General Resources

The exhibition Star Wars: Identities is currently in Montreal. Although I have not seen it yet, I was quite impressed with the artwork for the posters used to promote the exhibition. Here are a couple of the posters that I was able to find online. Pay close attention to the details in the picture. Each one reveals extra details once you look deeper. You can download any of these posters as desktop wallpapers. Their resolution is pretty good.

PHP Timestamps can be very useful in programming and tracking possible modifications which could have been made. The mktime() function in PHP is a powerful tool that returns UNIX timestamps of a given date. The mktime() function shows the number of seconds passed from 1st January 1970 to a given date. 1st January 1970 is taken to be the starting date for the OS and hence all the timestamp values are generated by keeping this as the base. This can be used to calculate the time elapsed across a wide range of varieties including the last 24 hours, yesterday, last week, this week, last month, etc…

I do a lot of web programming that involves interaction with Google Maps. In cases where I need to use Google’s standard markers, it’s always a headache trying to figure out what custom markers exist. So I wrote a little script to create a list of all the standard Google marker icons availalbe.
Here is a list of all the standard Google map marker icons available:

I love to read CSS and hate it when the CSS file is all packed up together and hard to read. So, I recently wrote a simple C# application that reads a packed CSS file and unpacks it by adding spaces and making the CSS file easier to read.

I absolutely love this poster for the Captain America movie. The visuals for this poster are absolutely stunning. This is one of the best design work that I have seen for a movie poster in quite some time. I love the attention to detail, the lighting and even the textures used in this poster.

I recently had to create a bar graph to highlight my skills in the portfolio section of this site. I started out being lazy and looked for a good tutorial for creating a bar graph using only CSS and HTML. After failing to find any good bar graphs, I decided to write one myself usin a combination of various techniques that I came across on the web. The result is the following bar graph:

I recently had a project that required me to use Wordpress shortcode inside a Wordpress excerpt. Anybody who is familiar with Wordpress will tell you that: Wordpress does not allow you to use shortcode in excerpts!
You see, you can use shortcodes for anything called through the_content() function, but the shortcode will be displayed as-is when the same post is called through the_excerpt() function. According to the Wordpress Codex, no code or html tags are executed in the_excerpt() function.

One of my favorite parts of the Iron Man 2 movie was the Iron Man Hope and Change poster. I thought I was the only person that thought this poster was great until I found out that many people are looking for this poster online. Well, for anybody out there that is interested, djbowen at Deviantart has created a pretty good replica.

So, as the entire world knows, I’m a Google-Groupie! Google can do no wrong in my eyes. I love everything from their Chrome browser to Google Maps to Gmail. (Oh, i also love their search engine…) Anyways, a friend recently introduced me to Picasa by Goolge. Picasa is a free photo management software from Google. Simply put, Picasa is AWESOME! All I can say is Google does it again! You can edit photo, create slideshows, upload your images and so much more.

F.lux is a great application for people like myself who stay in front of a computer all day! The application makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. F.lux adjusts the glow of your monitor (brightness and tint) based on the time of day, dimming your monitor later into the evening and tinting the screen color based on the kind of lighting you use.