Flickr Commons

I am regular user of Flickr from the time I was bitten by shutterbug few years back. I have been following many groups, reading & participating in a few group discussions now and then.

Recently while I was going thru the flickr blogs ( which I visit not so often ), came across this Flickr Commons Project and found it very interesting !

Flickr Commons enables people to view publicly available photo archives and share comments and information on that as told the the home page.


"The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

You're invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments."

One can visit the home page here

While I was browsing thru the pages, got some really nice photos of Egypt taken during 1900's !
These images are from Brooklyn Museum lantern slide collection.





Above photo was taken way back in 1990's and below is a recent photo of Sphinx in my flickr stream.



A bit of the Sphinx has been restored and much more exposed.

One more interesting archive which I found was "Changing New York, 1935-1938" in the New York Public Library, which can be seen Here...

And some World War I Panoramas HERE

Gtalk voice chat using PSI !

I am using Ubuntu from a quiet a long now and use it most of the time at home ( office I can not install OS of my choice ! ). Almost everything I need works fine in Ubuntu, whether its office tools or dev tools or graphics, the only shortcoming is I was not able to use gtalk voice chat with my pidgin IM Client !

Every time I wanted to talk to my friends online, i would use Skype or switch to Windows and login to gtalk ! !

Recently I found out ( from some blogs and Forums) that PSI has come up with libjingle support which can be used to make voice calls using your google account.

Yesterday I tried it with my Ubuntu 8.04 and it worked seamlessly.
And here is how to configure and build PSI-libjingle

First Install, following packages using apt.

1. libqca & qca-dev
2. libqca-tls
3. libspeex, libspeex-dev & speex

qca: is Qt Cryptographic Architecture which provides a straightforward and cross-platform crypto API, using Qt datatypes and conventions (ref: http://delta.affinix.com/qca/)

libqca-tls is the SSL Support for libqca

speex : is an open-source patent free audio compression format designed for speech.

Then download and build ortp, a OpenSource rtp library.

# wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/linphone/ortp/sources/ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz
# tar zxvf ortp-0.7.1.tar.gz
# cd ortp-0.7.1
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/
# make ; make install
# sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libortp.so.0 /usr/lib/libortp.so.0

Now download psi-libjingle

# wget http://www.db.toronto.edu/~nilesh/files/blog/psi-jingle.20060122.tar.bz2
# bunzip2 psi-jingle.20060122.tar.bz2
# tar -xvf psi-jingle.20060122.tar
# cd psi-jingle.20060122

# ./configure --enable-jingle --with-qca-inc=/usr/include/QtCrypto/ \
--with-qca-lib=/usr/lib/ \
--with-ortp-lib=/usr/lib/ --with-ortp-inc=/usr/include/ \
--with-glib-inc=/opt/gnome/include/glib-2.0/ \
--with-glib-lib=/opt/gnome/lib/ \
--with-glibconfig-inc=/opt/gnome/lib/glib-2.0/include/ \
--with-speex-inc=/usr/include/speex/ --with-speex-lib=/usr//lib

Note: here most important is --enable-jingle otherwise, voice chat doesn't work!

# make ; make install

Once done, fire psi and configure your google account, start voice chatting !

One update to this :

Starting Ubuntu 10.04, Empathy became default IM client for Ubuntu desktop and Empathy support Gtalk voice out of the box !!!. So one need not worry about all the work around :)

Almost after 2 months !

Here I am... updating my blog after almost 2 months..
got totally busy with so many useless things in life that, forgot I have a blog now.

Recently got chance to click some good pics with my Nikon D50 after so many days. My camera was idle for so many days ! !

Here are some of pics taken when i visited my hometown for Diwali .





Recently I got hold of a basic tripod and first thing I wanted to do was try out HDR ! Above are few snaps from the try, Used PhotoMatix to generate these.

When was at home this time, got a chance to look at my Niece's, my cousin's twins..they are just 4 months old now and they are very cute !

No - 1


and here is No - 2 !

My First Post !

Here I am with my first blog ! Yeah, I signed into Blog spot almost a year ago and I am writing my first blog today ! ! Strange eh ??

Hope to write more blogs in the days to come...