Web review

As a web developer I work everyday with FTP to transfer and update files on several web servers. The process is simple but boring: I’ve to download a page on my hard drive, edit it and then upload it back on the remote machine to test my modifications. These activities must be done with an FTP client like FileZilla, SmartFTP, WS_FTP…

Microsoft Windows can’t mount FTP servers on the local filesystem as network folders (you can do it only with computers that are connected in your local network), so it’s impossible to work with a local application (PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, Notepad++…) loading and saving documents directly on the remote server.

There is some software that is able to add this functionality to Microsoft Operating System, like the old Novell NetDrive, that is not freeware but is considered as abandonware by the same software house. Now Novell suggests to use a newer product like WebDrive, but it’s unfortunately a commercial software.

I Googled for a while and finally I found a solution.

leggi tutto »

Auslogics Disk Defrag is a free defragmentation tool. It seems to work very well on Windows systems, and several forums on the Internet confirm its efficiency.

Its free version is the only available (this is not a “lite” implementation of a more featured application) and it offers a nice interface and great defragmentation speed, compared to the defrag tool that is provided with Windows XP.

It worths a try

http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag

When you take a picture of a group of persons, it’s hard to have everybody with open eyes, with a natural face expression, with nothing to be fixed.
Of course you can take some pics and then “merge” them with an application like Photoshop, but you have also a quicker alternative: MSR Group Shot, from Microsoft.

This is little and free software can import two or more pictures of a same subject, and then merge them using only the parts that the user prefers.

Let’s see a simple example. I have these two photos I took with my girlfriend:

… what about we want to wear same transparent glasses? Well, we import the two files in Group Shot and we select her eyes in the first pic and my eyes in the second:

The application understand that we want to “swap faces”, so after some seconds we can click on “View Composite” to get the final image:

http://research.microsoft.com/projects/GroupShot/

[Versione Italiana QUI]

Update (June, 17th 2009): this project has been discontinued.

InFetch is a little application that I developed.
I needed to get the full List of Topics inside a section of a Forum, based on Invision Power Board: it was divided in 160 pages, and I didn’t want to merely browse them and to copy’n'paste threads in Word, so I created this tool.

User have only to go to the first page of a section in an Invision Forum with its browser, and to copy the URL of the address bar (something like “addressofyourforum.com/index.php?showforum=123″).

Then open InFetch, paste the address into the “URL” field and click on “InFetch it!”: it will browse automatically every page of the section and it will create an ordered list with all topics and their links.

This is probably not a news for a lot of people, but it’s surely a good tip for someone

On Mess.be one of the most appreciated patches for MSN Messenger (that since some time has a new name: “Windows Live Messenger”) is spreaded: who applies it to the famous application can activate many addictional features, like Messenger Plus! does, but the most important is the possibility to turn off the banners and the advertising texts of which Microsoft’s Messenger is nearly full.

In addiction, this patch can also deactivate other ugly functions, like the texts that invite to buy a webcam (they are visible if a webcam isn’t connected to the pa, but sometimes I see them also if I HAVE IT… this is ironic!), or the buttons to download animoticons or other paying stuff.

www.mess.be

1 – Are you tired of playing videogames at low screen refresh on your old CRT monitor? Me too…
Usually games runs at a 60Hz refresh mode, (I think) to be ”safe” for older monitors, and it’s often impossible to configure them to run at higher refresh rates. Reforce solves this problem, allowing you to exclude screen modes that you don’t want (for example, 1024×760 @60Hz), to leave on only more confortable modes (1024×768 @85Hz etc…).
Of course, it’s useless for LCD monitors, because they use a different system that haven’t a real refresh (but a “response time”) and so they don’t suffer of this problem.

2 – Looking for Reforce, I found also a little trick to activate CoolBits, some addictional features into the Control Panel of Nvidia Graphic Cards: after you installed the latest version of Nvidia Graphic Drivers, open Regedit (Start -> Execute… -> REGEDIT) and go to this path:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak]
now create a new DWORD value and name it CoolBits, then edit it and assign value 3 (exadecimal).
A new section of Nvidia parameters will be available. Search for it into:
Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > (The tab with the name of your Nvidia Card) > Clock Frequency Settings (or something like that)

You will have the possibility to manually set the frequency of your Graphic Card. Of course, USE IT CAREFULLY, because this setting may damage your hardware.

I spent some time searching for the “Puma Pace 2006” font on the Internet. It’s the custom font used by Puma for players’ t-shirts at Germany FIFA World Cup.
It seems to be impossible to find it: it wasn’t released and it’s not for sale.

The only decent source I found was this little GIF with a sample of the font. So I thought to try to re-create the original font, starting from it. It was a good chanche to try a couple of font creating applications.

So, I found FontCreator, that is a good app (it’s not free, but a trial version is available) and I vectorialized the characters I took from the above GIF. Unfortunately, only 16 of them (all in lower-case) were available, so the TTF file I obtained is very incomplete (ok it’s also bad because I didn’t a precise work… ), but it’s sufficient to write my name like it could be on a soccer t-shirt

I also found that there’s an another free font, Electrotome that is similar to Puma Pace 2006. It could be interesting to continue my work and to do a “mashup” of the two fonts (and maybe finding some other original characters from anywhere), to get a complete set of an “unofficial” Puma Pace 2006 font

Is there anyone that has time to do it?

tabbyFile is a small Windows Explorer remplacement.
This free utility stays in the systray, ready to be double-clicked in any moment. tabbyFile has no functions at all, only a useful bookmark system, to go quickly to your favourite folders, and the possibility to open different directories in different tabs, to compare or to copy/paste elements without having to manage several windows.

http://tabbyware.com/node/10

I’m back from lessons of Dr. Antonio Camurri, professor at the university I attend. He teaches “Image Processing” to us, and he presented his software, a free real-time audio/video processor, that can elaborate data from several sources (AVI or cameras, also from normal Webcams and/or PC microphones).

EyesWeb (this is the name of the software) works like Microsoft GraphEdit, the famous tool to convert multimedia files using directshow filters, throught a visual blocks interface.

The software is very interesting: it allows to create realtime effects also on live images from a simple PC webcam, adding and connecting the various blocks that are included in the base installation. Developers can also write new blocks (using C++ language).

The main advantage of this piece of software is, I think, its great speed, that doesn’t require a NASA PC to create good effects.

An example:

let’s drag the “FrameGrabber” block from the left column (Imaging > Input) to the “stage” on the right. Then double click it and choose your webcam from “Device” field.

Now drag also the “Display” block from the “Output” folder and place it near FrameGrabber; click on the little rectangle (the pin) on the perimeter of FrameGrabber block and then on that one of Display block, to connect them, like the figure.

Now we’ve a simple… viewer of our webcam To check if it works, press ALT+K on the keyboard. You should see live images from your webcam (Eyesweb will ask you to save your project, the ”patch”. Feel free to save it or just to click on cancel, anyway it’s better to save it, so it will stop to ask you again). When you’re ok, press ALT-H to stop it.

Let’s do something interesting: click on the link between FrameGrabber and Display and press DEL on the keyboard, to delete it.
Now drag 3 copies of “ExtractChannel” (Imaging > Operations, in the block browser) and connect FrameGrabber to them, like I did on the left.
Double-click on each of them and choose rispectively Channel 1, 2, 3 for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd block. So we are separating Red, Green and Blue channels of our source.

We want now to set a different delay for each of the 3 channels: drag 3 copies of the “Queue” block (from the “Generic” folder), and connect each of them with each of the ExtractChannel blocks.

Open properties of each Queue block and set a different delay (called “Lenght“) for each of them. My choice was to set them rispectively to 5, 10 and 15.

Finally, we have to recompose the image and to reactivate the display: drag one “ComposeChannels” block (Imaging > Operations), connect the 3 pins of Queue blocks to it, and it to the display block:

Our Graph is complete. Press on ALT+K to see it in action!

Please take note that I didn’t understand how to make last EyesWeb version (4.0.2.0) work. This little introduction is based on version 3.3.0.

http://www.eyesweb.org

or the “spots”, since Windows XP. These are the chars that the operating system replaces on the screen, when we write a password, to avoid the risk that someone could read it.
But what it happens if we don’t remember our password? The PC “remember” it, because we chose to store it, but what we can do if this data is deleted, or if we have to use it on another computer?

Revelation tells us what is under these masked passwords, restoring the readabilty.

Make attentin, because this little application is recognized as spyware by some security software. This because, of course, it can be a risk for our personal data, if it is left installed on a PC used by other persons.

http://www.snadboy.com