www.netsi.dk

For some time now the fustration of the slowness of my PC has bothered me. I even made a dual boot with Windows Vista Professionen and Ubuntu 10.4 as the two “competaters” – but leaving one OS for another is not an easy task. I have however started cleaning up the PC partition, uninstalling software, cleaning up discspace and so on.

I read about “Soluto”

This morning I read about Soluto and watch a video on lifehacker.com. So now I have downloaded and installed the Soluto application and will reboot now to see what it finds out. Shat Soluto does is watch for instance the boot sequence of your PC, and suggestion what can be changed to improve the performance of your PC.

After the first running of Soluto

When I had installed the application I asked me if I wanted to reboot – I did – here are screenshoots of what I experiensed after the program had analyzed my PC:

Conclussion

So I found the application very cool and can reccomend it! It makes it easy to get an overview and act upon the things making your PC slow!

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Vejret herjhemme i Danmark er nu endelig ved at ligne rigtig maj-vejr! I aften tog vi derfor en tur til vores venner på Trøjborg i Århus hvor vi grillede.

Jeg tog nogle billeder – her er de uden kommentarer…

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Google Picasa offers so much more than just viewing images on your PC and exporting them to a Google Webalbum. One of the cool ones is of template based webgallery generation. Exporting images using free templates can give your a twist making them very cool to watch.

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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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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Jeg kommer til at gentage mig selv: Man skal aldrig undervurdere Google og deres evner. Jeg kigger her kort på nogle interessante muligheder med Google Analytics – jeg træder ind i et universe som er avanceret og dog på vanlig Google vis bliver gjort overskueligt gennem deres dygtighed!

Når man først har fået sat tracking koder på ens website så begynder opsamlingen af de data som kommer igennem den trafik som går gennem din hjemmeside. Efter kort tid kan man begynde at kigge på analyser af denne trafik – Hvormange kommer der? Hvorfra kommer de? Hvilke sider kan de lide? og så videre… Hvis man ikke lever af trafikken/de besøgende på ens hjemmeside er det jo ikke livsnødvendigt at have styr på det, men man kan ikke lade være med at blive lidt pirret af sådanne tal!

Avanceret segmentering – hvad er det?

Da jeg idag åbnede min Google Analytics konto faldt mit blik på noget der hedder “avanceret segmentering”. Her er hvad jeg fandt ud af:

Regler bygget på en eller flere filtre – filtre som baserer sig på forskellige parametre. 

Når man opretter Avanceret Segmentering definerer man et segment udfra et filter – en "måling" eller en "dimension". Her en nogle eksempler:

Opsætning af “Ugentlig besøg” segment

Det er kun et udsnit af hvad der findes “filtre”. De kan kombineres med “eller” og “og”. Jeg har sat et segment op som er ret simpelt: Segmentet skal indeholde de besøgende som kommer på mit site med en frekvens på 7 dage. Her er opsætningen fra Google Analytics:

Man trækker simpelthen det filter man ønsker at anvende ind fra venstre side af skærmen. Det er hvad man kan se på det screenshoot der er ovenfor (derfor “fantom” blokken – jeg er ved at dragge “Dage siden sidste besøg” ind). Når det er kommet ind kan man sætte indstillinger for filteret! Jeg har valgt “Dage siden sidste besøg” og sat den til at være “Mindre end” 8 (dage). Tryk Gem segment – og voila! Segmentet kan anvendes!

Anvendelse af segment

Når man har gemt sit segment kræver det egentlig bare at man klikker på det! Så er det straks i brug og man ser resultatet her og nu! Lad mig komme med konkrete tal fra mit eget site:

• Før: Jeg kunne se at jeg i en periode på ca. 1 månede havde 965 besøg. Hvad siger det?

• Efter: Jeg aktiverede mit filter for “ugentlig besøg” og nu havde jeg i samme periode 933 besøg… Men disse besøg  var alle besøgende der kom forbi på ugentlig basis! Er det stamkunder? Eller er jeg bare dårlig til statistik!?

En gradbøjning af løgn!

Alt sammen meget spændende, krævende og “farligt” – for som gamle matematiklærer fra folkeskolen sagde:

“Statistik er en gradbøjning af løgn”

Men sjovt er det – og Google har jo også banket en lille geschæft op omkring Business Intelligense, så helt ved siden af kan det ikke være at investere lidt engergi i at forstå tal!

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Tonight I have installed a new cable modem from the Danish cable tv provider YouSee. I am paying for 50 Mbit down and 4 Mbit up – so I was exicted to run a test. The test is a test which I have tried many times before with my old setup (20/1 Mbit). Then I never got what I paid for (!)  So here are the results:

Bravo YouSee!! You may use this to tease your mother company TDC which could not even deliver 20/1 Mbit.

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Facebook have had it for a long time: the option to tag people in pictures in your photo albums, that is a great part of a social network oriented site like Facebook. Now in the free photo album (and more) software from Google “Picasa 3.6” the process of face dection can be done automatically!

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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Surfing the net is a free ride accross a living planet, offering many inspiring and amazing moments. If I were to pay for my rides on the waves of the internet I would be ruined by now! I love surfing unknown territorie, but some places keep returning value for time spend on viewing or reading the information on them. One such site is SMASHING MAGAZINE – this time I meet Zen Coding! From now on coding HTML or XML will never be the same (slow) process!

The princip of Zen Coding

As I experience Zen Coding it is a fast lane for inserting/handling tag-based elements. For instance XHTML and XML, which both use open (and close) tags. Lets start with this:

ul#menu>li.item$*3>a

Will result in this:

<ul id=”menu”>
   <li class="item1"><a href=""></a></li>
   <li class="item2"><a href=""></a></li>
   <li class="item3"><a href=""></a></li>
</ul>

So that one line of CSS-alike code will be replaced with the 11 lines of HTML markup! It is faster and you get HTML markup which is without typing errors! It is elegant and easy! What more can a programming nerd wish in the month of Christmas?

The rules you can use

It is actually not very difficult, if you are familiar with CSS. You could divide the typer and operators into 3 groups:

That is nice! Many users would be happy for that part alone, but the show has just begun! As it turns out – the Zen Coding is a snippet related idea…

Snippets – it even gets customizable!

In the original Zen Coding idea lies build in extensibility – you can customize it with your own “abbreviations” – in the file: zen_settings.js. That file is “simply” a JSON object defining which snippets/abbreviations should be available to which language. Looking through the JSON object I found many interesting abbreviations, let me just mention a couple:

CSS:  @i   =>   @import url();

XSLT: each =>   <xsl:for-each select="">                </xsl:for-each>

I decided to write my own snippet. It was simpel, no JSON involved, as I use the ZenCoding Visual Studio AddIn for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

Using Zen Coding with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

I use Microsoft Visual Studio as my prefered editor, and there has been made an addIn for it which is called “ZenCoding Visual Studio AddIn”. It is easy to install and to set it up is not so hard. The only thing you need to do is to download, run and goto the “Tools > Options” and locate the “Environment > Keyboard”:

Here is where you define which keypresses should invoke which command. ZenCoding Visula Studio AddInn offers two commands, and you find them by putting focus to the “Show commands containing” and enter “zen” (see above).

Select the “ZenCoding.VisualStudio.ZenCodingAddInn.Expand” and put focus to the “Press shorcut keys”. Not you simply press the keys which you wish to use as shortcut to invoke the “Expand” command! I choose “[Ctlr]+[Shift]+[Alt]+,” – pic (almost) any shortcut you like. When you are done, press OK – and voila, you can start Zen Coding!

Adding your own snippet when using ZenCoding Visual Studio AddIn

One of the nice things with the ZenCoding AddIn is the way it handles adding your own snippets/abbreviations:

Again you open the “Tools > Options”, locate at the bottom “ZenCoding” options. Here you simply select Snippets and click New…. From there on it is a simpel matter of selecting Category, Abbreviation and of cause: Enter the value of the expanded abbreviation!

I often need to insert a remark that here I have messed up thing – well, I might have! So I decided to create such one – a remark. A comment you might also call it appears in two different ways, so I defined it in two forms – one for HTML and one for CSS. Nice and easy!

Conclusion

It is not everyday that something like Zen Coding appears! Looking at the thoughts behind it and the way it works it is a brilliant idea. This post have focused on giving you a quick start into Zen Coding – so I have not spend so much time giving credit to the people behind the idea (Sergey Chikuyonok), behind the article which made me investigate this concept (SMASHING MAGAZINE) or the man who have actually written the AddIn for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (Einar Egilsson). Let me therefor end by thanking them all! A great job all of you!!

Related articles/links:

• Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code
• DEMO: Try out Zen Coding online
• ZenCoding Visual Studio AddIn
• zen_settings.js – the JSON object which containes the abbreviations defined
• fluentzen – a jQuery plugIn allowing you to create DOM element using Zen Coding abbreviations.

  For instance: $(‘body’).zen(‘table>tr*5>td*2′).css(‘border’,'1px solid red’).append(‘#myDiv’);

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Så ser det ud til at vi skal have 4 år mere her i Århus med Nicolai Wammen – tillykke Nicolai! Du fik ikke min stemme men du får her mine bedste ønsker, godt gået og her har du så en lille tegning!

Billedet er tegnet i Xara Extreme Pro 5 udfra et billede på DR’s hjemmeside på valgaftenen.

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