Here's a few stuff I have been working on since we last spoke:

fotomoto
If you're into photography, and you have a photoblog, chances are you are using (or have at least heard of) fotomoto.com. Fotomoto is a service that lets photographers (and other artists) sell their art-work from their own site. I'm proud to say I've been part of the fotomoto team almost from day 1, and have been doing most of the UI work, including everything you see on the shopping widget itself. I also worked on the layout and animation for the fotomoto demo video, which you can check out on the fotomoto.com homepage.

Women's World in Qajar Iran
This is another fun project I've been involved with. WWQI is a historical archive of cool stuff from the Qajar period (mostly 1800's) that shed light on aspects of women's lives back then. I've designed the front-end, and have worked with some great folks who have developed all the back end. I also designed the WWQI logo.

And change the symlink of CurrentJDK back to 1.5 by executing this from the shell:
sudo rm CurrentJDK
sudo ln -s 1.5 CurrentJDK

This should take away your Flash/Flex Builder/Flash Builder errors.

There might be better ways of telling Maven which JDK to use than specifying it in your .bash_profile, this thread has some good insight.

- you won't be able to start your mysql database unless you restart your machine after installing mysql via macports

- if you're installing any ruby gems, eg. sudo gem install -y rake and you're getting the following error:

Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org ERROR: could not find rake locally or in a repository

It's because you forgot to "source ~/.profile"

I hope this helps someone.

Modify clothing fills in the gap by applying personalization to women's dresses, with great effectiveness. They only have a single product for now: a black dress. But you can change the look of the dress by changing the "wrap" that gets tied to it. One might think, how can anyone dramatically alter the way a dress looks just by changing a wrap? Well, check out the photos and you'll probably be as surprised as I was.

I think it's a great idea. It makes clothing much more reusable and a lot more fun, not to mention a lot more affordable. I wouldn't be surprised if other fashion houses adopt similar approaches in the future, but for now Modify Clothing is pioneering a great concept.

Margin-doubling Error: IE6 doubles margin-left or margin-right on a floated element. The fix for this (as found here) is to add "display:inline" to the floated element. A question that arises, is that whatever you wanted that element to be a block element? Well, if you still give it a fixed width and/or height, it should still behave the way you expected it to.

Negative Margin Clipping Error : If you have an element wwith a negative margin inside a parent element, The parent element will likely "clip" the child element's background. So the child element will not be visible. A fix for this is to add "position:relative" to the CHILD element, i.e. the element which has the negative margin.

IE shifts elements by their margins when the window resizes : alright this is extremely weird and I spent way too much time than I should have trying to figure it out. It's a bit complicated to explain as well. Basically I had a floating relatively positioned element with a left margin inside a container. Everything was fine when the page loads. But for my application, I had to dynamically resize the container (using jquery animate). As soon as I did that, the floated element would lose its margin ... it would get it back again when I hovered over it. Anyway, adding position:relative to the PARENT seemed to fix it for me ... and I have little idea why.

First, there is this extremely unbelievably retarded news video that aired on a local Fox station in july 2007. You'll cringe as you see this, but this is not a parody or hoax, it's an actual news report : check it here.

The way I found the video was by reading about the concept of imageboards, another seemingly big topic which had illuded me (there goes my big business idea).

How did I hear about imageboard, you say? I was reading about another internet meme called "Rick Rolling" and in the process found out that Rick Rolling was started at one of these popular image boards (4chan).

And finally, what started all of this was this xkcd strip. The rickrolling comment at the end made me curious and set of my wonderous journey in the internets.

Oh and since we're doing this, another example of why 80's was a disaster.

I'm not a hardcore gamer at all. I only play a game if I love it, and that means that I might play 2-3 titles per year (or sometimes no titles, if nothing comes out that's interesting to me). But the games I do play, I play with passion.

So now comes Assassin's Creed, a game I anticipated and loved to play just as much as Ninja Gaiden and the Heavenly Sword, and I must say my first experience playing it was a bit of a let down. I had every reason to look forward to this game: It's made by my favorite studio Ubisoft Montreal, The characters and story were very interesting, the game was clearly next gen, and the setting seemed out of this world.

I'm still on the first mission, but I totally aree with this IGN review of the game. What could have been an extra-ordinary game just falls short because of a few bad gameplay decisions.

I must say I adore the realism and historical accuracy of this game (I can only look back and wish they had strived for the same accuracy in the Prince of Persia series), but the slow pace of the game and the less-than-ideal combat system is what breaks it for me. Also I was looking forward to a great soundtrack, but unfortunately that's almost non-existent.

Still, I look foward to finishing it, and even more so to the release of the sequel.

Labelheads, won Dr. Frank Piller's "Innovativeness" award. It was one of the panel awards in the competition. It also won the popular vote, which certainly surprised me in a very good way. Despite that and despite being in the panelists' top 3, it didn't get any of the main prizes. Spreadshirt felt it wasn't serious enough, a decision that I fully respect.

My second submission, Molecular Goodness, which was a collaboration with my designer friend Shahin, also won a panel award: Computerlove collaboration award, for best collaborative entry.

I must confess in the beginning I felt slightly let down because I had a lot of confidence that I would make Spreadshirt's top 3 cut, but I am very happy with my performance overall. It was the first competition of its kind that I had entered, and having 2 entires in the final 15 among 2,800 submissions, and both of them winning something was a great acheivement. During the 7 weeks that the OLP ran, I was truly addicted to the process and i'm thinking about participating in more competitions from now on.

Labelheads, the concept I came up with on week 3 is one of them. Spreadshirt is a company that lets its users customize their own clothing. So I tried to capture that essence with a customizable logo. They can always keep their logo fresh by changing it depending on the season and/or occasion.

The second one was a collaboration between me and my friend and talented designer/photographer Shahin. It's called Molecular Goodness. The three core values of Spreadshirt are represented by three basic shapes or molecules, that can be combined to form any shape (like a big "S", a t-shirt, or a tag).

The final winner will be chosen by Spreadshirt next week, and in order to help them make their decision they have made an online survey where you can see all the 15 finalists and vote for the best. If you're interested check it out and vote for your favourite (by which I mean us :D ).

Never show a design approach that you’re not happy with; stakeholders
just might like it.

I've been quite busy lately, working on multiple projects at a time. One of the more fun things I've been doing is taking part in an Open Logo Project for re-branding of Spreadshirt, a big online t-shirt label that lets you customize your own shirts (and is the platform I use for the Legofish Store).

It's a 7-week competition and one of my designs has made the final short list and I'm feeling pretty good about that. It's a really fun design and I had as much fun making it as people seem to be having looking at it and playing with it (it's quite interactive, so do check it out).

By the way, if you would like to show you support for Project 300 by putting the ribbon on your website you can do so by simply copying the following line of code and pasting it after the <body> tag on your template:

red ribbon
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://300themovie.info/threehundred.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
white ribbon
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://300themovie.info/threehundred2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>