April Fool is just around a corner. I just decided of doing another round of template changes. Got a bit bored with my previous template already. It’s not really a total template revamp, but as before, it’s the template header change.

There were a few time, when I changed my template, people asking me on whether I do the header myself. Well, the answer is YES and NO.

YES I create the header file myself and format it so that it fit in my blog template. NO I didn’t design the banner. I usually steal it somewhere and modify it with my bits and pieces. I am not computer artist that can produce something this beautiful. But I am computer enthusiast. So just apply a little of hacking skills, then you get things done.

So this entry will illustrate what processes that I usually go before I have my template changed, errmmmm well, my template header changed.

For any occasion, the best place that you can go to find a beautiful flash file for the season in electronic greeting card website. This time, I went to 123 Greetings website. Voila. It has a dedicated section on April Fool. After browsing around, I have found the flash animation that ticks my hearts.

Without further ado, I view the greeting card. Well. It’s really nice. Using Firefox media browser from Page Info dialog, you can browse the list of the media of the current page that you are viewing. That flash animation is a .swf type of file. By looking into the list, I saved the .swf file of that greeting card.

The next part is where it started to get a bit dirty. The .swf file can be think of as a compiled program already. In order for you to to be able to edit what is inside, you have to reverse engineer so that the source file is produced out of it. Once you have raw source file, you can do anything to it.

At this stage, I’m using Sothink SWF Decompiler. This this software does is, it opens .swf file, and reconstruct .fla file from it.

Once you have .fla file, you can do anything with it. So I use Macromedia Flash to edit it. Here, you need to be familiar with Macromedia Flash, things like layer, frame, shape, tweening and action script. I’m not pro myself with Macromedia Flash too. But little – little can la.

So, I just put my lacking creativity here to remove unwanted shapes and unwanted frames from the file. There are also several scenes. Usually, I just keep the last one, the part that repeated over and over.

After I’ve done with the editing, here is my final look.

So after exporting this back to .swf file, it’s time to place this into the template. With a simple math of finding the width and height of several DIVs in pixels, I managed to fit in this flash into my template.

And that’s all about it.

View my other template changes

• Aquarium fish
• Have a great weekend
• On Vacation
• April Fool
• Bubble Bear
• M’re Goes Dirty
• Chinese New Year 2006
• Happy New Year 2006
• Christmas 2005
• Fish
• More template tweaks
• Scroller added
• Template finalized

View my past template header in action at
http://www.mohdimran.com/_blog_header_/

• 4 Comments

Just now, I have been given the following link by Aries, to the website of MyHeritage.

At first, I thought this website is just another gimmick, where at the end, it either shows a picture of monkey or shows a picture of very ugly person.

But after trying it, I have to say that this website is really really really really cool!!! Find the celebrity in you!!. Yeap. That what it does. Just upload your pic, and it will detect your face area, and after that it will match your face with the closest faces of the world’s 3,200 most famous men and women. Make sure to upload high quality picture, the one that you take with digital camera as the recognition will be more accurate.

I have tried it myself. Ever wonder which celebrity that has closest match with my face? Tadaaa… Here is it. It’s Hrithik Roshan!!

Hehehe. No wonder there are a number of people that say that I have a bit of hindustani look. And some says that I have a bit of Arabian look.

Well, you not only can find the match face from the same gender, you can also find the face match of the opposite sex. So wanna see the women side of me? Hahahahaha. This is going to be funny. Hahahaha. I can’t stop laughing now. Here it is

She just too damn beautiful to be me.

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I got this in an email sent by my colleague here. It’s a Cadbury Warehouse sales.

Looks interesting. It’s time to stock up cheap chocolates. From the past warehouse sales, my officemates said that they really selling them very cheap.

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There was a time when da Vinci painted Monalisa

There was a time when Romeo sang a beautiful song to Juliet

There was a rumour of UFO abducting human

TagMe! now with even more smilies:

There’s a smiley for you to use for every occasion, during your sunny day, and during your rainy day.

Don’t be sad Put a smile on your face and always say

With lots and lots of kisses from me

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Just some of my random thoughts for today:

• 2 more people leaving my department, making it 7 people already leaving this company for this year
• I am too tired already with this job. I need a fresh new environment, and a new more challenging work
• The online data collection model that I have worked on for the past 1 and 1/2 year is going to waste, replace by that so called magnificent Dimension.net with bigger team to support it in US
• Asia Pacific region Dimension.net is lead by that guy from Australia, with the advantage that SPSS Asia HQ is located in Australia. I can sense that I’m not going to be the first person to lead online in AP anymore
• My big boss is getting more silly, tedious, time consuming jobs (autocharting that is), and starts throwing it to Malaysia to do – reason, the human labour cost always cheap here
• That silly GMI mailing is really pain in the ass, so repetitive and lengthy work. Pity the 2 ladies under me has to do this. No wonder Hong Kong really pushing everything of that nature over this side.
• Still discontented with the fact that I didn’t get promoted this year. So now, I only give 90% at my work, compared to I always strive to give 100% before. It doesn’t get appreciated anyway
• Money! Money! Money! I need more of that
• My family is trying to set me up with some girls. Happened to be daughter/nieces/cousins of my sister’s friends. I don’t know. I really don’t like this arranged marriage. Let me find my own soulmate ok.
• Sick with this oil price rise thingy. Too many domino effects, and we all the “rakyat jelata” is the victim

That’s all what I have in mind at the moment. Arrghhh… Serabutnya kepalaaaaaaaa….

• 8 Comments