Archive for May, 2006
Draw a wallpaper myself
Sunday, May 21st, 2006
Veerle described the method of using curves and gradiation in Illustrator to create a mac style wallpaper in her article Creating Mac OS X looking desktops. It seems to be a very good method and and hands-on. I can’t wait to try out myself, the problem is I’m not familiar with Illustrator, but Fireworks will do the work too.
The steps followed Veerle’s methods, and the result turns out to be okay. The most difficult part is to organize the curves and fill them with appropiate colors and traspanrency values. By that, a flat image can cheat your eyes the believe you’re looking at something 3-dimensional. It looks like some smoke in my result. I also add a quotation there just for fun, you can always let your creativities decide what elses you’re going to change.
Finally, it’s easy to change the color scheme, just open the file in any image editors that allow you to change the hue, by dragging the magical slider, the wallpaper can change into whatever color you want.
The zip source can be downloaded here.
Oh, forgot to mention, the Latin omnia vincit amor means “love conquers all”. You can put anything you want there, or just simply delete it, move it or change whatever you like. Cheers!
Chanchu leaves
Friday, May 19th, 2006You’ll never know the nature. When we all got prepared for the typhoon, it turns to another direction, and now we have one of the most shining day since I’ve been in Zhuhai.
Anyway, it goes where it goes, couldn’t control by anyone, isn’t that just the force of nature? This evening we’re going to do a physiological experiment on a rabbit, hope it may rest in peace.
===UPDATE===
We were the first group to finish the experiments. And Lindera told me the Amoya we kept for some months is dead that morning. She disset it and found one of its organs is bigger than usual. But she’s not sure and since she threw it away, it will never be known.
Typhoon Chanchu is coming!
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
The Typoon Chanchu(Chinese for “pearl”) is coming towards south China. An excerpt from accuweather:
As of early Monday, Super Typhoon Chanchu was over the South China Sea, centered near 15.2 degrees north and 115.1 degrees east or about 515 miles south of Hong Kong. Chanchu was moving northward at 7 mph with sustained winds near 140 mph. A northerly track and some fluctuation in strength is likely over the next day or two. Chanchu is forecast to strike southern China near or just east of Hong Kong Wednesday, ET. The storm will likely be a Category 3 or 4 storm upon landfall.
After getting ready for it, I’m actually looking forward to it, or rather miss it. When I was a kid, typhoon is not rare in our province during summer. Every time we kids heard about typhoon, we got excited, because we could get a day off school. I still remember that morning, when I was at grade 2 in elementary school. When I got to school on foot, the sky was completely dark, suddenly, it doesn’t feel like morning but some horrible night in a movie. Just then, the speaker turned on and told the kids to go home. Wow! Then we took all the things and rushed out. The school was not far from home, so I ran with a friend. It felt so good to race with the weather. A the moment I enter the house, rain started to fall, and soon the wind began to howl. I sat by the window, watching the world, which seemed so quiet and peaceful…
In recent years, I don’t experience much strong typhoons quod id desidero. Let the storm comes! Oh, I feel the wind now…
Amoya pregnant
Monday, May 15th, 2006Today when I went to feed the fish, I couldn’t find the Acentrogobius caninus in the big tank. I’m worried because last time when I fed them, the A. caninus swam away from a big piece of shrimp meat! I thought at first it’s too full, but usually this doesn’t happen twice. When I turned over the box I put in as shelter, and there it is, laying still on its one side, dead. I took it out and examined a bit, it seems that it has been dead for some time, at least for one day. The weired thing is that it has some pink color on its eye bow and snout, dunno why.
The Amoya didn’t feed much either, she (just found out) was just picking here and there for some left-outs. Her shining spots seem to fade a lot these days and her tail become shorter and rounded. What surprised me was that it’s pregnant, the yellow eggs fill her belly. For a goby, it means the most important moment in her life, to pass on her genes. And after doing so, according to exsisting report, she will leave the world. Sadly, there’s no more males survive in our tank, she’s not possible to finish her task. But what we hope for is that she may live longer, even as long as a year. We’ll see.
Oh, yeah, Reza kinda praised us this morning for the presentation of Windsor castle and Buckingham Palace in the English class. But I don’t think I’d done my best yet.
IE 7 WGA validation’s possible impact on the Chinese market share.
Saturday, May 6th, 2006
Internet Explorer 7 is the next version of Microsoft’s browser on the Windows platform, which is said to have great improvements on user experiences, rss and search integration, alpha-transparent PNG and enhanced css support. No matter the what the guys of Microsoft says, such improvements must have been made because the browser market share decreases since the release of Firefox and even greater when opera went free.
Unfortunately, these efforts in taking back the market share may be wasted in the China market because the new IE version has a string attached, the WGA validation. I’m not proud or happy to say this, but the fact is in mainland China, most computers are running non-genuine Windows copies. The WGA validation actually prevents these users to experience the improvements that IE 7 brings, thus they may stick to the old IE 6. However, when the time comes that explorer 7 is widely spread among western users, what a Chinese user would choose. Sticking to IE 6 or move to a more advanced and more important, free browser, such as next version of Firefox or Opera 9? Eventually, I believe more users will say goodbye to the granted IE, and embrace open source browsers.
I say so, because the web is developing fast. Maybe at this same day next year, the web will be full of transparent PNGs and more advanced css, less and less web developer will care writing a fallback version for older browsers. Even they do, users always want to see the best, if not through IE 7, why not choose others?
Of course, when Windows Vista comes, hopefully IE 7 can take some market back again. But before that, it’s a great chance to increase the open source browsers’ market share in China.