• Paint has an extremely simple user interface strictly following the desktop metaphor. Because of this, there is no way a user can go wrong with Paint. There is one window, one canvas and one toolbar/ribbon area to deal with. There is the pallet area too (prior Windows 7); but most users are OK with it.
• Paint starts fast: you don’t have to wait a few minutes to use Paint. It has such a small memory footprint and will start before you are done doing with double-click. Another benefit of the small memory footprint is that you don’t need a fancy computer to run Paint on.
• You can only use the most common file types with Paint. Here again, you do something, and save the file in your format of choice without being presented a handful of post-save options. The file is just saved and ready to be used in a few clicks.
• You will never rip apart the Paint UI by accident. Most modern software are designed with ‘total UI flexibility’ in mind so that there are 101 toolbars and menus to a density where people are scared to move the mouse pointer across the screen with the fear of moving one part of the UI and sticking it in another area rendering a total mess in the GUI. Paint doesn’t have this pervasive silliness.
• Paint is ubiquitous. Buy a new computer and Paint will be pre-installed with it; go to a friend’s PC and Paint could be found there; it’s installed by default on every PC since Windows 95. It’s totally available to you during the lifetime of your computer and will never expire asking you for a new serial number.

Certainly these aren’t the only reasons why someone would like Paint. For most people, the main reason to like Paint is its simplicity and availability. A normal user doesn’t fancy sophistication in software. They want their job done, in the easiest way and in the shortest time. Maybe there are the same reasons why Notepad is the most famous text editor for Windows.

Prologue

I use Paint.NET 3.36 on a Microsoft Windows XP Professional 64-bit workstation with 2GB of DDR2 RAM and ATI FireGL V3300 Dual-head display adapter. Installing a plug-in is a snap. Just copy the plug-in DLL to the relevant directory. For example, if the installation path of PDN is C:\Program Files\Paint.NET, then effects plug-ins should be copied to the Effects folder and file type plug-ins should be copied to the FileTypes folder.

1. Buttons

Forum | Author | Download

2. Rounded Corners

Forum | Author: dan9298 | Download

3. Borders and Shapes

Forum | Author | Download

4. Checkerboard

Forum | Author | Download

5. Multi-Color Gradient

Forum | Author | Download

6. Gradient Bars

Forum | Author: Pyrochild | Download

7. Water Reflection

Forum | Author | Download

The best approach I have come across to manage multiple web projects is to use subdomains. Subdomains are pretty, clean and easy to manage. This how-to article is about my simple and effective method of hosting multiple web projects on nstation using subdomains. We will create two projects ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ with http://foo.nstation/ and http://bar.nstation/ as their URLs to explain the whole process. Please note that the technique described here is based on the Microsoft Windows platform. However, it is possible to do the same on other platforms with minor adjustments.

Prerequisites

• XAMPP or a compatible web server software
  More info: What is XAMPP, XAMPP FAQ
• Notepad or compatible text editor
  Hint: drag-and-drop a file onto a Notepad window to open the file.

Step 1 – create folders

Create the folder structure as shown below.

It doesn’t have to be the C: drive. But for simplicity it is always recommended that you create the Webroot folder in a drive root. Refrain from using path names with spaces like C:\Program Files\Webroot.

A short description on each folder is given below.

Webroot\projects

This folder contains individual project folders. In our case the two sub folders foo and bar reside here.

Webroot\public

This is where you put all the default stuff. For example, you can copy the Apache htdocs folder content here. This folder hosts the main site (http://nstation) content.

Webroot\xampp

Contains XAMPP files – Apache, PHP, MySql, phpMyAdmin, perl and other server related components are stored here.

Step 2 – install XAMPP

Install XAMPP on Webroot\xampp folder. I recommend you use the self-extracting 7-ZIP archive. Run the setup and chose C:\Webroot as the Extract to folder as it will anyway extract the content to a folder by the name xampp.

Run setup_xampp.bat to finish the setup process. You will get a console output similar to the following screenshot.

Press any key to finish the setup. To run the XAMPP Control Panel Application, double click xampp-control.exe. Click the start button in front of both Apache and MySql modules to start the server. Since we haven’t done any modifications yet, XAMPP runs on its default settings. See screenshot below.

Step 3 – configure Apache

Now we need to change the default Apache configuration to match the directory structure. Apache configuration is distributed among several text files. All of these files reside in the xampp\apache\conf folder. We need to edit two files: conf\httpd.conf and conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf.

Step 3.1 – edit httpd.conf

Go to xampp\apache\conf and open the httpd.conf file. Locate <Directory “C:/Webroot/xampp/htdocs”> and change it to <Directory “C:/Webroot/public”> . Scroll down a few lines and locate the closing directive </Directory> and add the following at a new line.

<Directory "C:/Webroot/projects">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Step 3.2 – edit httpd-vhosts.conf

Go to xampp\apache\conf\extra and open the httpd-vhosts.conf file. Uncomment NameVirtualHost *:80 by removing all hash signs (#) at the beginning of the line. (By now you would have noticed that any line starting with a hash sign is indeed a comment.)

Add the following text at the end of the file on a new line.

# Default site: http://nstation
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/Webroot/public"
ServerName nstation
ServerAlias nstation
</VirtualHost>

# Foo sub domain: http://foo.nstation
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName foo.nstation
DocumentRoot "C:/Webroot/projects/foo"
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.html index.htm index.shtml
</VirtualHost>

# Bar sub domain: http://bar.nstation
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName bar.nstation
DocumentRoot "C:/Webroot/projects/bar"
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.html index.htm index.shtml
</VirtualHost>

Step 4 – edit the hosts file

The host file is the system file that matches hostnames to IPs. This file resides in the system folder %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc and on most computers this would be C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. Open the hosts file (yes, the file doesn’t have an extension) and add the following two lines to the end of the file at a new line.

127.0.0.1              foo.nstation
127.0.0.1              bar.nstation

This tells the system to direct requests for foo.nstation and bar.nstation to the IP address 127.0.0.1.

Step 5 – test the setup

Restart Apache and MySql by stopping and starting them using the XAMPP Control Panel. If you did not run these in step 2, just start both modules to see whether our configuration is in effect. If everything went accordingly, you should get the green Running status on both Apache and MySql.

Point your web browser to http://nstation to see the content served on Webroot\public folder. If you have nothing to start with, I suggest you copy everything in xampp\apache\htdocs folder to this location. You should get the XAMPP default web site with all the bells and whistles.

Put your Foo project files to Webroot\projects\foo folder and Bar project files to Webroot\projects\bar folders respectively. Point your browser to http://foo.nstation and http://bar.nstation to see them in action. Put the following code in an index.php file and save the file in both locations if you have nothing to start with.

<h1>Hello World</h1>
<p><?php echo "My location: " . dirname(__FILE__); ?></p>

You should get different location details depending on the URL.

Add more projects (optional)

Follow step 3.2 and step 4 to add more projects to your setup. Given below are the skeletons that can be used for this task.

Step 3.2 – httpd-vhosts.conf file entry

# vhost entry for new_project sub domain: http://new_project.nstation
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName new_project.nstation
DocumentRoot "C:/Webroot/projects/new_project"
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.html index.htm index.shtml
</VirtualHost>

Step 4 – hosts file entry

127.0.0.1              new_project.nstation

Done

That’s it. It’s easier than you would’ve imagined it to be. Hope this article helps and makes your web development experience a fun.

Disclaimer: Cover photo courtesy Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL.

A respectable member of the society will never attempt to steal a teddy bear from a department store although he may be well pirating software over the internet at home. But there must be reasons for this dualistic human-behavior for the same type of action; the same type of misbehavior. Read through my analysis as to why people steal software but not teddy bears in the modern society.

Tangible vs. intangible

The concept of stealing has a strong association to the tangible nature of an item. Software is intangible; you do not feel it. It is just an arrangement of bits and bytes on your hard disk or other type of media. You would feel wrong to steal a teddy bear from a department store but not to illegally download a copy of a software title over the internet. This intangible nature is also the reason for most other reasons why software is pirated.

A Replica

People do not feel wrong about replicating. On this forum post at Mininova.org the user has posted an interesting argument on stealing a cow versus replicating the same: if you steal a cow, then the owner of the cow will suffer from the los of it; if you replicate the cow instead, then you don’t actually take away anything from the rightful owner. It’s the notion ‘I’m just replicating – not stealing’.

Who gets hurt?

It is the software giants that get hurt with pirating and they already have ample amount of money in their pockets. People often think ‘the 50 dollars I do not give them are negligible in sight of their current wealth’. Even for tangible items, if the party is in concern is filthily rich; people assume that the items stolen will go unnoticed due to the ample amount of resources the wealthy claim. Remember Robin Hood?

I pay for my internet connection

Most software pirating is domestic and people often download software using their own internet connection. For this reason the notion ‘I pay for my internet connection’ renders a thought of justification in downloading software. This holds the same for duplicating software titles on removable media such as CD or DVD as the recipient has already purchased the blank media himself.

Readily available

Pirating is readily available and can be done from home. An internet connection, a mechanism to pirate (such as BitTorrent) and the knowledge on completing the process is all it takes for the completion of a successful pirating cycle. The flip side of this is that unlike other commodities, a software title cannot be evaluated at a store because of its intangible nature. People prefer to first try it at home and then but it legitimately; which to the most part end up remaining ‘evaluating indefinitely’.

Lack of pricing model

Software doesn’t have a proper pricing model. Often people believe that software titles are pricy. The same kind of software comes in various price bands. Since there is no proper gauge to measure the value of a software title, people recent to pay the right amount of money the developer deserve.

Disclaimer: cover pic by jesus_leon

This is where www.delorie.com comes in to the rescue. This website provides a handful of tools for SEO related work. You can use its online lynx viewer to view a web page in text-only format. Use the Search Engine Simulator to view a web page in different summarized forms based on the content and structure. There is also a purifier, header viewer, request viewer and backward compatibility viewer. All these tools provide you easy SEO while keeping it all in the cloud; and keeping off you hand from sweating too.

Ergonomics of the right-handed design: The practice of creating right hand oriented icons has come in to play from industrial design as almost all devices are right-hand oriented. If you haven’t noticed this before, the right-handed design is the same reason why your TV remote is well operated from your right hand compared to the left hand. The power button (or any other crucial controller) is conveniently placed where your thumb finger would rest when you are holding the remote. This is the same reason why controls are placed on the right-hand side of the elevator; and the list can go on and on.

To illustrate this, I’ve shown the left hand orientation in the Google Android UI icons here. See how the Android design is completely opposite to the common design in certain cases.

Primary and secondary objects are used in these icons to suggest the left hand orientation. For example the Alarm Clock, Browser, Calculator and Calendar icons are oriented towards the left hand side. The Dialer and Messaging icons clearly show the left hand orientation as the handset and the pencil is held left-handedly.

Certainly the current Android prototype is too early to sustain till the final release. Probably the entire set of UI icons will be changed in the final release. Maybe this is done purposely to be different from the rest of the world. The guys at Google are famous for doing things differently. I’m not complaining here — just enjoying the fact that someone has made a design that suite my style as I’m a left-hander!

Android screenshot courtesy androidcommunity.com.

Usage

My preferred way of using portable apps is to use them on a different partition where I usually keep my documents, music and other stuff. I use the PortableApps Suite that has the well designed start menu like UI. There are three flavors to the PortableApps Suite installer and my choice is the Platform Only edition as it is all what’s required if you prefer to hand-pick the software titles that will be installed later on.

Organization

The PortableApps Suite installer creates two folders (Documents and PortableApps), an executable called StartPortableApps.exe and an Autorun.ini file on the root folder of the partition.

The Documents folder is similar to the Windows My Documents folder and has three sub directories for Music, Pictures and Videos. This is where I keep all my files, music and videos. You can also point your Windows My Documents folder to this folder so that when you save in My Documents, you are really saving instead here.

The PortableApps folder is where the apps are installed. This folder will grow as you install applications. All portable apps are installed in a sub directory under this directory. If you ever need to uninstall an app, just remove the relevant folder from this directory.

The StartPortableApps.exe is the application that initiates the PortableApps Menu. If you install the suite on a portable device (such as a USB Pen Drive) the Autorun.ini file will make sure that this file will run automatically when you connect the device to your computer. Since I’m installing this on a fixed device I make a link to the StartPortableApps.exe on my desktop and run it every time I start Windows. The PortableApps Menu puts an icon on the system tray and hence you access your favorite portable applications.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Most portable apps do not use the Windows registry. They save settings on a file on their own folder. This is a key feature of portability. The other main feature is that they have minimal disk utilization. This makes the applications run slightly faster than their counterparts.

A major disadvantage is security. The partition you have selected to install portable apps may be accessible to others who have access to your machine and hence your files are exposed. This is not a major issue if you are the only person who’s using the computer or you have set proper privileges to prevent others from accessing the partition. You may also go that extra mile and use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted volume so your data is totally out of sight for others.

Conclusion

Life becomes a lot easier when using portable apps since managing your favorite software and files becomes a matter of copying and pasting. Although I have written this post with Windows is mind, please note that most portable apps have Mac and UNIX distributions. The list shown below is my favorite set of portable apps.

• AbiWord Portable
• Audacity Portable
• InfraRecorder Portable
• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition
• Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition
• Notepad++ Portable
• Pidgin Portable
• PNotes Portable
• Sumatra PDF Portable
• ToDoList
• VLC Media Player Portable
• WinMerge Portable
• WinSCP Portable
• WordWeb Portable

Mini FAQ

What if I want to use the same set of portable apps at home?

Copy the folder PortableApps along with the StartPortableApps.exe to your home machine. Use a partition that is not the system partition to prevent data loss in the case of a reinstallation.

How easy is it to install a new portable application?

Open the PortableApps Menu and select ‘Options -> Install a New App’. If you manually copy the application folder inside the PortableApps folder then select ‘Options -> Refresh App Icons’; the PortableApps Menu will pick up the newly installed/copied application and show it in the list.

What if I want to move all the content on this partition to another partition? Will portable apps still work?

Yes. Almost all portable apps use relative paths to store data and do not depend on where you save files. Just copy the contents of your entire partition to the new partition and run the StartPortableApps.exe from the new location and you are good to go.

I reinstalled Windows. Do I have to reinstall PortableApps Suite?

No. Just run the StartPortableApps.exe on the portable apps partition. For convenience you can create a shortcut on your desktop to this file.

Do I really have to use the PortableApps Suite Menu?

No. The PortableApps Suite Menu is just a launcher application with a few other handy features (like backup/restore) to make your life easier. You can absolutely be on your own and run individual apps by going in to the relevant folder.

Factors like legibility, etymology, syllable structure, familiarity, significance to real-life objects and events; easy pronunciation, the letter count and the shape of the name when printed on paper are often overlooked by many software professionals. Most software names are coined just by looking at few of the above mentioned factors and the trademark value. Although trademark/brand¹ value is very important in the highly competitive modern day world, it should not be given 99 percent weight when naming a software package.

However, careful craftsmanship can lead to a unique name even if the words constituting the name are unrelated and out-of-context. The Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are best examples for unique names that have super-brand attributes. But constructing such names are often time consuming and tricky. It leads to a lot of iterations in changing the name which is not healthy for the brand’s wellbeing.The bottom line is that software packages must be named judiciously. The name must be non-ambiguous. It should be a description of the software package’s usage. The name should bear the characteristics of the software. If a puzzled user asks the question ‘what does your software do?’ after seeing the name, then it’s time to consider re-naming.

1 – the difference between trademark and brand from alibaba.com:
• A trademark protects any sign or symbol that allows your customers to tell you apart from your competitors. You can register a name, logo, slogan, domain name, shape, color or sound.
• The brand name is a company-specific name for a particular product or service, usually used to differentiate that product or service from competitor offerings. French: nom de marque.

2 – The Name Cartoon source: http://wesclark.com/ubn/name_cartoon.jpg

When I started designing this theme, I didn’t have any expertise on WordPress. The principles of blogging were completely new to me. I looked into many other blogs to figure out the essentials of theming. Ironically most themes were structurally the same except they looked different in presentation. But is this commonly accepted structure really usable? This is what I discovered.

File Away

Some details presented on blogs are unwanted or rarely used. The archive for example has no significance to an average user. Since majority of users end up in a blog post by getting referred by a search engine, there is very little chance that someone visiting to read a certain blog post would drill down the archive to read other posts.

Attention to Detail

Only posts matter. Everything else is inferior. Even static pages have less significance unless information presented on static pages can draw more interest than posts. Having a mechanism to list and summarize the most recent posts can be beneficial.

No one dare to spare time on the archive. Give it less attention. Have a page that list all post titles that is groped monthly or yearly. This actually depends on how much you write; but reduces confusion and the hap-hazard nature of the archive.

Prevent making countless categories. Use a small number of categories to group different areas of interests. Make use of the new WordPress tags to brief your visitor about the post. By the way, that tag cloud makes no sense to many people. But it’s a good way of showing your intents. So use it judiciously, don’t throw it on the face.

Least but not last, avoid the top ten design mistakes when creating your blog. Remember, usability guidelines applicable to a regular websites are applicable to blogs too.

1 – current theme as at 20^th November, 2007

Prerequisite

The prerequisite is Firefox. No need to install any fancy third-party plug-ins although there are many to automate this task. We’ll be using a great feature already built into Firefox called ‘View Selection Source’.

Step 1

Go to the Flickr page that has the photo you want. Usually it’s in the format http://flickr.com/photos/<user>/<photoid>/
Ex: http://flickr.com/photos/enteelk/629074618/

Step 2

Select the photo by clicking just out the left-side of the image and dragging your mouse to the right-side of the image and releasing.

Notice how the photo is now selected with the selection color overlay.

Step 3

Now right-click on the selection and select View Selection Source.

Step 4

A window with the title ‘Dom Source of Selection‘ will pop up with the selection source code.

Step 5

Select the source attribute text (img src="<text>") of the image tag without the ?v=0 portion which is the path to the photo.
(Ex: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1405/629074618_20f6542a03.jpg)

Step 6

Copy and paste the text on the address field and press enter. Select Save As from the File menu or right-click on the picture to save it.

Done!

Please note that even if a photo is made public, you have to obtain license for commercial use. This post is about making your life easier and not about stealing other people’s intellectual property.