We've all heard that we shouldn't model ourselves against pictures we see in magazines, because "they're all airbrushed and retouched". But you won't believe how true that is until you check out this portfolio by a fellow who does it for a living. He swaps new pictures in from time to time,  but there's pretty well always some excellent eye bag removing, skin smoothing, and general thinning.

Before:  After:

He has a nice effect on the site: first you see the "after" picture as it was used in print, then when you mouseover you see the original. Wow! Bags pop out under eyes, breasts move down, wattle, wrinkles, and pimples appear. Move the mouse off and they're back to perfection. Just astonishing. He also tackles "the clothes didn't really fit the model" and "the background is all wrong" as well as "they couldn't all come to the studio on the same day" but it's the anti-aging work I found most astonishing.

In case you had any doubt how much hard work it is to do, somebody called Mizuno lays out in a dozen steps or so how to soften up skin features to do just the unpimpling:

Before: After:

The after looks a little fake here in a close-crop, but when you see the whole picture she just looks gorgeous. Now we know.

Nikola Dudar of the C++ team seems to have decided to catch up his blogging deficit. In a single day he covered:

• Norton WinDoctor errors about msvcr80.dll
• STL/CLR comparing to STL
• Generic Interfaces in STL/CLR

Plus a meta-post about comments. Keep it up Nikola!

Kate

Those of you who were interested in my loader lock topic at Tech Ed this year should probably get this whitepaper from Windows Hardware Developer Central (not actually a place I hang out regularly.) It's a downloadable Word document (8 pages) that tackles things like "what you should not do from DllMain" (this list is a page long), deadlocks, and threading considerations (and remember, we are all going to have to tackle threading considerations eventually). While it doesn't say it's C++-specific advice, in what other language could you "Use the memory management function from the dynamic C Run-Time (CRT)" or "Set global pointers to NULL, putting off the initialization of dynamic members"? It even has Vista-specific advice.

Kate

Catherine Heller, Windows Vista Technical Evangelist, is now blogging. She started during TechEd just before her session (one of the very few I attended) and so far has covered tips for interop to native APIs and some Search material. I'm looking forward to more as the summer progresses.

Kate

Recently the French government launched a geo-portal (GeoPortail en francais) with satellite pictures and maps of France and France-associated places around the world. The detail is pretty cool. Here's Le Château de Chenonceau:

Here's the smaller of the two formal gardens, to the left in the arial shot, as seen from inside the Château:

That one's not from the website, but from my own camera. It gives you a good idea of the scale the satellites can achieve. The building itself is amazing -- it actually spans the river. Worth a detour to experience if you find yourself on The Continent.

Kate

The seventh monthly DemoCamp in Toronto will be July 4th at No Regrets in Toronto. It's a pretty simple concept: no-powerpoint-allowed demos of working product, time limit 15 minutes, followed by socializing. And they do this every month! There's room for 150 people, and according to the wiki 90 people are signed up already, so there's probably room for you, too. Watch other people demo (so you can learn how to construct your own super cool 10 minute presentation, and believe me, ten minutes is HARD), see what else is going on in your world, tap into some of Toronto's energy... I can't make this one but I will watch for the August one for sure!

Kate

Hugh (hughtrain, cartoons on a business card) MacLeod has written an interesting set of "instructions" on how to be more creative. Many of these directly contradict each other... that's because there's more than one way to be creative. I actually found the summary points more helpful than the more detailed explanations further down the page. But either way, it's a good way to get yourself thinking about thinking. Then later you can relax and not think, and good ideas will come to you. Or at least that's how it works for me.

Kate

Jan Tielens points out a big relief in the next version of SharePoint: setting up alerts for someone other than yourself. I faced this need many times and adapted one of the many web part samples available online to allow administrators to set up alerts for other users.

Little things like this are going to dramatically reduce the number of web parts I have to write. And I like that!

Kate