Photoshop Velvia

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Back in the days when I used to shoot my photos on film, my preferred slide emulsion was Fujifilm Velvia (RVP). With strong colour saturation (particularly green) this film is particularly good for landscape work and, ever since I switched to digital, I’ve felt that there was some “punch” missing from my landscapes.

Then I came across episode 19 of This Week in Photography, in which the subject of creating Photoshop actions is demonstrated using “Scott’s Photoshop Velvia”. I tried it out today and it really works.

  1. Take an image and create a duplicate layer (in the process giving yourself the ability to return to the original at any time).
  2. Next, use the Channel Mixer on each of the three colour channels (red/green/blue) as follows:
    • Red channel: R 118% G -9% B -9%
    • Green channel: R -9% G 118% B -9%
    • Blue channel: R -9% G -9% B 118%
  3. Finally, adjust the contrast by tweaking the curves to produce a very slight S shape.

Here’s one of my images before and after the Photoshop Velvia treatment was applied:

Without Photoshop VelviaWith Photoshop Velvia

Hopefully you can see that the second image appears much more vibrant than the first.

Photoshop CS3 users can download the Photoshop Velvia custom action, but please note there is no warranty implied, no support, and you use it at your own risk. Thanks are due to Scott Bourne for demonstrating this – it really is a great Photoshop tip.

(anti-)Social networking

Posted on By Mark Wilson

So, last night I was in the pub with Richard, Stuart and Alex and the conversation turned to Facebook. I felt like some sort of social leper as, until then, I hadn’t responded to the various Facebook requests that I’ve received and the extent of my online social networking was LinkedIn – which is a professional networking site – in fact I think the word pretentious was used by someone (a little harsh I feel).

Anyway, I’ve done it. I’m now on Facebook, and I wasted a good chunk of this afternoon there. I suppose it will be Twitter next (although I still don’t see the attraction there).

So if you are reading this blog and you know me personally then I’d be happy to hook up with you as a friend on Facebook (after all, social networks get pretty lonely if there is no-one there to socialise with). But, just as for my LinkedIn profile (where I only accept invitations from people I know, have worked with, and would be happy to work with again), I won’t accept invitations on Facebook from people I don’t consider to be friends – it’s amazing how many people think I would like to link to them because we work at the same company (even though we have never had any interaction).

Bah humbug!

Microsoft’s Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool has been released

Posted on By Mark Wilson

One of the problems associated with virtualisation is “virtual sprawl” – the proliferation of virtual machines (which can totally negate the idea of “server consolidation” if not carefully controlled. Management becomes critical – and a key part of that management is patching virtual machines to keep the operating system and applications up to date.

But what about the virtual machines that exist as offline images (templates, test and development machines, etc.)?

I’ve written previously about the beta of Microsoft’s offline servicing tool for virtual machine images and last week it was completed and released to the web.

The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and, according to Microsoft, it “combines the Windows Workflow programming model with the Windows PowerShell interface to bring groups of virtual machines online just long enough for them to receive updates from either System Center Configuration Manager 2007 or Windows Server Update Services. As soon as the virtual machines are up-to-date, the tool returns them to the offline state in the Virtual Machine Manager library”.

There’s an executive overview on the Microsoft TechNet site and the tool can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.

Using packet level drivers for MS-DOS network connectivity

Posted on By Mark Wilson

One of the reasons to use Windows PE for operating system deployment is that it’s built on a modern version of Windows so, at least in theory, driver support is less of an issue than it would be using MS-DOS boot disks.

Even so, there are still times when a good old MS-DOS boot disk comes in handy and networking is a particular pain point – NDIS drivers are a pain to configure so packet-level drivers are often useful for operating system deployment tasks (but not optimised for anything more substantial). Available for many of the more common Ethernet cards, they are generally 16-bit utilities for MS-DOS and so will not work in 32-bit or 64-bit operating systems.

As this is not exactly cutting edge technology, many of the useful sites are starting to drop off the ‘net (but a surprising number remain) – here’s a few links I found that might come in handy:

Tracking down the Control Panel applet for Mail in 64-bit Windows

Posted on By Mark Wilson

At long last (and not before time), my corporate mail account has just been moved across to an Exchange Server 2007 system with Outlook Anywhere enabled. Unfortunately, I sold my Apple iPhone (which now has Exchange ActiveSync support) last week but I will be getting a new one at some time soon and there are many other benefits too – like that I no longer have to run a 32-bit VM to VPN into the corporate network and access my e-mail; and that the 2007 version of of Outlook Web Access is a huge step forward (even the “light” version for non-Microsoft and legacy browsers).

So, now that I can access Exchange from my 64-bit Windows Server 2008 workstation, I needed to configure an appropriate Outlook profile. Except that I couldn’t find the mail applet in Control Panel, and Outlook 2007 only seemed to present the account settings for the currently loaded profile.

Control Panel in 64-bit WindowsThen I noticed an innocuous icon in Control Panel, labelled View 32-bit Control Panel Items. Clicking on this exposed the Mail applet that is necessary in order to configure Outlook profiles.

MS-DOS revisited: building a handy utility disk

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of years back I was writing about trying to squeeze Windows PE onto a 128MB/256MB USB thumb drive and how times change – these days I have piles of unused 128MB, 256MB and 512MB USB sticks that have become redundant because I have larger portable data storage devices available.

Then, as I was preparing to image a PC, I found myself using 1.44MB floppy disks and it all got very frustrating. Just enough to boot the system used half the disk and that was without any utilities – the version of Symantec Ghost that I used recently won’t even fit on a floppy disk. So, I decided to put one of my old USB sticks to use as an “ultimate boot disk” – much easier to update than the CD-based versions we were putting together a few years back.

Despite having a pile of smaller USB thumb drives doing nothing, I decided to use one of the 1GB sticks that EMC were giving away at the Windows Server 2008 launch (plenty of space for expansion).

The first step is to make the drive bootable – I used the HP USB disk storage format tool v2.1.8 (SP27608) to format the drive and put a basic Windows ME boot subsystem on it (using a disk created with the Windows XP disk format tool as a reference image) but there are other options.

Why Windows ME? Well, because it’s easy – Windows XP creates ME boot disks – and because it was a prerequisite for the the next stage – network booting using Brad Driver’s universal TCP/IP network boot disk. There are many sites on the ‘net that offer network boot disks (including bootdisk.com) but the one I chose manages to include a huge range of drivers and it fits on 1.44MB floppy.

Basically, the disk boots a very basic operating system before expanding itself to a RAM disk and reloading the command shell. USB device support is still experimental (at v6.2) but after much experimentation I worked out that I could use the makedisk script provided with the download but in order to avoid a loop of pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart the computer I needed to edit the config.sys file so that the line shell=n:\command.com /e:4096 /p used c: instead of n: for the command interpreter (my drive was formatted as USB-HDD, this may not be necessary for other USB boot options) and I also removed the hidden attribute from command.com to avoid a file not found error (that didn’t seem to affect the operation of the disk in any other way). After this, the NIC is auto-detected and an appropriate network driver loaded, obtaining TCP/IP information from DHCP and logging on to the network.

With network booting working well (at least on the IBM ThinkPad T40 that I tested against – older machines may not have the necessary BIOS support), I added an autorun.inf file for when I use the drive within Windows. This file includes the following items and really just sets the drive icon and description:
Custom USB drive icon
[autorun]
label=USB Network Boot Disk (1GB)
icon=shell32.dll,12

Finally, the whole purpose of this disk is to run some utilities. At this point you can name your own poison but I created a C:\Tools folder (C:\Utilities is too long for 8.3 file naming, although C:\Utils could have worked) and started to pile in my favourite 16-bit .COM and .EXE files – I’m sure the list will grow substantially over time. There may be some issues with memory management but there is plenty of space to add a variety of tools and theoretically there could be multiple boot options too.

It’s been a long time since I played around in MS-DOS and there is very little call for it these days (I should really be doing this with Windows PE) but every so often it’s good to return to your roots.

A few things I found whilst drive imaging with Symantec Ghost

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I need to rebuild one of my PCs before lending it to someone for a few days but before I do that I want to take an image of it. If I had the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 set up at home then that would be reasonably straightforward but I don’t, and the old drive imaging technologies will be fine for this – at least that’s what I thought until I spent half the night and a good chunk of this morning fighting with Symantec Ghost… So, here’s a few of the things that I’ve (re-)discovered about Ghost in the last few hours.

  • Using Ghost in peer-to-peer mode does require the slave and the master machines to be running the same version of Ghost – it will present a version mismatch if you try and run different versions.
  • Ghost 6.x Enterprise has a multicast option but I couldn’t get it to work (it was always greyed out for me). Symantec’s knowledge base suggests that this may be down to TCP/IP issues and I’m pretty sure that packet-level network drivers are required with the MS-DOS client (the Windows server can use the normal Windows network settings) but, even with a suitable packet driver loaded, I gave up after a few hours without success.
  • GhostCast Server uses (UDP) port 6666 for communications.
  • GhostCast Server 8.x will create a Windows Firewall exception for itself but the exception still needs to be enabled manually.
  • On a multi-homed server, there seems to be no way to select the NIC on which the GhostCast Server presents a session.
  • Multicasting also seems to need the client and server versions to match one another. 16-bit Ghost 7.x should work with an 8.x server but it wasn’t working out for me with 7.5 and 8.2 (32-bit 8.x clients were connecting to the server fine, so I knew it was working, but I didn’t want to image those machines – and I didn’t have a copy of the 7.x server).
  • Compression adds a lot of time to the imaging process.

Eventually, I got everything working with a 16-bit copy of Ghost 8.2 running on MS-DOS (to be completely accurate, it was a Windows ME startup disk created from Windows XP) communicating with a GhostCast Server 8.2 running on Windows Server 2008.

And for anyone who is wondering why I was messing about with 16-bit executables and MS-DOS (in these days of Windows PE), Toffa suggested that I should try a Windows PE disk with the 32-bit ghost client. Although that would have let me access USB-attached external storage, I didn’t have enough space on a USB drive and was storing my image on a server. Windows XP (and so PE) doesn’t natively recognise the network card on the machine I was imaging, so that would have required me to extend the Windows PE image and provide additional driver support. Somehow, using a universal network boot disk seemed like the easy option.

Generating secure passwords

Posted on By Mark Wilson

One corporate blogger at Symantec recently wrote about the useless passwords that people use (with various lists placing “password”) at or close to the top of the list. His source contained some dubious claims (e.g. it claimed that one of the top passwords across Europe is “monkey”… maybe that is the case for English speaking Europeans but it’s unlikely to be the case in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Greek, etc., etc.) but his point is valid – systems that require a password require one for a reason – usually to protect either the data contained in the system, or the reputation/identity of the person to which access is being granted or the company who operates the system.

As a concept, the idea of a username and accompanying password is flawed – ideally we would be using another form of identification and authentication – and that should use multiple factors (something I have/know/am) but in amongst the nearly 2 hours of drivel that was last week’s MacBreak Weekly podcast (note to self: drop this subscription from iTunes) was a little gem about generating new secure passwords. The panel was advocating the use of a utility such as OnePass to generate and manage passwords when one of them said he does something similar from the command line: Unix/Linux and Mac users can type openssl rand -base64 6 to generate a secure 8 character password (the number on the end of the command needs to be multiplied by 4 thirds to get the length of password – more details of using OpenSSL to generate secure passwords are available at the tech-recipes website).

One man who knows an awful lot about security, Steve Gibson, has produced a secure online password generator but the 64-character passwords it generates are a bit extreme for most purposes – and “secure” passwords of any length create their own problem – they are totally unmemorable, so most users will resort to using some form of password safe (either online or offline), reducing the security considerably.

Then there’s the issue of password policy – some sites will limit the length of a password whilst others will require the use of special characters.

At work, I use a variety of corporate systems, some of which respect my Active Directory logon, and others (timesheeting, more timesheeting, mobile phone billing, self-service HR portal) which do not – each with it’s own password policy for password length, complexity, re-use and expiry. Then there are the hundreds of websites that I use and which require registration. It’s a usability nightmare – and many people will use the same passwords repeatedly – an identity thief’s dream.

I prefer to use a memorable passphrase, which is typically longer than a password and although it may include dictionary words they do not make up the entire password. For example, if my password needs to be changed and something is happening at that time that might be memorable I could use that – “2008HolidayinFrance” is memorable, easy to type and whilst it includes dictionary words it’s also 19 characters long so spotting the dictionary word placement might take a while for a password cracker.

Of course, there is no one answer – what works for me might not work for you. What I’m pretty certain of though is that “password” is not a good password and that re-using the same password (or variations on it) is not a good idea either.

Virtualised hardware hotel

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I was at a VMware event yesterday where they proudly played this video…

…it’s a bit of fun (and the music is really catchy – even if the lip sync is a bit out!) and was apparently first shown at VMworld a few months back.

It’s not just VMware that can offer this type of solution though – I did use VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI) in the design I produced for a server consolidation exercise with a “big four” accountancy firm a couple of years back but it was very expensive and required a huge leap of faith on the part of both the customer and the datacentre managed service provider. Now we’re in the second half of 2008, I’m not sure if I would be using VMware products in my “virtualised hardware hotel”. For a lot less money I could do the same thing with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, together with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Some people will argue that the VMware products have maturity on their side and I’ll concede that it’s true – VMware did create the x86 virtualisation market – but a hypervisor (or virtualisation layer, in VMware-speak) is a commodity now and the simple fact is that I really can’t justify advising my clients to spend the extra money on ESX and Virtual Center, especially as the Microsoft offerings under the System Center banner can be used to manage my virtual and physical infrastructure as one.

If only Microsoft produced viral videos like this, I could share one with you… so come on Redmond… give me something to play back at the VMware boys (and girls).