Ola Lindberg

I have been playing around with Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) some days and it’s really great for stitching several images to a panorama! The only thing missing is a way to open images in ICE from Picasa without needing to locate them in Explorer.

I created a button that you can add to Picasa that opens the selected images in ICE. It’s available for automatic installation or manual installation. If you choose manual installation copy the file to <your user folder>\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\buttons. If you want to remove it from Picasa you can delete the file from that directory. The pbz file contains two zipped files; one XML-file and one icon file. See Picasa Button API for more information about Picasa Buttons.

Prerequisites:

• Picasa Installed. I used the version 3 beta.
• Microsoft ICE installed. Note! It must be installed to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\Image Composite Editor

Issues / TODOs:

• There are a hard coded path for the ICE executable. I tried to find a registry key for ICE but I found none so you must install Microsoft ICE to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Research\Image Composite Editor
• The icon and text on the button doesn’t look quite alright. It works but looks a bit lame.
• Try to send a path where ICE should save the stitched image so it defaults to the same location as the unstitched.

I’ll try to fix the above issues. See my post in ICEs forum.

If you are using Flickr you might also want to check out picasa2flickr and if your are using Gimp the Gimp Picasa Button!

Don’t miss the Alt.NET “unconference” this Saturday!

If you haven’t - You should visit Ubuntu Brainstorm and vote for the features you want to include in Ubuntu!

I wanted to add a 80 column guideline to Visual Studio Express. I searched the settings without luck. Instead I found Sara Ford’s blog explaining how to do that. In the comments Tobias explained how to do that in Visual Studio Express as well. I tried it in Visual Studio C# Express 2005 and 2008. Works fine. The following is just a compilation from Saras blog with comments, all in one place.

Close Visual Studio. Add a string value to the Windows registry called Guides with the value RGB(153,153,153) 79 for a gray (#999) guideline at column 80 to any of the following locations.

Visual Studio 2005: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER]\Software\Microsoft\
VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor

Visual Studio Express 2005: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER]\Software\Microsoft\
VCExpress\8.0\Text Editor

Visual Studio Express 2008: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER]\Software\Microsoft\
VCExpress\9.0\Text Editor

It would of course be nice to have the setting in Visual Studio but for now this is good enough!

I came across Hackety Hack today. It’s a fun way to learn some programming basics via an interactive shell. Knock yourself out!

And yes, it seems to be the same guy that created Try Ruby.