The I.T. Life

This week I will be creating 2 additional photography tutorials. I will create a more in-depth tutorial for the transparent laptop screen, and also create my first HDR image, and also a tutorial. (Hopefully this will gain me points over fergy-ferg.net, his weekend at bernies joke was funny, but this is educational! And everyone wants to learn! Eitherway, I believe as for the current round of attacks, we are at tie, unless of course this weekend at bernies joke catches on. I hope that giving some of my plans for this week in advance will give my foe enough time to plan a good defense.

DSC_0004

Originally uploaded by hannjeff_87

I love traveling, road trips, vacations, whatever, I just love to see the world. Of course, I love to photograph my trips. As many people like me, you end up with thousands of photos, and you often forget where the sweet jebus you took them. I mean, the east coast has a bagilion beaches, and its hard to tell them from each other. One of the nice things flickr does is let you place the photo on a map. This is all good and dandy… but somewhat time consuming. A) it takes a while to upload all your pics, write titles, descriptions, add tags, and then place them on a map. and B) go through old photos and figure out where you took them. So, here is a sweet solution Geotagging! You bring a gps along on your trip, and record a trip log. Basically, you end up with a text file, with exact quarantine’s, and time stamps. A big lost that when read with the right software allows you to view a path on a map of where you went. Now, there is some software that takes this list, and a group of photos, and then matches the time stamps. It will check to see when photo a was taken, where were you, than adds these quard’s to the photo details. Now, when you upload to flickr, it adds it to the map automatically. I suppose you dont save a step, because you have to match the files and picures, but if you have 200 photos from a trip, you only have to do this once, and not add 200 photos to a map. Plus, its so fun to link technology that has no similar designs.

transparent screen

Originally uploaded by hannjeff_87

My first attempt at a trickshot, a transparent laptop screen. This was a fairly simple task, and I’m hoping to try again and do a better job. How it works is you take 2 photos, using a tripod, the first image with no laptop, the second with laptop. You open them both in gimp/photoshop/whatever, and make the photo with no laptop your base layer. You then select the layer that uses the laptop. Now, when i setup this image, I set my background to a very bright green, and had no icons or anything. This way I can use the fuzzy select tool and choose that color, it should pick the majority of the screen, and remove it from the picture. You may need some more cleaning after this. And finally… your done!
My second attempt will include a 3rd image, with laptop, icons and background. My idea is that once you have the screen removed, you can add a 3rd layer, with the laptop and everything, and add a transparency to it of probably 60%, this way everything else will be exactly the same, but you will have icons and a background shown. It will look more like a transparent laptop screen than just a laptop with no screen. Either way… this is attempt #1

So, life is about connections. Your next job is about who you know, and your problem can be solved by someone that knows the answer. This is obvious, its life, and its networking. So what happens when you make that life digital? You take all your pictures, and put them on flickr, you start a blog, you get on facebook, and even linkedin. Well, nothing. Your facebook friends don’t know about your professional contacts, and your photos. And none of these people know about your blog. Well, here is how “connections” help. The beauty of all this web 2.0 bull shit, is it works well with each other. For example, most people that know me, check my facebook page whenever it is updated, and thats it. They never bother with my blog, or my flickr page. Even people in flickr don’t know about my flickr’ page. So, I started trying to bridge these ideas. I found, in flickr, there are groups, you can join photo pools, for others to see, and comment on your pictures, and you can also categorize your photos, so you (and others) can see similar pics. At this point, they are still only knowledgeable about you on flickr, thats it. Well, flickr lets you link to your blog. So now, they can see your blog, because they see your pictures. This is only the beginning, now, I have facebook, linkedin, flickr, my blog, and they still are very separate beings. Flickr can post to my blog, and thats it. So, step 2, facebook, the biggest beast of them all. I have a app on facebook for flickr, and my blog. Now, when people go to my facebook profile, they see my blog posts, and my flickr pictures… and my blog posts about my flickr pictures (level 2 complete, level 1 of inifinit loop, complete). Alright, facebook and flickr are connect, and same with my blog, these 3 entities are all connected. So, I also had to add linkedin to my facebook page. Now, my life is a horrible mess of a circle, and hopefully, more people will read my blog, and see my pictures. The big goal of this is for a) me to make more professional contacts, or b) have my photography noticed, and possibly turn a profit. Of course, c) more people reading my blog, and maybe a comment or 2 would certainly lighten my day. I’m not going to bombard you with all my links, I believe they are all in my blogroll anyways. So, go find me! and maybe, find a new friend too!

I usually have quite a few side projects, and this year will be no different, except I plan to finish them all! (l0l). I am designing a new portfolio (should be done this week) that will allow you to update your home page, resume, etc, even the top level css all through a admin page. It will also allow you to manage mutiple portfolios through the same database and admin page (this will allow for very small secondary portfolios). This was well overdue but now I finally have some good reasons to do it. The second version will allow much easier editing of pages, without the need for html, but that will be later this year. After this I am going to finish my bookmark database site that is currently DOA, this will allow you to quickly login and bookmark a site for quick access anywhere, and also quick search through to find a site. This will also be seeing a version 2 later this year with features like bookmark exporting, and tag searching. Finally I will be starting this weekend a web + software application to organize all your cd / dvd / book’s. It will probably start with a very simple text list and a admin section for adding and removing, shortly after it will be linked into several external databases to get cover art, extra details etc. This will start with a database and .net app, and move into a web service, and website. Either way, I need to get to my real job now, designing pages for comedy central. Byes!

I really do, its true. I like outlook, it works the way my brain does. I find Notes primitive, disorganized, and far to complicated. Also, Active Sync doesn’t work with it. So, here is my workaround, keep in mind this only works for email, and it isn’t pretty. I have at work 2 emails, lets say for the sake of privacy jeff@a.com and jeff@b.com. I setup 2 email address to match a@jeffreyhann.com and b@jeffreyhann.com, just to keep everything separate the way notes keeps it. Now, I tell notes that every time a email comes to jeff@a.com send it to a@jeffreyhann.com, and same with jeff@b.com. I tell outlook that for every message in a@jeffreyhann.com, reply with jeff@a.com, and same with b@jeffreyhann.com. Now, I have them both checking email ever minute, and check everything from outlook. The problem with this is that the email never gets deleted on notes, so I will have to manually delete/organize message there. I’m hoping I can do this once a month, depending on email traffic. The main benefit of this is that my new phone (that I will get tonight) HTC Touch, supports push email via active sync + outlook. So I will now have instant and 24/7 access to my work email. I can set this up for any of my email address, I just have to set it up in outlook.

I mentioned earlier, this only works for my email, and for the most part, my calender is filled with items that do not need to be shared, I will have to use notes calender when I need something public unfortunately.

Ok, so, im a lazy and inventive person. Thus im a programmer (not a web designer, as my job may imply). So, instead of spending 15min reading my morning 8 or so web comics, i wrote a program that does it for me. Now, the version that I am uploading is not the most recent, however it is probably one of the best. It doesnt display the oversized comics of my choice, like ctrl-alt-del, and the outer circle, howver, it does display my 3 cell comics, and my 1 cell comics. I enjoy the program. I may finish the next version and get it to accept oversized comics, and make it work on sundays, however, for now, nobody needs to use my program on sunday, and, nobody needs to see oversized comics. Heres the link guys, check it out, tell me what ya think, and most of all, enjoy free software, ill be posting the code later, all my stuff is open source. However, it is under the beer license, meaning if you like it, and you ever meet me, you are obligated to buy me a beer, if you want. Its a nice open ended license, and it gets me free beer, asuming you like my program, meet me, and want to buy me beer. Yah, im gonna be getting lots of beer. Hey, maby I should put a section on www.jeffreyhann.com dedicated to my software, or just setup a section on The I.T. Life for my software. What do you guys think?

Its a sad day. Trully a sad day. As many of you may not know, symantic purchased sygate, the makers of sygate personal firewall. This was one of the best personal firewalls avaible, and it was free. Now, obviously symantic felt that it was a very present theat so they purchased it, than, discontinued it. Now, theres no way that you can see this as anything other than removing the competition. Good job symantic, now ill never give you my money.

Wired News has a great article on the worst software bugs. Also, theres some great interactive guides that explain common bugs like buffer overflows. Seriously, check this out!
Wired news story

Ok, now im the type of user that wants a computer to work, and I dont want to dick around with settings and files and stuff to get it to work. This is why I love and hate linux. Depending on the distro you will have to do everything yourself (ie slackware) or have it all done for you (ie madriva). Im a middle of the road kind of guy, and I think thats where all new users to linux should be. You should have everything set up, but it should be quick and easy to learn how to set it up yourself.
This why I use Its a debian based distro, so its rock solid. Its already set up and everything you need for basic applications is installed. And when you want to start setting stuff up yourself, than check out the Ubuntu Guide
I really like this and its pretty easy to set up.
Have fun.