The Beth Project

List to images

I've put together something I've been meaning to make for a while: a little program that takes a folder of images (.eps and .png files, specifically) and turns them into a webpage and a LaTeX document. My MATLAB code spits out images, and it's always a faff to put them together into something coherent and useful.

This is implemented in C++ and bash, and requires some kind of linux with pdflatex installed.

Click here to download the zipped up code, or use wget:
wget http://bethmcmillan.com/geek/ListToImages.tar.gz

Then, to unpack the file, use:
tar -xvf ./ListToImages.tar.gz

Then use listtoimages.sh followed by the path to the folder of images to make the pages. For example, I used:

./listtoimages.sh /users/bethmc/Pictures/

This gave me several files called "output" inside the Pictures directory, including a html file that contained all of the png images, and a PDF containing all of the eps images (the tex file is also supplied).

Anyway. Back to work, all of you!

Edit: my "Pictures" folder is mostly full of photographs of potoos. THEY ARE HILARIOUS.

jQuery is actually fairly amazing

After a very brief time reading the excellent jQuery tutorial on w3schools this afternoon. I've made a useful little prototyping page, which allows you to enter HTML in the text box and see it displayed below. It takes a staggeringly few lines of code.

First, the usual top-of-file business:

&lt;!DOCTYPE html&gt;
&lt;html&gt;
&lt;head&gt;
&lt;meta charset="UTF-8"&gt;

&lt;title&gt;Try HTML&lt;/title&gt;

Then, we load in jQuery from Google.

&lt;script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js"&gt;
&lt;/script&gt;

Now, the javascript. First, we check that the webpage has loaded:

&lt;script&gt;
$(document).ready(function(){

Then, we wait for someone to click on the button with the ID "show":

  $("#show").click(function(){

Now we take the value from the textarea with the ID "textin" and use it to set the HTML inside the element with the ID "results".

    $("#results").html($("#textin").val());
  });
});
&lt;/script&gt;
&lt;/head&gt;

&lt;body&gt;

Then, in the HTML, we have the area for the user to enter text:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;textarea id="textin" rows="4" cols="50"&gt;&lt;/textarea&gt;

The button to press:

&lt;/p&gt;&lt;button id="show"&gt;Show Results&lt;/button&gt;

And the area to show the results:

&lt;p id="results"&gt; &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/html&gt;

It has taken me significantly longer to write this blog post than it did to make that webpage. Hurrah for jQuery!

Geeky cross-stitch patterns

I've been having lots of cross-stitching fun lately. I'm a big fan of pixel art and especially that found in SNES games. Super Mario Bros 2 was one of my favourite games as a little girl, because you were allowed to play as Princess Peach (who is objectively the best character because she can FLOAT). I'm in the process of making a pincushion-based cross-stitch homage to her - the pattern is at the bottom of the page.

I also participated in the epic Reddit Secret Santa Gift Exchange this year. My giftee is a young gentleman who works in IT, with a love for Legend of Zelda. I made him a cross-stiched Link yoyo...

...and a friendly little sign for his desk.

I've made some downloadable patterns: Link, Princess Peach, and Go Away Sign.