Spam is still out there.

One of the most annoying things to deal with in IT is spam. It floods people's inboxes with all kinds of junk and reduces productivity. I've spent A LOT of time dealing with it. We've used GFI and others to try and keep spam out of our office but nothing has worked.

Then I heard about MXLogic from a local company. It's cheap and since we started using it a few months ago we've not had a single spam come through. And since 90% of all email is spam that's a huge help for me and a relief to everyone else.

Extending a USB device.

I started a live web cam steam with Ustream.tv but I didn't like the camera in my face. I had a 2 foot USB extension cable sitting here doing nothing so I decided to extend the extension.

It's easy to do if you have the supplies and skills to do some very basic soldering. I used simple phone cable for the extension material. It works perfect because the phone cable and the USB cable both use 4 wires. All you have to do is cut and strip them. Once you do that it's all a matter of matching the colors as best you can and solder them together. I have a nice supply of items here at work so I used some heat-shrink tubing to make it all nice and neat.

I've read on the Internet that there is a length limit to doing this. I can't recall the number off hand but I (personally) won't make them longer than 100'. After than you may see some line-loss and most simple USB devices (like my web cam) need about 5 volts for power.

I'm pleased with the way this came out but I see that I need a new web cam to get a better picture to feed the masses. TechCrunch.com has a nice stream.

Here's an example of how to run USB through phone lines.

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.

ZipGenuis does almost everything with compression

You gotta have a compression app these days.  I've been using ZipGenius for years. With 

ZipGenius is the absolutely free software for Windows® that lets you compress files to almost any kind of archive. ZipGenius supports more than 20 compressed archive formats, including CD/DVD-ROM image files in ISO9660 standard. This is the file compression suite you were searching for: it is free and easy to use, plus it supports more than 20 formats of compressed archives, including RAR, ARJ, ACE, CAB, SQX, OpenOffice.org documents and the excellent 7-zip. ZipGenius now can precompress executable files going to be added to a ZIP archive through the UPX compressor.

ZipGenius I can right-click a file (zip or rar is what I deal with mostly) and select whatever I want to do with the contents.  This picture below is a screnschot of the options I have on my machine.

I can do the same with multiple selected files.

ZipGenius is fast and easy to use.  Once you try it you'll love it.