Photoshop? No thanks.

Have you ever wanted to do a small image manipulation like putting two images together, creating an icon or simply drawing mustaches on the picture of a colleague? An operation that should be easy and fast, but it takes you more time than expected?
For almost all these operations MS Paint appears not enough. What means, that you should "jump" to a software like Photoshop, Gimp, Irfan View etc. to mention few. The drawback is, that they are too complicated for beginners and you lose time and nerve cells to just figure out  how to work with the software. Another issue is, that some of these are payed (like Photoshop). If you don't like installing software that will be used only occasionally then you'll find that as a disadvantage too. Why not go online? Because the online photo editors are crippled? Well think again!

Here is a link to an article I read a couple of days ago with a list of 20 online photo editors that could pass to everyone's needs. Some of them are complete free and others offer base features and operations free and also payed premium features. Some work with layers, offer animations, numerous effects, tight integration with social networks as Facebook, Picasa and Flickr. If you are already an experienced Photoshop user, there is even an online version of Photoshop, available on www.photoshop.com. Open stays the question how the images, which were uploaded are handled. Can't say anything about that, but there should be explained in some kind of Terms of usage document.

So, happy cropping, drawing and designing.

Migrating from one google account to another

Some years ago, when Google's e-mail service was not available for everyone, but for those, who had an invitation to join, I was stuck with an Yahoo e-mail account. No, I don't like Yahoo, and no I don't know what the hell made me have an account by Yahoo. The most shaming fact is however, that I still use my two Yahoo accounts for registering to forums, sites etc. that I suppose will spam me.
Last words about Yahoo, because they don't deserve more attention: First of all, it's 2012 and they still have their POP3/IMAP payed. And second of all...they still make you pay them to get your e-mails!!!

Back to the main topic. Because Google allows non-google e-mail addresses for acquiring a google account, I had my first google account tied to an Yahoo e-mail address. So, how can one migrate things to another Google account, before deleting the old one.

First I wanted to have my RSS subscriptions from google reader transferred to the other account. It turns out, that this is very very easy. Settings button (upper right corner)->Reader settings->Import/Export tab. It works like a charm.

What about Google Drive (known as Google Docs before)? To be honest I didn't need to transfer anything but I see that one has the option to download the whole "drive". That should do the trick :)

Next is Google Calendar. As one could suppose, there is an Import/Export option. Right from "My calendars" there is a small dropdown menu. Just select "Settings" and you'll see the Import calendar and Export calendars options.

If you've made the mistake to run a blog from the old account, then you have a slight problem. Long story made short, yes, you can keep your blog with all the posts/comments etc. after deleting the old account, BUT the posts will still appear as written from your old account. If that is no problem, then ok. For me such a thing will be a problem, because it would annoy me. I just like everything to be perfect. Here is the article, where all the steps for the blog transfer are good explained. Click

After dealing with all this, it is a huge pleasure to get rid of the old account. Especially, when it's associated with an Yahoo e-mail.

Despite being straightforward, here is a video I found on YouTube, explaining how to change the e-mail address, associated with your Windows Live Id.

 

Well, that was all. I doubt it, but I hope that that was helpful for someone.

Back after more than 2 years

Wow, more than 2 years have passed without a new post on my blog. Well, actually no excuse could be made for such a long period but I'll try my best in the following lines.
The truth is, that my life has changed drastically. Two years ago I was working as a software developer in Sofia, Bulgaria, married without children. Now, two years after that, I'm a second year master student in Bochum, Germany. I'm studying applied computer sciences at the Ruhr university. And I'm still married to my lovely wife with that difference, that I have a sweet daughter now :)

But how did all this happen?
Well, it's a long story, but I'll try to tell it as short as possible. I was not happy with my life in Sofia and the professional and personal perspectives that were for me and my family there. After 5 years as a software developer at OmegaSoft I didn't see what I could learn more and I was not so happy with how our project was going in general. Nevertheless I was loyal to my company until the end, despite some job offers for no less than 150% of what I was payed at my company. However the main reason for the "all-in" Germany move was not related with my job, but with the personal and social aspect of such a change. We decided to have a child and Sofia was not the place where we wanted to raise a one. So we started to learn german and we wanted to start a "new" life in Germany. I hope I will soon have my family here by me.

That whole change and the activity going with that, I mean the learning of german and the university were the reasons to not write for such a long time. Now I will try to write regularly, not only technical stuff but everything I find worth sharing and reading.

Can't debug Silverlight in Firefox - the solution!

Some months ago I was actively developing a Silverlight designer,about which I posted here.
Lately I found a small irritating bug in the designer and started debugging it. The strange thing was that I was practically unable to do that. The debugger was telling me that no debug symbols had been loaded for my silverlight application. For me this is one of the most annoying errors.
However, I spent some time trying to enable silverlight debugging with no success. I debugged it with MessageBox.Show(); and then forgot about the problem.
Today I found myself another bug and decided that it is time to get deeper into the debugging problem.
So to be sure that you will be able to debug silverlight applications:
1) Be sure to check the option for debugging Silverlight in the hosting Web project.
Web project -> Properties -> Web -> under Debuggers
2) There is a tab Silverlight Applications in web project's properties. You should add your project there.
3) Be sure that your ClientBin (or the folder where your web application expects your silverlight xap-s to reside) folder has the latest .xap packages. If not make sure that after building the silverlight project the result .xap goes there. That can be done with postbuild events.

If nothing of these helps, as it happened with me, read further:
This is a solution for debugging with Firefox:

Here’s how to ensure the VS debugger attaches to the Silverlight app for debugging:

* In Firefox address bar type about:config
* Read the warning, choose your preference to always remind you or not and accept
* In the search bar of the config options now type: npctrl
* You should then see the entry: dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npctrl.dll
* Change the value from true to false (simply double-clicking will change this for you)
* Restart Firefox

Firefox solution source

BTW there is also some valuable comments under this guy's post.