

I suppose Debian and its derivatives should have the plugin too. As any open-source software, installation from source is also a possibility.

Have fun!

Linux is more popular than Windows. Finally.

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When I started using Linux in 2000, it was just 9 years old and practically no one knew about this strange operating system. Linus Torvalds, its creator, had as ambition to make Linux achieve world domination status. Of course, no one believed him.

Fast forward 13 years (i.e. 22 years after Linux’s birth) and something beautiful happens: Linux is now the most used operating system in the whole world thanks to Android which powers most smartphones and tablets and which is built on Linux. According to a Goldman Sachs’ private report, Android accounts for 41% of all computers on the planet, Apple MacOS X and iOS represent 23% and Windows only 20% (from its 95% of market share in 2004).

When Ubuntu Linux was created in August 2004, Mark Shuttleworth created bug report #1: “Liberation: Microsoft has a majority market share”. He has just closed the bug because, well, the bug is not a bug anymore as Microsoft software represents a minority now…

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Interestingly, this makes sense. Until the beginning of the ’90s, the world of computing was very interesting: there were a lot of competing companies like Microsoft, Atari, Commodore, Apple, etc. and this fostered a lot of innovation and major advances were made. When Microsoft Windows became popular at the end of the ’90s, Microsoft crushed all their opponents by abusing their position of dominance and resorting to anti-competitive practices.

In 2007, something special happened: Apple released the iPhone. In the same year, Google announced Android, an operating system for smartphones and tablets, based on Linux, and released for free in 2008. Since then, major companies like Samsung, LG, HTC and Sony have adopted Android.

This means that we’re now mostly in the same situation as before Microsoft crushed its competitors. We now have three platforms, Android, Apple and Microsoft, and this can only mean that more innovation is to come. At the end, we, users, are the ones who are going to benefit more from this.

Laws couldn’t get Microsoft to behave. Linux, indirectly, has.