Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
The Cool Stuff
Installed Tweet Suite plug-in
Jan 21st
I’ve become a huge fan of twittering as I’ve been picking up a bunch of great tips on it. I follow Robert Bowling (fourzerotwo) on twitter (who was one of the devs on COD4 and I play a lot of COD these days) and he posted that he was installing tweet suite on his own blog so I wanted to try it out.
Tweet suite creates some twitter widgets on your blog for “My Tweets”, “Most Tweets” and “Recently Tweeted”. If you enter your twitter details it will also auto-twitter when you post a new blog entry so this post is actually to see if that works.
I did notice a bit of a bug with the app though. First time I posted the settings I didn’t have the right password. I tried to change it and wordpress threw up on me. I think it’s working okay but we’ll soon see.
Anyway, Tweet Suite looks, well Sweet! (DUH!)
Terminal Services Across Multiple Monitors
Jan 14th
At work and home I have the same setup, dual monitors. I always RDP into my desktop these days instead of installing Outlook, Office, etc at home and I’ve always found myself not working in dual monitor mode because of this when working remotely.
Turns out you can use multiple monitors in Terminal Services afterall.
Enabling Multiple Monitors via RDP
To enable multiple monitors in an RDP session you’ll use the switch: /span so you’ll start RDP with the command:
mstsc /span
When it loads just log into the machine as you normally do and your display will now span both monitors. The monitors will have to be the same resolution, only supports side-by-side configuration and a maximum resolution of 4096×2048
Creating your own Zooming Photo Mosaic
Jan 7th
I was really impressed with the deep zoom version of the Newseum newspaper frontpages from the Obama Election win in my previous blog post. I was so impressed that I had to figure out a way to do this myself. This post will guide you through this process, step by step.
Step 1, creating your Photo Mosaic
Recently Carlos mentioned he wanted to get a Photo Mosaic made by his Photographer from his wedding photos. I figured in this day and age of Information sharing there had to be low cost applications out there that would automate this process for you. (If you haven’t learned yet, everything is on the Internet)
After a quick web search, I found AndreaMosaic, a FREE application for this very purpose. (REALLY AMAZING APPLICATION)
With AndreaMosaic you take a picture you want to be the base of the mosaic:
Select a bunch of pictures you want to use to create your Mosaic (the more pictures the better):
And click a couple buttons and Presto! Photo Mosaic for free:
But you run into a problem. If you zoom into the picture moderately, you get okay photo resolution:
If you try to zoom in a lot though, you start to lose detail:
So what to do?
Step 2, Enter Silverlight Deep Zoom
From my earlier blog posts you know Microsoft’s Silverlight Deep Zoom allows you to take a bunch of high resolution images and stream them as you zoom in providing more detail on just the area you’re viewing.
The good news is that AndreaMosaic will generate a Deep Zoom application for you automatically, the bad news is to do anything with that you’re going to want to import it into a tool like Deep Zoom Composer and and start working with it. I ran into a problem here because my home PC only has 4GB of memory and quickly depleted that and Deep Zoom Composer would crash (let’s chalk it up to beta software). To get around this, I had Andrea Mosaic split my image up into 4 separate images:
I created a new Silverlight project in Deep Zoom Composer (DZC), added my 4 images to the project:
Then I zoomed in to arrange them on the palette in DZC so that they lined up I set the export options in DZC:
and had it create my new Deep Zoom project in an HTML / Silverlight project that was web ready for me. I could now go from:
To this:
All the way to this:
With plenty of detail that I could really enjoy. Best of all, the newly generated project has all the controls for zoom in, zoom out, center and even FULL SCREEN, all created automatically for you!
Step 3, uploading your new project.
Now that you’ve got your project created and tested out the next step is to upload. Now in the “New Microsoft” they’re all about hosting the content and applications for you so you can either host your new project on their site, or be uber-cool and host it on your own website like me:
http://www.jesscoburn.com/coburnchristmas08/
There’s a little massaging to do though to get it to display out of the gate. So here’s what I did:
- In your exported project you’ll find a folder DeepZoomProjectWeb. Let’s assume you’re going to upload your project to a new folder on your site called deepzoom. Within the DeepZoomProjectWeb folder copy the web.config file to your deepzoom folder on your website.
- In the DeepZoomProjectWeb/ClientBin Folder copy all of those files and folders (GeneratedImages, DeepZoomProject.xap, DeepZoomProjectTest.html, Silverlight.js) into your deepzoom folder on your website.
- Finally, rename your DeepZoomProjectTest.html file to default.htm (or index.html) and open your site, domain.com/deepzoom/ and the page should load fine.
That’s all there is to it. Really, just 3 simple steps and you’ll have your own Dynamic Zooming Photo Mosaic, thanks to a couple freeware apps, a little munging of data and a bit of creativity.
Here’s the cool thing. My original 4 files for my mosaic were about 25MB total. The zooming project is about 100MB but you don’t really download that full 100MB only the parts that you’re looking at and zooming into.
All Obama Elected Newseum Frontpages Deep Zoomed
Nov 7th
Scott Hanselman and Scott Stanfield did a fantastic job of creating a deep zoom collage of all of the frontpages collected from 11/5/2008 by Newseum. You can see it here:
Barack Obama listens when Jess Coburns speaks er um tweets..
Oct 2nd
I started this post at the beginning of September and today saw something pretty amazing…
I was adding people to follow on Twitter today (I have yet to figure out what to twit about) and after a few adds and tweets I got this email today:
Finally, a Presidential Candidate that recognizes my brilliance!! Ahh, it’s nice to have followers 
Now I just need to find out his gamertag on xbox live so we can play some COD4 .
In all seriousness though I am truly amazed with the way the Presidential candidates have embraced the Internet and are using it to spread their message and the fact that they are using social networking as one of these tools is even more amazing.
Back from the back burner.
As I mentioned earlier I had shelved this post because it wasn’t that interesting.. It’s cool but not really interesting. Anyway, I did start following Barack Obama on twitter because I was curious what the campaign would post. Before I continue, no I don’t really believe Barack is reading my tweets.. He should but he’s probably not.. but he’s probably is subscribed to my blog 
. Anyway, Today they tweeted about an official “iPhone App.”!!.
The Barack Obama Phone App
Now this is clever and really shows how technology and the Internet is changing the world. Back in 1988 we had a student project to volunteer for the campaign of a candidate running for election. At that time I opted for Dukakis in his Presidential run. I had 3 jobs:
1. Hang door hangers on all the houses in my neighborhood (after sitting for days in my bedroom my younger sister went out and hung them all out for me).
2. Hold a sign at a rally for Dukakis at a local union office and wave as the Bus carrying Dukakis comes in. Turns out I got to shake his hand be on TV, so for a high school kid this was impressive.
3. I was handed about 20 pages of computer printouts (the crappy old green and white paper used in 9 pin dot matrix printers), a script to read and shown to a phone where I was to sit for hours and make phone calls.
From this experience I learned a few things:
1. Dukakis was a short man but had a solid handshake and made a point to make eye contact, even with some punk high school kid wearing his cool high school mascot jacket. I was impressed.
2. I’m not one for hanging door hangers but my sister will gladly do it for free!
3. People don’t like to be called during dinner time. If you call a stranger’s house about a candidate they don’t care for they will probably rip you a new one and scream vulgarities at you and finally many people will just say “Yeah, we’re voting for him” just to get you off the phone.
4. Politics was not for me.
The reason I mention this is that the Barack Obama campaign continues to impress me with their grasp of the Internet and how they are using it to reach voters. The Iphone app is just pure genius. Instead of setting up a phone pool and trying to get people to come in and make these calls to strangers (that are going to curse them or just say yes for the sake of getting someone off the phone) they are providing a phone app that will allow you to make these calls to your contacts AND provide information upfront on key topics that you’re most likely to get hit with when talking to your friends and contacts about Obama.
This is truly clever. You know I often think back to that first batman movie website. I believe it was the first movie to launch a website to promote their movie. I was amazed with the graphics, the layout, the animation but more importantly excited about what it meant to the entertainment industry and was cool new websites we’d see. So I’m equally excited to see not only what else Obama’s campaign will do with the Internet but how other candidates will continue to raise the bar.
If you wish to pick up the Barack Obama IPhone app you can get it here.
NOTE: I’m not Political. I don’t care who you’re voting for and whether I vote or who I vote for is none of your business. So don’t bother me with political crap.
And a WARNING: Never give the NRCC money as a joke to tease your buddy who thought it was cool he got an award for being such a good republican because you got the award too and you’re a democrat! They’ll never leave you alone and will send you tons of crap awards, pictures, statues, letters, invites, etc. You’d think they’d look at your voter’s registration but I guess not.
