(left: focus blended image / middle: near focus / right: far focus)

This image was a blended focus image from 6 different exposures using Enfuse.  None of those images had both foreground and background in focus at the same time.  I think it’s clear from this experiment that:

1. Don’t use a lightweight camera on a tripod on carpet.  It moves.
2. Don’t try to focus blend moving people.  It’s bad

Otherwise though it looks like this might actually have worked.  How cool!

I’ve come up with a somewhat odd (but awesome) approach to templates for my static HTML pages that makes authoring/maintenance trivial and allowed for functional offline copies.

(article and code here)

I had been hosting with dreamhost.com and was starting to think that paying $100 / yr was more than I should be paying for my personal web hosting.  I also have a $20/mo linode account that I love but, alas, don’t actually use.

I tried moving my site onto a simple $1 / mo static page only account with he.net and using blogger to run the blog.  Unfortunately it turns out that I hate blogger.   Really.  It sucks in a lot of different ways.  WordPress is just better.

So I needed hosting that:

• Supports PHP/MySQL based apps (WordPress specifically)
• Lots of space (>5GB at least)
• Hosts multiple domains
• Allows fine tuning of DNS

After shopping around I came across justhost.com.  Their feature list looked like what I was looking for and their site was telling me I could get a more or less unlimited plan for $3.95/mo (CDN).  That seemed pretty good to me. 

However, in the middle of signing up, I was harassed by one of those automated pop-up customer service chat things offering me a limited time offer of 50% off.  That is way too good to be true.  Two dollars a month!

So I signed up via PayPal.  For two years.

Subscription Terms:
$70.80 CAD for the first 2 years

Then $70.80 CAD for each 2 years

I was attacked by GoDaddy style prompts at every turn trying to sell me additional services and a number of e-mails offering me various discounts.  Gah!

….
Also I wanted to make you aware of our special 50% discount on all
‘Account Upgrades’ available to new customers as this will expire
for you by midnight tonight.
…

and

…
We have found that a high percentage of our new customers contact
our support team within their first few days of signing up to ask;

"How can I generate more visitors to my website?"

So after listening to our customers requests we have developed an
instant "Search Engine Submission" tool to help you generate more
visitors to your website from the world’s largest search engines.

Here is a exclusive 50% off link to us;
http://www.justhost.com/submission-hub?domain=jclement.ca

…

But that all said they are pretty good.  The server seems fast enough and network throughput is fine.  They have all the usual features I would expect.  They do not allow SSH console access (although you can add that for $$$) but they do allow SCP for transferring files.

My one major annoyance is that they force the Document Root for all additional domains to be hosted under the Document Root for the primary domain meaning that, unless you do some .htaccess magic, you’ll be able to access the contents of the additional domains as subdirectories under the main domain.

I posted a short little how-to on bundling up a .NET program in a NSIS self-extracting installer to make writing .NET based utilities (single EXE with no installer) a little bit nicer.

It handles:

• Unpacking to a temporary directory, invoking the program, and cleaning up when it’s done
• Installing .NET 3 if it’s not on the machine already
• Passing through command line parameters to the .NET app

Article Here

I think I might have downloaded too much in the last few days. Shaw is going to be thrilled…

My first attempt at focus blending.  I shot a few images on my G9 at lunch today and used enfuse to blend the exposures, neither of which had both pop cans in focus, into a single sharp image.

Near Focus:

Far Focus:

Blended Focus:

There is a bit of a halo effect on the highlights on the tin can but otherwise it looks relatively good. 

The Process:

First align the images using "align_image_stack".  This would be more important if they were hand-held or something crazy like that.  This produces "aligned_img1.tif" and "aligned_img2.tif".

$ align_image_stack -a "aligned_" -m img1.jpg img2.jpg

Now run them through enfuse to blend the focus:

$ enfuse –wExposure=0 –wSaturation=0 –wContrast=1 –HardMask -o test.jpg *.tif

This takes a long time (a minute or so) but the result is pretty decent.  Not bad for free software!