I don’t know how you feel about having tons and tons of advertisements showing at the bottom of your Windows Live Messenger client (WLM), but it annoys me. But don’t worrie help is on the way! I will give you a WLM specifik fix and a description to avoid many adds in your browser and other places.

I had an error showing up today during init of WLM, and so I let the Microsoft Visual Studio debugger start up. Inside that I could locate the address – host name – of the host which deliveres the adds.

I was now ready to follow the advice from a collegue of mine given in another context. The advice was to add an entry to the hosts file on your computer which would bind the add server hostname to 127.0.0.1. By doing that you effectively makes it impossibel for the add handling software to show any adds!

So what you need to add to do is:

• Open the “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts” file in an editor
• Add this line: 127.0.0.1 track.adform.net

The effect is that any request to “track.adform.net” will be pointing to your own computer – effectively disabling the adds!

The next step – disabling any adds inside webpages (or anywhere else) from a list of add servers.

I have at this time not gone deeper into this step, but a simpel google on “hostnames for add servers” gave me this link: Ad blocking with ad server hostnames and IP addresses. Just choose the “hosts – in host file format”. Here is a direct link to a test I made. Actually the host mentioned at the start of this post is inside the list

Happy add blocking!

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Min Toyota kontra Dynamicweb CMS

Jeg er den lykkelige ejer af en Toyota. Tidligere ejede jeg en Yaris og da den var ca. 2 år gammel modtog jeg et brev om at man havde konstateret at der kunne opstå et problem med bremserne under visse ekstreme omstændigheder. Jeg skulle bare køre ind til et selvvalgt Toyota værksted og de ville rette fejlen uden beregning. Hverken mig eller værkstedet ville blive lastet for noget i den forbindelse. Det er service!

Og nu til Dynamicweb CMS… Jeg oplever jævnligt at der opdages fejl som opstår på grund af fejl i Dynamicweb CMS. Jeg arbejder jo som sagt professionelt hos en Dynamicweb CMS Partner (Bleau A/S) og det er nok noget der i ovenstående situation med Toyota må være at betragte som at arbejde på et “autoriseret Dynamicweb værksted”. Selv om Dynamicweb CMS også selv finder fejl og retter dem uden beregning gennem hot-fixes, så er situationen fra før med fejlen på bilen i en Dynamicweb CMS verden normalt noget anderledes:

1. Brugeren (chaufføren) oplever at noget ikke fungerer i hans “bil” (hans hjemme side)
2. Han kontakter værkstedet
3. Værkstedet må bruge megen tid på at fejlfinde og bevise overfor Dynamicweb CMS support at fejlen er noget der ligger i selve Dynamicweb
4. Dynamicweb CMS anerkender måske at der er en fejl, men det medfører ikke at fejlen rettes. Fejl prioriteres naturligvis af Dynamicweb CMS.
5. Brugeren må så acceptere at der ikke kommer en løsning “sådan lige”

Som professionel konsulent er det svært

• At forklare overfor kunden at det er kundens problem.
• At kunden vil blive faktureret den tid som vi har brugt på at finde fejl i det system vi har anbefalet dem.
• At problemet ikke umiddelbart er blevet løst.
• At en løsning vil koste yderligere tid (=penge).
• At løsningen ikke nødvendigvis giver en forbedring.

Intet er fejlfrit! – men hvem skal nu betale?

Der er mange elementer i ovenstående sammenligning der kan anfægtes og en sammenligning mellem en bil og et CMS system er måske unfair. Det som jeg her forsøger at starte en diskussion om og brokker mig over er at det ikke er rimeligt at kunderne alene skal betale for noget som kan påvises er fejl i det produkt de har købt.

• Jeg ville personligt aldrig betale for reperationen hvis min fladskærm holdte op med at virke indenfor garentiperioden! Det måtte producenten betale for (gennem forhandleren).
• Jeg mener at det er i alles interesse at fejl rettes, så produktet bliver bedre.

Jeg har ikke en færdig model for hvordan man kunne løse problemet med at få dækket omkostninger ved fejl. Der er tre parter som burde dele omkostningen – brugerne, forhandlerne (partnerne) og Dynamicweb CMS. Idag er det kun de to første der betaler! Jeg tror på sigt at hverken brugere eller forhandlere kan leve med den model!

P.s: Ovenstående står for min egen personlige regning.

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How does it work?

Well you need ofcause Google Picasa. Then you need to add some “templates” inside the Picasa program. When you have done that you can get another template to choose from when you use the “Export to HTML…” option. What is generated are a folder containing files needed to show a gallery of the images you have selected.

1 Getting Google Picasa

This is simpel: Download and install it from Google: http://picasa.google.com

2 Adding the template

This post uses templates on: http://www.paulvanroekel.nl/picasa/. You will probertly find many others elsewhere on the net! We will try to use Piecemaker.

1. Download the ZIP file containing the templates for Picasa
2. Extract them to a temp folder
3. Copy the folder named “Piecemaker” to a folder inside your Picasa installation – something like: “C:\Program Files\Google\Picasa3\web\templates”
4. Start Picasa

3 Exporting some images using a template

You simply choose some images in Picasa. Then you find the “Export to HTML..” under the “Folder” menu (my version is in Danish, so it might be called something in that direction). Here you can see how it looks in my Danish Picasa when I choose the “Export to HTML…”:

When you choose the menu item you get a box with some choices. Here you can see which templates are installed inside your Google Picasa’ target=_blank>Google Picasa’ target=_blank>Google Picasa’ target=_blank>Picasa – probertly some basic ones plus Piecemaker which you just “installed” above. Choose Piecemaker and change other settings if you like…

When you have choses the “export” (here: “Eksporter” – in Danish) Google Picasa’ target=_blank>Google Picasa’ target=_blank>Google Picasa’ target=_blank>Picasa will generate the static files inside the folder you can see above as “Mappe”. You do not need to worrie so much about it now, because when exporting is done Picasa will launce the file showing the final result!

Usefull links and information

You can read the instructions on how to add templates to Google Picasa’ target=_blank>Google Picasa’ target=_blank>Google Picasa’ target=_blank>Google Picasa from the FAQ on the website of Paul Van Roekel. Another page on that site has some videoes showing how to… The example above is IFRAMED into this post, which is okay, but not perfect. Also I have changed the index.html file inside the template to include a link to my blog – ofcause you can make other changes… Perhaps one day you can even create your own template!

• Piecemaker download
• www.easykiss123.com – a collection of templates
• Netsi Cycle Template

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The image above may look like a real newspaper image, but no it is not. I wrote the text an using “The Newspaper Clipping Image Generator”. So funny!

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What is truely healthy for you?

To the right you see an example. This interactive visualiazation will show you what is healty for you. For your eyes, skin or other of the selectable uses and types. It is very convincing and inspiring I think.

So go visit it here: http://bit.ly/aGoeom

“When sea levels attack”

Another example of visualazation – giving you something to think about…

I have a dream…

In Denmark we pay a lot of tax, that is not a problem – I would however like to at least get to know what I am paying to! So my dream is to have some cool visualization of what the tax I pay for now could be said to cover. I know how much I earn per month, which lets me calculate a tax per hour/minute number. So what you should imagine is: You calculate how much tax I pay on say a national level. You then divide the national tax “spenditures” and get end up with a calender showing for instance for how many weeks I work and pay for the danish armed forces. Or if I look at the clock now: Who am I paying to right now? So the dream would let any person in Denmark log on to a portal which would give such information to them.

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I love to see the creativity flourish on the internet. Back in the early days when I started using computers I had a Acorn Archimedes computer. An british computer developed by Acorn computers (who by the way developed the StrongARM processor for use in Acorn Archimedes) for use in schools – in the days before PC became the only choice in the area of computers. In those days people all could do some basic programming, and users of BBC computers were blessed with BBC Basic. That program allowed you to do serious, speedy programming in Basic without having to do peeking and poking like on say Commodore 64. Anyway I almost lost track there – sorry – my point is that on that platform many creative small programs were created. In magazines, like Acorn User, people developed “one-liners”. Simple programs which did not fill more than one line! Believe me – it was amazing what could be crammed into one line of BBC Basic code! Flame could have been such a program. Amazing and inspiring!

What you can do is to draw in some funny style using only your mouse and changing the style by adjusting one or more of the many settings. You can save the result – and here are two of my “results”. Let me say that it is not really the result but the experience – the process which is the actually goal in my humble opinion. So go an try it here: http://www.escapemotions.com/experiments/flame/index.html

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I am using some websites and software for croudsourcing myself, and on one of them (Aardvark.com) a question was asked “What will be the next thing after Facebook and microblogging?”.

I had a dialogue about it and ended up promicing that I would post a link to a document done by my colleague Nina Josephine Sjölund.

Here it is:

“WHEN THE CROWD CHANGES BUSINESS
– Leading towards conceptualization and management of changes
created by crowdsourcing”

Happy reading, and thanks Nina for sharing your work.

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First of all I have heard about the upcoming OS “Google Chrome OS” from Google. My philosophy is now that anything from Google is worth a try, so here I go. I then read about on LifeHacker that it should be possibel to run the beta version now, just following some steps described on the article mentioned above. Here is what I did:

1. Download and install the Sun VirtualBox
2. Register as a user on http://gdgt.com
3. Download the Google Chrome OS image from gdgt.com
4. Start the Sun VirtualBox and follow the step-by-step guide “How To Run Chrome OS in VirtualBox”
   (I used 1024 Mb of RAM for the OS)

You will then have a working virtual machine and when you start you need to sign in with you gmail (google) acount! After that it just runs as any other foreign OS running inside VirtualBox! Cool!

And here is a screenshoot of the VirtualBox application with information about the virtual computer running the Google Chrome OS:

How did it feel?
Well, the OS seems okay. I reset it once after there were no response when clicking on the twitter icon. After the reset it worked however with the YouTube site. As you can read in one of the guides mentioned above, at the moment it is only a browser on top of – well – Google Chroms OS…

YouTube as an example.
The connection was slow and I was a litle disappointed that I did not get any sound from the videoes however, but that is probertly some driver issue in the VirtualBox. So I could not enjoy Oxygene part 2 from Jean Micheal Jarre:

- Oh and after I left it playing for a while… It froze… After a reset (again) it how ever came up with this note:

 Conclusion…
Being a beta release it is no supprice the state of this early version of an OS. Judging it from this state would not be fair – but if everything on this OS will be internet based, it is a relative different thing for me. Yes, I have many internet based services, but I still have my own “private” harddisk with applications and data on. Perhaps I am getting old when I do not feel 100% comfortable with the idea of a “totally internet based OS” (if that is what Google Chrome OS is aming at…). Still I will be following it (as it comes from Google! ).

VirtualBox images
After I uploaded this post first time I found a site with images for VirtualBox – here you can download various OS which you can then run on your host computer, nice

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How it works in the application

Starting up Picasa, it is very cool to see how it scans all your images for faces and groups them under the “People” folder. For a start Picasa will find (probertly) a lot of faces which it is up to you to identify. The faces is found using face detection software inside Picasa – and I must say it works impressingly well.

The face detection finds rectangles containing faces – here you see the face of the author of this post. To start with Picasa does not know who this face belongs, that part is your job. So you will have to prepare yourself to put some time into that part. Since it is a Google product I would however not doubt that they stored the information in a wise way (more on this later). I have put some hours into this task now, and “only”  meed to tag 466 unknown faces (!).

This have given me the option to view the 377 photoes containing the face of my daughter as a slide show. I can also make a collage, a movie or perhaps uploade those photoes containing the face of my daughter – nice.

What can this be used for?

I personally love this new feature, perhaps mainly because of the fact that it is a new feature – I love the option to view images from various “angles”: Where they were taken, the date, the people on the photo and other. I love the idea of EXIF data inside the images, so that in 20 years my daughter can see much information about the images – if or should I say when I have forgotten all such information related to images.

Another use… perhaps…
As soon as I saw this feature I got at quick thought:

1. Google lets all its Picasa users identify all their freinds
2. All the face to people relation information is uploaded to a central server
3. Google can now do global people location based on the face to people relation done by the millions of Picasa users

- A bit scary! But ofcause Google is god (LOL) so something like that would never (LOL) happen!

Sharing the added information

The information about the faces on your images can actually be shared on online web albums you have. When you upload images you can see Picasa writing status information “Syncing face tags” and when images has been uploaded and is viewed in the web album you can see boxes around the faces. Both things you can see in the illustration to the right.

As far as I know however you can do nothing with the box that appears when hovering over a face of an image in a web album. In Facebook you get the option to view information about the person in focus, which can be a very strong feature. Ofcause we do not know what Google have in mind, which features it will release later, and you could argue that they are on the right path as they also couples the person data with the information of people in your contacts list.

I am not sure, but it might be so that when viewing photoes on you web album you actually get face detection of other people on photoes – people which you might or might not know.. But I am not sure if this is actually right!

The technical information

From an article “Google Responds to Picasa 3.5 Face Tagging Complaints” I got some information about how the actual data about the rectangles containing faces and the person inside the rectangle was stored. Here is the information:

Face tag data is stored in the Picasa database and also in the .picasa.ini file in the folder where your tagged photo sits. To see the location of the photo on your hard drive and the .ini file where the information is stored, right click the photo and select “Locate on Disk”.

I did that and discovered that it is not too difficult to read, though Google need to document just how to use it, and I look forward to a way to integrate Google contace (face) information with my Facebook albums and their people tagging information! Here are two parts of the “usefull” information inside “.picasa.ini” of one of my photo folders:

IIDLIST_netsi1964_lh=4aaff210a98f8f52
faces=rect64(3c5a182451e53aaa),5ca08dd0d7257594
...
[Contacts]
5ca08dd0d7257594=netsi1964_lh,6b4f68cf8bba7447

“And what is exactly that?!!” you might ask. Well, my guess:

• rect64(…): This is coordinate information for an area containing a face
• “5ca08dd0d7257594”, an identifier for a face
• “5ca08dd0d7257594=netsi1964_lh,6b4f68cf8bba7447” information about the relation from between the face identifier and a contact inside my personal contact list

Given some more documentation it should be possibel to convert the “face found information” to other services like Facebook, but how about the “face pattern”, where is it stored?

It gets smart – intelligent!

When you start to establize the relation between the faces found by Picasa and your existing (or new) contacts/persons Picasa can figure out by its face detection software other occurences of this person – that is: You do not need to approve each and every instance of a face detected by the software. It intelligently figures out by it self, or at least guesses. You will see that Picasa gets better and better to find people you have recognized – and as you do, it will come up with suggestions, which you then can accept or cancel.

All in all I find this face detection feature very cool and love my Picasa even more! I am looking forward to seeing even more cool features added to Picasa..!

Related links
24 Free Picasa Flash and HTML templates to showcase your photos

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This is a first hand blog post which should perhaps just be categorized as a note – so please have that in mind. I have not any conclusion but I found the website so interesting and potential exicting that I decided to write this blog post. Just watch this screen shoot from Firefox – those fonts are not bitmapped! They are true fonts, which I should note loaded so quickly that I did not notice any font replacing taking place!

So go visit this website: http://typekit.com/libraries/full?style=Scriptx

Please note that some parts of the site does not work in MSIE…

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