The Corner

Have you ever wanted to make one of those panorama photos that you sometimes see at art fairs or a nerdy friend’s house? I’ll show you how.

Like this:

[Click any of the photos for larger sizes]

I made that shot of the Grand Canyon with 4 photos and used a program called AutoStitch to put them all together. The hardest part is taking the photos. Basically, you can take as many as you want, but each one should overlap another in some way. I tend to overlap them about 20%. The above was made with these photos:

After I took them, I didn’t do any adjusting just yet. I just opened AutoStitch, went to File>Open

Navigate to the folder with your images and SINGLE click on the first one. While holding down the shift key on your keyboard, click on the last image in your series. Press the Open button.

Autostitch will do it’s magic and line everything up for you and create one giant image.

Once it’s done, your combined panorama photo will be displayed. It’s saved in the same directory as your images (named pano.jpg).

Autostich may be downloaded here: http://cvlab.epfl.ch/~brown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Another crazy error. The client was attempting to edit MetaData and gets the above error. The text doesn’t really offer any help:
“The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons: A datasheet component compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed, your browser does not support ActiveX controls, or support for ActiveX controls is disabled.”

Since I’m positive the machines here support ActiveX, even in our ancient IE 6 environment, it has to be this datasheets component. But she has Office 11 installed. She should be good to go, right?

Apparently not. Microsoft has a KB Article about this and refer you to download “2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components”. As of now, the direct download link is: right here

This one almost stumped me. Almost. I’m posting it here because either my Google-fo wasn’t strong enough, or this fix doesn’t exist on the net.

One of our clients connects via a Juniper VPN-type system.  It uses Java and downloads missing components on it’s own. It usually works pretty well.  One user began seeing this:

That line: “You currently have the following version of Java installed on your system: N/A” threw me for a loop. I headed to Java.com and completed the autoscan, which told me the user had the latest and greatest version of Java installed. What was going on here?

• Dumped the IE cache and cookies, cleared the Java cache, verified Java (Sun) instead of MS VM… basic troubleshooting wasn’t going to solve this.
• Reinstalled Java – Nope.
• Reinstalled Juniper components (uninstalled and visited the site to have the auto-reinstalled) – Nope.
• Checked the registry – Nothing looks out of order there.
• Check for odd/extra browser plugins (The Skype plugin is known to mess with some of our apps in IE) – Nope.
• Dammit!
• Uninstall Java, reg smash for Java and reinstall – Nope.
• Uninstall Juniper, reg smash for that and reinstall – Nope.

WTF?

I took a registry snapshot of the machine and compared it to mine, searching the differing strings for Java components. There’s one CLSID in the registry that was different, {08B0E5C0-4FCB-11CF-AAA5-00401C608500}. I imported that string into the users machine and was successful in connecting with Juniper.

Depending on what you’re missing, one of the files below is for you. Import one, try. If it fails, try the other. They overwrite each other. To use, copy contents of one of the boxes below, paste into notepad and save as (whatever).reg and then double click the file to import to registry. I leave them uncompiled so you can view the contents.

Possible_Solution_1.reg

Possible_Solution_2.reg

Steam is making me poor. Wow. Way too many good deals right now, most 75-80% off!

Pushed the reboot button on the site. Let’s try something else.