Category: Tech

Categories
Hardware

Sneaky ways to make money part 27: steal search traffic

Say you make consumer broadband routers and you’re looking for a new revenue stream. Your customers expect you to spend money upgrading the firmware for their routers, but you’ve already taken money from them… they’ve paid already.

Don’t despair, there definitely are ways to squeeze more money out of your unsuspecting clients. For example: in your next router firmware update add a new feature that directs all mis-typed URLs to your own search page. Bingo! You get a brand new pipeline of money from all those paid search results and your customers will never know what hit them. Heck, they’ll probably think it’s spyware on their computers and spend a bunch of time trying to track down the bad bits and never even blame you!

image

Some tips:

  1. Call it an “advanced” feature – Novice users will never touch anything labeled advanced for fear that they’ll break something important. You can rest easy knowing that you’ll be able to keep raking in the revenue for years to come.
  2. Turn in on by default in your next upgrade – People can’t turn off something they don’t know is there. And how are they going to know it’s there? Dig through all the menus to see what’s changed? I don’t think so. They’re not going to find it in the printed manual you gave them either… because you don’t give out printed manuals anymore.
  3. Throw in some security language – Who doesn’t want Anti-Phishing features? Protection from identity thieves?  Of course people want that, the net is a scary place and if you turn off security on your router pedophiles will move into your basement, eat your last Oreo and leave the lid off the toothpaste.

One final tip: don’t name your search site “dlinksearch.com”, it will shorten the time it takes for your customers to figure out that it’s D-Link who is being a dick and stealing traffic. If you make it too easy for them to figure out who’s stealing the traffic, but hard for them to figure out how to turn them off they’ll get pissed off and make blog posts telling their friends not to buy your hardware (yes, I’m looking at you, D-Link).

But, hey, no big deal, right? They’ve already paid money for your router. Once you’ve made the sale the existing customers are just a drag on your revenue. You can make it up in volume.

Categories
Photoshop Tech

Quick image straightening with Photoshop

Microsoft Digital Image Suite, for all its limitations, does a few things really well:

  • Fix red-eye
  • Stitch together panoramas
  • Make straightening images brain-dead easy

I love Photoshop.  It’s definitely my image editor of choice but I always used to launch Digital Image to straighten pictures, then I’d go back to Photoshop for the rest of my tweaks.  It wasn’t until I bought The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby (also in flavors for CS2 and CS3) that I learned the Photoshop method.

Straightening images is actually a pretty simple process, but nowhere in the Photoshop UI does it say “straighten”.  I suppose I could have read the manual, but where’s the fun in that?

The basic steps are:

  1. Use the measure tool to figure out the angle to rotate
  2. Perform an “arbitrary” rotation
  3. Crop your picture

Let’s say you’re in a hurry (or drunk) and snap a quick photo at a wonky angle.

The first step (after opening the picture with Photoshop, of course) is to select the measure tool from your tools palate.  The measure tool is the ruler buried under the eyedropper tool and can be accessed by clicking and holding or by hitting shift-i repeatedly until the measure tool is selected (I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop, they save me a bunch of time and make me feel like a power user).

Once you have your measure tool selected you need to pick a line in the picture you think should be horizontal or vertical.  If you’re straightening a landscape the horizon is a good bet.  If you are shooting buildings using a wide angle lens you’ll want to pick a line near the center of the picture and probably a vertical one.

Use the measure tool to draw along the line you think should be vertical.

Rotating the picture is now a fairly automatic process.  From the Image menu select Rotate Canvas -> Arbitrary.  When the dialog pops up you’ll note Photoshop has already filled in a number.  The software has looked at the line you drew using the measure tool and input the number of degrees to rotate automatically.  All you have to do is press OK.

Your image is now straight but you have some extra gunk you need to trim off.  Grab the crop tool from your palate (or hit “c” on your keyboard) and pick out the part of the picture you want to keep.  Hitting enter on your keyboard will crop the picture and after you save you’re done.

 

Categories
Tech

I want facial recognition software, why can’t I have it?

I have thousands of pictures… most of them aren’t tagged. Even my new batches of pictures only get tagged about 20% of the time. I really want a set of tools that will help me get this done. Companies are out there working on it but I want it now!

I realize there is some stuff out there, but it is all server-based. You could go into all sorts of privacy discussions (and people have) about doing it this way… but really, I just want to make sure I have a tagged copy for myself. Picassa’s web album tagging is fairly painless and would do what I need… if only it would sync the tags back down to my PC (it doesn’t).

Look, I know there are companies out there that have the code to do this. What are you waiting for? A revenue stream. At this point I’m ready to hire someone in China or India to go through my pictures by hand.

Categories
Microsoft

Office team shares the love: 2010 beta available

Yesterday we released the public beta of Office 2010, you should go download it right now.

Office 2010

There’s a bunch of new stuff, so it’s really hard to predict what’s going to be exciting to you, but here’s the top feature for me: ignore. Yep, ignore. Outlook has built in a big, beautiful chunk of anti-social awesome. You know when you get added to that really long e-mail thread that won’t go away? The one people keep replying to, dragging it on until it sucks the air out of your office through your monitor. Now you can just right-click, select ignore and the thread goes away… even future mails to the thread.

Another of my fav Outlook features: the Quick Steps. They are, at their heart, macros. Select a message and click a quick action to create a task, mark the message read and dump into into a folder all in one button press. I’m currently working on giving my quick steps the GTD treatment.

It’s the nature of my job, I live my life in Outlook. There is, however, a ton of goodness in all the apps. Go checkout the beta site for a run down of what’s new in each of the Office applications. There are features to make your life easier (e.g. multi-user editing of docs) and features to make you look good (e.g. spark lines in Excel).

But can you really use it? Absolutely. I’ve uninstalled Office 2007 on all my machines and only run Office 2010. Sure, it’s a beta, it’s not perfect. But it never stops me from getting my job done. So, If I can live using only the beta, you should feel comfortable at least trying it out for a bit.

Categories
Tech

Sneaking your dog into the office and other reasons to use speech recognition

Today is one of those rare days that I have no meetings.  And also happens to be a day that Paula needs to spend time getting ready for a house guest.  Finney is a good dog but he can be kind of needy.  To free up Paula I brought Finney into the office

For one complication was sneaking Finney into the office, however, is that when he is in new situations he gets nervous and whines a lot.  Now, sneaking a dog into the office doesn’t work very well if the dog is making a lot of noise.  The way to keep a nervous Finney quiet is to continuously pet him.  While petting him keeps him quiet, my hands are unable to do any typing.  Sounds like a good reason to try out speech recognition.

It may be my microphone, or it may just be that I need to do more training of the speech recognition, but my initial use has been slow going.  I’ve been using speech recognition to type this blog post, and I find that it is taking me three times as long as it would take if I were typing.  I can touch type and and fairly accustomed to putting my thoughts down directly from brain to fingers.  Part of the delay, I am finding, is expressing my thoughts in this new manner.  If I stare at the screen waiting for my words to appear, I’m brain just freezes.  There is a significant delay between voicing a word and having it appear on the screen.  For the touch typist who is used to seeing the output immediately on the screen it is distracting to have to pause ones stream of consciousness while waiting for the computer to interpret your words.

I also find if I speak too quickly the computer will run my words together to form similar sounding words.  This is usually frustrating as it requires frequent editing of the sentence is high and have just dictated.  Most commonly the errors are in the form of incorrect words but it gets even more frustrating when the dictation is incorrectly interpreted as commands to the program (it has tried several times to close this blog post prematurely).  It does, however, provide some amount of amusement when it makes errors like taking ” down directly” and turning it into ” downed rectally.”

As I struggle through, however, I find that through a combination of training the speech recognition engine and training Reeves, I am getting better at am using text to speech.  I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point where I can speak naturally to the computer and have it be acceptably accurate.

Categories
Microsoft

Microspotting – A peek behind the Microsoft curtain

Have you ever wondered what kind of people work at MS and what makes them tick? Hop on over to Microspotting to get the dirt. While you’re there you can also really get to know Dan, a great dev who started as an intern on the Entourage team when I was a test lead there, Omar, a PM from the Entourage team (and also, coincidentally an intern there too), MC, who was on Mac office (Entourage was part of Mac Office)…. hey, this is just becoming a trip down memory lane. Clearly my friends haven’t been pimping their fame (or I simply couldn’t be bothered to read their blogs… of course, I blame them).

At any rate, it seems Ariel has a great knack for finding the personalities at Microsoft, and isn’t shy about stalking them to get the story. Geeks and stalking? How can you pass that up?

Categories
Tips

Enabled Clear QAM on my Media Center, High Def goodness ensues

If you record cable TV using Windows Media Center you may have wondered about recording high definition signals off the cable (or, like me, struggled unsuccessfully to make it happen). If you’re willing to take the beta plunge, Windows 7 has made getting some high-def content off your cable a lot easier.

First, the hurdles: you’ll want to do this only if you’re willing to run beta software and are not afraid of using RegEdit. To get it done without running a beta operating system you can track down the TV Pack for Vista Media Center (code named fiji), some other software and do some registry changes. If you believe the forums, upgrading Vista is more work (clean install plus two additional software installs), however, than running Windows 7. Windows 7 is just the singular install… but keep in mind you’ll need to be ready to buy it when the full version comes out.

The whole process was completely painless for me. I needed more hard drive space so I just took the old drive out to be an easy backup. I put in a new, bigger hard drive, installed Windows 7 Beta then headed over to Mike Wren’s blog for the registry setting for my card (Hauppauge HVR 1600). A quick reboot later and Media Center could see the clear QAM channels! Sweet! No more weather interference when watching local high definition broadcasts. 

Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean you can get all the high definition channels. Even if you subscribe to HBO (for example) the signal will be encrypted. Clear QAM is the unencrypted digital content broadcast over cable. For Comcast in my area this is our local stations in high definition as well as standard definition duplicate versions of some other channels (like Speed). It’s worth noting, just because it’s digital, it doesn’t mean it’s high definition. If you want to get all the content off your cable you’ll need to pay the big bucks for a CableCARD approved Vista PC. If, however, you’re like us and you really only care about HD from the major networks this does it.

Categories
Tips

Getting a list of files for a directory

Ever had a folder full of files and needed a text listing of all those files? Here’s a quick n’ dirty way to do it.

image I have a whole folder full of new icons for the next version of SharePoint and need to check them into source control. The big pain here is that I’ll need to go into source control and type in each file name to unlock it for editing, copy in the new file, then type in each file name to check it in. If, however, I had a list of all the files I could make a quick batch file to do it for me.

  1. Open your command prompt (on Vista, type cmd then right-click and run as administrator)
  2. Change directories to where you need a listing
  3. On the command line type: dir /b > filename.txt

Windows will create a new text file named “filename.txt” (you can name it anything you like on the command line). One thing to note: your text file will be included in the list, you may want to remove that line before using it to do any bulk operations. Enjoy!

Edit: A good reference for directory listings: http://www.computerhope.com/dirhlp.htm

Categories
SharePoint

My first SharePoint post is up: Linking images in SharePoint

Building the next version of a product is great fun, but being able to help existing users makes me feel like I’m doing more than building a product and tossing it over the wall.

If you’ve ever tried to hyperlink an image in Windows SharePoint using the rich text editor you’ll know that you can’t do it.  SharePoint Server 2007 (the one that ties in more closely with Office 2007) has a slightly different text editor and you can link an image the same way you’d expect in other apps (click the image then click the link button). WSS, however, doesn’t make it that easy.  If you’ve ever struggled with it you should check out my post: Linking images in SharePoint.

You want the quick summary? Create a hyperlink then insert your image in the middle (remove the extra text when you’re done).

 

Categories
Software

Election results widget

I went looking for a Vista Sidebar Gadget to watch election results but didn’t find any in the Live Gallery.  I figured I’d just have to be “Old Fashioned” and refresh a web page so went to MSNBC (after finding CNN appeared to be melting) and found they have gadgets for all kinds of interfaces (FaceBook, MySpace, etc.) including a sidebar gadget and blog embed code.  If you’re biting your nails waiting for results, you may want to go pick up one in your favorite flavor.

Edit: Removed live gadget and inserted image for posterity.