Since I apparently don't have anything better to do, I wrote a tutorial on how to quickly get an Asus WL-520gU running as a Linux filer. If you've got nothing better to, check it out here.

Now this is scary...

Back in early 2005, Mike Matas blogged on how to create a life poster, a 20x30 collage of ~100 images. His instructions were specific to iPhoto (which I don't use), so I was forced to come up with my own. I've been using this method to create posters of my son since 2005. Each year I have to remember how I did it the year before, so this is more for my benefit than yours!

The first thing you'll need to do is find 98 landscape photos to use. You'll need to crop every image to a 4:3 aspect ratio. This needs to be exact...it seems that the Photoshop Elements crop tool prefers to work in inches and the rounding leaves things slightly less than precise. I worked around this by cropping each image 4in x 3in and then bulk resizing the images (File->Process Multiple Files) to 2048x1536.

The next step will use the image filenames to order them in the collage, so its worth randomizing them to spice things up. The following Perl script will do just that:

#!/usr/bin/perl

opendir(DIR, ".");
@files = grep { /\.jpg$/i } readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);

foreach my $file (@files) {
 $new = int(rand(10000000)) . ".jpg";
 print "renaming $file to $new\n";
 rename($file, $new) || die "Unable to rename $file to $new: $!\n";
}

Once you have the images aspect normalized and names randomized, you can assemble the collage. Select File->Contact Sheet II and choose the folder containing your images. Select "Pixels" as the units, specify "8000" as the width, and "11955" as the height (the height should be 12000, but that left extra whitespace in the collage...YMMV). Uncheck "Use Auto-Spacing" and set vertical and horizontal spacing to 0. Specify 7 columns and 14 rows. It'll take a few minutes to build, so click OK and walk away.

When you return, the collage should be built. You should probably zoom in and check all the borders to make sure there's no extra whitespace. If there is, you'll need to tweak the height setting in the contact sheet settings and re-run. If you don't like the ordering of the images, just re-run the Perl script until you find a better one. If you've needed to tweak the height setting, be sure to resize to 8000x12000 pixels when you're done.

Once you're satisfied, you can upload your poster to your preferred photo processor. I like Shutterfly, and they offer 20x30 prints for $23. It's worth mentioning that Posterino, a utility built specifically for creating these type of posters, is available for only $25. I'll probably be going that route next year - it's well worth the time saved.

I've been taking pictures in a RAW file format for the past few months. The images are much larger than an equivalent JPEG and they require some post-processing, but I think it's worth it. With the growth in flash sizes (16GB for ~$50?!?!) and software that automatically handles the post-processing, you might as well grab as much data as your camera will give you.

I've also been reading up on high dynamic range imaging (HDR) and picked up a nice little program called Bracketeer that can combine multiple exposures of an image to create a more evenly exposed image. Typically this is done with bracketed exposures by the photographer, but a tripod is needed to allow for a clean merge.

With a RAW image, though, you can play with the exposure details in software after the fact. It's debatable whether the final result is as impressive as a true bracketed exposure (or so I'm told), but the convenience can't be beat! Below is an HDR image created by merging three exposures (-2EV, 0EV, and +2EV) and a little bit of Photoshop action. The difference is subtle (mouse-over for the HDR), and I probably could've obtained the same result by tweaking the RAW, but I think it has a punch that the original lacks.

Inspired by Ryan Hadley's Goodbye Outlook post, I decided to build on what he had done. exchange2ics, a perl re-write with some additional functionality, is a multi-user gateway to allow calendaring clients read-only access to Exchange calendars via ics subscription. It implements caching to reduce server load and does not store any user credentials.

A friend recent pointed me at Phun, a physics engine. It's in the same vein as the Bridge Construction Set (which I'm mentioned previously), but it does so much more. There's a great YouTube video posted that shows what it can do. Check it out!

Verizon now offers a symmetric 20Mbps service in my area. In my testing so far the uplink doesn't quite reach the quoted speed, but it could be my router. It's a beautiful thing!

We recently painted Aaron's room a lime green (thanks Steve!) that works great as a greenscreen in Apple's Photo Booth software. Click the thumbnail to see some of the crazy places Aarons's been.

Adrian Richard LaPorte was born at 10:36pm on February 8, 2008, weighing 6lbs, 11oz. He was a bit early, but mother and son are both doing well!

I've long run virtualized servers using VMware's workstation, and more recently server, product. Something that's always concerned me - not so much in my particular circumstance, but in the general sense, is that the there's no encryption of the VM disk images. Sure, you could encrypt the actual files, but that may not allow on-the-fly decryption and probably won't give you the necessary granular administrative access and scalability. The solution, in my opinion, is to have the virtualization software handle encryption natively. Since none of the available packages does that, the next best solution is for the guest to handle it.

Anyways, I've found a poor man's solution to the problem. Using the free VMware Server and in conjunction with the recently released TrueCrypt 5.0, it's possible to do full disk encryption (FDE) for free inside a VM. I've tested it myself (for all of an hour) and it seems to work great with only a minor performance impact.

I'm running VMware Server 2.0 beta and I'm a little wary of recommending it. There are some bugs regarding interface bridging that took forever to figure out. Basically, you'll need to manually edit

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\
VMware Server\netmap.conf

if you need to anything beyond basic host-only, NAT, or bridged networking. The web interface is absolutely horrible and they've removed the windows client application. Fortunately, the Virtual Infrastructure 2.5 client works great (better than the old client, actually) and comes with the Linux version of VMware Server. Download it here and look for

vmware-server-distrib/lib/hostd/docroot/client/VMware-viclient.exe