What I did yesterday. Panoramic pictures.

It's been a while since I posted here so I thought I might start back in with a little bit of what tools I needed to get a job done yesterday.

The Job: Merge multiple photos of a field site into a single panoramic view and place it in a figure frame.

The Tools: Konica C450's scanner feature, Pain.net, Acrobat Pro 9 and AutoCAD 2006 LT.

Some of the job was easy because Mike (name used here for story time) had printed out the pictures he wanted and taped them into a panoramic view. I simply scanned the strip into JPG format using the companies Konica C450. Once I had my sections I used Paint.net to merge the

pieces.

Once I had the images digitally I then uesd my mad AutoCAD skills to make a nice figure frame for each photo. Once completed I created PDFs of each figure and combined them into one single PDF file for the client.

Nothing amazingly cool here. I just wanted to show an example of what IT tools I may use during the evolution of a project I've been asked to help out with.

This isn't the first time I've been asked to merge several pictures into one single picture. This is called image stitching and there are better ways to do it than what we've done on this project. Ideally you want to set up a nice digital camera on a tripod to take the pictures. This give a nice center point for all the photos. Take pictures every x-degrees or just make sure each photo overlaps so that the software you decide to use can have a better chance of making a nice photo. I just found Hugin panoramic photo stitcher today. Although I've not used Hugin yet I do plan on testing it within the next week because I'm sure that I'll need to do something like this again in the future.

UPDATE: 5-11-2009 Here's what it looks like. This panoramic picture of the building where I work is comprised of 23 photos stitched together. Click on it to see the full version.

Custom resource cd

A computer's life cycle is about 3 years. That's what I hear anyway. We have some computers here (still working) that are over 5 years old. When we get new computers for users here there is a set of software that goes onto each machine. Acrobat Pro6, Acrobad Reader, In-Out Board, Outlook Messenger, printer drivers, fonts and more.

What I've done in the past is just install these softwares from a network "drive" called Software which, if you think about it, is where all the software is located. Makes sense.

Then I got the idea of creating a cd that has all that stuff on it already. I used to make photo web sites on a locale computer then burn the "site" to a cd and have it autorun when loaded into a cd drive. It was very handy when I wanted to send a bunch of pictures to a relative. they load the cd and up pops a web site that they can browse and see pics of my kids. That was about 10 years ago.

So that's what I did for my Resource CD.

First I needed a web template. There are some great sites that provide open source web templates such as Open Source Web Designs, freewebsitetemplates.com, Open Web Design and a great list at DesignVitality.com.

So I pick a nice CSS design from freecsstemplates.org and rework it to list all the software I need to install on a machine. I also add serial codes to the main "page" to make life easier.

Here's where i had some trouble. I wanted to be able to "run" programs from the html page. I didn't want to be asked where I want to save the file to. I just wanted it to run. After a while of searching the internet I found that all you have to do is rename the index.html file to index.HTA. This will open the file into a different window and allow you to run the files you want.

After I get it looking just the way I want I copy the autorun files from another cd and tweak them to point to the new index.hta file.

I made two versions. One has basic software that is on all the computers here. All the data fits easily on a cd. I made another version that has more software to choose from which needed a DVD to fit it all on to.

Try to download an ISO I made here.

UPDATE: link is broken. sorry.

The Boss got spam attacked!

Monday the 13th. October, 2008. I get into work and my boss calls me wondering why there are some many emails flooding his Inbox informing him that the emails he has sent can't be delivered to the recipient. I take a look at his screen via mRemote and UltraVNC to check out what he's talking about. WOW! He's receiving dozens of emails per minute.

I call an IT consulting company to see if they know what is going on. I send them some emails that my boss is receiving and wait for their answer, which I think I know but want a confirmation from an outside source.

A spammer had gotten a hold of my boss's email address and was using it as the "from" address in all his spams. Of course a ton of the spammer's "to" addresses are bogus due to directory harvesting and are bounced back to the sender...MY BOSS.

How did this happen?

There is more than one reason for this. I will explain 2 of them that are relevant to my boss and his company.

Spammers need legitimate email addresses. One way to get good email addresses in large amounts is to hack a site that allows a person to subscribe to a newsletter. There's tons of good email addresses in those databases which can be as simple as a text file.

Another great way to get a good email address is to post code in your web site such as "mailto:email-address". Spammers run custom software called crawlers to search web sites for such code and glean the email addresses found therein. This can happen when you decide to ignore the IT Guy for several years to change your web site to NOT have this code because he knows about crawlers and what can happen with your email address.

So how did we stop the emails from coming in?

We did nothing. Absolutely nothing. See, spammers know that the emails they send out will be blocked or put on a custom blacklist by the recipient's spam filters. So they don't use them for long. By the end of the day the barrage of emails had stopped.