Technology Insights

Install Canfield Imaging Systems Mirror Software On Windows XP

Insights2 Comments

A medical research company that I do some work for called me the other day to install a software package on one of their Windows XP computers called Mirror. The Mirror software suite was created by Canfield Imaging Systems which is a medical imaging software company. Typically the patented Mirror software suite is used by aesthetic surgeons to show prospective patients a simulation of their potential appearance as noted on the Canfield web site. In this case my client typically uses a software package called VISIA which is also developed by Canfield Imaging Systems but doesn’t provide the easiest way to manage images outside of the software. In these studies dozens of pictures are taken of various angles of a patients face and VISIA will only allow you to export one image at a time as a JPG file or you can export the entire client as a .DIX file which I was only able to open with VISIA itself. Mirror allows you to manage the medical images in a much easier format including exporting numerous JPG’s at the same time. Below I describe how to install Mirror on Windows XP.

Technology Insights

Clean Macintosh iTunes Library By Batch Removing Dead Tracks

InsightsLeave a comment

A friend asked me to help him clean up his iTunes library on his iMac the other night so I asked him to bring it by. When he did I realized what had happened which is he had moved the location of his iTunes folder from his computer to an external drive. After moving the folder he imported all of his music again which caused iTunes to think his 8,000 MP3’s had become 16,000 MP3’s. Half of the tracks had red exclamation points by them because iTunes had information about them but could no longer locate the file since he had moved all of the music to a new folder in a different location. I found an easy solution to resolve this problem on a Mac which I describe in detail below.

Technology Errors

Backtrack 4 Installation StartX Error: AddScreen/ScreenInit Failed For Driver 0

Errors36 Comments

When installing Backtrack 4 on a Windows Virtual PC VM this afternoon I got an error when attempting to start the X server. After initially booting the DVD inside the virtual machine I set up for the Backtrack 4 installation I got the error starting X with the startx command. Resolving it was easy for me though I don’t know that it would always be as easy for others. Below I describe the error received when starting X and what I did to resolve the problem.

Technology Insights

WD My Book 1 TB External Hard Drive: Uninstall WD SmartWare & Unlock Drive For Use

Insights2 Comments

A friend of mine called the other day and asked if I would stop by to help him setup and configure an external hard drive he had purchased and unsuccessfully setup on his Mac desktop. Upon initial inspection I figured I would just uninstall the WD SmartWare software, reformat the drive, and set it up to simply act as a secondary drive. It turns out that the initial releases of the SmartWare software would require you to configure the drive using SmartWare so I instead of completely wiping the SmartWare software I decided to simply minimize the impact the SmartWare software would have on what my friend wanted to do which was simply have a secondary hard drive that he could copy files to. Below are a couple steps I took to minimize what the WD SmartWare software would do or require you to do before copying files to the external Western Digital hard drive. The first couple of steps are to make sure that the configuration we are starting with is from scratch and sense my friend started the install I wasn’t sure what had been configured so it was better to start over.

Technology Errors

Canfield Imaging Systems Mirror Software: License Server Error – err: 81F4000F

ErrorsLeave a comment

A medical research company that is a client of mine asked if I would come by to install some software for them the other day. The software was supposed to be an addition to Canfield Imaging Systems VISIA software package called Mirror. The Mirror software was going to provide my client a way to manage the images created from within VISIA in a much more efficient and standard way. Currently they are able to export images either one at a time or as a bundle in a non standard file format which makes them fairly useless unless you are importing into another VISIA system. Anyhow during the software install I was unable to launch Mirror after the initial install because of a licensing server issue which I describe below along with how I was able to resolve the problem short term and what needs to happen long term to make the two software packages interact together.