Picasa: Add Filename Captions Automatically

Ever wanted Picasa captions based on image filenames? Well, here comes a solution.

When adding pictures to Picasa, Picasa scans the pictures for meta information based on IPTC-NAA, a standard for attributing text, images and other media with meta information such as captions, copyright, etc. When Picasa encounters a file with attribute IPTC.Caption set it uses the value of the attribute as default caption.

I've come up with a litte ruby script captionize.rb to set the caption attribute to a bunch of images found inside a directory. The caption set is the filename (including the file extension) of the image.

The script requires a valid ruby installation and Exiv2 in your path to modify the meta content of an image.

The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die

The Prodigy is back with their new album "Invaders Must Die". The new long player will be released on 2009/02/27. Pre-orders are already accepted.

The cover track "Invaders Must Die" was free for download during the week of November 30th, 2008. If you missed it, The Prodigy was so kind to bring you an high quality video for free.

Enjoy the new/old The Prodigy style.

UUIDs For The Masses! (in Ruby)

An UUID (Universally Unique Identification), also known as GUID, is often used in software to uniquely identify information. Originally designed for distributed systems, UUIDs have quickly found their way to wherever non-conflicting identifiers identifiers are needed.

UUIDs in Ruby

Lately, some Ruby projects have evolved that generate UUIDs in pure Ruby language. This hasn't been always that way: in 2005 Brad Wilson posted a code snippet that allowed generation of UUIDs on windows platforms. Round about the same time the uuid project was kicked-off with the goal to create a pure ruby implementation and thus cross platform support for generating UUIDs. This project achieved gold status in 2006.

UUIDs from Web Services

There are some web services out there that allow online generation of UUIDs. So i thought it should be easy to fetch UUIDs from those web services in ruby. Turns out it is!

For those interested in generating UUIDs from such web-services I've added a uuid.rb along with some unit-tests and an adopted win32 implementation to my ruby-snippets repository.