Hi guys,

I’m settled in Pittsburgh and decided to reconnect my graphic tablet (Wacom CTH-460 Bamboo Pen and Touch).

And of course, it doesn’t work out of the box… but it works well after some secondary builds. I decided to share the link because it’s a really great one. Nothing really hard to do and the success is almost complete !

That’s it, I got my new room furnished.

… and believe me or not : we have beautiful sunsets. The luminosity conditions of Squirrel Hill are great.

Well, and I got my schedule for Fall 2009 :

• 15-411 : Compiler Design
• 18-450 : Digital Wireless Communications
• 18-751 : Applied Stochastic Processes
• 85-219 : Biological Foundations of Behavior

The Compiler course is a big step-by-step project of C-like compiler design.

And I’ll probably do that in Scala as the professor said other have tried and got successful, and the other option would have been Sml/Java/Haskell/C/C++, but who want to do a compiler in Java !

Well, and there are plenty of girls at cmu, if only we had so many at the EPFL !

The EPFL is definitively missing a school of drama as well as one of design !

Plenty of things happening right now ! Write you later !

Hi everybody,

we’re plenty of exchange students at Carnegie Mellon University. And of course, we almost all met once there.

I’ve been living by Vera and Yannick’s housing until the 22th. Now, I’ll go to my new housing (even if there’s a lot to be done in it before even having the possibility to say it is kind of « clean »). Vera and Yannick were very nice to host me (as well as Xavier). I thank them a lot. (oh, and there are the photos of the party at their house)

We’ve recently been visiting Downtown Pittsburgh as well as the Mt. Washington (again). Yannick went further (to the stadium) and here are some pictures of it.

And well, I love clouds (even more when there is sun behind and the cloud shadows appear !). It’s just starting to cool down (but maybe it’ll get warm again). Might be because of yesterday’s rain…

Write you.

Hi again,

you may have noticed I was speaking of the Kennedy Space Center as well as of the Everglades in my first Florida post.

… but where were the pictures of it ? And Orlando ?

Well, I actually got a problem with the sdcard on which these photos were and didn’t put them on the first lot. But I still have them (some are in heaven because of the hardware problem which I really don’t understand). Anyway, here they are !

Write you soon !

And many photos of course :

Hi guys,

I’m finally in Pittsburgh !

I’ve met all the swiss guys who are also coming as well as others exchange (and international) students (and my buddy, Tubtim).

With Xavier Good, we’ve finally a housing opportunity. But I’m still without non-temporary housing… and hopefully, Xavier who got a host family is willing to host me until next Tuesday, and then, I hope Vera will be able to host us until we have the possitiliy to really move in our new house in Shadyside (let’s hope !) with a native Pittsburgher !

I’ve been here with my family in Downtown Pittsburgh up to today.

It’s a nice city even if it’s a little too warm during the summer and all buildings are freezing cold because of the massive overuse of air conditioning (maybe to get used to the future hard and cold winter we’ll have).

Anyway, it looks all on the good way. However, I already have course overlaps and problems finding corresponding (I expect my overlapping courses to have sadly NO replacements…). But courses are another story and they’ll start on Monday 23.

See you, probably after the courses start.

Hi,

before going to Pittsburgh, I’ve been with my family in Florida.

We first went to Miami Beach (water, hot weather), then we went to Orlando with a car (long time driving) where we’ve visited both Universal Studios and the Kennedy Space Center (on the space coast).

Then, we went back all the way to go to the Everglades and finally got back to Miami Beach before leaving for Pittsburgh.

Since I have my new camera, you will get new pictures !

Enjoy your summer and see you (probably not soon)…

Recomputed picture of many which I’ve taken with my EOS 500.

There’s a high-definition one (4367 x 10284) here.

Hi guys,

these news are some kind of special news which will relate my travel experiences and other personal stuff.

As previously written, I’ll be studying in Pittsburgh (PA)’s Carnegie Mellon University. However, before even coming to Pittsburgh, I’ve been visiting Florida first (Miami, Orlando, the Kennedy Space Center as well as the Everglades).

See you with pictures of Florida soon. And the next things will follow.

Salut à tous, le site des galleries est désormais accessible (sous une forme rudimentaire, certes) !

Hi everyone,

today, I’ve been shooting the new dog of my aunt.
It’s a cocker one (see the photographies) and his name is Lenon.

I shot him with my new camera, a Canon EOS 500D.

But what caused me some troubles was the fact that the camera has a correct and smart way of handling the photography orientation (Exif and other metadata tags – and Linux does understand it), whereas browsers don’t seem understand it.

On my desktop, there’s no problem with the orientation, all my photo viewers work (gnome default image viewer as well as shotwell). However, after having uploaded the gallery (simple viewer) on the server, I looked at it in my Firefox browser. And it doesn’t care about the « Orientation metadata » which implies that the browser doesn’t auto-rotate the picture before viewing it.

The simpleviewer gallery doesn’t rotate anything either. Sad…

… but bash is here to help. Since I knew that my oriented pictures all needed a specific « on the right » 90° rotation, the tool was clearly really easy to make and use :

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#!/bin/sh
 
#
# Script for image auto-rotation (for web)
# using exiftool and imagemagick
#
 
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
	echo "You must specify a file to rotate !"
	exit 1;
fi
 
FILE="$1"
ORIE=`exiftool -Orientation "$FILE" | grep -c "normal"`
 
if [ $ORIE -gt 0 ]; then
	echo "[OK] $FILE"
else
	echo "Rotating $FILE"
	mv "$FILE" "${FILE}_noRot"
	convert "${FILE}_noRot" -rotate 90 "$FILE"
	exiftool "-Orientation=Horizontal (normal)" "$FILE"
	echo "[OK] $FILE"
fi

And you use it like this :

for file in image/*; do sh autoRotate.sh "$file"; done

And voilà ! All pictures are being auto-rotated for the browser. A more complete script would take care of the real orientation to rotate the picture in the good direction… but that wasn’t my goal at all since I knew all pictures’ orientation.