Vyoma

Ok. So I have been working on my blogs and websites. And that is when I came across Seth Godin's Squidoo page. It is said that it is a good 'traffic-baiting' for your websites. Has anyone here tried it? How successful have you been? Squidoo.com

Here is an illustration I did for a blogpost at KalaaLog.com: No More Photoshop - Use GIMP I tried to get a WestMinister style of illustration. (I am not even sure if that is what the style is called - it appears in the IEEE magazines like Spectrum - usally at the last set of pages).

A friend pointed me to this some time back. Quite a nifty plugin that lets me choose title and META keywords for all my posts induvidually. See full details at: http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

When I saw you replied to this, I knew I would be struck with something awesome. <_<And here it is - as expected.Regarding process - well there is not much. I just sketch (on the PC itself) on a separate layer.Then pickup colors and paint different things in different layer. Like the pistil in one, petals in one, and the leaves in one. The background was just a filler.I agree to that another set of leaves there. The issue is that it was a workshop focused on hibiscus. A weekly workshop and the focus is on getting the subject as proper as possible. Oh. And I forgot - I use GIMP.

It took around 3-4 hours. Did not do it in a stretch. It was for this workshop at another forum, and like I did bit by bit each day - taking my time. Tablets are good. It is not too long since I got a Wacom Intuos3 for myself - and man! Am I loving it! Digital painting is where you emulate traditional medium in a computer. It is quite similar to oil painting, water colors, acrylics or pastels - it is just that we do it on the software. Check out this blog post on digital painting I wrote couple of days back. You may use digital pen and tablet to do it, but I started to do it with mouse. Many people do it with mouse. It is more the technique that counts in digital painting than the actual tools and software used. Thanks for the comment though. This is one of my best works in digital painting to date - but trust me. There are awesome artists out there. For example, check out the the gallery of Genzoman at deviantART. Mind blowing!

Yes. The color choice was one 'bummer' moment at the end of it. I basically did want a white flower with a pink tint - but the mistake I made was that I started the mid-tone qutie close to the edge in the color pallette. I got stuck up with not able to give a lot of tonal variations. >< A mistake I have to learn from. :PAnd yes. We did use a lot of reference pictures. This picture was not an exact replica of any photograph, but we did have reference pictures.Thanks for the input, Arbitrary.

Here is a digital painting I did as part of a workshop at another forum.

So, you want to make a text based game or one that has graphics.And you mentioned you want to use PHP and C++. So, are you targeting web-based or for the PC?A little more details, and may be some referece links on the type of game you want, would be helpful for others to decide it they want to spend the effort on this or not.

Couple of weeks back, I had written a book on sketching. Download Link (PDF) In this book, I have tried to explain the process of sketching, and the approach that could be used. It is a bit different from the usual step by step sketching guide. (It is not something like - draw two oval, one big one small, and connect them with two curvy lines, draw a round corner triangle at the outer edge of smaller oval...) Let me know your thoughts. I could use some feedback.

Hey thanks Jeigh. Yup - I look forward at what I can do with the tablet too. Yes, indeed. I have to agree when you said, "at a certain point natural talent takes over" - but only to an extent. There is some amount of natural talent into it, but the larger part of the talent can be attained through practice. Practice. And a little more practice. m^e, thanks! Yeah, I will post that too, once I get back home.

Hey guys. I recently got myself a Wacom Tablet. Here is a character painting I did using GIMP. Related Blog Post: Digital Painting - Lavanya 2 I did most of it (around 80%) using mouse - I had not got the tablet by then. After that, I did the finishing touches with the graphics tablet.

Wow! This is a thread that seems to have come back from time.Heh. During this time, I had started a forum RPG of my own which failed due to poor planning. After that, I learnt from it and started again, and it was going pretty good. Now though, since I have been invovled in many other things, I have pulled that forum down too because I did not have time to run it. May be I will start again some time. I have a pretty good universe setup already. Let me know if any of you are interested.

Why you! You! Joomla lover.... I say to ye all. Hail to Drupal! Joking aside, as I have been ranting all over these forums, Drupal does have a steep learning curve, but that is because it is extremely flexible. On usability terms - they were at disadvantage. But things have changed a bit since Drupal 5 - and from what I see from the RC version - the Drupal 6, it seems to have taken a great step forward. But again - my opinion might not be cent percent correct because I have not tried Joomla 1.5.

Do I get to vote even if I have not been active for quite some time and I am in the process of moving over to Xisto - Web Hosting?B)Any case, here is my opinion. I have posted in the gaming forum, but most of the time, it is with the perspective of a designer. Here are the options:1. From seeing how things are going there, I would say get rid of it and direct interested members to Xisto forums. 2. If that is too harsh, you can remove the post count/credit given for posts there. And if it is kept, I would say at least combine all the subforums to one - it would hopefully deter and result in one spammy post instead of one in each sub-forum.

Ha ha. Yes, that is right. Paid hosting plan does gives few privileges that I would categorize as 'spoiled brat privileges'.

I should have mentioned. I am aware of that method, but I was in chat with m^e once, and he mentioned, there was a easier way. Hey, thanks WeaponX. I think that is what m^e mentioned. Thank you.

Finally, I bought a hosting plan at Xisto - Web Hosting. Now, I would like to know how to move all my files and databases to that hosting account from my present Xisto account.Once that is done, I will change the nameservers to point to Xisto - Web Hosting nameserves in my domain control panel. Thanks in advance.

I have not used any RSS aggregator yet in my Drupal websites, but there seems to be a handful of stable and mature RSS aggregator modules for Drupal. A quick search through Drupal.org gave me the following: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/core/modules/aggregator/overview I am not sure thought, what you mean by 'future RSS tech advances'. Could you please elaborate it a bit?

How to get Linux? Well, WeaponX seemed to have answered it well. Now, for the second question. The negativity towards microsoft and Vista. Well, here is my opinion. Microsoft products is not free and Linux is free. Free in what terms - you may ask? I am not worried actually about the cost of software, and hence, it does not make much of a difference if the 'free' is taken in the meaning as in 'free beer'. The real 'free' that I would prefer would be in terms of 'freedom'. Here is a case. Say, last month, I bought some music - Best of Me album by Bryan Adams. I shelled out $10+ because I do not want to steal someones hardwork. I paid for it and now I would like to use the music anyway I want. I may want to load it to my music player. I may want to listen to it in my car (no, I do not have one - this is just an illustration). But, having Vista limits me from doing that and it does that under the facade of 'protecting intellectual property'. That is totally absurd. The DRM is one of the main barriers why I have 'negativity' towards Microsoft. Another issue: What about all the different versions of document format they keep bringing out. It forces me to keep upgrading to their newer versions even when I do not need all the new features. It does not let me stick with the version I have, and constantly want to suck on my hard earnings. The solution? Shift to a Open Source alternative. I do not mind paying someone for coding something. But it is when they force me to do business only with them, and force me to continously spend my money on them, that is when I start having negative feelings. But in case of Open Source, I need not worry about that. I have the source code with me, and in theory (and practice) I can always go to someone else with the same code and have it modified and upgraded. I have the choice. I am free to take any choice. We may speak further on this, but I believe that will be a topic that would be justified by its own thread.

Doh! I feel like I have been trampled over. I guess I should not have bought my Dell laptop when I did a month back. I am now stuck with the freak OS, Windows Vista. I am not even sure if I can go ahead and install Ubuntu 'cause, it is covered by a year warranty - and it might go null and void.

It has been quite some time since I could come over here at Xisto. And lately, I have been seeing a lot of issues with the MySQL. I am not sure what has happened, but for the past couple of weeks - it has been terribly going wrong. As Mark420 mentioned, I keep getting MySQL errors when I use my Wordpress blog engine for Splat. vujsa, I can understand if the problem with MySQL, as you said is due to a lot many requests going to MySQL server. I did face that quite a couple of times earlier - but it was quite sporadic. But lately, it is happening every time. I am just not able to use my blog because of that.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I installed Ubuntu last night, and I am quite happy with the result. And again, as I said there, the font rendering is something that give room for wanting something better. The question is, can we use TrueType fonts with Linux, and specifically Ubuntu? Is it as simple as copying the font files (.ttf) into a particular directory? Or do we need to install or configure something? If it is simple as copying the required fonts to a particular folder/directory, which directory should they be copied to? Edit: The fonts in Linux seems to be a gripe for some others too: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000773.html http://times.usefulinc.com/2006/01/16-fonts

Linux Distro that is close to Windows? I am not sure about other distro, but I just installed Ubuntu last night, and man! I think I am in love. And yes, Quatrux, I agree with you when you say, Linux GUI does not need to look like Windows. It is far better in Ubuntu. May be because it is inspired by UI of both Windows and Mac OS. I read in their documentations that the KDE based distro, Kubuntu, was much closer to Windows and you could try that. But I am sticking with Ubuntu I think. Another thing that I liked about Ubuntu is how easy it is to install it as a dual boot along with Windows XP. There were about six steps, involving language selection, time zone selection, partitioning and similar stuf, and it was good to go! It comes packaged with basic suite of multimedia players, and productivity application like Open Office. The font set is something I wish would be a bit more expanded in terms of different fonts. I mean, there are a lot - a lot - of fonts. I could even find fonts for the different regional langauges. But in terms of English fonts, it leaves much to be desired. May be a hunt downt the internet would help me out. (It has a good set of Sans-serif fonts, but not that good collection of Serif fonts).

Check out KalaaLog.com. It is a blog I started recently, and used the blog.txt theme on it. I did a lot of Typographical changes and have just created a logo for it. I would be glad to hear your comments and critiques on this.