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Since the announcement a few hours ago:

Rufus has been helping out around the home office: providing moral support, slobbering on pant legs, and conducting some thought-leadership workshops (read: napping for hours on end). He’s a real team player.

Dale Chihuly:

I’m amazed at what people find in my work, and I don’t like to limit what you see with a title. For me titles are very difficult, and I don’t usually even think in terms of a theme when I’m creating a sculpture. Once it’s finished I’ll come up with a title, but one person might see flowers, another something from the sea or something from a dream. Bellagio was inspired by the hotel on Lake Como, and I wanted to use the lake in the title – it’s so romantic. I used the word fiori (flowers), but everybody sees something different.

While working on a project for the State Hermitage Museum last year, I had to implement some image watermarking. The basic requirement was that for a certain type of uploaded image, its largest thumbnail should have the museum’s logo tiled across it. I was using attachment_fu to handle the image upload, and ImageMagick/RMagick to process the thumbnails.

After some cursory Googling, I found the ImageMagick Annotating guide, which had this sample watermark command:

 $ convert overlay.png  -fill grey50 -colorize 40  miff:- |\
    composite -dissolve 15 -tile  -  original.jpg watermarked_image.jpg

The dissection of the command:

overlay.png: The source image to overlay

-fill grey50 -colorize 40: Alter the colors of the watermark file

composite: command to overlay the watermark

-dissolve 15 -tile: “dissolve” the overlay at 15%, for good transparency, and tile (repeat) the watermark over the source image.

That’s simple enough, and with these source files:

overlay.png

and dearest Rufus:

rufus.jpg

 $ convert overlay.png -fill grey50 -colorize 40 miff:- |\
    composite -dissolve 15 -tile - rufus.jpg result-15.jpg

Produces:

Overlay with 15% dissolve

convert overlay.png -fill grey50 -colorize 40 miff:- |\
  composite -dissolve 50 -tile - rufus.jpg result-50.jpg

Overlay with 50% dissolve

Unfortunately, RMagick’s watermark method doesn’t support tiling. To work around, I had to call the composite_tiled! method on a colorized image. This code is in my Thumbnail model, which includes attachment_fu:

class Thumbnail < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_attachment  :content_type => :image,
   # some settings omitted
   :watermark_overlay => File.join(RAILS_ROOT, '/public/images/watermark-overlay-image.png'),
   :watermarkable_size => "1500>" 
 
  after_attachment_saved do |record|
    if record.respond_to?(:parent_id) and record.parent_id.nil? # the original image, not the smaller thumbnails
      with_image record.full_filename do |img|
        img.composite_tiled!(
          Magick::ImageList.new(attachment_options[:watermark_overlay]).first.colorize(0.4, 0.4, 0.4, 'grey'),   # process and colorize image
          Magick::SoftLightCompositeOp)
        img.write record.full_filename  # save image
      end
    end
  end
end

Now every Thumbnail record will automatically have a watermarked large image.

This is Gordie, the Gansen family pet bird. He’s been around since 1997, making him 12 years old. Words cannot express how much I love this little guy.

He loves nothing more than to run around and chase pieces of paper. If you tap on the paper, the following will happen:

And sometimes he gets a bit overstimulated and decides to bite everyone, then it’s time to hang out in the cage:

Oh, Gordie. happy new year to you.