Kevin Ludlow is a 44-year-old accomplished software developer, business manager, writer, musician, photographer, world traveler, and serial entrepreneur from Austin, Texas. He is also a former candidate for the Texas House of Representatives.
Please take a moment to view his complete resume for more information.
Note: the entirety of this website was architected and developed from the ground up exclusively by Kevin Ludlow.
This song of ours called "Lullaby" has become one of my very favorite songs that we've written.
The song was initially written by Sasha and in fact his cello-driven band even plays a purely instrumental version of it. But Sasha brought it to Carly and I and the three of us started working out more complex bits of it that fit our particular style.
It's incredibly enjoyable to be playing the song and get about 2.5 minutes in when the bass and drums finally enter. I wind up playing a pretty simple interlude for about 30 seconds and then we break into a guitar solo. It's perhaps not the most complex guitar solo I've ever written, but for various reasons remains one of my favorite that I've ever written.
As a little bit of trivia to the song, you can hear and see Carly pretend to be angry at the 4:29 mark. She was trying to come in at a specific time over and over again in rehearsal and kept missing it. She actually nails her mark in this performance, but thought that she was off and so is looking to Sasha as acknowledgement that she messed up. But she didn't. She did it perfectly, as Carly has tended to do.
It's not very often that I take the time to make technical posts for all of the complexities that go into my personal website, but this one was so frustrating and time-consuming that I figured I would share my findings with the world. I've also been having to do a lot of ImageMagick work in my professional life lately and so I fully understand the frustration of not having good documentation on some of this.
The problem:
I have a bunch of .CR2 files in my photo gallery (RAW image files shot on a Cannon). I am using ImageMagick for a bunch of different processing components including resizing the images for my gallery. Unfortunately ImageMagick was failing due to UFRAW-batch not being found. The error would look something like this:
After doing a ton of research and trying to hunt down ways to make ufraw-batch work with ImageMagick, I finally went down a different path of deciding to configure DCRAW as my RAW-file ImageMagick delegate. This method wound up working perfectly, but it does require some special configuring. I've detailed that process below.
Assumptions:
The following installation was done on an Amazon AMI instance (essentially a CentOS machine), with ImageMagick 6.7.8-9 2015-10-08 Q16 installed. It also assumes the user has ROOT access and that all of the steps are performed as ROOT.
Installing DCRAW:
If you haven't already, sudo to root:
su root
Create a directory to work with somewhere in your home:
At this point you may find that you need to install the liblcms dependency. If this has happened then the installation of your RPM package will have failed. If DCRAW installed without any problems then skip to the libJpeg section below. If there was a dependency problem, take a look at the following:
Please note that there could certainly be other dependencies missing as well. This was simply a problem that I ran into with a pretty typical modern Linux installation.
Installing libJpeg (for cjpeg):
At this point DCRAW should be installed on your system. The best you'll really be able to do is to convert to either a TIFF file or get a raw stream of JPG. The problem with the RAW stream (assuming you're wanting to export to a jpeg as most people will want to do) is that it doesn't help you to actually compress the JPG stream into a usable file. If you try to simply pipe the STDOUT to a file (xxx.jpg for example), the image won't load as it won't be properly compressed for jpeg specs. You'll need to use cjpeg (or a similar tool) to accomplish this final piece.
gunzip libjpeg-turbo-1.4.2.tar.gz tar -xvf libjpeg-turbo-1.4.2.tar
Go into the newly extracted directory and install libjpeg:
cd libjpeg-turbo-1.4.2 ./configure make make install
Testing cjpeg:
At this point you should have DCRAW, any necessary dependencies, and cjpeg installed on your system. Incidentally, cjpeg will likely have been installed to /opt/libjpeg-turbo/bin/cjpeg. If you can't find it, do the following:
Update the mlocate database and find the jpeg tool:
updatedb locate cjpeg
From here you'll have the fully qualified path of where the cjpeg executable lives. Mine was installed to /opt/libjpeg-turbo/bin/cjpeg (which I assume is a standard location for this program).
Configuring ImageMagick Delegates:
So the final part of this process is to configure the RAW delegate for ImageMagick so that instead of trying to use ufraw-batch it instead uses your newly installed dcraw. Be sure to backup your delegates.xml file before making any changes to the file! You can break your installation of ImageMagick if you're not careful!
Find your ImageMagick delegates file
locate delegates.xml
Be sure to backup the delegates file first!
cp /etc/ImageMagick/delegates.xml ~/
Open the file with your favorite editor:
vim /etc/ImageMagick/delegates.xml
Search the document for ufraw-batch
Replace the ImageMagick Delegates:
That untouched line in the delegates.xml file should look something like this:
You'll want to change it to look like this (using your path to cjpeg):
I've been running a reasonably-sized farm of servers for almost a decade now. They were meticulously designed to meet the needs of my infrastructure and custom-secured to prevent intrusions. Given how long the boxes were up for I would have to say that they were pretty successful at their job.
The longest uptime I had at 5.97 years!
Slightly less at 4.35 years!
I had to install some software about 2 years ago and hence the mere 1.8 years of uptime.
The fourth server in my cabinet was reset with some regularity
As part of my SXSW Broadmoor extravaganza with bands from all over the country, my headlining band (The Ghost of Paul Revere) played an unplugged version of The Who's "Baba O'Reily". It's definitely one of the better versions of the song I've heard and sounds great with the banjo and harmonica filling in the background pieces.
To anyone interested they'll be playing on April 23rd, 2015 at the Saxon Pub.
