First, Happy 2007 to all. For GMail team, 2007 started with an exploit and they fixed it immediately. Googlified first discovered this serious exploit in GMail which lets your contact list to be stolen. Using a form of cross scripting,...

Let me start by wishing you all a very happy new year! May 2007 be a year full of inspiration and creativity! Today I’ve picked another topic from my list of requests that readers of my blog send in: swirly curls. Lets add some trendy elegance to your illustrations! Here we go…

Step 1 - Draw a spiral

Go to the Toolbox and hold down the mouse on the Line Tool so the other tools are revealed. Select the Spiral Tool. Now click and drag a line from the center point outwards. Instead of click dragging you can just click to get the Spiral Options box and enter the spiral radius, decay and spiral segments and click OK. I've used 80% of decay and 10 segments. If you click drag the spiral, remember that you can move the spiral while dragging if you hold down the spacebar. Give the spiral a stroke and no filling. Copy the spiral and paste it in front: go to the Edit menu and choose Paste in Front or hit command/control + f. Now select the Rotate Tool and click the center point of the spiral and drag the spiral to the right to rotate it a bit.

Step 2 - Transform the spiral into a nice curl

Select the Selection Tool (black arrow) or hold down the command/control key so you get the transform handles. Scale the spiral as shown in the image so you add thickness to the spiral from the center point out and you'll get a nice curl in the end. Select the center points of the 2 spirals. Use the Direct Selection Tool and drag a rectangle over the anchor points, make sure no other points of the spirals are selected. Go to Object > Path > Join (or hit command/control + j) to join both paths. Now do the same for the 2 ending points of the spirals.

Step 3 - Add a fill and put the curl in place

Click the double arrows right above the colors in the Toolbox to swap the stroke to a fill. Change the fill to your preferred color. Now drag the curl in place. Rotate the curl if needed so it forms a fluent line with the object you attach it too. You can select both and choose the Add to shape option in the Pathfinder palette if needed so they become 1 object.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Maybe this can be done in another way by using a special brush instead of copying the path, transform it and join the points, not sure. I haven't experimented with that. I just get perfect curls when I use this technique.

For those who missed the final result of this illustration, check it out & download a desktop ;)

How sucky is it to wake up on the first day of 2007 not with a hang over, but a head cold! Well, from personal experience, it's not much fun. And I'm home in Seattle where I could just turn on the fireplace (it's electric), and curl up and watch TV. I'm up in Ottawa, where I got to spend a great New Years Eve with some good friends. I'm staying for a few extra days to do a user group presentation on IE. If you're in Ottawa, or know anyone in Ottawa, let them know, it should be really interesting. I'm going to talk a bit, then really dig into some fun code. I've included the description of the session below, along with the registration info. I'll post the slide deck tomorrow after the presentation. Internet Explorer 7 took us over 5 years to...(read more)

It's a little bit tricky to create multi-value fields in LotusScript, particularly for a time-date or number field, but it can be done. SearchDomino.com contributor Chuck Connell explains how.

... I've used xmlgawk to good effect. -- Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS CPE Products "Content

Hi All,

Today the Beta Version of MyUniPortal was released which contains combination of streaming video, embedded browser, mapping,

... Hash: SHA1 Hi Ismael, You mean something like this? http://xsh.sourceforge.net/ http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/ See you, Camille. ... Version: GnuPG v1.4.5

$Id: guidelines.txt,v 1.20 2003/06/02 01:47:07 smith Exp $ xml-doc list guidelines ... These guidelines are sent as a Welcome message to new xml-doc

A second take on my Photo Map prototype - this time displaying photos taken from my 2006 travels... implemented using Virtual Earth, WPF/E and Script#. Read More......(read more)

Actually, this is not true. Whitespace is significant in XML and the parser is required to pass it to the application. There are two exceptions to this: 1)

Hi: Somebody knows good practices on xml filtering, using Command Line Interface tools, in the same ways as sed can delete or transforms text streams? Thanks

In you were out the second half of December, you might have missed some of the VS 2005 Service Pack 1 posts that I've previously made: Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Released Installing VS 2005 SP1 on Vista (and how to uninstall the VS 2005 SP1 Beta on Vista) HTML Source Editing Performance Improvements in VS 2005 SP1 Tip/Trick: How to Run a Root “/” Site with the Local Web Server using VS 2005 SP1 Below are a few more recent links and blurbs of information about VS 2005 SP1 that you might also find useful: 1) Details on some of the specific bug-fixes and changes for web app support in VS 2005 SP1 The VS servicing team is putting together a page that you'll be able to visit to obtain a more complete list of changes/fixes within VS 2005...(read more)

In many cases, when spreading ideas, your personal credibility, market position, and market matter far more than the message you offer.

First, Happy New Year to friends and readers! David Orchard has an article up at XML.COM entitled A Theory of Compatible Versions. It looks at versioning of XML Schemas as a sets-and-subsets issue. The punchline is Languages can be compatibly...

It was January 1st 2006 that I made the initial announcement regarding the nuXleus project. Over the last three months I have been on both a personal and professional push to release the initial public bits before the clock struck...

From large scale stat providers right down to the smallest detail it is easy to take a statistic out of context and draw false conclusions from it. You also can leverage statistical errors to make stories easier to spread.

It's that time of year again - the toys have been open (and the sundry pieces scattered to the four winds ... sigh), the eggnog's begin to acquire a slightly off taste and the stores have all finally turned off the elevator rendition of "Grandma got run over by a reindeer" (to much applause by the customers). Here in Canada we celebrate "Boxing Day", a quaint tradition that used to mean that you would box up those slightly used clothes and toys to give to the needy and desperate so that you had room for the new toys and clothes, but now just seems to be an excuse for the stores to box up the slightly used clothes and toys that didn't sell through the last month and sell them at cut-rate prices to the needy and desperate (or at least those who hadn't maxed out their credit cards buying the same stuff at above bargain prices) so that they can free up room for the new toys and clothes. Funny, the parallels.

Post about how the WSJ recently baited bloggers for links.

I've been tagged by Paul , so here are 5 things to share about me: 1) I was born in Michigan, lived for two years in California, and then spent a decade growing up in England. I attended Duke University and graduated with a degree in Computer Science. 2) During college I also worked for Apple Computer. 3) I joined Microsoft straight out of school. I was recruited by 5 different teams within Microsoft that were each trying to sell me on their group. J Allard (who then ran the IIS team and later went on to create the XBOX and Zune) found out I'm a huge college basketball fan and somehow got Bill Gates to send me a basketball to help convince me to join his team: Although the basketball wasn't actually the reason I picked the team, it didn't hurt....(read more)