Kyle Mulka's Blog

This article explains how you can (for practical purposes) put multiple pictures on your facebook profile. Basically you will go from multiple photos to something like this, ready to upload to facebook.

UPDATE: So, I tried uploading my image, but it looks like they are now limiting the dimensions of the profile picture. You can’t have it a whole lot longer than it is wide. Unfortunate indeed.

First, go find a computer with Imagemagick installed on it already, or install it yourself. Fortunately, I had previously installed it on my own linux computer. If you go to the University of Michigan, like I do, you can also find it installed on some of the servers that you can SSH into for IFS. For example, sftp.itd.umich.edu has it installed. For the rest of this article I’m going to assume you are using IFS.

First, find the pictures you want on your profile. Edit them to suit your tastes by taking out red eye, cropping them, and what not. Or, just leave them be. Whatever.

Upload them to a folder on your IFS space. There are several ways to do this. Check here: Connecting to IFS

Open an SSH terminal to that same folder.

Type in the following at the command line followed by the names of the images in the order you want them to appear and the name of the image you want outputted all separated by spaces:

montage -geometry 200 -mode Concatenate -tile 1

For example:

montage -geometry 200 -mode Concatenate -tile 1 img1.jpg img2.jpg img3.jpg out.jpg

Then press enter. It might take a short while. When the prompt comes back again, refresh the view of the folder (View -> Refresh) and download the output image. There ya go. Now, upload that image to facebook, and you are ready to rock! Contact me if you have any questions.

So, I discovered this really awsome web site simply titled Wayfaring. It’s kinda similar to what we want to do with Blue Puddle. Basically, its a really easy way to create your own map. You can plot points and lines and associate titles, text, tags, and such to them. Here’s one I created of places I visit and routes I travel on a daily basis while at the University of Michigan. I call it my Daily Wanderings.

Sorry about the outages the last few days if anyone even noticed.

I’ve been trying to move some stuff from off the server in my parents basement into a real hosting environment. So far I haven’t been very successful with my hosting provider. I don’t know if they are just slow or don’t understand that I want to host the DNS through another provider.

Before doing that, the power went out at home, and the computer I run my personal web sites off of doesn’t automatically turn itself on when the power goes on. Maybe there’s a BIOS setting for that, but I forgot to check.

What’s even frustrating me more is that when I’m at home, I can’t access my server via its internet domain name because the stupid router doesn’t seem to do loopback. WordPress, the software I use to publish this blog gets its domain name from the database, so if I wanted to use my blog in my house, I would have to change the database entry, thereby taking down the blog to the outside world, then change it back when I’m done.

When I got back to school (taking the wireless router with me) I couldn’t access my server at all from my laptop. I did a whole bunch of investigating, and was convinced for a while that the firewall for my apartment building was to blame. Maybe it decided I was communicating too much with my server, or the person who operates the firewall had noticed a large ammount of traffic from one IP.

Nope… wasn’t the problem. Here’s what was… In an attempt to fix the router loopback issue at home, I changed some of my portable wireless router settings to see if I could get it to redirect requests to the local IP of my server. Didn’t work. Because I did that, it was trying to redirect requests in my apartment building, which didn’t make sense at all. So, changed the configuration back, and bam… worked. Woot!

Sorry about all the whining. I needed to get that out of my system

Ok, Google doesn’t really suck, but I want to see if I can get anyone’s attention over there in Googleland about this problem. This is a BUG! A big fat BUG! Ok, so maybe it doesn’t produce the any error or anything, but it really annoyed me when I searched.

Wanna know what I searched for? … http

Yup… every web site on the internet has that wonderful prefix. Look at how many results you get: 6,340,000,000 Holy crap! But, guess what… when I type in http I don’t want every web site that ever existed. I want a web site about http, specifically the http protocol.

Seems that Yahoo has figured it out.

But MSN hasn’t. Who knows what kind of crazy algorithms they are using to come up with search results like that. Weird.

UPDATE: This post and Google Map have been deleted because I really shouldn’t have been medling with the bus project in the first place and because someone thought I stole their ideas/project which was not the case… I was just trying to improve upon what they had already worked on. My sincerest appologies to anyone involved especially Mike Bommarito who deserves credit for working on the Magic Bus Google Map and to David Harris for showing us the demo. Awsome stuff!

UPDATE: So, I found out that Mike really isn’t on the team. I went to one of their meetings and they pretty much told me I could work on the project. Awsome. So, keep an eye out for the news.

UPDATE: Finally! Here it is: http://mbus.pts.umich.edu/

It’s not quite Google Maps but its close. Here’s a little image of where viewers of my site are coming from:

I’ll be discontinuing the old way of accessing my weblog soon (kylemulka.com/wordpress/), so anyone still getting the rss feed from there, or linking there will have trouble. Please use the http://blog.kylemulka.com domain instead. Thanks.

So, after several weeks of waiting, Merit was finally able to upload the webcast of the Google Maps presentation I gave at the Merit Joint Technical Staff Meeting on October 11th, 2005.

Just as a warning, the video is 45 minutes long and my not be the most simulating thing you’ve ever seen before. It is basically, an introduction to the Google Maps API on a very high level. I didn’t go into any code. It lays out what you can and can’t do with the Google Maps API, ho

I thought this was interesting. It’s a list of sites related to Wolverine Access according to Google. See what I mean?

“The space, the social network, thinking tools and the network interface in the same field of view. The boundaries between what is interior and what is exterior intersecting tangibly in front of your eyes.”

If you have interest in continuous computing, location aware devices, social computing, or similar stuff check this out. At least start reading it. I just started, and it is amazing me. It has a lot of good ideas about where we can take the location sensing technology. The PDF is linked to on the left of the main page.

The Headmap Manifesto