In this tutorial we will draw a simple glass ball in the grass! This is a very basic tutorial… Many more effects can be added…

Here we go:

1. Create an image using File > New.

2. Change the colors to: #008aff (Foreground) and #0055e3 (Background).

3. Filters > Render > Clouds

(more…)

Make sure you watch this video!!!

Hey my blues buddies,

Have you ever wondered why you never understand some blues songs? Well… they have their own language, or their own vocabulary! for example, what do you understand if they’re talking about the “Black Cat Bone”? or “Eagle Fliges on Friday”?

Here are few words explained:

• back door man/friend: The lover of a married woman who sneaks out the back door before the man of the house gets home
• barrelhouse: a cheap drinking and dancing establishment
• biscuit: a young woman
• black cat bone: a good luck charm that is carried in a mojo bag
• The Blues: a style of music developed in the South whose roots are African tribal calls and American gospel music
• boogie: to move quickly, to get going, to dance, to party
• boogie-woogie: a percussive style of playing the blues on the piano
• canned heat: Sterno, alcohol-based, liquid in a can used to cook outdoors
• captain: form of address Southern white men demanded from their black employees / a prison guard
• chillun: children or people
• cold in hand: having no money
• dry so long: being poor
• dust my broom: breaking up with a woman
• eagle flies on Friday: payday
• easy rider: guitar hung on the back of a traveling blues man / an unfaithful lover
• flagging (a train, a ride): to signal for a train or ride to stop / to hitch a ride
• goin’ up the line/ goin’ down the line: line meaning railroad route; up the line means going North, down the line means going South
• hokum: pretentious nonsense
• hoochie coochie man: one who preaches voodoo
• hoodoo: voodoo / something that brings bad luck
• John the Conqueroo: a root kept in the mojo bag for good luck
• juju: magic or luck
• juke joint: establishment for eating, drinking, and dancing to the music of a jukebox
• killing floor: slaughter house where many Southern blacks worked when they migrated to the North
• mojo: magic spell, hex or charm used against someone else
• nation sack: donation sack carried on the belts of traveling preachers
• rambling: to move aimlessly from place to place
• riding the blinds: hitching a ride on the train between cars
• roadhouse: a drinking establishment outside the city limits
• rounder: a man that gets around / a big money poker player
• signifying: good-natured teasing
• Stagger Lee: a real life murderer that became a folk hero. He was so bad that flies wouldn’t fly around his head in the summer and snow wouldn’t fall on him in winter.
• Voodoo: folk magic derived from African religion and practiced chiefly in Haiti.

If you have anything to add, drop a comment!

Keep in touch

Hey friends…

I was so bored today which made me open my photos folders, and I found a pic for my family!!!

Here it is:

Click on the pic to enlarge!

Can you guess the number of guitars in the pic?

You say 5???

WRONG! Look deeper When you find the 6th, comment it!

Later buddies…!

Hello Friends…

I designed a new look for this site… As you see, it’s much more alive and way better then the Almost Spring theme!

The cool thing about this theme is the top which makes it live. It’s a bot that takes those infos (Nickname, Personnal Message, What I’m listenning to, Status…) and the Display picture from MSN Messenger and updates the top… That’s why it’s Live!

Hope you like it… I might add a small box which sends me messages to my MSN Messenger using Ajax post requests… and much more stuff will be added!

Thank you again for visiting my blog!

Cya

As usual I want to share the solutions for my coding problems! I’m sure many of you tried to resize images with Java to make thumbnails for example or to fit some images and logos in a game or just to create an animation…

Anyway, while I was working on a project of mine “DPMagnifier” (Display Picture Magnifier), I had to resize images to a fixed size of 96×96 the same way MSN Messenger does. I checked the Java Documentation, and found out that have implemented some Rendering algorithms. The best algorithm to resize a large image into a small one is the Bicubic! So there was some rendering hints like RenderingHints.VALUE_INTERPOLATION_BICUBIC. but too bad, Java people did not implement this resizing algorithm well! I tried it and it was just the same like the Bilinear algorithm. So enough talking about the issue… here’s the solution:

BufferedImage temp = javax.imageio.ImageIO.read(new File(imagefile));
/* determine thumbnail size from WIDTH and HEIGHT */
int thumbWidth = width;
int thumbHeight = height;
int imageWidth = temp.getWidth(null);
int imageHeight = temp.getHeight(null);

int tempWidth;
int tempHeight;
int x = 0;
int y = 0;

if (imageWidth < imageHeight) {
    tempWidth = width;
    tempHeight = (int)(((double)imageHeight*width)/imageWidth);
    y = -(tempHeight - tempWidth)/2;
}
else {
    tempHeight = height;
    tempWidth = (int)(((double)imageWidth*height)/imageHeight);
    x = -(tempWidth - tempHeight)/2;
}
Image temp1 = temp.getScaledInstance(tempWidth, tempHeight, Image.SCALE_SMOOTH);
image = new BufferedImage(width, height, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
image.getGraphics().drawImage(temp1, x, y, null);
try {
    javax.imageio.ImageIO.write(image, "png", new File("output.png"));
} catch (IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

If you have a better solution… or maybe you have implemented a better resizing function, write a comment and share it with us!

Cheers…