Roiy Zysman

Guest Post on the ISABlog - Keeping High Availability with Forefront TMG’s ISP Redundancy Feature

zroiy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:28:00 GMT

Keeping High Availability with Forefront TMG’s ISP Redundancy Feature..

Deepzoom with Silverlight 2.0 First Hands Example

zroiy — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:40:06 GMT

I was looking for an interesting starting point to getting my hands dirty with Silverlight. Deepzoom caught my attention. It is basically a Silverlight component that let's you zoom in and out into an image. While there are some examples out there that utilize and showcase it, most of them are pretty basic and not that practical. While back I wrote a small app that composes a target image mosaic out of smaller images, but back than , I had to use Zoomify to provide a zoom in and zoom out interface. Now with Deepzoom, I wanted to check it out.

So here is the final result, it is basically an image broken down to pixel size images that are matched to images that serve as the tiles of the original image. Now that we have the matching tiles, we can simply compose the original image. The only challenging is point here is to break the new image into Deepzoom format. For that I used this good codeproject published project. Because the end result is almost 200MB , I've decided to share a video showcasing a silverlight ASP.Net embedded page.

What is shown here is the Deepzoom running in an IE7 window with the composed mosaic image.

It would be cool to have this online application that let's you upload images and build the last uploaded image from all of the previously loaded images.
I'll share more technical information on this on later posts , so stay tuned.

BTW, here is a cool Michael Phelps mosaic, hand made. It would be nice to have a computer software to do this.

Halloween Fun - Embedding Ghosts Watermark in images with C#

zroiy — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 10:25:07 GMT

For those of you who are going to celebrate Halloween on the 31st , here is a nice cool thing to do with C# and System.Drawing library.
In this post I'll show you how to use C# to embed a ghost image with a background image.

First we'll pick out the ingredients:
A ghost image

And for background I've picked a times square shot taken by barcoder96

ok, now that we have these, let's start getting our hands code dirty.
open up a console project , and add the System.Drawing reference by adding a using System.Drawing;
Next, type in the following code

Image backImg = Image.FromFile("e:/pictures/times.jpg");

Image ghostImg = Image.FromFile("e:/pictures/ghost.png");

Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(backImg);

g.DrawImage(ghostImg, backImg.Width/2, 10);

backImg.Save("e:/pictures/halloween.jpg");

What's happening here is that we basically load up our background image and foreground image, we acquire a graphics object from the background image, and use it to paint over the foreground image. Looks simple, right ? here is the result

But to make it more ghost realistic (there's an oxymoron for you), we'll make the ghost more transparent

for that, I'm using an image color manipulation trick I first saw here (and there's also a good one here)
The Matrix33 value below sets the level of opacity or transparency. 0 is full transparency , 1 is no transparency at all.
The matrix multiply all of the colors with the new opacity value which "fades" out the colors and thus gives it the requires transparency.

Bitmap transparentGhost = new Bitmap(ghostImg.Width, ghostImg.Height);
Graphics transGraphics = Graphics.FromImage(transparentGhost);
ColorMatrix tranMatrix = new ColorMatrix();
tranMatrix.Matrix33 = 0.25F; //this is the transparency value, tweak this to fine tuned results.

ImageAttributes transparentAtt = new ImageAttributes();
transparentAtt.SetColorMatrix(tranMatrix, ColorMatrixFlag.Default, ColorAdjustType.Bitmap);
transGraphics.DrawImage(ghostImg, new Rectangle(0, 0, transparentGhost.Width, transparentGhost.Height), 0, 0, transparentGhost.Width, transparentGhost.Height, GraphicsUnit.Pixel, transparentAtt);
transGraphics.Dispose();

g.DrawImage(transparentGhost, backImg.Width / 2, 10);
backImg.Save("e:/pictures/halloween2.jpg");

Which gets us to this better version

And if you iterate it some more , and give it some skewing you can get the following result.

For achieving this , you can use the YAEL C# image manipulation library which provides a watermark image filter

Or trying this Halloween Ghosts Image filter online at http://www.imgtoys.com

Tagging Images with GPS coordinates. Now the lightweight app.

zroiy — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:38:00 GMT

In one of my previous posts I showed how to embed GPS coordinates to jpeg images using C#. It is mainly useful if you're using a maps+pictures services such as panoramio.com or everytrail.com or any other kind of mapping and pictures solutions.
My GPS buddy is a nifty HOLUX M-241 GPS among the regular location, speed, direction, time it can also records tracks, and on top of that it's rather cheap.

But unfortunately its image GPS coordinates embedding feature doesn't work so well.

So here is a little app to solve do that , it is basically an image GPS coordinates tagging solution. And it can be used with any other GPS that tracks data and can export the data as KML files.

Here are the 3 simple steps to use it (Please note that this application is just on its Beta stage, it doesn't come with any warranty, so use at your own risk)

GPS and Camera Time Sync - Before the shooting session starts, make sure your camera time is synced with your GPS time - "synchronize your watch gentlemen". This is critical to couple between the GPS sample and the appropriate picture that was taken at that point. Also make sure your GPS sample rate is as frequent as can be (I for example, take a waypoint record every second)
Shoot - Go out and take some pictures. Download your pictures to a folder, and export your waypoints as a KML file (hopefully this app would support more formats in the future)
Geotag - Run the application, show it where the pictures folder and KML file are, hit the GO button.

And that's basically it, now your photos are tagged with their relevant GPS location. Once you upload them to any of the services listed above , they would be automatically placed on the map.

Since this is a technology blog, I feel obligated to share a few words on the technology. This solution is actually being deployed with the ClickOnce technology. Here is a quote of what it is from MSDN
"ClickOnce is a deployment technology that allows you to create self-updating Windows-based applications that can be installed and run with minimal user interaction. ClickOnce deployment overcomes three major issues inherent in deployment..."

One of the advantages of this feature that fits like a glove to this solution is that it comes prebuilt with an update check mechanism (as seen in the image above). You can configure it to look for newer versions each time the application starts, and if there is , it automatically download and installs it on the client machine. Developing this functionality from scratch can be really tedious. If you're into releasing small foot print, specific focus solutions, I strongly recommend reading more about it. It's not that it is perfect, ClickOnce has it's own issues, but for most cases (especially for these kinds of micro solutions) it will be enough to take the overhead of working on an additional setup feature.

Using Live Maps to Show Beijing 2008 Medals Distribution by Contry

zroiy — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:36:00 GMT

I've was looking for an interesting project to get my hands on live maps API. Just to get the hang of developing cool application on top of Live maps.

I've started this Olympics Medal Count + Community Contributed Data + Live Maps Mashup

And It's almost complete.

Take a look at this Beijing 2008 Medals Count on Live Maps

If you want to help complete the picture, make your contribution to this wiki page

Want to get a grip on the Live Earth SDK as well, here is your starting point [Live Earth SDK]

Olympics Medal Count + Community Contributed Data + Live Maps Mashup

zroiy — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:07:22 GMT

This is still work in progress , since this countries list is not completed yet. But I'd thought I'd share the work so far.

Live maps with its extendible API/SDK allows you to do cool things. Here is one, taking the countries 2008 Olympic games medal counts, asking the community to help with getting countries coordinates, and mashing it all up with javascript to create a cool representation of nations of the worlds map with their Beijing 2008 medals count.

Here is what's ready so far.

Beijing 2008 Medals Count on Live Maps

Want to help to complete the picture, add your country coordinates to this wikipedia countries gps coordinates page

No fancy ASP.Net stuff was used to build this, just a bunch of ye-olde-regex magic procedures.

Engineering Failures, Bad Engineering or No Engineering at all

zroiy — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:45:51 GMT

Here are a few examples that you can probably relate to as an analogy to your latest Software Development Project

Missing Windows Authentication provider For IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008

zroiy — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:43:04 GMT

In case your Windows Server 2008 machine doesn't include a windows authentication scheme (see image below), do the following

Open up Server Manager (one way to do this is by right clicking the computer node from within the start menu and choosing Manage). Expend the Roles node. Right click the Web Server (IIS) and choose Add Role Services. You'll get the following wizard, just scroll down a bit and check Windows Authentication under the security node.

If you've done everything right , you should also get the following option in IIS authentication pane

Here is how to do this on Vista
Adding Windows Authentication provider into IIS 7 on Vista

Mapping the world - Community Style.

zroiy — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:17:38 GMT

I had an idea for a cool mashup that included a map , countries coordinates and another secret ingredient. But to my surprise, I couldn't find a free Country to gps coordinates Database. which means that even though Columbus discovered America more than 5 centuries ago there are still some uncharted lands in the virtual world.

Sure, there are some interesting GPS information Databases about Airports , Hotels and other special interests but I just couldn't find a very basic type of I'll give you the country name and I'll get a GPS coordinates (somewhere in the middle of the country) in return.

So I've started this wikipedia page, it is basically just a list of countries and an empty place to enter a longitude, latitude coordinates.

How can you help you ask ? One simple way is to go to any maps services such as Google maps or Live's maps service, zoom in to a center location of your favorite country, extract the GPS coordinates of that point and paste them in the wikipedia page for all to use freely .

Here is a very short tutorial on how to extract the coordinates from Google maps , the same similar technic can be used for Live's maps service as well

3 states are already tagged with their coordinates, just 254 to go !
let's see how long it takes for the whole list to get completely filled with would countries coordinates.

GPS Coordinates in JPEG C# Example - Looks like there is a western side to the world as well

zroiy — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:09:26 GMT

In one of my previous posts , I provided an example of embedding GPS coordinates into a JPEG image. I had a bug!. It only took care of the eastern side of the world.
A comment by John about not working with negative longitude numbers identified the issue, thanks John!.
Well, watching the Olympics , and the concept of living in a global village have motivated me to sit down and fix my code so all of you people on the left side of the prime meridian can embed you Geo location in your Jpegs as well.

JPEG GPS Coordinates GeoTag Exif Example

Beijing 2008 medals count

zroiy — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:29:07 GMT

China wants to be in first place in the total medals count in the 2008 games.
Here are three easy ways to see if the can stand up their word.

Search Google for Beijing 2008. The first entry would be a simple and clean table with the result.
Check out this official Beijing 2008 results page.
Embed this NBC medal count widget in your website.

For other Beijing 2008 related info, check my pervious post

Beijing 2008 IT

zroiy — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:09:04 GMT

I hope the title of this post is not too much misleading, by IT I don't mean to talk about which brand of CPUs is being used to host the official games website, or which Imaging technology is being used by which vendor. By IT I mean that I need and want to see the Olympic games Information ,now show me which Technology I can use to get it .
Well there is of course the official Beijing and Olympics games sites. But since according to my world time zone a lot of the events would take place when I sleep or when I'm at work so watching it on a plain TV wouldn't always be an option. With RSS I can get interesting almost real time results streamlined into my favorite RSS reader. Now the only problem is to actually find the RSS feeds. The official Beijing web site has a 13 category RSS page which was actually a bit hard to find (there is a small RSS link at the bottom of the main page). For me the most interesting one is Sports News: News on the Games' sport events , only trouble is that it only includes a segment of the first sentence. You have to actually press the link to read the full detail.

There are also some more RSS feeds :

Eurosport's - Which currently looks a bit lame (only one post)
MSN/ Fox sports
Yahoo's

But the king of them all RSS feeds has got to be NBC's

It's the king because it lets you customize your RSS feeds according to nation or sport events or other relevant criteria. Here is for example the rss feed for just the Sailing events or Judo events

NBC also offers a set of gadgets that can be embedded in your favorite Web 2.0 social network ,or on your desk as a vista widget or in your blog (if your reading this from the actual web site , check out the results and schedules widget on the right pane)
I highly recommend checking it out. more info here

So what can I also get on other media fronts ? you would expect that IPTV would be huge by now , getting a boost by this global event. Well , the situation here is not that great.
Here are some IPTV options:

Youtube's dedicated channel is a bit ironic , it only serves countries where the IOC failed to sell exclusive rights which means , in my guess , that these are countries that the economic situation is not that good , which also means that a broadband connection needed to watch YouTube's streams is not that common ;-(

There are also some podcasts and videocasts
http://www.olympic.org/uk/news/podcast/podcast_vodcast_help_uk.asp

And your occasional on location video blogs

And there are also some Media you should probably avoid. here is a toolbar designed for the Olympics [ttp://2008summergames.ourtoolbar.com] (add a prefix h to this url) http://www.trustedsource.org/en/feedback/url say they are a shareware legit site, yet I would double check the end user and setup to understand what's really in there that they are installing.

I just wish that there was a cool results screen saver.

Good luck to all of the athletes!!

Making your site more RSS browsers friendly

zroiy — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:14:22 GMT

Both IE7 and Firefox 3 are embedded RSS on page aware, meaning that in order to improve user usability they provide a one click RSS subscribe button.
Here is how it looks like :

IE7 when enabled (from cnn.com)
Firfox enabled
IE7 not enabled (from bbc.com)
Firefox not enabled

Now you ask , what makes these nice buttons to be enabled or disabled. It's pretty simple, it is basically just a <link> directive placed within the <head><head/> section of the page.

here is a simple example

Hacking 101

zroiy — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:17:25 GMT

Not so much software related , but something to keep in mind when designing user interfaces aimed for security purposes.

From the following picture, guess which buttons are being used for typing in the parking lot gate code ...

BTW, this is a real life parking lot code key..

An informative GeoTagging Getting-started Article

zroiy — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:58:00 GMT

A friend at work , sent me this well documented and informative article on geotagging.
He got the feeling I was hooked onto this technology after I nagged him about whether his Nokia N95 can take pictures with embedded GPS coordinates (No it can't if you're asking) as a research for my Embedding GPS coordinates and other info in JPEG images with C# post.
I recommend reading it , especially if you're into digital photography or into technologies mesh ups.

Roiy