Azeem Azeez Go Home

This was taken outside a toy store on a recent trip to Singapore

Clean as a whistle is a minimalistic wordpress theme designed to show off your content. It adds focus to your text and images, is easy to use,  has a couple of options you can customize and is absolutely free to download and install. After the success of “White as milk“, this theme uses a newer web framework that should make updating and customising these theme a whole lot easier.

After you install the theme, you can go to Appearance > Theme options to tweak the theme. If you find any bugs or have comments about the theme, please let me know.

Download “Clean as a whistle”

I’ve recently got a couple of people asking me what settings I used to take certain photos. In response, on every individual photo page, I’ve added a link under the photo called “exif info” which should provide you with things like the ISO, focal length and aperture I used for that photo.

I just finished reading “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose” by Tony Hsieh, who is the CEO of Zappos.com. Although Tony did write this book, there are a lot personal excerpts from others who have worked for Zappos over the years. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a lot from this book, but I was very interested in seeing what made Amazon acquire Zappos for in an all-stock deal worth $1.2 billion in 2009.

One of the first things you’ll notice about the book is that its a very easy read. Tony breaks down most of the vocabulary down to layman’s terms and since most of the book involves personal stories and experiences, there aren’t a lot of technical verbiage anyway to confuse users. As he mentions in the book, this book was designed to be read by fellow Zappos employees, vendors and customers.

The title of the book is very apt for this book, as it deals a lot with what Tony and his team have done to achieve true happiness in the workplace. He not only focused on how to achieve happiness with his employees in the company and also their vendors, but also with their customers by focusing a large part of their company strategy on customer support. If you’re someone looking for ideas to achieve true happiness and bliss, I strongly recommend you pick this book.

Road Inc is a must have app if you own an iPad. Its an app thats sort of like an interactive coffee table book that showcases classic cars. You download tours of individual cars which includes a 360 degree view and a brief history about the car. A definite must have for any car enthusiast with an iPad.

I’ve recently made the drastic change of using cloud services for my music. I started by deleting all my music off my computer and resorted to using Rdio and SoundCloud to listen to my music. Rdio makes listening to music unbelievably easy with its massive library and easy to use interface. I pay a flat monthly fee to access their entire music collection. Rdio also has an awesome mobile app that lets me create playlists and listen to them when offline or stream directly from the Rdio service. Rdio even has some excellent social features thats lets me know what my friends are listening to and it also lets us collaborate on playlists and share music we like.

SoundCloud is another service I find myself using more frequently as more music artists use this service to share and crowdsource their music. Mainstream artists like Madonna, Beyoncé and Rihanna are also using Soundcloud to share popular tracks and showcase new exclusive tracks to their fans before releasing it. SoundCloud also has a very unique player that lets you add comments to any part of the track.

Its a bit scary too think we’re becoming so dependent on cloud services, in this case, to listen to music. But the convenience it adds is completely worth it especially when you have apps like Rdio and SoundCloud. With apps like Netflix and Hulu, I don’t think it will be too far along before watching movies and tv shows exclusively online will be a standard.

One of my favorite applications that I use all the time is Adobe Lightroom. After trying out almost every popular photo-managment software including iPhoto, Picasa and Aperture, it was pretty obvious that Lightroom was the robust choice to handle my 60GB+ worth of photos. One of the coolest features I like about Lightroom is that you can buy and download Lightroom presets. These presets can be programmed to do anything from converting a photo to black-and-white, removing grain and dust or just enhancing and sharpening dull or darkened photos, all with a single click. You can find a few presets on The Bell Sisters website.

The one preset that I love the most and probably use on almost all my photos is “Punch”. Its a default preset that comes with Lightroom and can be found towards the bottom of the Lightroom presets list. Punch basically takes any photo you give it, and bumps the “Clarity” level on the photo by 50 points and the “Vibrance” level by 25 points. This removes some of the dullness or gray-ness of the photo that you might have inherited especially if you have shots taken in a cloudy environment and makes it, in my opinion, the easiest way to cleanup a photo.

I’ve been trying to read more lately. After a few recommendations, I’ve managed to pick up quite a few books this month to add to my reading list.

Microsoft is using a ridiculous marketing tactic to get people to download and use their latest trainwreck web browser, Internet Explorer 8. They’ve created this campaign where you use Internet Explorer 8 and follow a twitter user to get clues to where this ten grand could be.

We’ve buried $10,000 somewhere on the Internet
and if you’re the first one to find it, you get to keep it.
But you’ll never find it using old Firefox.
(So get rid of it, or get lost)

Suuuuure, Firefox is old alright. And apparently IE 8 is a lot better than we all thought.

What’s even better? Someone who works for Firefox, created a website called TenGrandIsBuriedThere.com which is basically a Google map with a crop circle of the Firefox logo that you’ll see if you zoom in enough. Some nice marketing for Firefox.

Here’s a quick roundup of interesting CSS and Javascript related articles I’ve come across this week:

Everything You Need to Know About the !important CSS Declaration
If you’ve ever worked on a sizable web project you know how hard it can be to figure out which HTML element is using which CSS selector. And since CSS uses cascading, it can be harder to figure out if a CSS selector is overriding another CSS selector. One way to hack and fix this is to use the !important declaration. Of course, that has its downfalls too. This article does a fine job of telling you how !important works and when it doesn’t.

All About Floats
If you’re new to designing with CSS of if you’ve ever been confused about how Floats work in CSS, this article is just perfect. I’ve always had to decide if I wanted to use floats, or position elements absolutely and relatively before creating a template for a project. The author lists how Floats work, why they could break and most importantly, techniques you could use to fix them.

7 JavaScript Differences Between Firefox & IE
Every web browser does things differently (IE6 is a perfect example). But did you know that there a lot of significant differences in the way you use javascript in different browsers? This article lists 7 interesting examples where you have to use different javascript syntax’s to do the same thing. Of course you could always use jQuery (or another javascript library) and just forget all this, but its good to know how javascript works on the bare-bones level.

TinyBox JavaScript Popup Box
After looking around for a small script that does very basic modal pop-ups, I finally found one that does exactly what its supposed to in less than 4kb. Easy to use and no-nonsense