Photographer’s Tips #4 – Great Photoshop Book

photoshopcs2
I’ve been reading a great book called “The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers” and I’ve picked up a number of useful tips and tricks. One great one that I thought I’d share is how to add more canvas area using the crop tool. The author of the book Scott Kelby goes on to explain how to do this. When you have the image open that you want to add canvas area to hit the F key to reveal the grey desktop area around your image. Hit D to set your background color to the default of white. Click on the crop tool and create a crop selection within the image. The size and shape of it does not matter much at this point. Once you have your crop selection area you can then resize the selection outside of the borders of your image to include the area you want to add. Hit enter and the new white canvas area will be added to your image. Pretty cool huh? Thanks to Scott Kelby for his excellent book. There are many many more tips and tricks in his book. Even after using Photoshop for several years I’ve learned numerous new things to help with post processing.

Headed to Chicago

Chicago

I’m sitting in an airport in Springfield, Missouri waiting to board a flight to Chicago. Brandon and I are headed to the windy city for a couple of days. You can count on lots of shots in the coming weeks, assuming I get some good stuff! See ya in a coupe of days.

Reset Pixelpost password

passwordResetSomething happened to one of my Pixelpost installations making my password not work. No problem, I figured I’ll just do the forgot password thing and it should reset my password. Except that didn’t work, I keep getting a error message that says “Database error: Updating the new password failed.” Hmmmm….what now. I remember reading somewhere that if you lose your password you are pretty much hosed.

So I went to the Pixelpost forums and poked around. Joey from team Pixelpost had left this SQL command for someone else who was having a problem with their password:

UPDATE pixelpost_config SET `password`=MD5(‘*****’)

Change the asterix to your desired new password. You’ll need to run this from within something like phpMyAdmin where you can run SQL commands. Once I did this I was able to get in and work. The reset password function still doesn’t work, but it’s no big deal since I can do it this way.

Must read book – Who controls the internet: Illusions of a borderless world

ControlI ran into the library to drop off some stuff my kids had checked out. If you have kids the library should be in the top 10 list of places to frequent for a number of reasons. First of all, kids are like sponges that soak up information and learning and you should be constantly feeding that habit and books are not cheap. It’s summer time and instead of letting your kid zone out and play video games all day long it’s better to channel some of that energy into learning. I’m not talking about rigorous school, but at least something to keep those brain cells growing. The library offers a constant stream of this for free. Secondly, at least our library, has regular activities and sessions to entertain kids. Unless you drop your kids off at daycare staying home with them all day long can be a challenge to give them something useful to do. It can also get expensive. Ok, enough of my preaching about using the public library, back to a book I picked up at the library.

I was browsing the new non-fiction section and saw this book called “Who controls the internet: Illusions of a borderless world.” The geek in me was immediately interested so I grabbed it. It’s very good reading and it raises some interesting discussions about the internet and who is really in control of it.

Although the internet has it’s beginnings tracing back to the late sixties it really began it’s widespread growth and development in the early 80’s. When it really took off from an end user standpoint was in the 90’s with the World Wide Web (which is not the same as the internet).

When the telegraph was invented and began to be used for long distance communications it was said that it would break down barriers and lead to borderless nations. That didn’t really happen and the same has been said with the popularity and reach of the internet. This book goes in and examines this question of control and the idea that the internet is a borderless self governing entity.

In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet’s challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It’s a book about the fate of one idea–that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google’s struggles with the French government and Yahoo’s capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay’s struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them.

I have really enjoyed reading this book and for me it’s been one of those that I don’t hardly want to put down.

Delegate control to disable/enable user accounts

DelegateI have a user I want to be able to disable or enable other domain user accounts without giving that user to much permissions. I spent some time Googling and on Microsoft’s support site and couldn’t find a specific permission that allowed just that. I found one that allows you to delegate the ability to unlock a user account. After playing with this for a couple of hours I grew to appreciate the complexity and power Active Directory gives an administrator over a domain. What I finally ended up using was a permission that allows for the user to enable/disable as well as change anything in the account options window on the Account tab. A bit more than I wanted to give, but not a problem in my case.

Right-click your domain and select delegate control. The delegate control wizard starts, click next to begin. Next select the users or groups that you want to delegate the responsibility to. In my case I have a group called “DisableEnableUsers” that I want to give the ability to disable/enable user accounts.

Next select create custom task to delegate radio button and hit next. On the “Delegate control of:” dialog select “Only the following objects” and scroll down to “User Objects” hit next. Put a check in the “General” box on the “Show these permissions:” window. Scroll down to the “Read and Write Account Restrictions.” Hit next and finish.

Now the users and or groups you delegated control to “Read and Write Account Restrictions” will be able to disable or enable user accounts.

Cleanly shrink transaction log on a SQL Server database

SQL ServerSQLServerOne of our database’s transaction log had grown to over 5gig. Considering the actual size of the database itself and the amount of activity this is huge. Plus it slows down our back-ups and just generally bugs me.

So, first I’ll tell you how not to try and clean it up. Don’t goto the Enterprise manager and right click on the database and select “Take Offline.” The next thing you don’t want to do is go and delete the transaction log file now that the database is offline. This sounds like a good idea and yet it’s not. When you goto bring the database back online it will kick and scream and throw fits and generally not work. Plus if the transaction log is large like say 5gig, it’s too big to send to the recycle bin and it gets permanently deleted.

The way you should shrink the size of the transaction logs is this:
a) Detach the database using sp_detach_db procedure (before that ensure no processes are using the database files.) Open query analyzer and type: “sp_detach_db ‘DB Name'” then execute query.
b) Delete the log file. (I feel more safe simply renaming it before deleting it.)
c) Attach the database again using sp_attach_db procedure.
This will tell the database server that the database was closed cleanly and it will proceed to create a new transaction log.

Update 10/03/06: We’ve since switched to using the following command to shrink our transaction log:

backup log “databasename” with Truncate_only
DBCC SHRINKFILE (‘databasename_log’,truncateonly)

It’s been pointed out to us that detaching the database is not a safe way to shrink your transaction log. We stand corrected! :)

Add record count to Frontpage Database Results

Frontpage DRWI’m not a huge Frontpage fan for the most part, but when it comes to creating ASP pages with database results it does do a good job. There are some things that it lacks, but overall you can get a nicely formatted report that is easily distributable through an intranet.

One of the things I had thought when working on past ASP pages is the lack of a record count. After some poking around the newsgroups (gotta love Usenet!) I found some pieces of code that I finally tweaked and experimented with enough to add a record count to an ASP page containing Frontpage Database Results.

The main piece that generates the count is this:

Now, the placement of this little bit of code is key. You need to switch to code or split view so you can past this into the actual HTML. It needs to be within the database results region. If you place it in certain places on the page, Frontpage, being the clever helper, will simply remove it. If you place it to high in the results region you will get a count but it will be off by one. The reason for this is because it’ll start with 0 as the first record. So, it really needs to be at the end of the results region.

After playing around a bit I found it works best just below the table holding the database results. I added the following:

 
Records: < %=fp_iCount%>

DBEnd

Remove Nero Scout from Windows Explorer

Nero ScoutI’ve used Nero almost exclusively for burning for several years now. I recently purchased the latest version and installed the whole thing. It now comes with a bunch of applications 90% of which I care nothing about. One new annoyance, in my opinion, is something called Nero Scout.

Truthfully I don’t even know what it is. It looked like something for finding and cataloging media files. I have my ways and methods and don’t need a new tool for this. It puts an annoying icon in my Windows Explorer that I don’t want there. I’m very particular about my computers and I don’t want anything extra floating around anywhere. So I figured it must have been installed with all the extra junk and it must go away if I remove all of the Nero applications except the actual burning part. Wrong. It was still there after un-installing all the rest. So after some poking around the web I found the following commands to remove the little pest. Goto Start/Run and execute one of these. It simply un-registers the dll associated with Nero Scout.

Remove Nero Scout:
regsvr32 /u “%commonprogramfiles%\Ahead\Lib\MediaLibraryNSE.dll”

Put it back:
regsvr32 “%commonprogramfiles%\Ahead\Lib\MediaLibraryNSE.dll”

Thanks to DjLizard.net for the info

Left behind

Left behind

I went for a drive looking for something to shoot and saw this old abandoned building. I walked around it and though there were many broken windows there was no easy way in. So I settled for shooting through a couple of the broken windows. I wanted so badly to go in and wander around, but I’d either have to jump a barbed wire fence or break more windows and I didn’t figure that was a good idea.

Categories

Archives