Alright, again, I'm a developer, not a designer... but I like the design related stuffs. See the dumb monkey face on the right side? Well, I just drew it quickly, scanned it in Photoshop and set it up here to replace the default BlogEngine.NET avatar when I started this blog.

Two weeks ago I got Illustrator CS3 (I know, I know, CS4 is coming soon...), so I experimented with it, obviously just the basic stuffs following tutorials.

Last weekend I needed some "original" icons and I didn't have any #%$ inspiration... So I took my pencil and draw things on a piece of paper... "hmm, that looks good!"... So what damn? Am I gonna scan this in Photoshop and try to apply colors...again? I have already tried this many times in the past without success... not even close to be able to use it on a web project.

After browsing Internet on "techniques" on how I could do this, I felt on this Using Adobe Illustrator CS2’s Live Trace tutorial (I didn't even know this was part of CS2)... Well, that seems easy!... the first thing I have tried is to use my own monkey... I got back my old sketch, traced it back a bit darker and scanned it again in Photoshop

Then, following the tutorial and playing with the "Live Trace" properties, I got a nice "vectorialized" monkey... After enabling "Live Paint" and applying two "Live Paint Bucket" on it, I got this

Alright, alright, it's not a "finished" professional image but it just took me few minutes...

Here is another quick sketch I did of a pair of pliers that were lying on the table....

I'm sure designers that read this think that "Live Paint" feature is for amateurs... I give that to you! ha ha ha ha... That's probably like "wizards" or "drag and drop controls" features in Visual Studio... For me, this is like "well, you don't know how it works, so use it... but you won't be able to dig further down in the code because you won't understand a &%*@ thing of what it produces..."

Since my last update everything run smoothly on the server. I'm a "Microsoft guy" but I always liked to experiment on Linux. Once a year, since college, I get an old machine, format it and re-install the latest Linux version and after everything is done... nothing... ha ha ha ha. ...but this time though, I had another goal in mind... compile my code with Mono and running it on a Linux box! (I know, I could have use Mono on Windows but, hey, what's the fun?)

So last weekend I undusted my machine, boot it up and reformatted it. This time I've installed openSUSE... The installation went smoothly without any issue.  First, I was curious to see if my code would compile at all using Mono... I have been very surprised to see that it did compile.... except the "interop" part where I use the browser obviously.

Hmmm, alright, it's time to try Gecko to produce my browser "screenshots". That was the easy part... there is still a sample code on the web that is dated '04 and does that. Before modifying my existing application, I compiled the sample code and tried it ... no issue here... except one thing: the browser needs to be "visible"... and that is not good.  That's the same issue I got when I tried IHTMLElementRender::DrawToDC version on Windows... I haven't found a way to hide the window and get the image... it only outputs a black image...

Unfortunately, time is precious and that's all I had to give to it...

See you next year Linux!