The Technology Center: Idle Time

[CoffeeShark]

that's pretty amazing

[Dopefish]

I put up a page showing off a bunch of different filters you can use.

Subpixel Resampling Test


When generating thumbnails, keep in mind that if you do use a filter, the larger the matrix the longer it will take to complete. The motion blur filter is a 9x9 matrix and it took about 67 seconds to generate a thumbnail.

[Dopefish]

I'm going to make a simple metaphor here.

Your typical window is not only breakable, but it's easy to break with little effort. Microsoft Windows is no different.


Some time ago I had issues with my X-Fi card when I had Vista x32 installed. I didn't reinstall Windows at the time because it wasn't worth it just for that card. Later on, I changed the drive layout of my system and a bunch of other things and installed Vista x64 this time. I left the X-Fi card out because of my previous experience with it in Vista.

I set up my system to use a combination of power-saving options, like sleep and speedstep, while still providing performance. If I walked away for an hour, the system would automatically go to sleep and recover perfectly. It was like this for months...

I then decided I should throw my X-Fi card in and see if I could get it working. After installing the card and drivers I was surprised to see it worked and worked great.

One day I walked away from the computer for awhile and came back and I noticed the power light on my computer was on when it should have been off due to sleep mode. I turned the monitor on and it was sitting at a blue screen. The message was related to power saving. Since then I've gotten mixed results from sleep mode. Sometimes it will crash and present a blue screen, other times it will sleep but never recover, and sometimes it sleeps and recovers just fine. The only thing I could think of that would be the cause of this was the X-Fi card because that's when all of the problems started.

Now my fault in this is that I kept forgetting to go and disable sleep to prevent the issues from happening again and again.

Well, because of it crashing, when it happened today and I rebooted the machine, Windows came up and told me that it couldn't load my profile and was logging me in with a temporary profile. Windows doesn't keep a backup of your profile? Something as important and trivial as that is not backed up automatically? Windows told me that I should check my event log for detailed information. Any person that's worked with the event logs before should already know what to expect: Nothing. "Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off." This is the detailed information that it wanted me to see? I already knew this. Thanks for providing absolutely no helpful information.

Apparently the only solution to this is to back up the files in your profile directory, and then delete and recreate your user. :/

At least the registry is still intact and it's only a matter of copying all of my files back and re-doing all of my settings. :/


Seriously, Windows should automatically keep backups of the user's profile. :mad:

[Bojingles]

It's Windows.

[CoffeeShark]

can't you just use a restore point?

[VincentVega]

that's what I was thinking.

[FuzzyLogik]

dont think MS would ever make an automatic backup of your profile folder. If you install everything and save everything the default way, a bunch of that info is stored within your profile and can get quite large - can be easy to set your own backups though, to save your profile to an external drive or whatnot. Recreating a profile isn't too big of a deal but can be a pain if it happens a lot...then id suggest reinstalling the OS.

[DJ_Wheels]

I've had that happen to me several times in Vista (logs into temp profile). When it happens I just log out and log back in and my profile is properly loaded.

[Dopefish]

Originally Posted by FuzzyLogik

dont think MS would ever make an automatic backup of your profile folder. If you install everything and save everything the default way, a bunch of that info is stored within your profile and can get quite large - can be easy to set your own backups though, to save your profile to an external drive or whatnot. Recreating a profile isn't too big of a deal but can be a pain if it happens a lot...then id suggest reinstalling the OS.

Not the whole profile folder, just the actual NTUSER profile itself. The file apparently got corrupt from the computer not sleeping correctly. If this file goes down, you might as well format and reinstall since it holds all of your user registry settings. Recreating the user is basically just like creating a new user right after a fresh install. Any user settings that were stored in the registry are gone, which unfortunately included about 60+ hosts in PuTTY for me, and basically every setting I had. :/

I just think for a single file that holds all of your user settings, registry settings, etc. should have backups made quite regularly by the OS itself. It should create backups every time you log off or so. The file doesn't get large at all so multiple copies of it won't be a killer. Sure, the user can back it up, but for that important file the OS should handle it. It's the smart thing for the OS to do. They could even make a simple option for it in the control panel somewhere to create backups when you log off.

Originally Posted by DJ_Wheels

I've had that happen to me several times in Vista (logs into temp profile). When it happens I just log out and log back in and my profile is properly loaded.

That won't work if the profile is actually corrupted.

[Dopefish]

Okay, I'm adding color matrix support to my thumbnail thing.

I don't know if any of you have any experience with these but they're really powerful.

Any adjustment to brightness, luminance, color rotation, negatives, etc. are done via color matrices.

One thing I'm not sure about is saturation. I have the code for it in place, but I'm not sure whether the saturation gets applied on its own or as part of the rest of the matrix. I'll have to do some more tests later.

Here's some code examples (I'll provide image examples later):

// Negative -- Set ColorWeightNegative to TRUE
$SR->ColorWeight =Array(Array(-1, 0, 0, 0, 0),
                        Array( 0,-1, 0, 0, 0),
                        Array( 0, 0,-1, 0, 0),
                        Array( 0, 0, 0, 1, 0),
                        Array( 0, 0, 0, 0, 1));
$SR->ColorWeightNegative = TRUE;

// Sepia
$SR->ColorWeight =Array(Array(    0.14,     0.12,     0.08,        0,        0),
                        Array(    0.45,     0.39,     0.28,        0,        0),
                        Array(    0.05,     0.04,     0.03,        0,        0),
                        Array(       0,        0,        0,        1,        0),
                        Array(       0,        0,        0,        0,        1));

// NTSC Greyscale
$SR->ColorWeight =Array(Array(0.299, 0.299, 0.299, 0,     0),
                        Array(0.587, 0.587, 0.587, 0,     0),
                        Array(0.114, 0.114, 0.114, 0,     0),
                        Array(0,     0,     0,     1,     0),
                        Array(0,     0,     0,     0,     1));

// Color Rotation
$R = Deg2Rad(45);
$SR->ColorWeight =Array(Array( Cos($R), Sin($R),       0,       0,       0),
                        Array(ASin($R),ACos($R),       0,       0,       0),
                        Array(     0.5,       0,       1,       0,       0),
                        Array(       0,       0,       0,       1,       0),
                        Array(       0,       0,       0,       0,       1));