Gettin' Geek

OK, two things I learned today totally unrelated: How to make Wordpress multilingual, I need that for a new project that's planned to be in three langauges, Arabic, English & French, it's a Plug-in named Language Switcher: The way it works is that you write the content for your blog in multiple languages, using special tags to tell the plug-in which text goes with which language. You'll also install "gettext" language files to translate the text generated by your theme, other plug-ins, and WordPress itself into your target languages. Second thing I learned is a way to draw symmetrical shapes in Adobe Illustrator, the Tutorial can be found it here in Shape Shed blog . You will need your Ruler (CTRL + R), your Reflect Tool (O) & the most interesting thing in that tutorial, a well hidden shortcut to join and average end points with one operation: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + J (on MAC: Apple + SHIFT + ALT + J ). OK, this was my short update, it's 12:06

Only one post this month & this is the second, it's not a lake of ideas or that I'm learning nothing, I just had no time, too busy with other stuff, even now I should be ... sleeping after a long day of work ... OK, this is the only WP Blog I upgraded to version 2.5 & I didn't like it because I'm used to the old interface, a lot of things seem not "in their place", & moreover, when I tried to upload a picture for my other post I got an error with the new Flash based uploader, just today I went trying to fix the problem. A good troubleshooting thread can be found in Wordpress support forums. To summarize it, it talks about: - Reinstalling & make sure the files are uploaded correctly & to delete wp-admin and wp-includes before starting the Reinstallation / upgrade ... I upgraded my 2.5 to 2.5.1, but nothing (something about the upgrade in the end of this post :) ) - Deactivate Plug-ins & try the uploader, then activate one by

I thought the word "Turing" was an adjective, but when I looked in the dictionary, I didn't find it, this was some time ago but I didn't care till today. I went & asked my preferred free encyclopedia, entered "Turing Numbers" & was directed to CAPTCHA A CAPTCHA (IPA: /?kæpt??/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine that the response is not generated by a computer. The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. The term CAPTCHA is an acronym for " C ompletely A utomated P ublic Turing test to tell C omputers and H umans

OK, I had to invent this for an illustration I was making, & here I'm making a quick tutorial, I will give you the large lines, then you can experiment & have a final result that satisfy you :) Note: I'm using Illustrator CS3 on Windows, if you have a different version there may be slight differences in the way of doing steps. Also you should be familiar with some basic Illustrator functions & tools. 1st draw a perfect circle with the Ellipse Tool while holding the Shift key. Now, keeping the circle selected, select the Scale Tool , put it in the center of the circle, & while holding Alt key make a left mouse click, a box will pop-up, set the Scale on 120% & click the Copy button (not OK) You have now a bigger circle in front of your first one, bring the 2nd behind the first from the Layers Palette or from the Object menu: Object > Arrange Now, keeping the bigger circle selected, go to the Filter menu: Filter > Distort &g

OK, I already talked about my Vector application on iStockphoto then about the rejection of one of the samples required ; well since then, I replaced the file rejected & got approved & now I'm officially an iStock illustrator yippeee! Once I started uploading real Stock, I faced again the rejection problem & I think each time it was for a different reason, so hopefully I'll be getting less rejections in the future as I'm not repeating the same mistakes; like I mentioned in my other post , some bad things may have a beneficial impact in the long term .. iStockphoto provides some good guides on what to do & what not starting from the Training Manual then the Vector Dos & Don'ts (two must reads), & others mentioned in my previous post linked above, but still there are some points that are subtle enough to not be understood, at least I didn't understand them fully till my uploads were rejected; some others so subtle that they're not me