The Making of an O’Reilly Animal

I’ll be out for a few days on vacation again, so here’s something that might keep things interesting around here.

Have you ever wondered how those O’Reilly books got their covers? How did they choose the animal for a specific book? Why did they even choose animals in the first place?

Their website posted an article answering those questions, with a step-by-step image on creating one of the animals (a pelican).

Read the article.

May 1st Rebootion

May 1st just went by, and all the participants now have their rebooted sites up. There must be at least a hundred participants for this. I registered on the site last month, just for kicks, but I never really got around to making my site.

Head on over to the site and have a look at all the new sites that went up at the same time, and cast your votes for your favorite.

http://www.may1reboot.com/2008/

Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment

I found this article on digg and I found it very interesting.

I always wanted to spread Ubuntu to my friends and family, but that is easier said than done. I even proposed to my girlfriend that she install Ubuntu on her machine to get rid of her virus problem, but she hesitated when I told her how different it was from XP.

A guy listed a few common tasks for his girlfriend to perform on a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.04. The result is not good for Ubuntu, but it could help in the development of Linux for the masses.

It’s surprising how many seemingly simple things become complicated and even out of reach for someone without a knowledge of Linux. There are a lot of little things that could be done to make the experience a lot more friendly for non-computer-literate people – some of them easy to implement, others not at all.

Read the article here.

Read the online documentation!

Adobe’s ActionScript online docs that is. This has got to be the best resource you will ever find if you have trouble with ActionScript. I only found that out myself yesterday. I always thought that the online docs, or any other documentation/reference/manual, were scary to look at. Just the sight of all those complicated words that don’t seem to mesh together terrifies me. But when I was bored the other day, I decided to just read up on the BitmapData class just for kicks, and as I was reading, I surprisingly understood everything I read! I have never used the BitmapData class before, but I think I’ll be doing a lot of experiments with it soon (I have seen what others could do with it).

It has been laid out so well, everything is explained thouroughly, with simple and understandable examples and it’s searchable. It’s basically one giant tutorial about ActionScript! If there is one, I would love to buy a print/book of the online docs, because I hate reading on the monitor for extended periods of time. And yes, I’ll be reading the online docs for extended periods of time.

[Learn] How to use StumbleUpon for interesting search results

I use StumbleUpon a lot. Everytime I am bored, I just click away on that little icon to just see what I stumble on. But apart from having random interesting pages ranging anywhere from sex book reviews to funny pics to Flash tutorials, I don’t have any control with what I will get. I think that’s one of the best features of this cool plugin.

Only recently have I discovered that SU has a “Stumble with query” feature. You type in the search query you want, and just stumble away. You might end up with something you had no luck googling, or just end up with something interesting, and still within your search terms.

To start “query stumbling”, just click the ‘All’ dropdown menu on the StumbleUpon toolbar, and click ‘Search’. Enter your search terms, and click on ‘Stumble!’.

Here’s a screenshot. Notice I’ve already started stumbling for “actionscript”.

FontStruct

Here’s a cool site. It’s main feature is an RIA that allows you to create fonts and share it with the community. That’s right, creating fonts online for free. I am so impressed with what people can do with the web these days.
You could create any font you could imagine. From simple pixel fonts, to dingbat style fonts.
The gallery is very impressive. There’s some really nice fonts there, all created with FontStruct and free to download and use. You could even “clone” someone else’s work. To download a font, click on the font name or double-click on the preview.

The application itself is a work of art. Its interface is very intuitive, its tools adequate, and it’s just so comfortable playing/working with it. You could save your work, it even has hotkeys for undo, redo, tool selection, etc. Although you are limited to the “bricks” provided, they are more than enough to create a wide variety of fonts.
Go to http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/ to get started in creating your own fonts. You need to register for free though to use the fontstructor and download fonts.

Demonoid is back!

My favorite bittorrent site is back with a vengeance. It has been down for several months, I was afraid that it would never come back. But now it has. I could again download torrents that I know would work. Woot!

I think I might have a few invites with me, so if you want some, just post.