Are users right in rejecting security advice? is a must read, in my opinion. Make sure to set some time aside to think it through and follow links. Favourite quotes:

We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort*

...costs and benefits do not always directly refer to financial gains or losses... Password rules place the entire burden on the user. ... [who] know that strictly observing the above rules is no guarantee of being safe from …continue.

My reputation on Meta StackOverflow, as of April 2010, is still a meagre 1 in spite of my only 2 contributions to MetaSO having 17 and 18 upvotes respectively. I did not realise the system was weighted to reward self aggrandizement over community service and have been systematically making all contributions community wiki. This is broken, but I'm happy to finally understand why there's been so little movement in my score. It's not even like I care that much about my reputation, I only want enough to be able to participate in the community: up and down vote content, edit so-called community wiki posts, and perhaps close or re-open my questions. …continue.

So what’s the number? Well there is an ongoing legal battle of the Motion Pictures Association of America and the makers of the HD-DVD system against the right of the public to state a simple number. According to them the string “09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0″  contravenes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Many website owners have been given cease and desist orders, and some sites have disappeared entirely from the net.

See Wired's The New HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Hack: What It Might Mean For Us for an in-temporal-context overview  and Wikipedia's AACS encryption key controversy article for the ongoing story.

At work we'd put together an experimental OpenZoom image of a mountain panorama. Time passed, stuff happened, and the original photo montage was lost. So now the project is how do we get the original back from the eight thousand tiles which comprise the zoomified experiment?

Enter dezoomify.rb, "Stitch Zoomify tiles into a single image (Ruby + ImageMagick)" by henrik. Now because I'd used openzoom and not zoomify, and had the tiles on a local network disk instead of an a webserver, I had to majorly bastardize dezoomify to get it to work. The result isn't pretty and is hardcoded to work with this single project, but because it didwork I'm posting it here. Perhaps …continue.

Adapted from http://wiki.winehq.org/picasa, March 2010.

Install wine, sane, cabextraxct.

Download picasa 3.6 (http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa36-setup.exe)

From terminal run command below for configuring wine environment and in resulting dialog go to in the “audio” tab, let wine make its audio configuration, test the audio with the "test" button. When that's done, install picasa. I did not need to install or run winetricks.

env WINEPREFIX="/home/$USERNAME/.winepicasa" winecfg
env WINEPREFIX="/home/$USERNAME/.winepicasa" wine picasa36-setup.exe

Add SmugMug upload button

adapted fromhttp://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=898227

Visit picasa-smugmug-uploader and from the "click here" link (picasa://importbutton/?url=http://www.smugmug.com/photos/picasa/picasa2smugmug.pbz) strip prefix and save it to

\~/.winepicasa/drive_c/Program Files/Google/Picasa3/buttons

\ PS: please let this fellow know too: http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1349390&postcount=36. I would but I'm not allowed to register on dgrin for some reason...

To see which version of debian your hosting account is run under (ref):

cat /etc/debian_version

my first serious contribution to the Ubuntu community: How to: install Picasa 2.7 under 64 bit Ubuntu Fiesty (7.04) It’s kind of sad that it is about a non-free app, but after flailing around with F-Spot and Digikam and gthumb, I’ve succumbed to the siren song of a well polished and easy to use UI (with a big push from my wife who needs to share the computer with me).

—————- 1. Install official google linux picasa version, forcing architecture from 32bit to 64bit

sudo su #(or simply log in as root)\ aptitude update\ aptitude -y install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk linux32\ wget http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/…820-5_i386.deb\ dpkg –force-architecture -i picasa_2.2.2820-5_i386.deb

Start Picasa, let it run …continue.

Our kids received Crayola Kidz Cameras as gifts. On Windows XP Home, under Limited Accounts (can't install programs etc), pictures cannot be imported, failing with a "read file error". Turns out the silly program, with the smooth roll off the tongue name of '913D Camera', requires write permissions to %ProgramFiles%. Under XP Home changing permissions here is difficult. In any case, after some time crawling in through a sticky web I've solved it:

​1. Download and install subinacl from the Windows Resource Kit.

​2. Grant Users group [C]hange permission for "C:\Program Files\913D Camera":

cd /d C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools
subinacl /file "C:\Program Files\913D Camera" /grant=Users=C

Along the way I learned the drivers from Sakar's website (the …continue.

My wife bought me 100 years of National Geographic maps on an 8 CDROM set. The maps are great, but the image viewer it comes with is horrible. If anyone can help me extract the images I would be incredibly grateful. This is a personal project, so I don't have a lot of money for it, but would be willing to trade  services in kind in addition to a small honorarium.

The files have the extension ".@EX", begin with "ExeComp Binary @EX File v2" and appear to have embedded JFIF pyramids in them. I can send a sample to anyone interested in helping me but not post publicly as they …continue.

This is one of the smallest maps from the natgeo set. The compressed attached @xe file is 545kb. Here is zoom level 4, focused on the canadian part of the Yukon River, using the NG map viewer.

Corresponding entry from my reconstructed mapdb (more on that later):

<map>
    <title>Sketch Map of Alaska</title>
    <file>UAK191E1</file>
    <features>
    125Map LegendJuneau, Alas.Sitka, Alas.Pt. BarrowBering StraitYukon RiverYakutat BayAleutian Islands35543351533122342221241311211211</features>
    <size>13 3/8 x 10</size>
</map>

And this is how it looks in the NG app. Obviusly there is another table beside the one I've reconstructed to pull info from. I've not …continue.