July 9th, 2010 Rana |

2 days back one of the employee of our very old client called me and asked “Rana, I need a help with Microsoft PowerPoint presentation which I’m going to present with in an hour. This is a post-bid presentation & I’ve to hand over a copy of my presentation to the client, for that I need a PDF of the presentation. Please tell me how can I do it, because MPP has no direct option of saving or exporting to PDF ”

I did help him by sending a mail with options of how can he save the PPT to PDF and he replied me with a big

I thought why don’t I share it in my blog so that some other can get the help… So here it is.

Microsoft PowerPoint to PDF / PPT to PDF

I’ve 2 different options to do that …. One with ‘PDFCreator’ & another with ‘OpenOffice-Impress’

PDFCreator

With ‘PDFCreator’: Its a Free to use software for Windows. Install it & use it as a printer from any other software to save as PDF. It creates PDF files from nearly any Windows applications. To know more and download visit the site http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator

Impress

With ‘OpenOffice-Impress’: It is also a free to use office software from OpenOffice.org bundle. It has the direct option of ‘Export to PDF’. So either you can make your whole presentation in Impress or run your already made Microsoft ppt in it to export as PDF. By the way Impress has almost same interface as PowerPoint. URL: http://download.openoffice.org/index.html

June 15th, 2010 Priyanka |

Waka Waka (This Time For Africa) by Shakira -- featuring Freshlyground is announced the official theme song for the FIFA 2010 World Cup.

“Wavin’ Flag” is the official anthem of Coca-Cola’s 2010 FIFA World Cup program. K’Naan has specially recorded a version of the song for the tournament.

(Waka Waka! The official song of the world cup! Sing along to Enjoy!)

LYRICS

You’re a good soldier
Choosing your battles
Pick yourself up
And dust yourself off
And back in the saddle

You’re on the frontline
Everyone’s watching
You know it’s serious
We’re getting closer
This isnt over

The pressure is on
You feel it
But you’ve got it all
Believe it

When you fall get up
Oh oh…
And if you fall get up
Oh oh…

Tsamina mina
Zangalewa
Cuz this is Africa

Tsamina mina eh eh
Waka Waka eh eh

Tsamina mina zangalewa
Anawa aa
This time for Africa

Listen to your god
This is our motto
Your time to shine
Dont wait in line
Y vamos por Todo

People are raising
Their Expectations
Go on and feed them
This is your moment
No hesitations

Today’s your day
I feel it
You paved the way
Believe it

If you get down
Get up Oh oh…
When you get down
Get up eh eh…

Tsamina mina zangalewa
Anawa aa
This time for Africa

Tsamina mina eh eh
Waka Waka eh eh

Tsamina mina zangalewa
Anawa aa

Tsamina mina eh eh
Waka Waka eh eh
Tsamina mina zangalewa
This time for Africa

Shakira’s Waka Waka has been selected as the official anthem for the FIFA 2010 World Cup. This song is based on the Zangalewa song which is a marching song popular throughout Africa. It was popularized by the Cameroonian military band in 1986.

May 24th, 2010 Priyanka |

Are your counting the days too? Now this is an extremely easy solution to count down to the FIFA world cup 2010 with php or javascript.

Lets see how to do this in two ways.

First we get the exact date from the Official website. In numeric format the date will be 6.11.2010.

It is starting on June 11 2010. WOW!!!

COUNTDOWN WITH PHP

Now we will place the date month and year in the mktime section of the php code below:

<?php
$fifa2010 = mktime(0, 0, 0, 6, 11, 2010) ;
$now = time () ;
$result =($fifa2010-$now) ;
$daystoGO =(int) ($result/86400) ;
print "World Cup 2010 - $daystoGO days to go!";
?>

We have written “World Cup 2010 – ” before $daystoGO in the code, you can write some more text or change it as you like.

For php only code just add this code to your wordpress blog sidebar or posts if your blog is php-code enabled, or add this code directly to a page or post or sidebar template. If php is not working for your html only pages then the javascript code can come to your rescue.

COUNTDOWN WITH JAVASCRIPT

If you are not aware of php or it is not working on your html only page, just copy and paste the javascript code below to your page, see how we have added the occasion date in the “target” variable.

You can also add this section to your page before the end tag, to keep the page content clean!

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
today  = new Date();
todayE  = today.getTime();
target = new Date("11 June, 2010");
targetE = target.getTime();
daystoGO = Math.floor(((targetE - todayE) / (60*60*24)) / 1000);
</script>

And add the following section to the area where you want the countdown output.

World Cup 2010 - <script>document.write(daystoGO);</script> days to go!

RESULT: World Cup 2010 – -49 days to go!

April 17th, 2010 Rana |

I was stuck some days back with space problem in my Virtual hard disc, which runs with VirtualBox. It was deactivating & locking the screen within a minute I started it.

It was a quite panic situation. My operating system at that time was Ubuntu Karmic.

So I started searching the internet for solutions. The common suggestion I found was to De-frag the volume & run sdelete. You can find the full instruction here Visit Site

Many users said that it solved their problem, but it didn’t work in my part as VirtualBox was not letting me to open my VM so that  I can shrink my VDI image.

So I opted for suggestion No. 2  Visit Site

Now I downloaded nullfile.exe & did as said by the site (Suggetion No. 2) EXCEPT defraging as I was unable to do so. The whole process took near about 18 hours & the result was WOW! it compressed it 16GB to 4GB, just 1/4th. It solved my problem for the time being but I’m not sure that  is it the right process or not. Comments are welcome.

April 16th, 2010 Priyanka |

Every now and then you create a bookmark link by dragging the website shortcut icon to the firefox bookmark toolbar.

Everything is fine, but after a while you cannot find all the frequently visited websites in the toolbar because it gets hidden after you have added lots of bookmarks to the bookmarks panel and you have to click the “>>” link to find and go to that site.

If you have added 500 sites then you will always have to do this but 30 to 40 sites can easily be arranged (icons only) in the toolbar region as the image below.

For this you just have to add some lines to the firefox userchrome.css file.

Those who don’t know what the userchrome.css file is. It is the file in your Firefox profile which can be used to make tweaks and customisations to Firefox. You can find it by going to the following folders as per your operating system:

[WindowsXP] C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\Chrome
[Windows Vista] – C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{some_profile}\chrome 
[UBUNTU] - /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/{some_profile}/chrome

Inside there, you will find the userchrome.css file. If it is not there create a copy of the file called userchrome-example.css which is there by default and rename as userchrome.css.

After that open the userchrome.css with your favorite text editor, if you are in windows you may open it with notepad and paste the following line:

toolbar[mode="icons"] .toolbarbutton-text {
display:none !important;
}

Save the file, close and re-start your Firefox browser.

Now right click the firefox toolbar area select customize.

A new window will open up like below. Select “icons” from the “Show” dropdown list.

You will have your “icons only” Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar!

Note: If some thing terrible happens just delete what you copied and pasted into your userchrome.css file. Then re-start your Firefox browser.

April 10th, 2010 Rana |

Already popular Adobe CS5 “Content-Aware Fill” feature video on Youtube with above 2,280,000 views has got a competitor now! It is the “Resynthesizer” plug-in of GIMP for texture synthesis. Every one here knows about ADOBE Photoshop for sure, but if you don’t know, GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for image retouching, composting and authoring software and runs on almost all the major OS Windows, Mac, and Unix (in UBUNTU it is pre-installed). You can download from their official website here and the “Resynthesizer” plug-in can be found here.

Now let’s watch the videos -

[1] Photoshop CS5 “Content-Aware Fill” Video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI

[2] GIMP “Resynthesizer” Plug-in Video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2gonFtc1yc

Comments are welcome!

April 1st, 2010 Rana |

An ‘eye’ for an eye…
We have come up with our new logo. It was a huge effort to fix a single idea out of several that were popping on our head.

Why we choose this: We were looking for something very simple but unique enough to recognise easily. Something that is easy to put anywhere like stationery, T-shirts, thumbnails etc etc…

What’s that Circle: Oops! You don’t get it?  Its an glossy wide open ‘eye’ out of small ‘E’ of eyedea.

Whyyyyyy…….: As our caption is ‘Ideas For Eyes’, we have tried that the ‘eye’(logo) must depict the emotion ‘Eureka’ or ‘Wow!’

So the Pitch was: WOW! Idea!

Now what do we want from YOU: No! not donation, we just want your valued suggestions as in the poll below. Because this LOGO is not only for us, this is for you too. It really really matters a lot if as a viewer do you like it or not. Everybody love their own car, as they take it for granted and see it inside out always. Where it really matters is who see it from outside or may be for the 1st time.

So do you like it…?

March 19th, 2010 Priyanka |

Recently we wanted to add a poll facility to one of our web posts Official Websites of IPLt20 Teams where we wanted our readers to share their opinion with polls. Some time back I had used Wp-polls plugin for another site and it is surely a wonderful plugin. So obviously I installed it. But to my surprise this did not work as expected. The poll was loading forever and ever.

So now I cross checked the wordpress forums, the developer’s website, for a quick solution.

Some said to add <?php wp_footer(); ?> in footer.php before the

</body>

tag and <?php wp_header(); ?> in header.php before the

</head>

tag. But this did not work for me.

Got another suggestion of changing the folder permissions to 755 and files to 644 through ftp. Still no luck for me! (I thought this as an issue with my version of wordpress and the plugin version)

The plugin author suggested in his website that the plugin works perfectly with the default theme, so I also did a testing with the default wordpress theme and the polls were working OK.

So I was confirmed that there must be some problem with my custom theme files only. By checking the function.php I saw that I had used a deregister script/styles code in my theme function similar to this below:

if ( !is_admin() ) wp_deregister_script('jquery');
add_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'my_deregister_styles', 100 );
function my_deregister_styles() {
wp_deregister_style( 'wp-polls' );
wp_deregister_style( 'thickbox' );
}

So now when I removed wp_deregister_style( 'wp-polls' ); and if ( !is_admin() ) wp_deregister_script('jquery'); from that, the polls are working perfectly just as it was before.

Although now I have to edit the the plugin files and theme files once again so that it does not load the jquery twice which I had previously added it manually to the theme to minimize page loading. But that is another story.

Since this the wp-poll solution was not available on googling, I thought I should write it down. Hope this helps someone else.

February 11th, 2010 Rana |

As Valentines day is knocking on the door with lots of love and passion, yesterday my brother-in-law called me & asked me to help him make a valentine Ecard for his girlfriend. He knows photoshop 7 a bit but, instructing the whole process over the phone is madness. So I made this tutorial in photoshop 7 for him and thought why not share it with you as well. Here we start, if anyone didn’t understand some part, feel free to shoot me a mail.

Lets start with a new window with default 5X7 inch (postcard) size with white background. Keep it in Res:300 so that you can print it if you want.

Now we will give it a gradient background, for that choose #2C1557 for Foreground Color

and #410630 for Background Color

Now select Radial Gradient and click + drag it from upper left corner to lower right corner. Color effect may look like the upper image.

Select Shape Tool from Tool Menu & find the ‘Heart’ shape from archive.

Note: If Heart Shape is missing in your Shape Archive, You can load it by clicking small arrow in upper right of Archive window, a drop down menu will appear, now Select Load Shapes & another window will appear called ‘custom shapes’. Select “All” and then click “Load”.

Draw a heart shape in Transparent New Window (200 X 200 pxl)

save it as BRUSH by clicking ‘Edit’ menu > Define Brush. Name it HEART-BRUSH.

Now find it in Brush menu, by default it will appear at last.

oops! as always, I forgot to save the file and ready to loose all we done yet. Save the file and give it a name as you want, I will call it Valentine Card. Now press SAVE.

Now will customise our selected ‘HEART-BRUSH’ a little. To do so click on ‘Brush’ tab on right upper corner or select it from window > Brushes. A pop up will appear. There select ‘other dynamics’ & give inputs as I did on upper image.

Next select ‘shape dynamics’ & again give inputs as I did on upper image.

now ‘scattering’ …

you can experiment & check your brush output & size by painting with a bright shade on canvas. To get same result in this project I will suggest do as I do, I fixed the brush size in 30.

next step in a fresh layer draw a ‘Heart’ shape again but selecting ‘path’ mood. Draw it in the size of 2/3 of the page.

go to path tab or window > path, select the layer & right click…

…a small drop menu will open. Select ‘Stroke Path’ …

now select ‘brush’ from the drop menu & click ‘OK’.

You will see a heart line will be made with small hearts… Name the layer ‘Hearts’

double click on the layer or click on the small ‘f’ button on layer panel to give the above effects.

it may look like the above image…

Now select a new layer up on ‘Hearts’ & also select a ‘soft pixel brush’ of 300 size.

pick color with the value of #F6F598…

…and draw heart upon it with the brush. Remember it should be on another layer.

now click on the ‘Blending Mood’ drop down menu on layer panel or right click on the layer to find it there. Select ‘Overlay ‘

is it looking like this…………………………………………………………………………… ^

To give it a splendid effect put some colors (nearer to the background gradient shades) like this in different layer.

again give ‘overlay’ effect to all the color layers & also a ‘pattern overlay’ effect from ‘Layer Style’ (if you forgot, you will find it by double clicking the layer)

To give it a starry look put some more hearts here and there with ‘Heart-Brush’. Give them the same effect as ‘Hearts’ layer. To do so right click on the ‘Hearts’ layer, select ‘Copy Layer Style’ & then right click on new hearts layer to ‘Paste Layer Effect’.

Choose your own style of font (preferably cute or romantic) and write what you want to write. White should be the shade of font to give it a bright look. You can give it the same ‘layer style effect’ you gave in the hearts.

And your Valentines e-Card is ready. If you want to print it save-as in .tiff 300 res, if you want to e-mail it as e-card, save-as it as .jpeg/jpg 72 res. For more Valentine Ecards visit ecards.eyedealab.com . Have a Happy Valentines day.

Download as Wallpapers

1024×768 | 1152×864 | 1280×800 | 1280×1024

January 15th, 2010 Priyanka |

Today I tried to install TweetDeck in Ubuntu Linux. It is a desktop application for different social networks. The main feature being to stay updated on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

To know more check out their features page.
Ok, now lets start.

Note: I am using Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Kola) right now, so I don’t know if this tutorial will work with other versions too and my Web Browser is Firefox 3.5.7.

A. How to install Adobe Air in Ubuntu

STEP 1: Go to Adobe website and visit AdobeAir page for more information. You can directly download the latest AdobeAIRInstaller.bin file from this page: http://get.adobe.com/air/

STEP 2: Save the downloaded file in your Home folder.

STEP 3: Open your Terminal (Applications>Accessories>Terminal) and run this command below.

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Next command –

sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Now follow the instructions, until you complete the installation and see this screen below.

UPDATE – If you get the following error: “An error occurred while installing Adobe AIR. Installation may not be allowed by your administrator. Please contact your administrator.”
Try in terminal:

sudo aptitude remove adobeair-enu

Or:

apt-get remove adobeair1.0

Or this:

apt-get update

(last one worked for me)

B. How to install TweetDeck in Ubuntu

STEP 1: Visit Tweetdeck website and you will find a download tweetdeck link as in the image below, but it didn’t work for me. I tried twice to receive only installation error.

If you are lucky you may find a Download TweetDeck link for Linux (manual installation) as suggested by many older users but I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Somehow I managed to get a link for v0.32.6 from this page below:

To get the .air file CLICK this short url:
http://bit.ly/thedeck or http://tweetdeck.com/go/download/tweetdeck

Now you will get a download-able file named TweetDeck_0_32.6.air (or the latest version)

STEP 2: Save the downloaded file in your Home folder or desktop.

STEP 3: Right click and open the file with Adobe Air as below. The installation will start now.

STEP 4: By default it will load in your /opt folder but you may change it if you wish. After finishing the installation you will see a similar screen as below.

FINAL STEP: Get social!

MORE TIPS:
1. To learn more about using Tweetdeck, this is an interesting read at 1stwebdesigner.com.

2. Another Tweet deck usage tutorial at edgehopper.com

January 13th, 2010 Rana |

Count down to the world cup 2010 at South Africa has started. Although Shakira’s Waka Waka has been selected as the official anthem for the 2010 World Cup to be held in South Africa by Fifa, everyone is already grooving to the Coca-Cola world cup 2010 anthem. To join in the football fever, we also wanted to sing along!

(The Coco-Cola Celebration mix for the world cup! Sing along to Enjoy!)

LYRICS

Ooooooh Wooooooh

Give me freedom, give me fire, give me reason, take me higher
See the champions, take the field now, you define us, make us feel proud
In the streets our heads are lifting, as we lose our inhibition,
Celebration its around us, every nations, all around us

Singing forever young, singing songs underneath that sun

Lets rejoice in the beautiful game.

And together at the end of the day.

WE ALL SAY

When I get older I will be stronger

They’ll call me freedom Just like a wavin’ flag

And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes

When I get older I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom
Just like a wavin’ flag

And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes

Oooooooooooooh woooooooooohh hohoho

Give you freedom, give you fire, give you reason, take you higher
See the champions, take the field now, you define us, make us feel proud
In the streets our heads are lifting, as we lose our inhibition,
Celebration, its around us, every nations, all around us

Singing forever young, singing songs underneath that sun

Lets rejoice in the beautiful game.

And together at the end of the day.

WE ALL SAY

When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom
Just like a wavin’ flag

And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes

When I get older I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom
Just like a wavin’ flag

And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes

Wooooooooo Ohohohoooooooo ! OOOoooooh Wooooooooo

WE ALL SAY !

When I get older I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom
Just like a wavin’ flag

And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes

When I get older I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom
Just like a wavin’ flag

And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes back
And then it goes

Wooo hooooo hohohohoooooo

And everybody will be singing it

Wooooooooo ohohohooooo

And we are all singing it……!

======================

Somalian/African artist K’naan’s song ‘The remix of Waving Flag‘ is part of Coca-Cola’s global integrated marketing campaign “inspired by the joyous dance celebrations familiar to Africa.”

December 16th, 2009 Rana |

Rocket Singh from Rocket Corporation

Suddenly it might look odd to see a movie poster on our site. Hey! we didn’t do any graphic or web job for RSMOTY mean Rocket Singh- Salesmen of the year, the Ranbir starer film.

I was just overwhelmed to see the movie last night at theatre with my wife. Actually the story of Rocket Corporation & its ethics are really very similar to small firms like us (at-least ours).

Honesty & Service is the only stack we have end of the day & we are not quite a business organisation rather a creative organisation doing business I think. So thanks Jaideep Sahni for writing a quite lively original story & thanks to Yash Raj Films along with Shimit Amin for making it happened.

December 10th, 2009 eyedealab |

Eyedea Lab celebrated its 5th birthday today. Although it seemed like a regular working day, it ended in a fun and simple dinner event, with good food and warm regards from well wishers. All team members were present in a happy spirit, enjoying every moment.

Eyedea Lab started its journey in 2004 when Internet was a little different than it is today. From simple htmls to complete database driven CMS websites, from low quality web graphics to high end flv videos, it has experienced a new era in internet like all of you. In the last 5 years, new names became great names – like WordPress, Twitter, Facebook or Google. Simple text journals got a new dimesion with the term ‘Blog’.

Eyedea Lab salutes all, in their own success, and is proud to be a tiny part of this wonderful, ever-evolving web and graphics world. We hope to be more creative, more hardworking and wish to continue this journey for years to come.

Thanks everyone for your support.

October 8th, 2009 Priyanka |

Series: Playing embedded midi file in firefox – Part 1
Continued from: Playing embedded midi file in firefox – Part 2: Windows

Instructions For Ubuntu Users:

A special plugin and a midi software ‘renderer’ is required for playing embedded midi file types from within the browser.

Installation
Open up a terminal, type the command below and then press enter.

sudo apt-get install timidity mozplugger

Answer yes to all questions and the installation will be complete.

Restart firefox (don’t forget to close all instances) and embedded midi files should now play when you go to this sample webpage below.

Additional tips you may require in the process:

1. Sometimes you may need to delete /home/[USERNAME]/.mozilla/pluginreg.dat and restart firefox. This is because a bug require mozplugger to be the last plugin loaded .

2. The mozilla folder is in your Home folder, but you cannot see it until you turn on ‘show hidden files’ (Ctrl+H) in the ‘view’ menu.

3. Mostly the default Evince (http://projects.gnome.org/evince/) PDF document viewer will have no problem with reading PDF files. But this plugin doesn’t cooperate very nice with Acrobat Reader in firefox, but using xpdf in firefox solves this problem. If pdf’s are not displaying anymore in your browser follow the instructions below:

Type:

sudo apt-get install xpdf

Then:

sudo gedit /etc/mozpluggerrc

Put an # before the line with acroread in it, as shown below:

text/x-pdf: pdf: PDF file
#      repeat swallow(documentShell) fill: acroread -geometry +9000+9000 +useFrontEndProgram "$file"
        repeat noisy swallow(Xpdf) fill: xpdf -g +9000+9000 "$file"
        repeat noisy swallow(gv) fill: gv --safer --quiet --antialias -geometry +9000+9000 "$file"

October 6th, 2009 Priyanka |

Continued from: Playing embedded midi file in firefox – Part 1

Instructions For Windows Users:

Quicktime is useful for playing embedded midi file types from within the browser in windows.

Clicking the “Install missing plugins” button in firefox brings up Apple QuickTime, which you mostly have installed in windows. But it still does not work.

Actually the music file being loaded from the web site is formatted as a “.mid” MIDI file. The MIDI player that should work in Firefox is QuickTime, and QuickTime is mostly being correctly identified. However, by default, QuickTime is not configured to play MIDI files.

So, we have to configure QuickTime to play MIDI (.mid) music files ourselves.

Before we start configuring QuickTime, you need to make sure you have QuickTime installed correctly.

If you do not have QuickTime installed, you need to install it (even if you already have it, you can download and install over the latest version).

You can go directly to Apple’s site, where you will find the option to download the combination package of QuickTime and iTunes.
Or you can download only the QuickTime program (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/ ).

1. Download and Install
2. Start the QuickTime Player
3. And we see the Untitled (no music or video file loaded) player appear
4. From the menu, pick Edit / Preferences / QuickTime Preferences…
5. Select the Browser tab and click on Mime Settings
6. Click on the “+” box to expand the “Audio – Audio only file formats” listing
7. Check the box beside MIDI and then click OK and close QuickTime.

Now, Firefox will play the file .mid automatically.

Some Alternative midi player:

Download QuickTime Alternative
Download QT Lite
Also see Playing embedded midi file in firefox – Part 3: Ubuntu (Linux)