Results matching “paint”

I am working not far from St. Paul's Cathedral, so I decided to have a walk to get some photographs of the cathedral during lunch. It was a cloudy day, and it was fairly quiet as people were settling back into their jobs from the holiday break in January, and it is a little too early for many tourists. Despite the grey day (the dome of St. Paul's is much more elegant in the sunshine and looks like a painting with the light and shadows playing on the architecture), I did manage to get some good photographs with clear white skies. 

Bath is hosting a public art exhibition with 100 large sculptures of lions, painted by artists, located in various places around the city. Some of the money for charity will be given to help protect dwindling numbers of lions in the wild. (London hosted a similar public event this year with 250+ elephants.)

During the lion-spotting, I came across one lion that was painted white and covered with many mobile-scannable barcodes (known as QR or QuickResponse barcodes). Using a mobile phone, the barcodes could be scanned, and this would display the location of another lion via a web URL; a URL to the official Facebook and Twitter groups were also present. (I remember first seeing this technology back in 2006 and blogging about it as an innovative way to share and market information.)

I enjoyed the innovative use of technology and art, and others who walked by the lion stopped to interact with the exhibit/technology as well.

 

 

One phenomenon I have been noticing recently is beautifully-decorated 'designer' cupcakes in the shops and specialty cupcake shops around London. Cupcakes seem to be in fashion at the moment. The designs can be anything from very pretty to very cute to promotional. There are cookbooks dedicated to the art of creating beautiful (and tasty) cupcakes. 

There's a charity in London that has put out over 250 elephant 'statues' in attempt to earn some money to protect elephants; they have called this 'Elephant Parade'. Each elephant is painted or sculpted differently, and each one is a beautiful work of art located around various London parks and streets; some of them are also indoors. I have been a little obsessed with locating the elephants around London (there's three of them near where I am working) and snapping photos of them. While I've been admiring them, I've noticed that others have been following the 'elephant trail' as well and interacting with them. Some of the admirers (tourists) seemed to happen to stumble upon the elephants by chance and snap group photos next to them. Judging by the reaction of others to the elephants, they certainly have put a smile on peoples' faces in London. 

I enjoy this time of year; Christmas decorations and lights. (I don't care for the cold weather, snow, and ice, but it's tolerable at least until the Christmas season has come to an end.) Cambridge (in Ohio, not the city by the same name in England) is not too far away from where my parents live, so we decided to go and see the Victorian figures (an art display on the streets in downtown Cambridge) and look at the Christmas Light Show on the Cambridge Court House. 

Rome - beautiful city with so much history. The Colosseum, the ruins of ancient Rome, fountains, beautiful architecture, nice museums and galleries, and little shops and cafes. The Vatican, a separate city-state a short walk from the centre of Rome, also has many tourist attractions, including St. Peter's basilica and the Sistine Chapel with the famous ceiling paintings, not to mention many museums. 

Here are some more photographs that I took in Morocco.

Here are a few of my favourite photographs taken from my recent trip to Germany.

I took a trip to Prague, in the Czech Republic, over the Easter holiday. In brief, Prague has amazing architecture. There's the Astronomical Clock tower in the Old Town square, Charles Bridge, St. Vitus' cathedral - just to name a few. The architecture is detailed and colourful - red-orange roofs and pastel coloured facades; there are also quite a few spires.

Over the past couple of months, I have been creating my own custom Java look-and-feel (LAF) using Synth. By default, Synth applies the style to an element (JButton, JLabel, JFrame) throughout the application. However, it is often necessary to have an additional style type for an element in the application. For example, I wanted to have a default style for the main application window as well as a different style for the 'wizard'. Most of the elements in the main application used the default font and J-object styles, but I wanted the wizard to have a gradient background colour and section header fonts that were different to the rest of the application.

 

To create a new style, include a new style in the Synth XML document, as displayed below.

 

- <style id="WizardBg">

  <object id="background" class="com.ssl.cctv.tvbs.oif.gui.swing.skin.BackgroundPainter" />

- <object class="javax.swing.plaf.ColorUIResource" id="startColor">

  <int>108</int>

  <int>171</int>

  <int>221</int>

  </object>

  <defaultsProperty key="Panel.startBackground" type="idref" value="startColor" />

- <object class="javax.swing.plaf.ColorUIResource" id="endColor">

  <int>184</int>

  <int>196</int>

  <int>197</int>

  </object>

  <defaultsProperty key="Panel.endBackground" type="idref" value="endColor" />

  <painter method="panelBackground" idref="background" />

  </style>

  <bind style="WizardBg" type="name" key="wizardPanel" />

 

In the 'bind' tag, the type should be defined as 'name' to specify that all elements accepting this style will be bound through the name attribute instead of 'region' which allows all elements of a certain type to be bound to the style. The 'key' attribute in the 'bind' tag will be the name of the element as defined in the Java code. To apply this style to the element, use the myobject.setName("myname") attribute in the Java code. In this example above, the name of the element will be the 'key' attribute in the 'bind' tag: 'wizardPanel'.

 

If you're a web developer, think of this as a little bit like CSS where you define a style of an element (a font or a DIV) and reference it.

 

Finally, ensure that all styles with 'named' bindings are located at the end of the XML document so that this style is not overwritten by the default style.