Designrific

Designrific is transferred to Designrific :)

2007-02-25T16:24:00Z

My blog (Designrific) is transferred to my website (Designrific.com)

The 8 types of bad creative critics

2007-02-07T13:42:00Z

That is a very true cartoon. I've met every single one of those people. :)
Especially "The Blender"

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer's office is SO small!

2007-02-06T23:09:00Z

Can you believe how small this guy's office is? Mine is bigger than that.
Click here to check the rest of the photos!

Black Google Would Save 3,000 Megawatts a Year

2007-01-23T20:23:00Z

Terrific article from Rising Phoenix Design that points out to the fact of black pixels take less energy than white pixels. Background to background, black comes in at about 59 watts, white is at 74, a full 15 watts higher.

I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

Written by Mark Ontkush

"Fiji" the next version of Windows!

2006-12-15T09:45:00Z

written by Mary Jo Foley @ http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=142

Even though more and more teams at Microsoft seem to be shying away from christening their fledgling products with good, old-fashioned code names – favoring the ever-so-boring “V.Next” designation instead — there are still some who are doing so.

Microsoft code names always have piqued my interest. They offer some great clues about the Redmondians’ development priorities, not to mention a better understanding of which future Microsoft products fit together, from a strategy standpoint.

In honor of Microsoft code-name junkies everywhere, I’m going to feature one, random Microsoft code name per work day for the rest of this month. I’ll provide as much information as I’ve been able to unearth on each, and attempt to provide some context as to how the team chose the name and how the forthcoming technology fits into the Redmond product hierarchy.

Best guess on what it is: Fiji is "the next version of Windows" following Windows Vista and preceeding Windows "Vienna" (the version of Windows formerly code-named "Blackcomb"). Some people say Fiji will take the form of Windows Vista Service Pack (SP) 1. Others believe it will be a full-fledged, but relatively minor, Windows release — more of a Vista R2. Microsoft won't comment publicly on the code name at all.

Meaning/context of the code name: Fiji, like a number of the code names I'm planning to feature this week, is part of Microsoft's vista (with a lower-case V) series. When Microsoft officials acknowledged the decision to change the Windows Blackcomb name to Windows Vienna, they said to expect other products to be part of the "beautiful vistas" line. Some of the "vistas" are cities; others seem to be countries.

Back story: For the past few years, Microsoft's plan of record has been to release a new version of Windows client and a new version of Windows Server every two years. The thinking in Redmond: Stagger releases of more minor, interim (R2-style) updates with major, full-fledged ones. If the new Windows development organization under Steven Sinofsky sticks with this plan, Fiji should be out around 2008. If Fiji is simply the code name for Windows Vista SP1, it should be out by the end of 2007, right around the same time as Longhorn Server.

Additional info: Fiji raises an interesting question: What counts as an operating system? Going forward, will service packs/roll-ups count, in Microsoft's, partners' and customers' eyes, as new versions of products? (That's what Windows XP Service Pack 2 was, after all.) Or will Microsoft try to get company watchers to consider SPs the equivalent of new Os releases, in order to appear to be more agile in its development? Stay tuned.

Anyone have any other details on Fiji to share? Or have another Microsoft code name you’ve been wondering about? Send it my way and I’ll do my best to track down some leads on what it might be.

And if you want to keep track of the full month's worth of Microsoft code names I end up posting, bookmark this "Microsoft Codenames" page.

SilverKey one of the top 12 distinguished Microsoft partners for early adoption.

2006-12-14T10:31:00Z

SilverKey Technologies was nominated at the vista & office VIP launch as one of the top 12 distinguished partners for early adoption of Microsoft technologies. Our logo was presented for 600 executives and BDM's in the event!

The best thing about SilverKey, we don't like using old or common technologies, we only use new and upcoming ones as much as we can. learning is our main concern here.

Here at SilverKey we always use the quote said by Johann von Goethe
"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."

If your site hits the front page on DIGG.COM, consider it nuked!

2006-12-09T22:36:00Z

On August I discovered my color blindness, and thought it would be a nice article to be written. But I did not think for a second that I'll have more than 70000 visitors in less than 24 hours. The reason was simply DIGG.COM

Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.

The upper graph is to show you how we got bombarded by visitors on August!
Some people say, your site is nuked by digg, which I believe is true, some sites can't handle 30 minutes from being on digg front page, they collapse from this extreme high traffic or sometimes you see that their bandwidth limit is exceeded!

Thank god our hosting is good; spellcoder can handle more than 3 or 4 blog articles being on the front page of digg in the same time. But, what if my site can not handle digg nukes? Can I ask digg to remove the digg story on their front page because I’m the owner of the site (in case someone else submitted the story) and if they refused, can I sue the person who submitted it on digg without my permission? I believe that digg can add a feature to remove any digg story on their front page upon the site owner request. Some people have websites which is not designed to receive more than 70000 hits per day, which is almost 1 hit per second, your site is nuked by visitors and you'll stay paralyzed for a while and your business might stop!

If your hosting is bad, just add a sign saying, NO DIGGS! :)

designrific.com - Site of the day on webdesign.org

2006-12-07T14:09:00Z

Today I got a very nice and astonishing surprise, Designrific.com was site of the day on December 4, 2006

This is really great, I'm getting a lot of hits now from them!
You'll ask me, but Mostafa, you got other good awards before, like for example NewWebPick which is considered one of the hardest awards to be taken. So, why are you so happy now from this award?

Well, I did not get just an award, no, I'm chosen to be site of the day!
to be chosen from a lot of websites to be featured as site of the day is really a prestigious award!

Click here to check the award page.

Click here to check the snap shot of the page! :)

Million Dollar Homepage Becomes Multi-Million Dollar Homepage

2006-12-03T16:23:00Z

Alex Tew, the mastermind behind The Million Dollar Homepage is most certainly pressing his luck. Tew sold one million pixels worth of advertisement for $1 per pixel and made $1 million. It worked so well that he thinks he can do it again, this time for twice the price.

Tew is reportedly on the verge of launching a second site called Pixelotto. Instead of selling each pixel for $1, he plans to sell each pixel for $2, plus hold some kind of lottery where the winner who clicks the right advertisement will win $1 million.

I will gladly eat my words if Tew can pull this off but I just don’t think that lightning strikes twice. It was a good idea…once! Second time around, it’s not, as Michael Arrington calls it, “another stupid, brilliant idea.” It’s just a stupid idea.

Story from techcrunch.com

Announcing Drupal 5 Beta 2

2006-11-28T22:31:00Z

Drupal, an open source content management platform.

Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.

Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites, including

community web portals and discussion sites
corporate web sites/intranet portals
personal web sites
aficionado sites
e-commerce applications
resource directories

Drupal includes features to enable

content management systems
blogs
collaborative authoring environments
forums
newsletters
picture galleries
file uploads and download

and much more.

Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL, and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use. If you like what Drupal can do for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your needs.

Dell says Vista will need 2GB of Dram

2006-11-27T14:34:00Z

Microsoft's Vista operating system is going to need double the amount of Dram than previously thought to run at its best, according to Dell.

Speaking at an event in Shanghai's Jiaotong University, Dell CEO Kevin Rollins said 2GB of Ram will be needed to get the most out of Vista. Microsoft’s own claim is that 1GB should do the job.

Most PCs today ship with less than 1GB of memory, but this is expected to change as Vista-ready machines start to roll-out. Right now, only a tiny proportion of PCs ship with 2GB of Ram.

“I think they tell you maybe 1GB of memory is OK. No. Two gigs of memory would be great,” Rollins said.

On its Vista website, Microsoft recommends 1GB of RAM for running the operating system's touted Aero interface. The minimum system requirements, however, claim that 512MB of memory will be sufficient.

Memory manufacturers and PC makers are expecting a windfall in the coming year as users will be forced to buy more memory if they want to enjoy all the new features in the Vista OS.

Story from www.pcw.co.uk and www.itnews.com.au

Store 256GB on an A4 sheet

2006-11-26T12:03:00Z

How much information can you store on an A4 sheet? Well, according to some new technology designed by an Indian engineering student, an extraordinary 256GB.

New "rainbow technology", devised by Sainul Abideen who has just completed an MCA degree in Kerala, data can be encoded into coloured geometric shapes and stored in dense patterns on paper.

Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in "rainbow format" as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch. The paper can then be read through a specially developed scanner and the contents decoded into their original digital format and viewed or played. The encoding and decoding processes have not been revealed.

Using this technology an A4 sheet of paper could store 256GB of data. In comparison, a DVD can store 4.7GB of data. The Rainbow technology is feasible because printed text, readable by the human eye is a very wasteful use of the potential capacity of paper to store data. By printing the data encoded in a denser way much higher capacities can be achieved.

Paper is, of course, bio-degradable, unlike CDs or DVDs. And sheets of paper also cost a fraction of the cost of a CD or DVD.

Abideen has demonstrated a 45-second video clip being encoded on paper, termed by him, a rainbow video disk - RVD - and then played back through a computer with an RVD scanner attached. In another demonstration he has shown 432 A4 pages of paper rainbow format-encoded and stored on a two-inch by two-inch square of paper.

He says that smaller scanners could fit inside laptop computers or mobile phones, and read SIM card-sized RVD's containing 5GB of data.

The recording media could be either paper or plastic sheets. Such media are making a comeback - witness yesterday's story about re-writable paper.

Sainul Abideen can be contacted at: 0091-98950-81493, Res: 0091-494-2495493, email: mysainul@yahoo.com

Story from techworld.com

Windows Vista Wallpapers

2006-11-25T18:34:00Z

This is all the RTM windows vista wallpapers provided by Haklabs

Download (47.4MB)

The most insane pixel art!

2006-11-24T21:36:00Z

This is the most insane pixel art you are going to see in your whole life!
I think the guy who made it was doing nothing except doing it!!

click here to see it

I took it from the original site, lovepixel.com, because sometimes I find their hosting not working due to exceeding download limit!

Memo for Bosses: 101 Ways to Prevent your Office from Hating You

2006-11-21T23:24:00Z

I found this intresting article here

DON’T…

Make your employees come in on their days off even when you know there is no real work to be done.
Call them when they are on vacation, not unless the office has burned down, in which case the call is moot anyway.
Be biased, play favorites or show partisanship when dealing with your subordinates.
Hog your employees’ limelight, or more specifically, take credit for ideas that are not yours.
Monitor every aspect of your employees’ work. Peering over their shoulders every few minutes, or worse, hooking up hidden nanny cameras to spy on them in your absence is as good as wearing a sandwich board saying “Hate me, I deserve it”. Remember, just as a watched pot never boils, an over-supervised employee’s creativity and productivity are stifled.
Harass your employees, sexually or otherwise. Improper touching and patting (don’t ever do what Chandler’s boss does on Friends), especially with members of the opposite sex, is a definite no-no.
Get involved in a personal relationship with an employee of the opposite (or same) sex. The other employees will hate you both while the relationship is on, and your partner will hate you once it’s over.
Exaggerate or overstate your accomplishments, spectacular though they may be.
Lose your temper while taking your employees to task or at the first scent of a problem.
Let sycophants rule your decisions. Those who fawn over you are not the best people hang around with. Their praise tends to go to your head, and other employees suffer as a result.
Put down those who work for you in front of their peers, or for that matter, before superiors and subordinates too.
Complain about or discuss shortcomings of some employees with others. The office grapevine will come back to strangle you if you do so.
Crow over or dwell too long on your employees’ failures.
Interfere in the way they get their jobs done, as long as they get it done. Establish boundaries and guidelines, but don’t chart out every single step of the process.
Follow the “It’s either my way or no way at all” rule.
Nitpick or disparage too much. Encourage open and creative thinking; you never know when your employees may come up with a gem of an idea.
Be bitter when employees resign for personal reasons. Be supportive and let them go with good grace.
Be a slave driver and wield the whip over your employees. The application of force may have a profound effect on momentum in the scientific world, but it does not do anything to boost employee productivity or morale.
Make them work on holidays without providing advance notice and checking if it’s ok with them.
Throw in that extra bit of work just when they are getting ready to leave for the day.
Monitor what your employees do during their breaks or lunch hours.
Give them work that will stretch into and eat up their lunch breaks, not unless it’s mission critical.
Call them at home for every trifling problem at the office. Private time and space should be respected.
Deny them vacation time. Don’t be the boss who asks a genie who’s just granted two of his workers spectacular vacations on beach-lined islands, to bring them back by lunch time, because there’s work to be done. Remember, rejuvenated employees work better and are more productive.
Be snobbish or stuck-up just because you are the boss.
Establish unreasonable deadlines and targets that cannot possibly be met unless the employee spends all his time at the office.
Be miserly and count every penny in all the operations of the company.
Be the wet blanket on the office camaraderie. Raining on their parade just because you feel they’re having too much of a good time will not win you brownie points with your employees.
Take offense if you find out you’re the butt of the latest office joke doing the rounds.
Look down on your subordinates because they come from a culture alien to yours. Globalization has made the world a much smaller place, and it’s near impossible to have only natives of your country working for you.
Turn down your nose, discriminate against, or make fun of customs and traditions of people from other religions and cultures.
Feel threatened by good performances from your employees and stifle their growth when the fear that they may end up with your job looms large.
Induce fear in your employees. Fear is a great dampener of creativity.
Make them tip-toe around the office when you’re in and goof up when you’re not. It’s not wise to be the cat that the mice wait for to leave before they play.
Renege on promises made, like telling them the company will foot a relocation bill and then going back on your word. Or promising unlimited time off for an employee with a sick child and then firing him/her when he/she returns.
Practice deceitful measures. Getting them to work on a temporary basis with the promise of future permanency, but terminating the employee once your ends are achieved is definitely not a good idea.
Contradict yourself. Telling your employees to take more initiative and then telling them not to overstep the limits sends out mixed signals.
Cut down salaries and perks and expect to hear no grumbles and protests. If the company is going through a financial crisis and needs to tighten its purse strings, explain the situation to your employees and detail the reasons why drastic decisions have to be made.
Find loopholes in contracts to layoff employees, or use the incompletion of a particularly impossible task as a reason to fire them. Be upfront in all your dealings, and tell them that the situation demands a downsizing of human resources.
Fire employees over the phone, or worse, through a text message.
Ask for personal favors, especially when you know your employees are in no position to refuse.
Rifle through your employees’ personal desks or snoop around their workspaces.
Misuse your company’s expense account for personal reasons. If you argue that your employees will never find out, a word of warning; the office grapevine extends its tentacles to places and events you would never dream of.
Treat your employees like machines or robots who can be ordered around at your bidding. “Do as I say or else…” does not pay!
Give them only pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and expect them to present you with the complete picture. Provide them with all the tools required before you set them a task.
Tell them only what’s necessary. Give them all the details and some more before a new project or task is begun. Superior work is the resultant product when all the relevant data is at hand.
Flare up or drop the axe each time someone makes a mistake. Look at mistakes as part of the learning process.
Insult your employees by addressing their personal attributes, like the way look, the color of their skin, or their weight.
Criticize personal preferences or tendencies such as dress sense, sexual orientation, alcohol usage, and relationships, as long as it doesn’t affect their work.
Cut your employees mid-sentence. Show that you respect their opinions too.
Point fingers before being aware of all the facts. Blaming one person for another’s errors based on hearsay and rumors will not win you an employee fan following.
Foster animosity between your employees by pitting them against each other.
Expect employees filling in for colleagues to produce the same quality of work that the regular guys produce. Not everyone can be jacks of all trades with equal élan.
Force your subordinates to compromise on their principles. You may not be averse to using the casting couch (or its equivalent in the office) to win favors, but asking an employee (a female one, at least) to do the same will bring you down a few pegs on the respect scale.
Try to please everyone. That’s like taking the sure route to disaster and chaos.
Be a doormat. Letting your employees walk over you will only create scorn and have them laughing at you behind your back.
Accept substandard work. Your employees will respect you all the more for your unwillingness to compromise on the quality of work.

DO...

Be a part of, not above, the entire work team, but set limits to prevent undue familiarity.
Respect your employees as human beings; don’t look at them as people at your beck and call.
Appreciate work that is well done.
Reward hard work, even if the outcome is not totally satisfactory. If an employee has put his heart and soul into a project that goes wrong due to reasons beyond his control, award the next such project to the same person. Hard workers are hard to find these days, and you also earn goodwill by showing that you don’t assign blame unfairly.
Motivate employees who are usually good workers but down in morale for the present. Don’t taunt them with poor performances and send them deeper into depression.
Divide work and tasks fairly.
Provide your employees with clean and comfortable work areas.
Compensate them well, financially and otherwise. The perks of a job are sometimes the deciding factor between a valuable employee staying and resigning.
Make overtime and vacation work worth the while of your employees; pay them well so they don’t feel shortchanged.
Recognize that each of your employees is different, and do not compare one with the other, especially to put down a particular employee.
Admit your mistakes, you’re only human.
Be magnanimous when your employees goof up, after all, they’re only human.
Be straightforward; tell your employees upfront what’s wrong with their work instead of beating about the bush and telling them to figure it out themselves.
Be accessible, don’t give your employees the feeling that you are the big bad ogre waiting to gobble them up for lunch if they so much as step into your office.
Push your employees to achieve their potential, but know when enough is enough; you don’t want them falling off the cliff.
Be realistic in your expectations.
Take pride in your employees’ accomplishments, and let them know you’re happy for them.
Grant time off when it’s really necessary
Be flexible. Company policy may state that there’s absolutely no coming in late under any circumstances, but what would you do if an employee has to take a sick child to the hospital before coming in to work?
Be consistent. Set and follow certain ground rules. I know this seems in direct contrast to the preceding point, but a good boss should know when to draw the line and when to be a little lenient.
Know at least a little bit about your employees’ personal lives, their families, and their passions and pet peeves.
Find out why employees behave out of character; poor work may be a result of a personal crisis that is weighing on his/her mind. Unhappiness and stress hamper productivity.
Offer support, both moral and otherwise, in times of personal difficulties.
Be self-sufficient; make your own coffee and get your own doughnuts, write a few of your own letters – and make your employees feel you’re one among them. In other words, don’t expect to be waited on hand and foot by your secretary.
Accept suggestions and ideas that you know are good, and proffer praise and credit where they’re due.
Encourage personal and occupational growth. Support your employees’ decision to pursue a higher education.
Acknowledge and respect their goals, even if you cannot nurture them.
Recognize strengths and weaknesses, and assign responsibilities accordingly.
Lead by example; don’t expect your employees to do things you wouldn’t do yourself. A boss who rolls up his sleeves and pitches in to even muck the stables rates high on the popularity scale.
Know your subordinates’ jobs well. You don’t want to be caught with your pants down when called to step in and complete any task.
Provide fair reviews and performance appraisals. Don’t let personal prejudices come in the way of professional assessments.
Listen, really listen to your employees when they offer suggestions and opinions. Avoid multi-tasking in such situations, it gives the impression that you are not really interested in what the other person has to say.
Defend your employees when they are in the firing line from other departments or sections.
Be transparent in your decision-making process; tell them why and how you reached certain conclusions.
Apologize with good grace when you know you have treated an employee unfairly.
Make it up to an employee when you have sometimes gone overboard with your criticism.
Seek your employees’ opinion before introducing any changes that significantly affect them. People don’t take too kindly to sudden changes that throw their routines out of gear.
Get regular feedback on your performance and employees’ satisfaction.
Act on the feedback received; don’t use the bundle of paper to line your desk.
Make your employees believe you really care about them, and are not just using them as means to an end.
Support their career moves, even if it means you end up losing a valuable employee. You never know when the same person will turn up on your doorstep later. The best boss I have heard about is the one who removed his tie and put it around his employee’s neck when the latter had a job interview at another company.
Surprise your employees with small, unexpected treats, like allowing them to leave an hour early on Friday evening, or allowing them to bring their family to work on a slow day.
If you are a woman with men working as your subordinates, understand that the male ego is very fragile, and act accordingly. You don’t have to be subservient, just use your common sense and discretion when using a firm hand to deal with male employees.
And last, but certainly not the least, bear in mind that a job is not just about money; it’s also about human relationships, families, hopes, ambitions, happiness, satisfaction, pride, achievement, growth, recognition, and praise.