“…They would have sex with a Mac if it were possible… It’s a fucking computer. Do you see me telling you that Macs are not as good? … if you think it’s wrong for me to tell you to eat sushi instead of pizza because it’s simply better, don’t tell me Macs are better than my PC.”

Mac users can be categorized into 2!!! broad categories.

1. Mac Users - Those who understand that picking a computer is a personal choice based on preference and style of work. These people are rational, intelligent, and respect other’s choices, and understand that every OS has its pros and cons. Gary Lee is one of these people. He’s a Mac fan, but when I told him about my bad Mac experience and how I ended up returning it, he just understood. He didn’t try to preach me into using it.
2. Mac-Thumping Assholes, aka iFags - Those who religiously follow the Mac trend with a blind faith, as if it was a cult, and a demi-God of some sort that they NEED to defend against the evil doings of Windows and Bill Gates.

   These guys can be worse than religious cults.

   They love Macs regardless, consider every single feature of a Mac to be superior to other computers, even the shortcomings. Rather than telling them why you do not like a Mac, you may as well spit in their faces and then grope their mothers, sisters, or girlfriends (if any). (more…)

I was surprised at the poor results Google returned when I searched for “difference between vector and bitmap” on Google.com. Every single first-page results were either not clear enough, lacked the proper visuals for explanation, or were too complicated (such as discussing the file size and performance ratio for vector and bitmap files). So, for once and for all, I will define on the internet, what the difference between vector and bitmap images are.

1. Bitmap Images (also known as Raster Images)

Bitmaps are the more common type of images that you see on the web. Bitmaps are a map of bits, literally. It defines the color of each dot as it goes across and down a photo.

Red Red Red Red Green Green Green Red
Red Red Red Red Blue Blue Blue Red
Red Red Red Red Green Blue Green Red

Would produce an image like this (I put the white lines in just so you can see properly, but they don’t actually exist) :

This is perfectly fine for computer monitors because they define the screen’s display by pixels, so each of these cells constitute 1 pixel. Screen resolution is usually 72~96 DPI (dots per inch).

Here’s what happens when you enlarge a bitmap image. Because they are simply dots after dots in a sequence, the dots become visible and the image blurs.

2. Vector Graphics

Vector graphics do not rely on dots, but instead, rely on the actual math of it. This is basically how a Vector graphic file is written, in plain english :

Anchor 00001 starts at point 100 from top, 100 from left. This anchor has no curvature.
Anchor 00002 connects to Anchor 00001, and is located at 50 from top, and 200 from left, and has a curvature of 50, in a 0 degree angle.
Anchor 00003 connects to Anchor 00002 and 00001, and is located at 100 from top and 280 from left, and has no curvature.
Anchors 00001~00003 constitute a filled shape aaa and the fill color is red. It has no stroke.

This will show you something similar to this (once again note that the blue lines don’t exist - they are there to show you the angles and locations etc) :

So, as you can imagine, when Vector files are enlarged, they still look just as clear and crisp. There are no dots that emulate the shape - the shape is physically defined!!!

How should they be used?

Bitmap and Vector have their place. Vector takes longer to calculate and process to show on the screen, and is more complicated to make. Also, note that due to the nature of the images, real photos cannot be vectorized whatsoever. Because of the complexity of the image, vectorizing it would only result in a bunch of dots after dots - which is in essence, a bitmap image anyhow. Vector graphics are used for simpler shapes, or simplified photos (like that daisy above) and is great for logos. Also, all text for print should be vector, so that they do not show jagged edges when they are printed. In short, anything that needs to be printed (which has a much higher resolution than the computer screen) MUST be in vector format (with the exception, of course, of the embedded photos and images, which should be at 300 DPI for optimal results).

Adobe Illustrator is what I use to generate vector graphics (note this tutorial using Illustrator’s live trace feature). The file formats can be AI, PDF, EPS. My recommendation is PDFs (make sure you turn on the “Preserve Illustrator Editability” when you save it).

Bitmap is used for photograhpy, and the web. To show things on the internet, or on computers, things need to be in bitmap. Even on print, the photos are still in bitmap because it’s simply impossible to vectorize a real photo without quality loss. Any major file formats used on the internet (jpg, gif, png) are all bitmap files, and my primary tool for editing these is Adobe Photoshop.

I had a lot of people asking me how I learned all my PHP coding skills as well as AJAX… Well, if you’re up for the task, and have patience, and the intelligence (if you are a natural with math, physics and other logic-driven subjects, you’d do just fine) to handle it, all of it can be learned online. I am a fully self-taught coder - I never took a class of any sort in my whole life (apart from the crappy computer courses taught in the public school systems). All my learning comes from the internet. The sole exception of it was Illustrator - I was in a rush to learn it in a week or so, hence I bought a book so I can read it and do it faster rather than having to search for tutorials online. It was worth the $40 I spent.

I’d likely briefly share the sources from which I learned. Remember that it always helps to look at different websites by different people in order to fully understand it. Everybody can explain things differently, and even the coding method to achieve the same results can differ from one coder to another.

• www.W3Schools.comThis website is probably the best place for basics of any language. Before you delve into the complicated PHP tutorials about how to handle database connections and spit out product directories etc., read this first, to get a more general understanding of how it works. This website gives you the most standard and compliant information for just about any web-related coding/scripting languages out there. HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP etc. Remember that they do not have the hardcore tutorials for difficult things (with the exception of the javascript section.. their javascript examples are quite abundant).
• www.tizag.comI found this website a long time ago, and I haven’t looked at it until today. But I remember taking some valuable lessons from here, and today I mastered another PHP trick while I was searching for information on Google. This website shows you a lot of great in-depth tutorials for handling PHP. I haven’t checked out the Javascript or HTML section yet, but if they are as good as the PHP section, I’d give this website a thumbs up for sure.
• www.php.netThis website will make sense only if you already have a good understanding of PHP. On this website you can search the functions, look at the parameter options and everything. You can also pick up neat information on server restriction settings and what not. Also, each function page has a comments function - just like Wordpress blogs do, so that users can discuss the applicability of each function. You’ll see some smart people leaving smart comments there for sure!!!
• www.mysql.comThis site also requires some basic understanding of things before you can delve in. But to research more complicated SQL queries to optimize and speed things up, this site is probably the most reliable, resourceful, and authentic source for it.

So there it is. That’s where the coder Jeff Kee was trained out of. That’s the only 4 that’s on my mind, but there were numerous other places where I learned about DIV positioning, CSS, Javascript, XML, AJAX, etc. Look them up on Google and you’ll see tonnes of results. Also here’s another handy tip - if you want to do specific things, type that entirely into Google, and you’d be surprised at how much information you can find. For instance, “how to create new files with PHP” will give you some good results. Also, if you are looking to do something with a specific function that you already know about, toss it in. “http get header request with php pfsockopen” will return fabulous results for you. The more specific your target is, the more specific your query should be as well!

Maybe this makes me sound like some kind of a nazi or a communist bastard promoting some crap, but it’s really not. The truth is, whenever a friend of mine joined facebook and added me as a friend, I’d write on their walls, “Welcome to the Facebook Revolution!” And there is so much truth to that statement.

I already wrote a lengthy post about why the facebook user interface is so much more superior to that of MySpace or Nexopia or any other social community websites. And I also wrote a post about the new Facebook Toolbar for Firefox that I installed. Today, I would like to explore a larger aspect of it - the open source concept using their API that Facebook is promoting with their stuff. For detailed documentations on the Facebook API system, click here.

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Well, Wordpress 2.1.1 was released less than 24 hours ago and I just did the upgrade. It’s not a crucial upgrade, but whatever. May as well keep it up to date.

The upgrade is available at the Wordpress Download Page. Also, a description of the new upgrade can be found here.

In my case, I simply re-uploaded the entire wp-includes folder and wp-admin folder. I never touched anything within those folders or modified them so it’s good to go. I did do a database backup, however, just in case, and I did do a full backup of everything under the wp-contents folder before I started.

It worked for me. That’s the easiest way to upgrade Wordpress, as long as you don’t modify the core files outside of the wp-contents folder. If you want a care-free WP upgrade, that’s the ONLY folder you should ever be touching!

The Golden Question : WHY am I announcing the upgrade of Wordpress?

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I had the sidebar widgets plugin installed on my wordpress system since day 1 but I never really figured out to use the juice of it until tonight.

I had did not know how to add my own widgets within the dynamic sidebar, which is why all add-on items such as my Google ad, John Chow’s Widget, MyBlogLog Avatar plugin and what not were taking on the top only, never in the middle. But today I went down to work and discovered that adding new widgets to the sidebar in both PHP and HTML is rather simple. Here is a brief explanation for those who are more code-savvy.

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I recall the days when complicated Javascript or Flash programming was required to produce a decent-looking dropdown menu. But these menus were often less reliable, had more errors, and were difficult to customize/use. It was time consuming and slow.

CSS Comes Along

With the advancement of the application of CSS usage, the dropdown menu market slowly evolved. The dependency on Javascript slowly reduced, and there was more emphasis on the CSS, which mean that the customization of the style/design was easier, AND it took less resources and ran faster. Also to note was that with the use of CSS, cross-browser applicability went up as well.

For many different projects, I experimented with all sorts of dropdowns. Sometimes I simply settled for less, as it was just too time-consuming to find the right one, and to test these things after modification was a very lengthy process. I needed to check it on FF, IE, and now IE7 has brought some more concerns…

Today I would like to announce that, as a well-seasoned and experienced web designer/coder, that I have found the best CSS dropdown menu I could find out there which you can find here. I have applied this menu to this new website that I am working on, and it works great on IE6, IE7, and FF2. Here is why I like this CSS dropdown code :

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