Recently I had to find an answer of the question “How can I include Creative Commons License watermark on all of the images in my gallery“? I have my blog licensed in by-nc-nd CC license and I wanted all the images to be licensed in CC as well.

I had two options:

* Downloading all my images, watermarking them with some Free Software like Picture Shark and returning them to the gallery. Quite sick and costly solution, having in mind that I have about 400 images alreaedy there and I have to take care to watermark any of my images, which I upload in the future.
* Modifying my gallery in order to display any image from my albums with a given watermark. This seemed to be the right solution – costly at first sight, but cheaper if you look in a perespective.

After some evaluation, I decided to go with the second solution, and started to search for solution of my problem. Coppermine Gallery forum search seemed to produce some sufficient results, but the solution there was quite lenghty and I decided to postpone implementing it.

Instead I focused at the problem as it was seemed in BGDev.Org forum (in Bulgarian!). It seems that the user __webdev__ was proposing a solution of the problem. I decided to give a try to that solution, as it seemed to be the most suitable to me.

The idea in general is:

* You place a .htaccess file in each directory of your gallery, on which images you would like to place the watermark.
* You forward all images’ requests to a script, which generates the image with watermark.

Simple and effective – at least from the end-user’s point of view. It gives some load on the server, but who cares 🙂 ? For simple and not-so-visited gallery as mine, that seemed to be the solution. However, the posting in BGDev had quite some problems, and the code was written on prima vista, so I had to do some modifications in order to have a good, working solution.

Here is the solution in details:

* Place the CCwatermark.php file in a directory, where it will be accessible by the web server and suits the best your needs;

* Configure the CCwatermark.php by editing the two macroses SMALL\_WATERMARK\_FILE and BIG\_WATERMARK\_FILE. You must put there the full path to your watermark images, since you do not know (at least I didn’t knew) what’s the current dir, from where your script will be executed;

* The script supports two watermark images at the moment: a “normal” one (named above as “BIG\_”), and a “small” one. The small one is used, if the width or height of the target picture is not at least 5 times bigger than the length of the “BIG\_” watermark. I had to do that, because otherwise the thumbnails of my images really sucked. If you do not wish to have two different watermark images, either modify the code, put two identical images, or give the same image name in the two macroses;

* Now you must put the following .htaccess file in each directory, which images you want to place watermark. If you already have .htaccess, you just add the following code to it:

AddHandler watermark .jpg
AddHandler watermark .jpeg
AddHandler watermark .gif
AddHandler watermark .png

Action watermark <the Apache-related path to your CCwatermark.php here>
Here is what these lines do to your web server:
* The first lines instruct your Apache web server to apply the action ‘watermark’ to all files of types .jpg, .jpeg, .gif and .png.
* The following line defines the ‘watermark’ action as forwarding the Apache to execute the given script. In my case, that was the ‘https://doncho.net/gal/CCwatermark.php’ script, it’s up to you to write the correct according to your own site, and how Apache serves it. Take special attention on the path, because it took me few hours to discover why I’m getting 404 Error, until I realized that the path is the URI and not direct path in my file structure.

* Please feel free to download the ZIP file with both .htaccess and CCwatermark.php.

__In case you decide to use this article or code for your own purposes, please have in mind that:__

* The author _does __not__ guarantee_ you that the code will not ruin out completely your whole site, causting you billions of USD loss. If you use the code, provided in this article, you agree that you have used anything from this article and code on your own behalf and you __release the original author from any potential loss__ (if you want, you can release the author from any potential profit too, but I will not deny you this choice :));
* Both __all the code__ and __this blog article__ are licensed under the Creative-CommonsAttribution license. This differs than the license of my blog, which is a bit more restrictive (and old).

Here is a brief article on how to create a shortcut, which will open Windows Explorer window with at “My Computer” location in it.

If you want to have just Explorer window at “My Computer” (similar to double click of the “My Computer” icon at your Desktop), then create a shortcut to the following target (just copy and paste this after you right click your Desktop and choose “New shortcut”):
explorer.exe ::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

If you want to have the Explorer window with two panes (similar to the same effect as if you press Win+E keys: folder list at left and the contents of “My Computer” at right), then use the followig command instead:
explorer.exe /e,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

Today I had quite interesting experience, when I tried to install Microsoft SQL Server 2000 on Windows Server 2003 SP1, which was running in a Virtual PC “box”.

I had the installation files on my host machine into a folder, which was “Shared Folder” for this Virtual PC. When I started the install, first I’ve got the prompt that “SQL Server 2000, versions lower than SP2 might be incompatible with Windows Server 2003”, advising me to apply SP2 as soon as possible. So far – so good, “Continue”… and wham – “Internal Error, please contact Microsoft Technical Support”.

WTF?

Instead of contacting Microsoft Techinical Support :), I decided to ask directly my colleague, who is sitting next to my desk and has quite an experience with these damn database servers. He also was a bit amazed of this behavior, but his advice was “put the damn shared folder besides and copy the installation first on your Virtual HDD”, and then to try again. Then he left to get some smoke into his lungs.

Althought I was not believing this would help, I copied the installation files on the Virtual PC’s virtual hard drive, and retried the installation from there. And (oh bloody miracle) it worked! I was already bit pissed off, but since I did not knew who to blame first (except me, of course), I decided to let it go.

However, I still have the feeling that this is not a Virtual PC issue. It seems more SQL Server setup issue. I think that if your MS SQL Server 2000 installation files lays down on a network drive (since VPC “Shared Folders” are nothing more than a shared network drive for all the software, who’s running in the virtual machine), you may see the same problem! If you see it, try to copy the files on your local hard drive and it will most probably work.

The following MS SQL 2K SP4 installation went fine. I didn’t try installing it from my network share, but I directly unpacked it and let it go from my Virtual HDD.

Computers are strange animals, aren’t they 🙂 ?

About a week ago I downloaded and installed one Racing game demo, because I wanted to see how my son will do with it (if he’s going to like it or not).

Unfortunately after installing the demo, it started to throw nice BSODs on my machine. Something was wrong. A quick check revealed the reason – my NVidia driver was way too old and obviously needed upgrade.

I downloaded and installed the latest NVidia driver, version 2.11.15.0. Everything worked with a charm. Angel really liked the game, and it shortly become his favorite. I will have to buy it now, but this is for another post ;).

However, today I observed very nasty behavior of my machine. It seems something was really bugging its performance. Each minute the machine was freezing for about 30 seconds! Everything seemed to stop, including its network adapter (it stopped accepting ping requests too).
After these 30 seconds the machine was resuming its normal operation, till the next freeze (which was occuring in maximum of 5 minutes).

I was pissed off! I was suspecting the newest hardware/driver change, and that obviously was the NVidia driver installation. I was even more pissed when I found proof of my suspicion in my System Event Log. Each time when a new hang occurs, my SCM (Service Control Manager) was issuing the following message:

> Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the NVSvc service.

For those of you who do not know, NVSvc happens to be the NVIDIA Driver Helper Service, part of the latest driver update I made.

Now I had two oportunities:

* Either I remove the NVidia driver, and BSOD returns, making the game unplayable and disappointing a lot my little son;
* Either I look for a solution.

Google didn’t help at all. It seems people had similar problems, but no good solution was provided whatsoever..

So I decided to try the last resort. I disabled the NVidia service, and restarted the machine, expecting the worst, i.e. – unability to boot except in Safe Mode (where the NVidia driver would not be used).
Fortunately, so far I had no problems at all. The system rebooted normally, and I was able to login and work with no side effects (again – so far).

No more nasty hangs, no more event log messages. This disgusting service has gone away, making my system usable again.

It seems this is the solution. If I have any problem because of this solution, I will update this article.

Short quote here: if you experience problems connected with nvsvc.exe, please be sure you will check first this article about W32/Agobot-EL troyan, which represents itself as nvsvc.exe service! Although my problem was not connected with this, it’s quite possible you to have this troyan running there!

Have fun!

I bought today new USB hard-drive box device from MemorySuppliers.

Everything happened while I was listening to MicMouse radio show. They mentioned an interesting device – UDB box for notebook HDD. You buy the box, and after that you put inside any 2.5″ notebook HDD you want. You have quite cheap, reliable and big USB storage, which does not need an external power supply. Having in mind that I needed such thing for my trips around, I was already considering something similar – and this idea seemed great to me.

After I receive the USB box I will search around for a cheap old notebook drive – I think that 20GB will be a very good begining :). However, if I find 60GB, it won’t be bad at all ;).