Archive for December, 2008

Posted on December 31, 2008 - by Khaled

Happy new year 2009!

Happy end for 2008! I hope that 2009 will be excellent for all of you and better than 2008. I want also to remind you that changes will occur here soon. So see you next year (that’s merely in few hours from now!) I’d better go now to prepare myself for the dinner out in this new Italian restaurant…

Posted on December 27, 2008 - by Khaled

Revamping, refurbishing and renaming

I decided to revamp and rename my blog. It’s time to do so and to focus a little bit more on it. I will probably be able to have more time to blog more effectively! I will keep writing and posting about the same things I used to. But starting from the beginning of 2009 this blog won’t no longer be called “No relation”! and the CMS will be updated to WordPress 2.7. I will have a new theme too and some more cool stuff!

May be the above graphic will give you some clue about the future directions of this blog! So stay tuned!
And if you have any comments or inputs don’t dither to share them with me! 

Posted on December 26, 2008 - by Khaled

Café du Jour: Café Glacé

As I am a huge fan of coffee and of food in general I decided to start blogging about some recipes that can really be called as geeky recipes. Everyone knows that most of the Graphic / Web designers/ developers are fond of caffeine that keeps them awake during the cold long nights while they are brainstorming, cogitating, designing, drawing, coding, programming, photoshoping, or just stuck out in front of a blank screen searching for inspiration!
I’ll try to share with you my love for the tasty coffee recipes that I come up with or the ones I’ve learned to prepare!
The recipe I am going to blog about today is one among many frozen coffee recipes. I like frozen coffee or café glace even in the winter, that cold sensation travelling down my mouth and esophagus energize me with a boost of stamina! Let alone the taste, the smoothness and… Of course, the caffeine! I like to call this one Vanilla café frappé..
So you are going to need:
- 1 liter of hot strong black nicely roasted coffee
- 4-6 table spoons of Sugar
- 1/8 liter light milk cream (10%)
- 1/4 liter of vanilla cream
- 6-8 ice cubes

Preparation:

Pour the hot coffee in a bowl add the sugar, stir it up and let it cool down. Then transfer it to the blender, add the milk and vanilla creams and mix it till it is homogeneous. Add the ice cubes and mix again with short pulses at first. Once the Ice cubes are crushed we’re done!
Pour in a pitcher and put it in the fridge for an hour or so and don’t forget to stir it up from time to time.
After an hour it is ready! Pour some in your favorite mug/ glass add 3 or 4 ice cubes and drink!
This will be enough for a full day (3 to 4 glasses)…
I hope you will enjoy it !

Posted on December 22, 2008 - by Khaled

Internet Explorer 6: less painful?

Yes, Web designers hate Internet Explorer 6. This old browser was released back in 2001 but still quite frequently used by many people despite that it is really insecure, buggy, slow and far from being standards compliant. There was even an “Internet Explorer 6 Uninstall Day” held, thanks to a facebook group, on the 27th of August, 2008 which corresponds to the 7th birthday of IE6.

But that initiative was not very successful.

But lately things are changing. MSIE6 is still painful, but thanks to the efforts of Dean Edwards the situation is now really better!

Dean created a new Scripts library, IE7, available on Google code that will make Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser as It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6. Still the transparent PNG image can’t be tiled nor can it be positioned using respectively background-repeat and background-position.

Thanks Dean!!

Posted on December 18, 2008 - by Khaled

Weather & Web Design

Today is a rainy cold day… The sky is dark and gloomy. As I have a big thin glass window in front of me it seemed to me as if the stormy weather colors were sneaking inside my office, and by the way this is my first winter in this office with this huge window that gave me the impression to be seating on the dark clouds…

This just happened as I was looking for some inspiration to design a new graphic theme for a joomla web site. The general topic of the site is about Nature, wild life and environment… Checking out my Gmail box themed with the “Bus Stop” design that turned into its ‘rainy’ version based on my location gave me a nice idea to design different themes for this web site that will be displayed according to the weather of the visitor’s location… I proposed this to the client via a phone call and he really liked the concept…

Funny enough, when I opened Photoshop to start a design mock up and pick up color palettes; I instinctively started with a rainy theme… It was the easiest palette to create and it probably has the nicest colors… At least that’s what the other Graphic designers of my company thought…

This is the first time I feel such a strong connection between Web Design and the elements surrounding you especially the weather. Of course I, sometimes, seek specific inspiration from different sources according to the theme or the design element I am working on including going out to some specific places or browsing some given web sites or reading/viewing some magazines, books or photo albums but it is usually necessary to take some time and think about ideas and sketch some of them on paper… So the connection is not as obvious as it was today and the creation of the mock up (which turned out to be quite nice and close to a final design) and the choice of the palette were never easier?!! Is it the window? Or is it the fact that I am producing less during the year as I am a bit more focused on tasks like Sales, marketing, Project management and human resources recruitment… I can’t really tell but I believe that today’s rainy weather was really useful to come up with this design and to discover tangibly this existing and interesting relationship between Web design and nature element like the weather… It was like a flawless process this time…

A hot cup of kopi luwak coffee is good idea for now…

Posted on December 17, 2008 - by Khaled

Twitter

From now on you can follow me on twitter! Yep finally I am joining the vibe!

Posted on December 16, 2008 - by Khaled

Google the most “trustworthy” Web company?

Josh Catone, the Lead Blogger at sitepoint.com, posted a poll to see which big web tech companies users trust the most? For the moment, and after few hundreds of votes, Google is the leader collecting more than 40% of the votes in front of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo!
Take a look on the results and cast your vote here:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/12/16/poll-who-do-you-trust-more-google-or-facebook/

Posted on December 16, 2008 - by Khaled

Joomla! Module for Alfresco

Alfresco Software and Joomlatools collaborated to create a new module that will allow the integration of both open source CMS. This module relies on Content Management Interoperability Services technology and the API CMIS REST. This will enable current Joomla installations to access the back-end content repository services of Alfresco ensuring Joomla users to be able to more effectively manage bigger volumes of content on their sites. Whereas Alfresco users can, starting from now, search, publish, edit, or download content directly on Joomla sites.

I’ve testing it for few hours and I was quite pleased by its level of sophistication and usability.
Just take a look: http://www.alfresco.com/products/platform/try/
This is going to be an awesome Open Source tool… believe me.