Man On A Street

Last week I needed to compile a list of several hundred fake customer names with fake (but verifiable) email addresses and passwords to test a client's eCommerce site. Fake data generators At that time, I knew of only two online identity generators: Fake Identity Generator  (FIG) and GenerateData.com  (GD). By accepting three user-specified parameters (country, gender, age range) FIG outputs a lot of nice fake data, including disposable (but accessible) YopMail email addresses and relatively easy-to-remember passwords. However FIG doesn't provide free bulk identity generation so I had to generate and copy-paste identities one at a time – a very slow process – along with manually creating accounts using these fake identities at the client site (I had no access to the client content management system so I couldn't bulk register the fake identities). On the other hand, GD allows bulk generation of identities (up to 100 at a time) for free (and with more paramete...

[Note: This was originally posted as a Facebook Note on  December 24, 2014 at 12:44pm . I lost several images on old tutorials in the Facebook Note format – maybe because images get moved around. I'm recreating them here. Although the software examples are outdated, the principles used can still apply with newer software.] “Maayo” is the first half of the Cebuano Bisaya greeting of “Maayo’ng Pasko”, literally “Good Christmas” but some of you might prefer Happy Hanukkah, Diwali, Eid al-Adha or a simple well-wishing so I kept it open-ended. “Maayo” – good, happy, best, something something – as long as it makes you well. The “birds” are the Baybayin syllable characters for Ma+A+Yo. The Baybayin was supposed to be generic calligraphic pen writing (I think I’ll get a cheap graphics tablet next year) but then I noticed they look like birds so I ended up with bird forms. Step 1: Set up page When you fire up Inkscape , the default document size is US Letter Size. I decided to go ...

[This was originally posted as a Facebook Note on Feb 23, 2010 . I lost several images on old tutorials in the Facebook Note format – maybe because images get moved around. I'm recreating them here. Although the software examples are outdated, the principles used can still apply with newer software.] In 2006, a friend asked me how to achieve this photo effect without using a dedicated photo-editor (eg Photoshop): Here's how: If you have a Linux distro installed, look for the XaraLX package (drawing package like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw but open source like Inkscape). If you don't, download the trial version of Xara Xtreme http://www.xara.com/us/ —trial but more advanced than XaraLX). Here's the finished version: STEP 1. Obtain a suitable picture (I was lucky an oversized priest uniform was lying around heheh). we will trace it using pen tool (Shift-F5) Here's a closer look on how to trace (i set the outline/stroke to yellow so you can see ...

[Note: this issue has been solved with the release of Inkscape version 0.92 in January 2017.] An 'In-x-scapable' problem When version 0.91 of Inkscape , the famous free and open source SVG illustration program, was finally released last year (it took five years for it to jump from 0.48 directly to 0.91), fans were wowed by the  new features . However, a bug soon surfaced:  Missing icons in toolbars and menus (they used to be there in the previous 0.48 version). This presentationally embarassing shortcoming usually happens on Inkscape 0.91 installed on Windows™ and OS X™: Menu icons Expected action icons, like document 'templates', 'revert', 'preferences', 'undo' and 'redo' were replaced by document icons with red 'x' on them. Also the right-to-left (RTL) icons, for right to left systems, remained at the left-to-right direction. However, the buttons still worked when pressed. 'undo' and 'redo' t...