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If you wish to get a bigger copy of this image, please contact me directly. All images are available in various sizes up to the resolution of 3008×2000.

If you wish to get a bigger copy of this image, please contact me directly. All images are available in various sizes up to the resolution of 3008×2000.

If you wish to get a bigger copy of this image, please contact me directly. All images are available in various sizes up to the resolution of 3008×2000.

If you wish to get a bigger copy of this image, please contact me directly. All images are available in various sizes up to the resolution of 3008×2000.

If you wish to get a bigger copy of this image, please contact me directly. All images are available in various sizes up to the resolution of 3008×2000.

As promised, today I start showing you my factory works. I have a few pictures in my red room and plan to expose them to your judgment as they get dry. The comments are always welcome.

If you wish to get a bigger copy of this image, please contact me directly. All images are available in various sizes up to the resolution of 3008×2000.

Yesterday I sent one of the works I like best of all to 500px — the growing community of photographers. Review of ingoing material is part of their submission process and they are free to reject your work if they don’t like it, but in turn I’m free to ask why. So after four hours from my submission I’ve got a rejection with this kind of explanation: “Sorry, but this picture doesn’t match our notion of artistic photography in terms of style”. Wow. So, they say that these are artistic enough …

while this is not …

Well, it’s definitely something wrong with my taste.

Canceled my account there…

Hi, I just wished to let you know that I have a photostream in Flickr and it received several new items for your viewing pleasure. So, everyone is welcome to check it out and leave some comments. I would love to hear from you!

Back to my Feb 19, 2006

I have a link among my bookmarks to the great page — Astronomy Picture of the Day by NASA. Several times a week I visit this place to get a new charge of positive energy. It’s inconceivable that they have so many great shots from all over the universe!

As you might know if you are reading this blog that lately I got interested in Ruby. I’m a Linux guy and all these scriptic-cryptic languages are fun to learn for me, so I quickly jumped in the boots and found some applications for it including the one I wish to share with you today.

Below is a small Ruby application which is fetching the NASA’s page, parses it, takes the picture link, fetches the picture into some local file and sets it as a wallpaper for the Gnome desktop. Everything is in 7 lines of uncompressed code excluding initial setup, comments and white spaces. What would you say, heh? Fun, isn’t it?

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

# Absolute path to the place where to store pics
picture_root = '/home/aleksey/pics/astro/'

# Find URL, fetch file and set the background
sourceURL = 'http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html'
page = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(sourceURL))
imageTag = page.scan(/<img [^/>]+>/i)[0]
url = URI.parse(sourceURL.scan(/^.+//)[0] + imageTag.scan(/src="([^" mce_src="([^"]+)"/i)[0][0])

filename = picture_root + Time.now.strftime('%y%m%d') + ".jpg";
File.open(filename, 'w') { |file| file << Net::HTTP.get(url); }

`gconftool -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename #{filename}`

Photographers never stop to surprise and creativity of some of them knows no limits. At that very moment when I start to believe that there’s nothing conceptually new one could create, I immediately find the proof of the opposite. This time it’s absolutely unbelievable pictures of liquids, forming amazing breathtaking sculpture. Take a break and spend some time with a natural beauty — visit Liquid Sculpture.