Top 5 Budweiser Wassup Commercial

Some things leave an impression on people for many years,
even if they were meant to be short lived.

The Budweiser commercials are just damn good.
Every couple of years I watch them again and enjoy them like it’s the first time.

But you have to watch them in a good sequence – so here is my pick of the Budweiser Commercials:

The Original Budweiser Commercial:

The pizza version:

The girl invastion:

The wassabi version:

8 years later
The Budweiser Wassup Commercial has evolved to reflect the changes:

Technorati Tags: funny

Free Photo Editor – Top 4

There are many great photo and graphic software for a nice amount of dollars out there, but finding the few good applications that are also free is harder.

Here are a few good ones – both the online version and those you install on your desktop:

Online Photo Editor

The first one I like is from aviary.com :

They have a flash interface for editing the image, which allows the app to work well in Linux as well as on windows, and its a decent enough image editor, but the most impressive application on their site is not the image editor but the color editor tool Toucan:

What is so good about this tool? well, part of my job is to make graphs,
some of them are dynamic, some of them are RRD based or excel based, or just a static graph to show some stats to the management, but they should be nice to look at, and here is my problem as i have no sense for color picking, i usually get some ugly graphs.

but this is where this tools steps in – it allows you to pick a group of colors that go well together.

you choose how many colors you need and it will help you group them from these options:

• equidistant
• Circular
• Alternate

etc…

and you can save your color groups for later use:

So this tool helps in creating good looking graphs…

Colorjack

now this is another nice color picking tool, it loads faster then Toucan,
and does the same work.

Another Online image editor

Pixlr

Pixlr gives an easy feel of photoshop application, while it is also a flash application which loads into your browser – no install needed.

The best part about this app is the tools it lets you use on the image you load into it:

• Red eye reduction tool
• Bloat
• Pinch
• Dodge
• Smudge (my favorite as you can see in the image above)
• gradient
• crop

And many more, if you need to quickly edit an image, without buying a software to do that, pixlr can be a very handy tool.

Offline Free Image Editors

paint.net

This is a great easy to use image editor, its quickly installed and its very simple interface is smooth to work with, the great plus about this app is it will allow you to easily drop a print screen image on it and start editing and cropping it as needs be.

The only drawback for paint.net is that its using the .net framework, which is not Linux native (ha!),
which brings us to the finalist:

Free Linux Photo editor

Gimp !!!

Gimp is the all time champion when it comes to Linux free image editors,
It is a very strong software with many options and features, and filters and brushes,
and people keep creating more free filters and brushes all the time.

It comes with a lot of default brushes, but you can easily download some beautiful brushes some other happy user created.

Creative Commons

Now – combine all or any of these tools together with free images downloaded which you can search for at the CC search web page and you are ready to create some fine images which you can use anywhere.

Technorati Tags: desktop, Linux, windows

nagios love – vote on SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards

SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards have opened up for voting,
now is your time to go and vote for your favorite Open Source applications,
Show the love for those Linux apps your have been using for free for so long

I’m voting for nagios in the “Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins” Category,
and here is the direct link to vote for nagios.

But don’t stop there – other apps I’ve been lovingly using for the last years and I’m gonna give some voting love for are:

• xampp  -  apache mysql php and perl on windows/linux
• TortoiseSVN  -  SVN client for windows
• Notepad++  -  The best simple text editor
• Audacity  -  Sound editor
• phpMyAdmin  -  Management system for MySQL Database
• OpenOffice.org  -  MS office replacement
• KeePass  –  Password manager

There where some hard choices to do there, since in the same categories I had more then one app that I’m totally depending on for day to day work.

phpMyAdmin changed the way I’m working with Mysql databases,
Notepad++ is my favorite editor on my windows box,
and with Audacity i make all my ring tones

what are your favorite Opensource apps?

Technorati Tags: desktop, Linux, windows, xampp

installing wordpress on windows

In my last post i talked about installing apache and mysql on windows for development needs, and now we can add to that install a wordpress blog.

when i do changes to the php code on wordpress i first test it on the local version of the them to make sure its good before going with it public.

1) get the wordpress files

first thing – download the wordpress install file from the website,
the default html folder for xampp is C:\xampp\htdocs so lets create a folder for our blog there: C:\xampp\htdocs\testblog and unzip the wordpress files into that location.

2) setup the MySQL user and database

go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/index.php and choose the Privileges tab,
find the “Add a new User” link.
fill in a user name – anything you want, and a password.
in the “Database for user” section make sure to check: “Create database with same name and grant all privileges”
in the “Global privileges” press the “Check All” link to give the user all the privileges (this is something you should do only on a development server!!! )

press the Go button.

at this point its best to reload the privileges tab and use the “reload the privileges” link to make sure the user is loaded.

3) edit the wp-config.php file

go to C:\xampp\htdocs\testblog where all the blog files are located and rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php, edit the file and setup:
edit the DB-NAME line and replace “putyourdbnamehere” with the username we created a minute ago,
replace “usernamehere” with the the same user name we just used,
“yourpasswordhere” should be replaced with the user’s password,
and also you have the “Authentication Unique Keys” part where you need to create keys for your blog,
you can use this wordpress.org page which will create the keys for you. copy and paste the keys to the config file.

4) run the wordpress config php

if you installed the wordpress files into “testblog” folder, the install file will be at: http://localhost/testblog/wp-admin/install.php

choose a blog title and an email, and you have your own development blog running.
don’t forget to change the admin password first thing…

you can access your new blog at: http://localhost/testblog/

from here now you can do all the changes and testing you want, including themes and plugins, before you upload them to your live blog.

Technorati Tags: apache, desktop, windows, wordpress, xampp

Apache and MySQL on windows

Although I’m a great Linux fan, i still have Windows on my personal computer, since the computer is not used by me alone, and although i have various Linux OS installed on this same computer, most of the time its on the windows mode. so what do i do when i need to test something on wordpress or mediawiki?

For that reason i needed a development environment on my home computer that will run Apache, MySQL, php and Perl. There are some ways to go about that – i could have installed Cygwin, which is a Linux-like environment for windows.

Another way to go about it is to install the windows version Apache and mysql and php and perl.

These two options are fine solutions but they will need some more work on them , other then the point and click option which is xampp.
xampp for windows version 1.7.1 on default will include all of these:

• Apache HTTPD 2.2.11 + Openssl 0.9.8i
• MySQL 5.1.33
• PHP 5.2.9
• phpMyAdmin 3.1.3.1

and if you want to can add Perl 5.10.0-2.2.11 from their Add-Ons page.

The install process is a next,next,next version of a regular windows install, and in the the end you have everything installed into the default location at C:\xampp.

This is the windows control panel that stops and starts the Apache and MySQL for you if you don want to install them as services, personally i prefer to start them when I’m developing since they are resource heavy applications.

Some default file locations:
the html and php files are installed to C:\xampp\htdocs
Perl scripts should be placed here: C:\xampp\cgi-bin
the php.ini (php config file) can be found at: C:\xampp\apache\bin\php.ini
httpd.conf (apache config file) is located in: C:\xampp\apache\conf

Note that for Unix Perl scripts you need to replace the first line with the location of the Perl binary on your windows, so it should look like:
#!”C:\xampp\perl\bin\perl.exe”

Another not is that the xampp on default is set to work with php 5 , but you can from the xampp configure page which is at http://localhost/xampp/ , use the “PHP switcher” and change the install to work with php 4 instead.

And that’s it – your local development website is ready and is available at: http://localhost/ to play with.

Technorati Tags: apache, desktop, perl, php, windows