Category Archives: Tools & Utilities

Jun 23

Picture Collage Maker: a great tool to create photo collage

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When I was asked to create a custom header with collaged photos by one of my customers for his business web site, the first thing I did was to Google for a free good collage tool. Not surprisingly, I found a list of free collage software that seem to be very promising, such as Shape Collage, Scrapbook Flair, and E.M. Free Photo Collage, however, none of them works for me because they either don’t have the important Mask feature, or implement the Mask feature in a complicated way.

CollagePictureNoMask ===> CollagePictureWithMask

So my search continued on, and finally, a program called Picture Collage Maker showed up in my search result. It is not freeware, but the single personal license fee of $29.90 is reasonable. What attracted me is that it supports the Mask feature, besides other useful features. For example, it comes with about 80 free collage templates for you to choose to create a photo collage, a calendar, or a greeting card. Besides the mask feature you can use to decorate your photo, you can also add text, frames, clipart, and photo effects, such as blur, grayscale, mirror, and more.

Therefore, I decided to give it a trial and downloaded a 15-day trial version from their web site. The installation went smoothly and the user interface is simple and clear. You will be prompted with four options when you launch the software:

2010-06-23_142330

I chose Create Blank Collage to enter the main design area of the software:

2010-06-23_142809

The user interface of the software is very simple, clean, and straight-forward. You can easily add a photo, clipart, text, or calendar by clicking the Add menu, and you can also easily change the background to use a different image or color fill . There are 59 built-in Masks and can be easily dragged and dropped onto the photo that you would like to apply mask.

The last feature but not the least is the Share feature. You can save your collage as picture format, or use your collage as your desktop wallpaper, or email your collage to friend to show off your creativity.

Now, to celebrate 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa, let’s see how easy it is to use Picture Collage Maker to create a World Cup collage:

1. Choose collage_22 from the built-in template list

2. Add your favorite photos to the template

3. Save the collage as picture (the trial version inserts a watermark on the output picture)

4. Show off time

WorldCup001

Jun 23

Google Voice released to public for free

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Google released Google Voice to public(well so far for people in US only) free of charge today. If you have not heard about Google Voice and want to know what it is, then watch this video below:

Once you sign up and choose a Google Voice phone number, you can add your home, work, or mobile phone to your Google Voice account, then once someone call your Google Voice phone number, all phones that you add will ring, pretty cool. Also, you can set up your voicemail in Google Voice and have your voicemail transcript sent to your email account. All your phone call history, including voicemail, text message, etc, are stored in Google Voice account.

For more features, check the feature page of Google Voice. If you already have a Google account, then just go to www.google.com/googlevoice and sign in to get started.

Have fun!

May 14

Getting more space for Microsoft Office Live Workspace

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Good news for Microsoft Office Live Workspace users! Microsoft Office Live Workspace account will be upgraded to Windows Live SkyDrive very soon, which means it will become a part of Windows Live SkyDrive and as a result user’s space will be increased to 25GB SkyDrive from the current 5GB Workspace.

The upgrade will be automatic and all your Workspace files will be moved to your SkyDrive automatically. The upgrade plan consists of two phases, during the first phase, all Live Workspace users will be notified via email to upgrade their accounts. User will be invited to click a button within Live Wordspace account to start the automated process. Eventually, users who didn’t upgrade their accounts during the first phase will be moved automatically to Live SkyDrive.

I am glad that Microsoft started some merging process for various Live services. I hope someday Live Mesh service will be integrated to SkyDrive too.

Mar 31

Process Explorer cannot replace Task Manager in Vista 64-bit

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I installed the latest version of Process Explorer (v12) on my Vista 64-bit computer and set it to replace the default Task Manager, however, when I right-clicked the task bar to launch Task Manager, Process Explorer did not come up but an error message saying cannot find taskmgr.exe file:

Windows cannot find ‘C:\Windows\system32\taskmgr.exe’. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.

ProcessExplorerError

The old version of Process Explorer does not have this problem. The easy fix is this posted on Windows Sysinternals forum by Mark:

The solution is rather easy: start ProcessExplorer, go to the directory where it is installed and copy procexp64.exe to another location. Then close ProcessExplorer and copy procexp64.exe back to said directory. When you now use this file to start ProcessExplorer (change Links/Shortcuts) you can use it as a TaskMgr replacement without problems.

I followed the steps above and it did the trick on my Vista 64-bit. I hope this bug will be fixed soon.

Mar 26

Firefox 3.7 pre-release 4 still not pass Acid3 test, but getting close

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As shown in my last post, Firefox 3.6.2 didn’t pass the Acid3 Test with a score 94/100, 6 points away from passing the test. Today, I downloaded Firefox 3.7 Pre-release 4 and ran the Acid3 Test again to see if the new Firefox will do better. The result showed that Firefox 3.7 Pre-release 4 did do a better job than Firefox 3.6.2, but unfortunately it still didn’t pass the test, having a score of 96/100.

Firefox 3.6.2 Acid3 Test Result

 

Firefox 3.7 Pre-release 4 Acid3 Test Result

Acid3ScreenCapture_Minefield

Test details:

Failed 4 of 100 tests.
Test 26 passed, but took 1185ms (less than 30fps)
Test 40 passed, but took 42ms (less than 30fps)
Test 46 passed, but took 34ms (less than 30fps)
Test 71 failed: expected '1' but got '2' - wrong number of children in HEAD (first test)
Test 77 failed: expected '4776' but got '5560' - getComputedTextLength failed.
Test 78 failed: expected '90' but got '0' - getRotationOfChar(0) failed.
Test 79 failed: expected '34' but got '33' - SVGSVGTextElement.getNumberOfChars() incorrect
Total elapsed time: 3.67s
Mar 25

Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview shows big improvements

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Microsoft released a platform preview for Internet Explorer 9 last week and I downloaded and installed it today, and compared some results with IE8, Firefox 3.6.2 and Google Chrome 4.1.249 and would like to share the results with you.

First, the release notes of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview is here. This version can only be installed on Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7, so check your system before download. Even if your system does not meet the requirements, you still can visit the test drive site to see the new and improved features in IE 9.

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-driver.html)

Compare to IE 8, IE 9 Platform Preview already has a huge improvement on JavaScript Benchmark test, about 6.5 times faster than IE 8. The results also shows better performance than Firefox 3.6, but not as good as Google Chrome, however, it is very impressive for such a early release.

SunSpider_JavaScript_Benchmark_IE9

Because of the different hardware configuration, I couldn’t get the exact results as above, but the result ratio of IE 9 and other browsers (IE 8, Firefox, and Chrome) is very close. For example, according to the data above, IE9/IE8 = 598.8/3825.53 = 0.1565, my results show that IE9/IE8 = 1358.0/8886.8 = 0.1528. For Firefox, my results show that IE9/Firefox = 1358.0/1711.4 = 0.7935 vs. IE9/Firefox = 598.0/699.8 = 0.8545.

Acid3 Test for Web Standards (http://acid3.acidtests.org/)

IE 8

Acid3ScreenCapture_IE8

IE 8 (Compatible Mode)

Acid3ScreenCapture_IE8_CompatibleView

IE 9 Platform Preview

Acid3ScreenCapture_IE9

Firefox 3.6.2

Acid3ScreenCapture_FireFox

Google Chrome 4.1.249

Acid3ScreenCapture_Chrome

Only Google Chrome passed the Web Standards Test and IE 8 Compatible Mode had the worst result with a poor score of 13/100. IE 8 improved not much and IE 9 still has a long way to go to pass the test.

CSS3 Selectors Test (http://tools.css3.info/selectors-test/test.html)

IE 8

CSS3_Selector_Results_IE8

IE 8 Compatible Mode

CSS3_Selector_Results_IE8_CompatibleMode

IE 9 Platform Preview

CSS3_Selector_Results_IE9

Firefox 3.6.2

CSS3_Selector_Results_FireFox

Google Chrome 4.1.249

CSS3_Selector_Results_Chrome

Google Chrome, Firefox, and IE 9 Platform Preview all passed the test and neither of IE8 or IE8 Compatible Mode passed the test (no surprise I think).

I am impressed by the results of IE 9 Platform Preview and am interested in trying the future release of it.

P.S. At some point, my CSS3 Selectors test results in IE 9 Platform Preview failed. After I relaunched IE 9 Platform Preview and the test passed. Don’t know what caused the problem.

Nov 18

Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 released

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Mozilla community released Firefox 3.6 Beta 3, which contains over 80 bug fixes from the last beta release. If you are a Firefox fan, you should give it a try.

How to run Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 in Ubuntu?

1. Download the tar package of Firefox 3.6 Beta 3

2. Unzip the tar package to a folder

3. Open the folder, find a file named “firefox”

4. Double click “firefox” to launch Firefox 3.6 Beta 3

You can also add to the top menu a custom application launcher pointing to “firefox” in Ubuntu to easily launch Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 in the future.

There are some web sites show you how to upgrade Firefox 3.5 to 3.6 beta in Ubuntu, but I don’t recommend to do that.

Sep 29

Free Anti-Virus software from Microsoft: Security Essentials

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Security Essentials is a free antivirus, anti-spyware product from Microsoft, a public beta version was released in June 2009 for a limited number of downloads, and now the beta test is finished and the final version of Security Essentials should be available at any time, according to the email that was sent to all beta users:

Dear Beta User,

Thank you for participating in the Microsoft® Security Essentials Beta. Your participation has been instrumental to ensuring the best possible product release quality.

The final version of Microsoft Security Essentials will be released to the public in the coming weeks. If you are running the older version of the beta (1.0.1407.0), we encourage you to upgrade to a newer version of the beta (1.0.1500.0). To ensure a smoothest possible experience, please follow one of these options:

· Click on the ‘Upgrade Now’ button on the Microsoft Security Essentials Home tab. OR

· Select ‘Upgrade Microsoft Security Essentials’ under the Help drop-down menu

Thank you again for your participation in the Microsoft Security Essentials Beta!

Best regards,

Microsoft Security Essentials Team

Many people said it is today that Microsoft will release the final version, however, by the time this post is written, Microsoft has not published the final version for download yet, hopefully, it will be released soon.

Keep an eye on Microsoft Security Essentials web site for the coming final version.

UPDATE (09/29/2009, 10:45AM)

The final version is available for download now.

Aug 25

Sending email with Visual Studio 2008 in Windows 7 by using Free SMTP Server

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You may already know that Microsoft dropped SMTP in client OS since Windows Vista, so apparently Windows 7 will not have SMTP either. If you need a SMTP on your local machine to test and debug your mail function as I do, you can install a free third-party SMTP server called Free SMTP Server. The installation is very straight forward and you don’t need to do any customization. In your application, just use “localhost” as the SMTP host and you are done. Here is an example of using Free SMTP Sever to send a test email in Visual Studio 2008 web application.

The SMTP settings can be stored in web.config:

<system.net>
  <mailSettings>
    <smtp deliveryMethod="Network">
      <network host="localhost"/>
    </smtp>
  </mailSettings>
</system.net>

A sample email snippet:

Dim mm As New MailMessage()
mm.To.Add("jeffrey@techproszone.net")
mm.Subject = "Test email from www.TechProsZone.net"
mm.Body = "This is a test email from http://www.TechProsZone.net"
mm.IsBodyHtml = True
Dim smtp As New SmtpClient()
smtp.Send(mm)

When the above code snippet is executing, you will see an active connection in Free SMTP Server shown as follows:

FreeSMTPServer

Note: you will need to keep Free SMTP Server running in order to use it to send email in your web application.