Toluu

Sillyness, werd

And it came to me then that every plan, Is a tiny prayer to father time

Making a watercolor, on the cheapJuly 22

If you ever find yourself needing a piece of "art" and only have a photo to work with, then have I got a tip for you.

The process is fairly simple, but it does require Illustrator and photoshop. I am still working with CS2 at work and at home, so the steps I outline here will be for that version of the software.

Step 1: pick a photo

First, select the photo you want to use, I chose this panorama of the Asbury College campus:

First things first, we need to open up Illustrator and create a new document. Once the document is ready to go, you need to select "Place" from the File menu. This will launch an "open file" dialog. Find your image, and choose "place".

Anyway, I hope this helps someone who is looking to achieve the same effect, quickly.

Once the image has been placed in your document, click on it once to select it, and then go to the "object" menu and select the "live trace" submenu, and then select "trace options" since we need to tweak the settings a bit.

Once the new dialog comes up, click on "preview" so you can see what effect your changes are having in real time, and then start adjusting the values. For my image, I chose the following to modify the Mode. Setting it to "grayscale" allows us to maintain a goodly number of the gradients and

Darth is blue...July 16

Yeah, even the dark lord of the Sith needs the blues every once in a while.

You know your a dork whenJuly 14

You are asked to fill a drop down with a range of heights, and you immediately write a PHP snippet to do it for you.

For those interested, this little routine could be useful for future use:

$f= 4; //number of feet to start with
$i= 0; //we start with no inches
do {
// if inches are less than 12, and feet does not equal 7
if( $i // go ahead and echo out the format we need
echo $f . '.' . $i . "= '$f feet $i inches',\n";
// and increment the inch value by one
$i++;
}
// now we check if we have hit 12 inches,
// if so it is time for a new foot.
if( $i== 12 ) {
//reset inches back to 0, and increase
// our foot value by 1
$i=0; $f++;
// do that crazy echo dance again
echo $f . '.' . $i . "= '$f feet $i inches',\n";
// and of course lets not forget to
// increment our inch
// value by one again.
$i++;
}
}
// do all this crap as long as inches are less
// than 12, and feet do not equal 7.
while( $i ?>

And that is about it. This little bit of code can be repurposed to create ranges between two numbers.

Can We Save Free Software from RMS?July 8

“… You might as well introduce the children to an addictive drug. If the XO turns out to be a platform for spreading the use of proprietary software, its overall effect on the world will be negative.”

— Richard Stallman

Yes you self-righteous prat. Giving children in third world countries access to technology that will allow them to aspire to greater heights of learning and economic standing is evil, evil I say! Unless of course it is technology that you approve of. Then it is all ponies and rainbows.

Would someone make this man get a real job. Please?

Animoto: JakobJuly 8

Just testing out this new service. Looks interesting.