Roiy Zysman

[OT, definitely not a C# post!.]

System.Drawing.Color is awesome, but sometime just the item name doesn’t say a lot. for your reference, here is a simple color table.
Powered by of C# reflection and System.Drawing.

With all of the open source movement going around and new licenses like the creative commons you would have expected someone should be able to grab a simple jpeg or a png of the world map for free, without any licensing issues. Well, I’m not sure when I actually started looking for one, but at some point in time I did, and couldn’t actually find an appropriate map of the world countries that’s free to download and royalty free to use in projects. Sure some of you would say that Bing and Google maps have their own maps and API which is great for some purposes. but just grabbing a simple map world map with countries borders and without any companies watermarks or restrictions is just not available. (and if you do happen to find one , please let me know).
So anyway I’ve decided to play the role of a cartographer and create my own maps and share those with the rest of the world , for free!. the first step was to find a reliable data set of country borders . Took a look in the CIA world Fact book which was good but not enough , took also a look here in this database which seemed very outdated. Eventually, I’ve stumbled upon this marvelous Natural Earth Data website. here is the Natural Earth Data site’s description

This might be simple, but also tricky if you don't know where to look for. Once installed, Server core has a default name assigned.
To get it , just run ipconfig /all in the command line.
The first line will include the server's default name.

I was looking for an interesting starting point to getting my hands dirty with Silverlight. Deepzoom caught my attention. It is basically a Silverlight component that let's you zoom in and out into an image. While there are some examples out there that utilize and showcase it, most of them are pretty basic and not that practical. While back I wrote a small app that composes a target image mosaic out of smaller images, but back than , I had to use Zoomify to provide a zoom in and zoom out interface. Now with Deepzoom, I wanted to check it out.

For those of you who are going to celebrate Halloween on the 31st , here is a nice cool thing to do with C# and System.Drawing library.
In this post I'll show you how to use C# to embed a ghost image with a background image.

In one of my previous posts I showed how to embed GPS coordinates to jpeg images using C#. It is mainly useful if you're using a maps+pictures services such as panoramio.com or everytrail.com or any other kind of mapping and pictures solutions.
My GPS buddy is a nifty HOLUX M-241 GPS  among the regular location, speed, direction, time it can also records tracks, and on top of that it's rather cheap. 

But unfortunately its image GPS coordinates embedding feature doesn't work so well.