You know Vista REALLY sucks when...

... when Microsoft is giving away Visa Ultimate for free.

Seriously. They are giving it, or any of the other junk they create, Office, Works, or others.

The catch? They will monitor you using it. .. It is called the Windows Feedback Program, and is available in the US only.

They must be desperate to have someone, anyone, use Vista. They do want to see how did they miss up so badly I guess. Plus this can probably save them some money from their usability labs.

Oh well...

Attention to Details

I heard this some time ago:

In pre med school the Professor was standing upon a corpse with all the new "Doctors-to-be". He says: "There are two very important lessons I'll give you today... Lesson One: you should not be afraid or disgusted of the body, or the dead body.... “
At that time he proceeded by inserting his finger into the corpse ass hole and extracted some stuff...
Then he proceeded: "You will need to examine and operate on the body too see what went wrong… “
Then he proceeded by licking his finger, showing he is not afraid or disgusted. He told the students to do the same.
Some student left, but some inserted their finger then licked it, proudly showing how strong and ready for being doctors they are.
After all students either left or put and licked their finger he said “Lesson Two: I inserted this finger, and licked THAT finger… PAY ATTENTION!

VictorMagic - No more pixelations!

If you enlarged or zoomed too much on a photo before you will notice pixelation effect.

Because all photographs and most pictures are actually a grid of very small picture elements, or pixels, when you zoom in, you see these ugly rectangles. Just like zooming in too much on a photo on a book or newspaper reveals the dots. With a vector drawing program, like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape or others, your picture or drawing is actually made up of lines and curves. Even when you zoom in, you will not those pixels. You will still see smooth lines and curves. You will also be able to a lot more with Vectors, like smooth resize, skew, and distort.

Note however that Vectors are generally not suited for photographs. They are best suited for things like line art, signature, logo, or other such things. You can however vectorize an image if you want to make a really huge poster and don't want people getting close and seeing the pixels. They do look terribly annoying and unprofessional.

So, how do you convert from Pixels to Vectors? Many systems are available, including those from Adobe, Inkscape, and some other Open Source programs but non are as easy, or free as VictorMagic.

VictorMagic makes it very easy with a Wizard type User Interface. You upload your picture, select the kind, tune it, and then an EPS, PNG or SVG vector file.

There is no need to go through a tutorial or how to. It is dead easy, just go to the site and start playing.

Unfortunately I could not find a place to upload the test Muffins picture I posted earlier. flickr and Blogger do not allow uploading SVG pictures. But you can see samples on the VictorMagic site.

Blueberry Muffins - Take 4

Week 4 was finally a success....
Correct Muffin mix. Ingredients were all there, including an egg, which I don't remember needing. And no ants...
Here they are... And they taste grrreeaat.

Blueberry Muffins - Take 3

I love muffins. Specially when baked fresh. Betty Crocker Muffin Mix is really delicious and very easy to make. It doesn't need a whole lot of equipment to make, just a bowl and a spoon, which means it is also easy to clean up afterwards.
I used to get them from Al-Jazeerah Supermarket when I was in Bahrain, but did not see them since we moved to Jeddah, until about four weeks ago. So I took one bag and was ready for some fresh muffins for the weekend breakfast.
Week 1: I got up before my wife and told her to get ready for some good fresh chocolate chip muffins. Got the bags, heated the oven and read the instructions. You will need, water, an egg, and a stick of butter. Butter??? I don't recall the muffin mix needed any butter. Maybe I forgot, since I did not make them for a while now... But damn... we don't have any butter!!! No muffins this weekend.
Week 2: We got butter.. Same thing.... get up... get ready to bake and have fresh muffins for breakfast... Re-read the instructions... HEY!!! Those are NOT muffins!!! Those are Cookies!!! Damn it!!! The box looked exactly like the muffin box, and the Arabic label was probably confusing... Oh well.. the cookies are not as good, but okay...
Week 3: We bought another muffin box. Made sure it was Muffin this time. Same story... Get up.. get out the box.. and there are these ants on the box... hmmm.. get out the muffin mix, and those ants were making a party out of the mix!!! They made a hole in the plastic bag... Damn those ants! Just next to the muffin box was an opened bag of sugar... no ants. dates in an opened box... no ants. closed muffin mix bag... ants make a hole and get in... grrrr.. .
Week 4: Got another box, and put the box in the fridge. Hopefully I'll be able to have some fresh baked muffins for breakfast tomorrow....

Have a great weekend everybody..

One Month to WW III

Well, according to the Adnan wa Leena prologue, World War III was in 2008

...اندلعت الحرب العالمية الثالثة عام 2008

Makes you think how time flies ha? When I first saw that in the 80's, it seemed so far away. And now it is upon us.

Well, hopefully the prophecy is wrong. It has to be. I don't yet see the cool robots nor the weird looking flying machines anywhere!

And I don't know where القلعة could be. So... we might be safe for now.

rsizr - Intellegent Image Resizing

rsizr is a very innovative web-based application to intelligently resize images, without loosing much details. Instead of dupkicating or removing some columns or rows of pixels from an image, it uses a technique called Seam Carving to duplicate seams in an image that contain most details, or to remove the seams that contain least details. Even Photoshop (c) does not have that capability, yet.
Seam Carving Technique:

rsizr in action:

The user interface is very simple. Simply put, you upload your image (make sure the size is suitable for your speed, it may help to resize your image before you upload it). After that, you can mark the areas you need to protect (green), and the areas you want to remove (red) and then start your resizing. It is that easy. Give it a try, it is a lot of fun removing that person from the group photo!