ImageMagick and Excel

Posted on 17/10/2008 by dougaj4

Back from my holidays, with a hard disk full of holiday snaps, and looking for a program to extract the image data saved on the camera, and add comments.  Not liking the offerings provided with the cameras, or any of the free programs I found, I have written my own, using ImageMagick.

ImageMagick is a command line image manipulation program, which has COM+ component, allowing the program functionality to be accessed from VBA.  More details here: ImageMagick COM+ object

My image importer program can be downloded from: PastePic.zip, and screenshots are shown below.

To run the program you will need to download and install the ImageMagick software, then in the Visual Basic editor create a reference to the ImageMagickObject 1.0 Type Library, using the Tools-References menu.

The spreadsheet file has only been provided in Excel 2007 format because in earlier versions the file size becomes impracticably large with only a small number of images.

File input list

File input list

Imported thumbnails and file details

Imported thumbnails and file details

Posted in Drawing, Excel, VBA | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

The Willoughby Choir in Austria

Posted on 01/10/2008 by dougaj4

The wonderful Willoughby Symphony Choir give an impromptu performance of Motzart’s Ave Verum at the Dom Cathedral in Salzburg.  Use headphones or good external speakers to get the full effect!

Posted in Bach | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Will it Fall Over?

Posted on 28/09/2008 by dougaj4

Is the arch in the picture below stable, or has it been created in Photoshop, or perhaps with the assistance of some glue or external straps?

Book Arch

Book Arch

A simple analysis suggests that tension will be generated at the bottom of the crown, and at the tops of the columns, suggesting that the books would not be stable in this configuration without some reinforcement.

Analysis 1

Analysis 1

But looking at the problem from a geometric perspective, it is possible to fit a catenary within the shape of the arch, and the structure should therefore be stable:

Catenary

Catenary

A slightly more detailed analysis, allowing the arch segments to separate rather than develop tension suggests that the structure would be able to develop a compressive path to carry the gravity loads to the base.

Analysis 2

Analysis 2

The stability of structures is not always obvious. The ray tracings below from, PM 2ring, show two different types of “pseudo arch”, which are both stable, if correctly configured:

Cantilever

Cantilever

Posted in Arch structures, Finite Element Analysis, Newton, Ray Tracing | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Old Bridge at Heidelberg

Posted on 23/09/2008 by dougaj4

The “Old Bridge” at the German university city of Heidelberg was constructed in 1788,replacing a wooden bridge that had occupied the same site since 1284, and which was regularly destroyed by ice and floods.

Heidelberg Old Bridge from the castle

Heidelberg Old Bridge from the castle

Heidelberg Old Bridge

Heidelberg Old Bridge

On the south bank can be found the Bruckenaffe, or Bridge Monkey,made by sculptor Gernot Rumpf, based on a carved monkey from medeival times. The monkey carries a mirror, and the adjoining
inscripion roughly translates as:

Why are you looking at me?
Look in the mirror
and you will see more of the same

The Bridge Monkey

The Bridge Monkey

The monkeys inscription

The monkey

Posted in Arch structures, Bach, Historic Bridges, Newton | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Drawing in Excel 6 – getting shape properties

Posted on 17/09/2008 by dougaj4

Previous post

One of the less than useful new “features” of Excel 2007 is that its macro recorder no longer records operations on shapes, which removes the easiest way to discover the exact names of shape properties, and how to manipulate them.  The file ShapeProps.zip contains a spreadheet with a User Defined Function (UDF) that will return a list of property names, and the values for each property, for any named shape.  In addition it will generate VBA code to read aditional properties if the correct property names are inserted in a list on the spreadsheet.

 

The UDF currently reads 94 different properties, which can either be returned as a column array of all 94 values, or if a list of property numbers is entered only the listed property values will be returned.  See the screen shot below for examples.

ShapeProp() Output

ShapeProp() Output


ShapeProp() code generation sheet

ShapeProp() code generation sheet

Posted in Drawing, Excel, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments