I have finished the month long LEGO portrait project, the result is up on the wall at home and on the blupark.net Web gallery (Project: LEGO portrait).

In short, I took a picture that seemed perfect for the project. I used GIMP to edit the picture, sort of optimise it for LEGO (reduce colors, sharpen the edges, etc…). I used a LEGO portrait specific application – Bricksaic by Bob Kojima – to generate the LEGO output. I loaded the results from Bricksaic into LDraw to do further improvements and optimisation on the bricks. I printed a bill of material (BOM) for the LEGO pieces, then went off to the Bricklink stores to buy the pieces. I ended up buying from 5 different stores and from a local LEGO store. I could buy all the pieces from LEGO Factory, but that would have cost 5 times the price. Once the pieces arrived I followed the drawing from LDraw to place the bricks on the plates. The last task was to “simply” mount the picture on the wall.

A few statistics: the picture is made from 5068 pieces, it weighs 5kg, it is 76cm by 76cm in size, 96 by 96 bricks, and it took about a month to finish with a lot of delays and long breaks.

There are a few really nice projects on the Web about LEGO mosaics, pictures and similar projects. Here is one with a lot of useful details and instructions that helped with my project: DarthVader Lego mosaic or Starry Night LEGO Mosaic.
Believe it or not, there are people making a living out of such work, like this dude: http://www.seankenney.com/ or this company http://brickworkz.com/

I have got a new article published on the IBM developerWorks site, under the architecture domain.

Title of the article: Explore model-driven development (MDD) and related approaches: Applying domain-specific modeling to Model-Driven Architecture
It is the 4th in the series of the model-driven development articles at developerWorks.

This is the second article of mine after the first one: Login scenarios and techniques in WebSphere Application Server using JAAS.

More articles to come…

The reasults of the new theme are already up on this blog…

The customization went pretty smooth with only a few gotchas.

My personal choice of tools were:

• Xara Extreme for vector graphics. I have designed the whole page with this proggy.
• GIMP the bitmap editor – to slice up the page into manageble pieces.
• Bluefish text editor on Ubuntu.
  The story here is that I am running an Ubuntu virtual machine with WordPress installed (and some other apps as well), where I can do all sorts of test and customization without breaking the live site.

I used the default theme from WordPress as the basis for my new theme: blupark ONE. The documentation is pretty clear about how to do theme customization and the default theme is fairly well structured and documented (inline comments).

A few gotchas though:

• Most of the customization is done through CSS. As a matter of fact, hardly anything had to be done with the HTML/PHP code – at least for the moment. The difficulty is that it is very easy to get lost in the hierarchy and long list of style definitions.
• The theme uses a set of well placed DIV, rather than a TABLE, to partition the page content. I am not sure which one is worse actually. TABLEs have a pain in the neck behavior when you start playing with padding, border, margin, width, height, etc. DIVs are similarly rubbish when it comes to constructing a page.

I am planning further tuning and enhancements to the theme, these will come later…

Selecting the right, or just a content management application for the Web is similarly challenging as picking the album and photo management package.

The most important is to define the requirements for the content management application.

• What type of content is it going to present and manager?
• How much time is it going to take to add, update, remove, comment on the content?
• Is the structure for the content complex, is it more hierarchical or more flat?
• How complex (or fancy) the presentation, the look&feel of the content will be?

I had two major paths to chose from: take a full blown Content Management System (CMS), try a Wiki system, or go with a light-weight blog style content manager? I decided that a blog-style will fit the purpose, because:

• blogging it is the “thing” to do on the Web lately,
• it is easy (in other words, does not need much time) to manage,
• the structure and the use (reading, commenting) of blogs is simple and it is almost common knowledge,
• it has all the features I may need to host the content I have to deliver.

There are quite a few Web applications available for blogging.

First I tried b2evolution, but it was not as exciting as the second choice: WordPress. I will not bore you with the feature this proggy has to offer, here are the reasons I liked it:

• Easy and simple installation. This happened remotely using nothing else than a browser.
• Heaps of excellent quality themes for free. This is always a good indication. Furthermore, the theme customization is fairly simple as well.
• A nice set of plug-ins.
• Support for pages, kind of a mini content management system.
• Online theme editor – it is nice to fine-tune the theme on the spot from the admin client.

Next step with WordPress is to customize the theme…