If you spend a good part of your day using the computer, the 20-20-20 rule, might help you relax your tired eyes.

The rule goes something like this.

Every 20 minutes you are staring at your computer screen, take a 20 second break, and stare at something 20 feet away.

Since it  is nearly impossible for any computer users to remember that they have to take a break every 20 minutes, I’ve devised a simple program that will track how long you have been working. Every 20 minutes, it will cover your screen, forcing you to stair away for 20 seconds.

This application is currently a prototype, and would greatly appreciate feedback and suggestions for features and updates that could help improve the application in future releases.

Current Version: 0.1

Features:

• Track the time you have been working
• Fullscreen interruptions for 20 seconds every 20 minutes
• Pause Work time, or Skip Break options

Download Now

Happy Valentine’s Day!

This is the first painting I’ve done of you significant other, a fact she has always been suspicious about, so here it is.

Love you Hun.

As a web developer many want to test their developments on their local machines. But when it comes to dealing with PHP and MySQL you will need a web server (software) to test the sites you make. Normally we would have to download Apache from www.apache.org , MySQL from MySQL.net and configure these separately to work with each other on our local machine. Also if you want to administer MySQL on the browser you will have to install PHPMyAdmin which is a burden for the novice user.

To tackle these problems there are several packaged solutions on the net. Popular and more robust one is WAMP server. www.wampserver.com .

Let see step by step on how to create a root folder for our new web site that has to be built using PHP.

Step 1: Easiest way!

After installing WAMP on your local machine (You should see a white Speedo meter on the notification area) goes the folder where WAMP resides (If you install it on you C: partition then it is C:/wamp/). The folder structure is as follows,

Go inside the www folder and create a new folder inside it called “TestSite”. This is the rot folder of your web site. Better if you do not put spaces. Open up a simple notepad document and insert the following on it (don’t copy the formatting. Just type it),

Then same it inside the newly created folder and name it index.php.

Go to your browser and call http://localhost/TestSite/

If you see something like this then you are ready to do building rest of your dynamic web site.

Step2: Assigning a root folder outside “www”.

Well, if we want separate our web site folders from the WAMP server folder and put somewhere else in the hard drive then procedure gets a bit tricky for the beginners.

First create the folder you want as the web site root folder. Let’s say D:/MyNewTest/

Now we have to tell the WAMP server that this folder contains a web site and it should come up when the URL is called through the browser right?

Ok, first click on the little Speedometer icon on the notification area. Then go to,

Apache > Alias directories > Add an alias

Then you will be asked to give an alias to the site, this is what you type after http://localhost/ in the browser. Previous one was “TestSite” which is actually the folder name itself. But this is not necessary in this case. You can put anything. But don’t use spaces or dots. J

Let’s put “MySite”.

Then you will be asked what is the actual folder that MySite alias point to.

Give the following, D:/MyNewTest/

Note the forward slashes.

Now press enter to close the DOS prompt.

Go to your browser and type the http://localhost/MySite/

You will see the root index now. Put the notepad file we created earlier to “D:/MyNewTest”and refresh the browser page to test the PHP.

That is it. Simple isn’t it?

Source: http://www.webdesign.org/web-programming/php/configure-a-virtual-directory-using-wamp.16605.html

I’ve had this issue on numerous occasions. For some reason, one of the Acrobat updates completely breaks the program, preventing it from opening or being able to preform any of its standard tasks. The quickest fix I found was to reset the Adobe cache file.

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files(x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Adobe PCD\cache\
2. Take the file cache.db and move it to the desktop (or delete it)
3. Now open Photoshop (Or other Adobe program from the same suite), you’ll notice this automatically make a new cache.db file in the cache folder.
4. Try and open Acrobat again and you will be prompted to Activate.
5. Select License this Software, enter your product key and sign in to your Adobe account.

Fixed!
If it happens again just repeat the process. It’s far quicker then re-installing all of a Creative Suite,

This is a fun game for Typography nuts, try and move the letters to get the best kerning

http://type.method.ac/

This site is an awesome guide that helps you make those minor adjustments to your typography, with nice descriptions and justification for why these little changes have such a huge impact on the readability of your site.

http://www.kaikkonendesign.fi/typography/section/

I always hated the signal bars on the top right, as they always seem inaccurate. If you want to see a more accurate decibel number of your signal strength, try the following hack (no jailbreak required).

Step 1: Dial *3001#12345#* on you phone and press call.

Step 2: You’ll now enter Field Test mode. You’ll notice at the top it is already showing the signal strength in decibels. You can tap the signal strength to toggle between the numbers and the bars.

Step 3: Too make this setting permanent, hold down the power button till the poster off screen appears, but don’t power it off.

Step 4: Hold down the Home button till you leave the power screen and exit the Field Test app and are returned to your home screen.

That’s it, you can now see the exact signal strength.
The lower your number, the stronger your signal—but don’t include the – sign when evaluating (so, if the signal says -60, that’s better than -90).

In this scenario I was tasked with setting up a local server on our company network (so not accessible out side our network) for students to access and upload their own websites, and give them access to their own MySQL database through PhpMyAdmin.
The first thing is to direct your desired domain name to the networked computer (since I don’t want to keep typing the IP address in the address bar, and it helps my students relate to a real web server). In the DNS manager of your domain host, have the domain point to your local IP address (this is usually a 192.168.1.##). Once the DNS record is saved it may take up to 48 hours before it updated, but their is still some other things to do before we see this work.
You’ll want to already have your favourite Apache, MySQL, PHP package installed. I personally love XAMPP so I’ll be using that.
Navigate to your XAMPP’s httpd-vhosts.conf file, it should be in this directory:

C:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf

Go to the bottom of the file add the following:

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot "C:\xampp\htdocs"
ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot "C:\xampp\htdocs\yourfolder"
ServerName yourdomain.com
<Directory "C:\xampp\htdocs\yourfolder">
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Replace the area the says “yourdomain.com” the the domain name you need the server to accept.
Replace the “yourfolder” with the folder in your htdocs folder your want the domain to point to (remove if your want to just use your htdocs folder as the site root).
That will get the domain pointing to the folder and acting as a website, but we aren’t done yet; One issue we have is PhpMyAdmin does not accept requests from names outside the localhost, so we need to tell it to allow. Find the http-xampp.conf file, it should be located here:

C:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-xampp.conf

Go to the bottom of the file and you should find an area labeled as “New XAMPP security concept”, change the “Allow from” part to just allow “all”. it should look like this:

#
# New XAMPP security concept
#
<LocationMatch "^/(?i:(?:xampp|security|licenses|phpmyadmin|webalizer|server-status|server-info))">
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from all
ErrorDocument 403 /error/HTTP_XAMPP_FORBIDDEN.html.var
</LocationMatch>

Finally, that is all we need to do in XAMPP, but for security purposes Window does not allow outside access to your computer unless strictly approved. We just need to add our domain to the safe list; navigate to your windows hosts file found here:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

In this file, near the bottom, you’ll find where Windows is allowing even your localhost to access your computer (“# 127.0.0.1 localhost”). At the bottom of any other localhost name resolutions, add your domain to be resolved to the same local IP (127.0.0.1 which is just a reference to your computer), so your file should look like this:

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost
# 127.0.0.1 yourdomain.com

In this example, I had to take an existing large image that was uploaded by the user and create a smaller version of it for the thumbnail.

To create a thumbnail image in PHP, you need make sure the your server has the GD Library enabled, which if you are on a hosted server should be a given. You can check this by running this code in a PHP file:

<?php
var_dump(gd_info());
?>

Then you can enter the code in as follows:

$src = imagecreatefromjpeg("upoloads/your_large_image.jpg");
$new = imagecreatetruecolor(180,112);
imagecopyresampled($new, $src,0,0,0,0,180,112,imagesx($src),imagesy($src));
imagejpeg($new, "thumbnails/name_of_new_thumbnail_image.jpg");

The first part “imagecreatefromjpg” returns an image identifier representing the image obtained from the given file (basically just storing the image in the variable “$src” for us so we can use it in conjunction with the next few image functions), so here we pass the location of our uploaded or large image. This function also has a PNG, GIF and other image format versions.

Next we run “imagecreatetruecolor” which creates a new black image at our specified resolution. Think of it like creating a new document in Photoshop and setting your sizes to your thumbnail size preference. So we passed this a width and height in pixels (180, 112).

Then we run “imagecopyresampled” which copies a rectangular portion of one image to another image, smoothly interpolating pixel values so that, in particular, reducing the size of an image still retains a great deal of clarity. In other words:
we take our thumbnail image ($new, which is blank right now), then we copy over our large image ($src);
we then pick the x and y co-ordinates we wish to start drawing our rectangle with our thumbnail (in this case we want to start in the top left corner, so we leave the two values at ’0′),
then do the same for our destination image (again we just use 0,0 to start in the top left);
next we tell the function the width and height of the area we wish to draw in our thumbnail (so in this case we use the same dimensions of the thumbnail so we use all the space);
and finally we select the area from the uploaded image ($src) and tell the function how much of its area we want to copy and scale down into the thumbnail image ($new). In this case we run the  ”imagesx” and “imagesy” function on our large image to get the exact width and height, since we don’t know what the user uploaded.

Now you’d think that would be all, but we have only created an image in code, their is no actual JPG file write to our folder yet. So we run the “imagejpeg” which we give the data of our newly created and re-sampled thumbnail image ($new) and tell it where to put it in our folders.

From here you my want to embellish upon this a bit, for instance, your want to check if the image exists before making a thumbnail out of it to avoid errors:

if(file_exists("uploads/your_large_image.jpg")) {
 //Put code to make thumbnail in here
}

That’s it! you have made a thumbnail image in PHP.

Kinshira – Poetic Movement entertainment company asked us to spice up their branding, showing more of their fiery spirit. The symbol is based on a fire dance the performers do, in which they draw the symbol in the air. I wanted it to seem link the symbol had just been drawn with fire from the bottom up, and the audience gets the single glimpse of it before their eyes catch up with the fire.