Note:
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

Thank you for all your comments
thank you for all those suggestions
May 2009 be a year full of
love, laughter and happiness!

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 localhost using subdomains. We will create two projects ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ with http://foo.localhost/ and http://bar.localhost/ 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://localhost) 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://localhost
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/Webroot/public"
ServerName localhost
ServerAlias localhost
</VirtualHost>

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

# Bar sub domain: http://bar.localhost
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName bar.localhost
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.localhost
127.0.0.1              bar.localhost

This tells the system to direct requests for foo.localhost and bar.localhost 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://localhost 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.localhost and http://bar.localhost 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.localhost
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName new_project.localhost
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.localhost

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.

A man goes to a store, sees something nice (say, a teddy bear), checks whether it is available elsewhere for a better price and eventually buy it for the lowest price available. A man sees a computer game, checks its price, if the price isn’t lower than a few bucks, pirate it over his internet connection or borrow a copy from a friend. That’s the background of most modern software pirating stories. The teddy bear analogy is used here for the sake of simplicity and proof of concept whist regardless of the commodity we may use in comparison, software pirating is happening at an unbelievable rate.

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.

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.

OneNote strengths

Although EverNote has managed to surpass Microsoft OneNote in some areas, OneNote is still strong in formatting text, etc. OneNote’s ability to automatically tabulate content as soon as it detects a table like structure is severely missed in EverNote. The default colors and fonts on OneNote goes nicely with the rest of the Microsoft Office suite to the extent where a note entered in OneNote is no different to a document typed in Microsoft Word.

EverNote strengths

The latest version of EverNote is as mighty as you want it to be. Write once, access from anywhere in the world (which requires a registration on the EverNote server) is the best feature you can cheer upon. The new user interface is very simple and user-friendly. Unlike the OneNote UI which is a candy jar in its appearance, the new EverNote UI has a unique touch and a soothing green shade to it. Once you start working on it, you wouldn’t want to go back to another note taking tool ever.

The bottom line

Many note taking tools roamed but none prevailed to be the best among the rest until the days of OneNote. The introduction of OneNote damaged every other note taking tool’s reputation and took note taking to another level with sophistication and novelty. The lessons learnt from OneNote’s arrival have been put in to practice nicely with the introduction of EverNote 3. The next big thing will be to see how Microsoft strikes back with their next version of OneNote. Or will it be just Microsoft Notes?

On the other hand, today’s date (2008-08-08) has a nice vibe to it too. You can’t simply ignore the reiterating arrangement in numbers. I guess this happened last year too; but a month and a day earlier (2007.07.07). If you go to the Wikipedia article on number eight, you’ll see there are many facts on this number. I was awestruck to see how many interesting and equally important things have associations to this symmetrical numeral. Just for the sake of completing this post I thought I’ll post the most interesting 8 things on 8 according to the same Wikipedia article mentioned above.

• Eight is the atomic number of Oxygen.
• The maximum number of electrons that can occupy a valence shell is eight.
• In the human adult dentition there are 8 teeth in each quadrant. The 8th tooth is the so called the wisdom tooth.
• There are eight notes in an octatonic scale.
• A byte is eight bits.
• An Eighth is a common measurement of Marijuana, meaning an eighth of an ounce.
• Eight is symbolic for lesbian sexual relations.
• In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths ramifies as the Noble Eightfold Path; In Islam, eight Angels carry The Holy Throne of Allah in heavens; In Hinduism, eight is the number of wealth and abundance; In Christianity, eight is the number of Beatitudes.

Image courtesy: Duncan. See 8 on Flickr.

When I say regular people, I meant to classify those who do not belong to the school of designers and related disciplines. The five top reasons why Paint is the choice of graphics editing program amongst the common can be stated as follows.

• Paint has an extremely simple user interface and strictly follows 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 to deal with. There is the pallet area too; but most users aren’t afraid of it as they are with other parts of a window.
• Paint starts fast: you don’t have to wait until the next epoch to use Paint. It has such a small footprint and will start before you are done doing a 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 milliseconds.
• You will never rip apart Paint 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 prevailing silliness and hence you are a happy user.
• You can buy a new computer and Paint will be there; you can go to a friend’s PC and still Paint will be there. Paint is ubiquitous; it’s installed by default on every computer 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.

It seems like the main reason for regular people to like Paint is its simplicity. A normal user doesn’t fancy sophistication in software. They want their job done, in the easiest way and in the shortest timeframe.

It took me about three months to complete the design. This is entirely done in Illustrator and has no raster elements to bleed. The base for the card was done in wood and painted to glue to the two sides of the card. The card flip opened to show the invitation text inside the fold.

Hi Resolution Images

Inspiration

I looked at many Sesatha designs before attempting to do one on my own. Most real designs were not eye-catching and the elements that made the Sesatha looked oddly put together. Then the design on the 2000 rupee note caught my attention and this was heavily inspired by that.

Hi Resolution Images