I give you Jess Coburn, Heavy Weight Boxing Championship fighter… 6′ 6″ and 255lbs of pure ripped muscle.. On the XBOX 360 anyway…

EA Sports has a new video game coming out called FaceBreaker. What’s innovative about this game is that it’s going to allow you to upload your own faces and then build your own boxer.  I know you’re thinking:  “Great, I’ll get to put my ex-wife’s face and box her”.  Well yes you will!  Or you can upload McCain and Obama and let them slug it out old school style.

Anyway, what’s interesting is that the game developers are allowing you to upload your own images through their social networking website www.easportsworld.com, then the video game downloads the pictures, allows you to select some key points and then renders your face based on those points you selected.  I find it interesting for several reasons:

1. They’re making you register for a social networking site and introducing you to other games they have there and they’re trying to build an online community site ala facebook/myspace for gamers around their games. Very clever.
2. They’re using a sort of web service integration with the game bringing a new level of interactivity to the game. In fact, NBA Live 09 is doing something similar, throughout the season it will update the game’s players and stats from downloaded web content and even let you replay last night’s games.
3. We get to see the processing power of the XBOX 360 as it appears it’s rendering it directly on your XBOX and then uploading your created character. (it’s slow btw)
4. C’mon just the fact you get to see yourself in a game is pretty awesome. 

I think this is the next new twist we’ll begin seeing in video games. People are bored with playing as master chief and now they want to see themselves in the game.

Finally, here’s a close up of my face. When it renders your character it’s bald and hairless. So I added the hair and gave myself a bit of a 5 o’clock shadow as I hadn’t shaved that day.

Microsoft released another update to Deep Zoom Composer on August 3rd. The latest build of Deep Zoom Composer includes a feature that generators the silverlight code for you and also support photo-stitching. Photo-stitching is where you take multiple pictures and stitch them together to create a panoramic photo. Deep Zoom is the seadragon technology from Microsoft that allows you to pan and zoom in an image and the browser downloads only those pieces of the image in detail that you’re looking. 

Add an 8MP Point and shoot and Deep Zoom Composer and what do you get? The cool stuff ofcourse!

So recently I went to San Francisco and found a little time to took a few pictures. If you’re wondering what a Florida boy takes pictures of in California, it should be pretty easy to figure out… Bridges and Mountains ofcourse!

So here’s the good stuff: Deep Zoom from the top of Mount Diablo. Deep Zoom of the Golden Gate Bridge.

You can open those files and if you have the newest Silverlight 2 beta installed you’ll be able to pan and zoom all through the images by either using your mousewheel or doubleclicking on an area. Cool stuff.

So That’s Cool, But How’d I do it?

So here’s the coolest thing about this whole process. The pictures of the golden gate bridge aren’t actually in order and in fact they were taken with the camera at 90 degrees so I could get more landscape in. What’s cool about that? Well deep zoom composer (we’ll call it DZC) figured out the order of the pictures and did the best job I have found yet for photo stitching. I don’t use a tripod or any fancy fish eye lens so it’s got some work to do but it does it faster and with better accuracy than anything else I’ve used yet.

Here’s what the pics looked like in Picasa2 (you can see I went left to right and then back to the left to take two more pics of the fog rolling in)

 

Here’s another cool thing about these pictures. This effected is created using 770+ different smaller images and it only streams to you in detail the area you’re looking at. So instead of downloading 7 images that are all 3MB each you’re downloading bits and pieces needed for that area you’re viewing. Pretty cool stuff.

Well is that really? Yes it is.

Okay you’re probably thinking right now “big deal it’s just a photo stitching application with some flashy zoomy-zoomy stuff”. But here’s where it really shines. Look at the first Golden Gate Demo app I created. You’ll see this picture:

Yeah it’s a nice picture. But then start to zoom into that little light brown weed bush:

Yeah that’s a little more detail right? But Zoom in some more…

Oh look it’s got some other leaves… But zoom in some more..

Now the details really start to come out… Okay you want to zoom some more don’t you? I don’t know if it’s a good idea but go ahead, indulge yourself..

EEK!! You went too far! But now you get the idea of just what can be done..

 

What else?

Alright here’s a few more pics:

And one more Deep Zoom of the Golden Gate Bridge (taken from the other 5 images in the screen capture above and it’s 1500+ smaller images).

The number of SQL Injection attacks across the Internet continue to rise. I’m seeing regular posting on the SANS RSS feed related to SQL Injection and XSS these days and clients are finding that applications they thought were not vulnerable turn out to be vulnerable because of patches and custom mods they’ve had made to them.  For most site owners this meant going back to the developers and getting updates and this is generally costly and time consuming. Fortunately, Microsoft has stepped up to the plate and brought us a little relief in the form of URLScan 3.0 beta/go-live release.

Here’s a few links to get you to good stuff and hopefully save the day:

Microsoft Security Bulletin: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/954462.mspx

Link to download HP’s custom SQL injection scanner and how to use it. They created this for Microsoft to help you identify possible vulnerabilities in your site.

A source code analysis application that can help identify vulnerable code in your application.

UrlScan 3.0 Beta. I’m generally opposed to installing beta software on a production webserver but I think if you’re getting hammered, it’s probably better to just bite the bullet and do it.  As you probably know UrlScan was for the most part built into IIS 6 but it doesn’t have querystring filtering, this build does and it works with IIS5.1 and later including our beloved IIS 7.0. Kudos to the IIS Team!

Word of caution

Word of caution, I’ve installed this for a few people and a couple times it wouldn’t load after the initial install (Beta software). My fix for this was to install the ISAPI filter directly on the website in question. I used Filemon to watch for when it triggered and referenced the log files to tweak out false positives from there. Each site is unique so you’ll need to tweak your settings accordingly.

Another useful tool

LogParser is another great tool for reviewing your server logs and searching for information such as hack attempts. Steve Schofield has a nice write up about using LogParser and URLScan.

A few FAQ’s on this subject:

Q: Is it Microsoft’s fault and if not then who’s fault is it?
A: It’s yours and your developer’s fault. As hackers evolve so much our techniques to combat them.  Coding methods and ways to access SQL server have changed over the years as a result of this and if you haven’t had your site updated, then it’s your fault.

Q: I just moved my website to a new server and I’m getting hacked now and I wasn’t before. It’s the new server right?
A: No. This is a new type of worm if you will that affecting websites the fact that you changed hosts, websites or applications probably doesn’t have anything to do with it at all. This really started to become a huge problem around late April of this year and we’ve watched it grow into a bigger problem since then.

Q: Is URLScan the answer to my prayers?
A: Consider it a stopgap you’ll be able to employ until you’ve had your web applications updated. You really need to get your application secured.

Q: I haven’t been attacked, how do I know if I’m vulnerable?
A: Use the two tools above and also you might want to hire a service to do website security scans. If you’re hosted with Applied Innovations you can you get free quarterly security scans from scanalert.com.

Q: What kinds of applications are vulnerable? Is it just shopping carts?
A: Every application that accesses a database server of any kind is potentially vulnerable.

Q: My website is written in XXXX language and it’s supposed to be very secure, am I vulnerable?
A: Potentially, YES! Any web application that uses a database can be vulnerable.

With the new addition to the family I’ve got a renewed interest in taking photographs (and video) and ofcourse sharing them. Yeah, I’m one of those Dads.  So today I wanted to crop a image for William’s website (yeah, not even 5 days old and he’s already got his own website at http://williamcoburn.net ). The image I wanted to crop and enhance was of the wallpaper border in his room of Pooh Bear.  The only tools I had available on my desktop were picasa and snag-it.

So the first thing I started to do was download a trial of photoshop elements or paint shop pro (I miss the days JASC provided it). Then it struck me that Adobe recently made an online version of photoshop available called adobe photoshop express. I created a free account, uploaded the image was able to enhance, rotate and crop it within 5 minutes and the finished product is visible on William’s site.

So here’s a few online photo editors available for free (I love freebies):

Adobe Photoshop Express - Adobe’s actually late to the game but they have the name and reputation to bring them to #1 pretty quickly if not already.

FotoFlexer -  This is actually my favorite of the ones I played with tonight. It has a lot of features the others don’t seem to have and little gadgets I love like inserting your own face in a picture, creating little inspirational posters, etc.

Splashup - It seemed pretty basic to me and I really didn’t get that involved with it.

Picnik - I enjoyed using this one and found it really intuitive.

I also found a couple ASP.NET projects that seemed to offer basic features and could make a nice little runner up. Who knows maybe you’ll see photoeditor.jesscoburn.com before long

Here’s William Henry Coburn, 8lbs 2oz, 19.5 inches (I’ll leave out the silly joke this time). Unfortunately my attempt to blog post from my cell phone via email failed miserably. But here’s a couple pictures from the first 24 hours.

First Williams Nursery (because I spent a god awful amount of time painting that darn thing)

Williams Very First Baby Picture (being held up by his mommy’s OB Dr. Newman)

Daddy Snips the cord (not nearly as easy as it looks on TV but 10X more gross as you can see from the blood squirts)

Here’s the grandparents and Auntie Louise getting their first look at him (they still have those smiles on).

Strike A Pose …

Finally, Daddy doing for the first time what daddy is going to do the most for the next few years… changing the nappy…and dodging the stream of pee (he almost got me)