Glass Effect Border

Yesterday I created a small Photoshop Action for Photoshop CS to apply a simple blurry glass effect border around the image. You can choose the amount of gaussian blur, the width of the border and the color of the small inner border.

You can freely download and use the action like you want.

First look at the Canon EOS 400D

Hmm… let’s say WOW! Last friday the package with the cam arrived at home. I made some testphotos and what should I say: this camera is simply a great tool. Speed, ergonomics and of course the image quality are phenomenal. The photo shown here is a snapshot of my cat “Shiva”. I’m currently working on a photo blog for my website for an adequate presentation platform for the photos. Stay tuned for further information…

A new toy…

I make digital photos since about 1998. My first Camera was a Casio QV-7000SX with about 1.3 Megapixels. After this camera broke under Isaac Newtons force (it fell from my office table and the lens was broken) I bought a Casio QV-4000 with about 4.1 Megapixels. With this semi-professional tool I made about 10.000 photos and every photographic need was satisfied over about four years.

But now the time has come for a new toy: Today I ordered my new Canon EOS 400D Digital SLR with about 10.0 Megapixels. Can’t wait for Thursday which is the estimated arrival day for the cam.

Visual Studio 2003, Subversion and Web-Projects

Today I ran into an error using VS2003 ASP.NET Projects and SVN for version control. The error I got when I opened a SVN-controlled web-project was “Refreshing the project failed. Unable to retrieve folder information from the server.” This error occurs, because Visual Studio 2003 cannot handle folder names starting with a period (“.”). So the most pragmatic way to get is working is to write two batch files to rename all “.svn” folders before opening the project and rename them back when synchronizing with the SVN-repository:

hide-svn.cmd
@ECHO OFF
FOR /R %%f IN (.svn) DO IF EXIST "%%f" (
ATTRIB -h "%%f"
RENAME "%%f" _svn
)

restore-svn.cmd
@ECHO OFF
FOR /R %%f IN (_svn) DO IF EXIST "%%f" (
RENAME "%%f" .svn
ATTRIB +h "%%~pf\.svn"
)


Note: this is one solution taken from tigris.org.

Before using the two batch files it may be necessary to clean the VSWebCache folder. This folder contains the structure of web projects so Visual Studio can load the projects faster. It is located in the users directory (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\Username\VSWebCache).