You want to install a Facebook fan page using a Flash template.

I recently took these series of photos in my weekend, these are my toy story 3 toys, out of the self & inspire me

• Introduction to IPS for developers - Solaris - wikis.sun.com
• Ryanair.con - The no cares airline | i-florence

An interesting benchmark was published yesterday - SPARC T3-Based Systems Deliver Top-Notch Cryptographic Performance:

The SPARC T3 processor running the IPsec AES-256-CCM can operate at near-line speed over a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) network and demonstrates more than 2x the throughput of the latest generation Intel Xeon processor. Moreover, with dedicated hardware support for encryption/decryption for AES and eleven other ciphers, the SPARC T3 processor is 12 times faster than the Intel Xeon processor for in-memory RSA decryption.

Some key takeaways from this benchmark:

• The SPARC T3 was able to decrypt AES with 9,900 Mb/s at 36% CPU utilisation and encrypt the same amount with 39% utilisation
• The Xeon 5670 was able to decrypt AES with 4,400 Mb/s at 85% CPU utilisation and encrypt 4200 Mb/s at 77%
• For RSA decrypt operations T3 was able to execute 79536 ops per second whereas the Xeon 5670 was just able to execute 6472 (six thousand four hundred seventy two - no typo) operations per second
• The benchmark run with a single processor T3-1 against a dual XEON 5760 system. However the benchmark was executed on a processor set just consisting out of a single proc to have a fair comparison

I think this benchmark is a good example why a dedicated crypto accelerator has it's advantages over a command set extension over crypto. The T3 can encrypt and decrypt a 10 GBit/s at almost line speed and after sinking and sourcing traffic at this speed and encrypting it, it has still 64 respectively 61 percent of the CPU left for other tasks. With an Intel CPU you have 15 respectively 23 percent CPU left when doing the same tasks for half the bandwidth of the T3. This difference doesn't surprise me: With T3 the whole encryption process is offloaded, whereas the encryption process is just supported by special commands on Xeon which are part of the normal pipeline flow. Of course everything that happens in-pipline is utilizing the pipeline.

Welcome to the other side. In the unlikely event that you have this blog in your bookmarks or RSS feeds, please now point them at http://blogs.oracle.com/calum (RSS - Atom).

Május 31.-én 9:00-13:30(!) fejlesztői konferencia a Web-en. A téma: ADF

Ajánlom azoknak is akik saját fejlesztői keretrendszerrel dolgoznak, de használnak valamilyen UI függő Oracle technológiát.

Ugyanis az ADF már jó ideje nem csak egy alternatív keretrendszer JEE platformon, hanem magja (lesz) minden felhasználói felülettel rendelkező Oracle technológiai (WebCenter, BPM,  Mobile, stb.) és kész alkalmazásnak (Fusion Applications) is. Mindez lehetővé teszi a jövőben a még könnyebb és nagyobb integrációs lehetőségeket az egyes funkciók között.

Apache Derby 10.8.1.2 was released earlier this week. Read the full announcement here.

Derby 10.8.1.2 is a new feature release, the first one in the 10.8 series. The highlights include:

• Automatic calculation of index statistics: In earlier releases, index cardinality statistics had to be updated manually (for example by calling the SYSCS_UTIL.SYSCS_UPDATE_STATISTICS system procedure) if they got out of date. Otherwise, the optimizer might choose suboptimal, poorly performing query execution plans because of the outdated information. This typically happened if one of the tables accessed in the query had grown or shrunk significantly after the index cardinality statistics were calculated initially. As of this release, Derby will recalculate the statistics if it detects that the size of the table has changed so much that the statistics are no longer usable.
• JDBC 4.1: The early access builds of Java SE 7 (available for download here) have added new methods to many of the interfaces in the java.sql and javax.sql packages. This Derby release implements all of these methods so that you can try them out.
• Improved interrupt handling: Earlier releases of Derby didn't handle interrupts very well. If a user thread was interrupted while performing a database operation, it could often end up crashing the database engine and require a reboot of the database. Starting with this release, interrupting a user thread shouldn't take down the entire database. The documentation has also been improved by clarifying which behaviour to expect if a thread is interrupted.
• XML operators out of the box: Older releases of Derby required some work setting up your environment before you could use the XML operators (XMLEXISTS, XMLPARSE, XMLQUERY, XMLSERIALIZE). In Derby 10.8, the implementation of these operators has been made more portable and should work out of the box on most implementations of Java SE 6 and newer.

The release also contains many bug fixes and documentation fixes, as well as some performance improvements. As always, make sure that you read the release notes before upgrading to see if any of the changes could affect your application.

Just published, is my recent interview with a well known face in the ADF community and OTN ACE Director, Sten Vesterli of the aptly named Scott/Tiger. Sten's been busy working away on his second book Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development  - Made Simple. So the podcast is available now on OTN - download and listen.

To address an issue in the specification, the JSR 334 expert group has decided to ban the combination of diamond together with explicit constructor type arguments. For background, a constructor can have two sets of type arguments. In a parameterized class, constructors can have type arguments corresponding to the class's type parameters. This is the common case and the type arguments appear to the right of the class name and "new" as in "new ArrayList<String>()". In addition, if a constructor declares its very own type parameters (which can be done whether or not the enclosing class is parameterized), then those type arguments appear between the "new" token and the class name as in "new <Integer> ConstructorWithTypeParameter(Integer.valueOf(42))".

As with generic methods, the type arguments of generic constructors are usually inferred and not explicitly passed. However, generic constructors are much less common than generic methods.

After the specification change, using diamond to infer the class type parameters but explicitly passing the constructor type parameters is forbidden. However, the other three combinations of explicitly passing type arguments versus inferring them are supported, as shown in the table below.

class Foo<T extends Number> {
      <S extends T> Foo(S s) {super();}
}

Class	Constructor	Supported	Example
Explicit	Explicit	Yes	new <Integer> Foo<Number>(null);
Explicit	Inferred	Yes	new Foo<Integer>(null);
Inferred	Explicit	No	new <Integer> Foo<>(null); // compile error
Inferred	Inferred	Yes	new Foo<>(null);

The substitution that was used to formally describe the semantics of diamond did not fully propagate constraints if there was a typing relationship between the type parameters of the constructor and the type parameters of the class. Lifting the imposed restriction on the banned combination of explicit and inferred type arguments can be revisited in future work in the context of broader type inference getting added to the Java language.

Since generic constructors are so uncommon, adding this restriction about combining them with diamond should have little effect to most programs. For example, none of the uses of diamond in the JDK had to be updated as a result of this change. A changeset implementing this specification change has been pushed and will appear in subsequent promoted builds of JDK 7.

We're back! Now that we've migrated to blogs.oracle.com we have a new shiny look and don't intend to change the content from what you have been used to. Check out the few entries posted while we were not publicly visible. Other companion blogs such as the GlassFish Stories, The GlassFish Podcast or GlassFish for Business have also been migrated.

As for individual blogs, you should not only be able to continue reading content from the GlassFish engineers but we've spent time making sure that the valuable content from now retired bloggers is still accessible.

Let us know if anything doesn't work for you, chances are we haven't caught everything in the migration process. Thanks!

And now for some serious blogging to catch up with what happened during the migration period.

In a prior entry we introduced the objectives for the GlassFish 3.1.1 release. With a goal to be highly compatible with 3.1 we can only fix a small number of critical bugs and we'd like you to help us identify the most important ones using the voting mechanism built into JIRA.

With four promoted builds of GlassFish 3.1.1 accounting for already well over 100 bug fixes we'd like to ask you to vote for what you consider to be the most important bugs by 9 am PT Wednesday, May 11th, 2011. And if you want to send fixes we'll take that too, thanks!

Here's something I knew wouldn't be a problem but I wanted to confirm. As you know, an HTML page cannot make an Ajax request to a remote server. There are ways around this (a proxy on your server or JSONP), but for the most part, it's a hard and fast... [More]

Today I joined 70 other Adobe employees and traded my high-tech tools for gardening and painting tools at a local volunteer project. We spent the morning at Burnett Middle School in San Jose, which is an Adobe Youth Voices site, painting educational murals, tilling soil and tending the garden beds. Although this project was not [...]

Cocoon P2P is an open source peer-to-peer library for Flex/AIR and mobile devices that makes peer discovery, messaging and object replication via the RTMFP protocol easy and straightforward. It was created with simplicity in mind and does most of the...

Before I tell you about the event I just wanted to give a special thanks to Erin Kelly, Shawn Pucknell, Sandi Carmichael, the FITC crew, and volunteers. I don’t think people realize how much time and effort is put into an event like this. These guys all did an absolutely amazing job making sure everything [...]

We have just released a 3d medieval fantasy cottage model for purchase download. You must be a registered user to purchase the product zip. "A weathered stone cottage 3d model with detailed multi-pane windows, stone walkway, slate roofing, double chimney and rear wood shed." The Product Page with more images; http://teotigraphix.com/3dmodels/fantasy/fantasycottage6 This model can be used with Unity 3D. Mike

As more and more devices come out, we on the Flex team have occasionally seen platform-specific or device-specific bugs. One of the more visible ones is when flash.system.Capabilities.screenDPI reports the wrong value. Flex Mobile applications use the screenDPI property for application scaling (when setting the applicationDPI property) or when choosing density-specific skins (i.e. not using the applicationDPI [...]

If you are developing multiple forms / fragments inside your application whereby some forms look similar, a common way is then to copy some XDP-files at some point to make specific changes to these forms. What most developers don’t realize … Continue reading →

jQuery 1.6 released a significant change to the way it handles DOM attributes and properties. Take for example in version 1.5.2, the following code would return isCheckedAttr as “true”. <input type="checkbox" checked="checked" /> <script type="text/javascript"> var isCheckedAttr = $('input').attr("checked"); </script> In version 1.6 the addition of .prop() and .removeProp() changes what the .attr() method will [...]

Skeleton tracking test from InteractiveLab on Vimeo.

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be participating in the Jumpstart Foundry, a seed stage funding and mentoring program here in Nashville. As part of my business I plan to create a tool that helps designers build apps for iOS and Android devices (using the Reflex component framework). I probably won’t be releasing much more [...]

I’ve started a new meetup group here in San Francisco for other Graphical User Interface Designers and those who are interested in learning more about this topic. Here’s a list of Resource links from the topics we covered in our discussion. It was nice to meet you all and I hope to see you at [...]

FITC Toronto 2011 Titles from FITC on Vimeo. The production quality on these things is awesome. They (MK12) should do a decomposition on how they went about the creation process (in fact, maybe they did at FITC, but I missed it?).

This dude clearly watched RAD more times than I did growing up.

The “Vector Paparazzi” app I blogged on Sunday drew an extremely strong response, and now it’s arrived for real: VectorScribe is available in two flavors, Designer (£39+VAT (roughly $65/€45)) which features path manipulation & measurement tools, and Studio (£69+VAT ($119/€79)) which adds smart shapes & dynamic corners. Here’s a slightly updated version of the earlier [...]

The Flex 4.5 release introduced many new features, including support for mobile devices and tablets. The following links will help you get started with the Flex 4.5 release: Introducing Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK by Adobe Product Manager, Deepa Subramaniam at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/introducing-flex45sdk.html Build your first mobile application in Flash Builder 4.5 at http://www.adobe.com/go/learn_flex45_build_mobile_app_en Mobile development using [...]

Computer users have been warned to be weary of multiple malware attacks that claim to offer photos or video footage of Bin Laden’s body and are spreading on the internet.... Read more » This is a content summary only. Click on the above title or visit techsling.com for the complete article and much more!

Version	Build No.	Release Date
SQL Server ‘Denali’
CTP 1.0		November, 2010
SQL Server 2008 R2
RTM CU-7	10.50.1777	April, 2011
RTM CU-6	10.5.1765	February, 2011
RTM CU-5	10.5.1753	December, 2010
RTM CU-4	10.5.1746	October, 2010
RTM CU-3	10.5.1734	August, 2010
RTM CU-2	10.5.1720	June, 2010
RTM CU-1	10.5.1702	May, 2010
RTM	10.5.1600	April, 2010
SQL Server 2008
SP2 CU-3	10.00.4279	March, 2011
SP2 CU-2	10.00.4272	January, 2011
SP2 CU-1	10.00.4266	November, 2010
SP2	10.00.4000	September, 2010
SP1 CU-13	10.00.2816	March, 2011
SP1 CU-12	10.00.2808	January, 2011
SP1 CU-11	10.00.2804	November, 2010
SP1 CU-10	10.00.2799	September, 2010
SP1 CU-9	10.00.2789	July, 2010
SP1 CU-8	10.00.2775	May, 2010
SP1 CU-7	10.00.2766	March, 2010
SP1 CU-6	10.00.2757	January, 2010
SP1 CU-5	10.00.2746	November 2009
SP1 CU-4	10.00.2734	September, 2009
SP1 CU-3	10.00.2723	July, 2009
SP1 CU-2	10.00.2714	May, 2009
SP1 CU-1	10.00.2710	April, 2009
SP1	10.00.2531	April, 2009
RTM CU-10	10.00.1835	March, 2010
RTM CU-9	10.00.1828	January, 2010
RTM CU-8	10.00.1823	November, 2009
RTM CU-7	10.00.1818	September, 2009
RTM CU-6	10.00.1812	July, 2009
RTM CU-5	10.00.1806	May 2009
RTM CU-4	10.00.1798	March, 2009
RTM CU-3	10.00.1787	January, 2009
RTM CU-2	10.00.1779	November, 2008
RTM CU-1	10.00.1763	November, 2008
RTM	10.00.1600	August 2008
SQL Server 2005
SP4 CU-3	9.00.5266	March, 2011
SP4 CU-2	9.00.5259	February, 2011
SP4 CU-1	9.00.5254	December 2010
SP4	9.00.5000	December 2010
SP3 CU-15	9.00.4325	March, 2011
SP3 CU-14	9.00.4317	February, 2011
SP3 CU-13	9.00.4315	December, 2010
SP3 CU-12	9.00.4311	October, 2010
SP3 CU-11	9.00.4309	August, 2010
SP3 CU-10	9.00.4305	June, 2010
SP3 CU-9	9.00.4294	April, 2010
SP3 CU-8	9.00.4285	February, 2010
SP3 CU-7	9.00.4273	December, 2009
SP3 CU-6	9.00.4266	October, 2009
SP3 CU-5	9.00.4230	August, 2009
SP3 CU-4	9.00.4226	June, 2009
SP3 CU-3	9.00.4220	April, 2009
SP3 CU-2	9.00.4211	February, 2009
SP3 CU-1	9.00.4207	December, 2008
SP3	9.00.4035	November, 2008
SP2 CU-17	9.00.3356	December, 2009
SP2 CU-16	9.00.3355	October, 2009
SP2 CU-15	9.00.3330	August, 2009
SP2 CU-14	9.00.3328	June, 2009
SP2 CU-13	9.00.3325	March, 2009
SP2 CU-12	9.00.3315	February, 2009
SP2 CU-11	9.00.3301	December, 2008
SP2 CU-10	9.00.3294	October, 2008
SP2 CU-9	9.00.3282	August, 2008
SP2 CU-8	9.00.3257	June, 2008
SP2 CU-7	9.00.3239	April, 2008
SP2 CU-6	9.00.3228	February, 2008
SP2 CU-5	9.00.3215	December, 2007
SP2 CU-4	9.00.3200	October, 2007
SP2 CU-3	9.00.3186	August, 2007
SP2 CU-2	9.00.3175	June, 2007
SP2 CU-1	9.00.3161	April, 2007
SP2	9.00.3042	March, 2007
SP 1	9.00.2047	April, 2006
RTM	9.00.1399	January, 2006
SQL Server 2000
MS08-040	8.00.2273	May, 2008
SP4 CU	8.00.2187	December, 2009
SP4	8.00.2039	June, 2005

- May 10, 2011: SQL Server self-service BI

Abstract
In this fast paced and ever changing world, insight in your company’s data becomes more and more crucial to stay ahead. Power users need this insight in data now, not in the next week or month. Due to this trend, BI has to evolve into a more mobile, quick and personal approach. Microsoft addresses this need for self-service BI for Power Users with Report Builder 3.0 and PowerPivot. This session gives you a quick overview of the SQL Server BI stack and introduces you to the concepts of self-service BI.

Speaker



Luc Lemaire is a Senior Architect at Ordina Belgium. During his 20 year career in IT he advised and assisted many companies with the introduction and optimization of new technology. As an MCT, MCSE and certified MCDBA since SQL Server 6.5 Luc knows the ins and outs of IT infrastructure and IT projects. He currently focuses on the Microsoft SQL Server stack and managing the life cycle of reporting and BI projects.

Timing
14:00 – 15:30

Attend this webcast and get a FREE "I have IT in my DNA" T-shirt!

- May 24, 2011: FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint: a developers walkthrough

Abstract
Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint extends the SharePoint search functionality and provides an exceptional search experience by incorporating features such as an extensible content processing pipeline, contextual search, extensible relevance models and an advanced query language. This session will introduce the FAST search platform from a developers perspective and will explore the different functionalities as well as talk about common developer tasks around Fast Search 2010 for SharePoint 2010 such as:
- Configuration and extension of the FAST search webpart
- Extending the content processing pipeline
- Building search applications using the SharePoint object model combined with the capabilities of the FAST Query Language (FQL).

Speaker
Joris Poelmans works as ECM unit manager and SharePoint principal architect at RealDolmen (www.realdolmen.com), a leading Belgian IT services company and Microsoft Gold Partner. His main competence area is Information Worker solutions, where he currently focuses on the SharePoint 2010 Products and Technologies platform. In October 2005, he was given the Microsoft MVP award for Windows SharePoint Services. He is also president of the Belgian Information Worker User Group (www.biwug.be) which regularly organizes sessions about the SharePoint platform in general. He can be contacted through his blog at http://jopx.blogspot.com.

Timing
14:00 – 15:30

Attend this webcast and get a FREE "Cloud Continuum" T-shirt!

- June 7, 2011: Integration as a service - Creating hybrid solutions with the Windows Azure Platform

Abstract
There are plenty of business drivers for enterprises to consider a move the cloud, but at the same time there are plenty of reasons as well why these enterprises will not be able to move their entire stack in the short term. At least for the next ten years hybrid systems will be the defacto standard way of implementing cloud based systems in the corporate world. In this session I will show you around the different services, offered by the Windows Azure Platform, that ensure a seamless integration between cloud and on-premises resources.

Speaker



Yves Goeleven is a Windows Azure MVP and Solution Architect for Capgemini Belgium. His main focus is on the implementation of enterprise grade solutions on the Microsoft’s platform in corporate environments, based on both custom software development practices as well as platform services offered by Microsoft, including for example the Windows Azure Platform and xRM.

Timing
14:00 – 15:30

Attend this webcast and get a FREE Windows Azure hat!

Alpha cutouts (where you use the alpha channel of a texture to determine the shape of a sprite or billboard) are the cause of many an aliasing problem. There are basically two ways to do alpha cutouts, both tragically flawed.

 

Alpha blended cutouts

As long as you start with high quality source textures, and draw them using bilinear filtering and mipmaps, alpha blended cutout textures can be pleasingly free of aliasing artifacts.

But alpha blending does not play nice with the depth buffer, and it can be a PITA to manually depth sort every piece of alpha cutout geometry!

 

Alpha tested cutouts

In an attempt to make the hardware depth buffer work with alpha cutouts, many developers switch from full alpha blending to alpha testing (using the XNA AlphaTestEffect, or the clip() HLSL pixel shader intrinsic). This does indeed avoid the complexity of manually sorting alpha blended objects, but at the cost of aliasing.

The problem is that alpha testing only provides a boolean on/off decision, with no ability to draw fractional alpha values.

In mathematical terms, when we quantize a smoothly varying signal such as the alpha channel of a texture into a binary on/off decision, we are increasing the amount of high frequency data in our signal, which moves the Nyquist threshold in the wrong direction and hence increases aliasing.

Or I can avoid the math and try a common sense explanation:

We would normally antialias our source textures by including fractional values around shape borders, but alpha testing does not support fractional alpha values, so this is no longer possible.

We would normally avoid aliasing when resampling textures via bilinear filtering and mipmapping. But even if the original texture uses only on/off boolean alpha, when we filter between multiple texels, or scale it down to create 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8 size mip levels, these will inevitably end up with fractional alpha values. To use alpha testing, we must round all such values to either fully transparent or fully opaque, which entirely defeats the point of filtering and mipmapping.

We would normally avoid aliasing along the edges of triangle geometry by multisampling, but remember this only runs the pixel shader one per final output pixel. Since each group of multisamples gets a single alpha value from this single shader invocation, each multisample inevitably also has the same alpha test result, so multisampling is useless when it comes to smoothing our alpha cutout silhouette.

Yowser!  Our entire arsenal of antialiasing techniques just vanished in a puff of smoke...

The only common antialiasing technique that works with alpha tested cutouts is supersampling.  Which is great if you can afford it, but most games cannot.

Example time.  Consider this image, taken from the XNA billboard sample, which uses full alpha blending with a two pass depth sorting technique:

If I change the code to use alpha testing instead of blending, standard depth buffer sorting works with no more need for that expensive two pass technique, but at the cost of nasty aliasing on the thinner parts of the grass fronds:

How to fix this?

You don't.  There are really just three choices for alpha cutouts:

1. Go for quality over simplicity. Use full alpha blending, and manually sort by depth.
2. Put up with sorting artifacts. Use full alpha blending, but don't bother to depth sort.
3. Put up with aliasing problems. Use alpha testing, and let the depth buffer handle sorting.

In MotoGP we used a mixture of #2 and #3, and let the artists choose which was the lesser evil for each alpha cutout texture.

The ColdBox team will be holding a small, intimite gathering of ColdBox aficionados at cfObjective on Thursday May 12th at 6:30pm. If you are attending the cfObjective confernece or live in the Minneapolis, MN area we hope you will join us for a fun evening. Team ColdBox will be there and we welcome the chance to discuss ColdBox, the roadmap or anything else you like. Where: Spikes' Sports Bar and Grill at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis (1300 Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis, MN). When: Thursday May 12th at 6:30pm.

In a few weeks, kids and teens around the world will be packing up and heading off for camp. I went to a few camps myself, and I never once got to throw dynamite into a lake. Here’s the latest episode of Dick Figures. It’s episode 2 of season 2, and Red and Blue head [...]

The public beta of Flash Builder “Burrito” that was released at MAX included several “quick fix” features. For example, if you typed the name of a property or method that didn’t exist in the current class, you could hit Ctrl/Cmd+1 and create the missing item. The final release of Flash Builder takes this much farther. Here [...]

In this tutorial we're going to show you how to connect to a Microsoft Access database file but everything you learn here will apply equally to other data sources (SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc).To follow this tutorial you'll need to be familiar with ActionScript 3. You can use Flash, Flex or your authoring tool of choice, as long as it supports ActionScript 3. You don't need to have Access installed unless you want to open the example database file. An ADO provider for Access ships with all recent versions of Windows and that's all we need to work with these

My apologies that it took so long to get this up, but I've finally posted the slides from my presentation with Adnaan Ahmad on behalf of Anaara Media. The full-length video presentation of the session will be available very soon on Zaa.tv, along with all of the other incredibly fascinating sessions from 360|Flex 2011. Originally this [...]

Flex 4.5 was recently released, and one of the big pushes for that is mobile support. When building mobile components, we want to build ActionScript Skins for them instead of MXML skins, as we did with Flex 4 and Flex 4.1. This is a bit of a change for us, as Adobe always pushed us to use MXML when creating skin classes. I believe that the push to use ActionScript over MXML is due to performance. MXML is really just an ActionSript code generation language; and sometimes it does some unexpected things under the hood. Writing skins in ActionScript is

  To communicate the LG Steam Direct Drive Washing Machine’s ‘wrinkle-free washing’ promise, we reinvented the laundry bag and gave them to neighborhood laundries to deliver their ironed clothes in.       Agency: Y&R, Dubai, United Arab Emirates Chief Creative Officer: Shahir Zag Creative Director: Shahir Zag / Husen Baba Associate Creative Director: Ash [...]

The final installment of this series, about a Sage Commons Congress on the open-source sharing of genetic research, looks at what Sage Bionetworks and its friends need to do.

In the latest Publishing News: A study found digital text might disrupt cognitive mapping, digital browsing solutions are discussed in Pete Meyers' latest "Breaking the Page" installment, and Amazon launches its fourth imprint.

With the launch of VectorScribe 24 hours ago, we are very pleased to say that we have been overwhelmed by the reaction, quick uptake and kind comments. As this is a new product, and so many people have downloaded the 7 day trial version so quickly, it’s unfortunate but not completely unexpected that a couple of [...]

The site for MAX 2011 is up and has a ton of info about what’s in store for October. It’s going to be tough to match next year but with the launch of CS 5.5, the new mobile workflows in Flash Builder and Flex, plus a big focus on HTML5 and Gaming, there really is [...]

This technique is useful when you need to draw forms or reports where you need areas to be defined not by borders on all sides but only on – for example – the bottom. Below are some examples of diagrams where you can use this technique.

In the image below, we can use such shapes for filling in fields

In the next image, you might use such a shape to define the column headers in a table. This is in fact my original motivation for constructing this shape: I needed to mock-up several SSRS reports in Visio and had no easy way to draw the column headers

 

Prefer to Watch?

Of course, I have a screencast available: http://vimeo.com/23377173

 

 

Step-by-Step Instructions

Let' start with a basic rectangle that has a fill color and a line.

What we want is shown below – a line on the rectangle, but only on the bottom side.

Our initial attempt at creating such a shape may be to draw two shapes – a rectangle and a line – and group them together.

But this has some disadvantages:

• Generally Visio does not handle grouped shapes as fast as a single shape
• If you format the line format of the grouped shape, the change will affect both the plain rectangle and the line

 

There's a better way to construct this shape so that it works for all intents and purposes like a normal rectangle. As you may have guessed, it's ShapeSheet time.

First bring up the ShapeSheet

And you'll see a Geometry section

A cursory look at this, should make it clear what is drawn by the rows in this section: a simple rectangle.

Our first step is to set the Geometry1.NoLine to TRUE. This will cause the fill of the shape to be rendered but there will be no line shown.

This is what the shape will look like now. No matter how we set the line formatting – no line will appear.

Now let's add a line that covers only the bottom part of the rectangle. We will do this by adding another Geometry section. This technique (multiple Geometry sections) has always been possible in Visio, but is not so widely known if you haven't spent a lot of time making complex shapes.

Anywhere in the ShapeSheet window, simply right-click and select Insert Section.

 

The Insert Section dialog will appear. Select Geometry and click OK.

Now you will see two Geometry sections.

Notice that the second section already has the NoFill property set to TRUE – which is what we want.

All we will need to do now is to change the second row – the LineTo row – to have an X value of "Width*1"

And we are done. We have a shape with a fill but only a partial border.

From the instructions above, it should be clear how to handle the other three sides.

Topic: Hands-on: Enhancing PowerPoint Courses with Adobe Captivate 5 Date and time: Thursday, June 9, 2011 8:00 AM – 10:00 AM US/Pacific Description: Join Dr. Pooja Jaisingh and Vish for an exciting hands-on session on how to convert the existing eLearning courses from PowerPoint to Adobe Captivate projects. Learn how to edit a PowerPoint presentation, [...]

Topic: Different Types of Slides in Adobe Captivate Date and time: Thursday, June 16, 2011 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM US/Pacific Description: Join Vish and Dr. Pooja Jaisingh to learn how to use different types of slides in Adobe Captivate 5. What’s in it for you? After attending this session, you will be able to: [...]

Topic: Adobe Captivate Interface Made Easy! Date and time: Thursday, June 23, 2011 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM US/Pacific Description: Join Dr. Pooja Jaisingh and Vish for an introductory session on Adobe Captivate interface. In this session, they will walk you through the Adobe Captivate workspace and show you how to use the toolbar, panels, [...]

Topic: Amazing Image Slideshows with Adobe Captivate 5 Date and time: Thursday, June 30, 2011 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM US/Pacific Description: Join Vish and Dr. Pooja Jaisingh to learn about creating good looking image slide shows. They will also discuss about adding audio to these image slides to make the content enjoyable. What’s in [...]

jQuery IdealForms jQIdealForms is a forms framework for jQuery that assists developers in building attractive forms with minimal Javascript code. Forms are defined in standard HTML so if the user has Javascript disabled, the form still displays. After calling the .idealForms() method on your form, jQIdealForms automatically styles and enhances all inputs. All styling is done with CSS, no images are used. jQIdealForms supports IE7+ and other modern browsers. MicroJS.com Microjs.com helps you discover the most compact-but-powerful microframeworks, and makes it easy for you to pick one that’ll work for you. Micro-frameworks are definitely the pocketknives of the JavaScript library

If you choose to add images via the operating system to a folder that Lightroom is already aware of (ie you have already imported that folder which had some image in it, but now there are more), Lightroom will NOT automatically display those newly added images. If you want Lightroom to display them, Control (Mac) [...]

Anyone out there playing with iText? iText is an open source library that allows for the creation and manipulation of PDFs via Java. I've heard of it before but have never really played with it. I find cfdocument and cfpdf to be good enough for most ... [More]