Colours Blog

Hotels-Wizard.com, what I am working on..

admin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:55:40 +0000

This is a brief article to introduce my new site www.hotels-wizard.com. It’s an hotel, hostel, B&B, apartment serarch engine running on a HotelsCombined affiliation platform.

Through www.hotels-wizard.com it is possible to search hotels in more then 30 accredited and well-established hotel reservation portals at once. The search for hotels will be mainly performed by city.

The reservation process follows 4 main steps:

Typing destination, number of guests, check-in check-out dates on the homepage search box;
Browsing the list of hotels. During this step it is possible to sort hotels by “popularity”, “price”, “stars”, “names”, “distance”. Here we can choose the room we would like stay in.
The third step offers a list of hotel reservation suppliers: all well-established, popular and safe hotel reservation portals; names such as Booking.com, Hotels.com, Venere.com, Expedia.com Travelocity.com etc … in one screen we will have a complete list of suppliers offering the room type and the hotel we have chosen. Here we can compare nearly all offers available online for that room and choose the in which website we want to complete our reservation.
Once we have chosen our room and the portal offering the best deal, we will be redirected to the supplier we have chosen website where we can review all the rooms facilities, pictures and terms and conditions. So the reservation will be performed not on www.hotels-wizard.com but safely on the supplier’s site we have chosen.

Hotels-wizard.com is now on its 0.04 development stage: it’s already fully functional but still needs some small improvement. At the moment supports English and Chinese; in a very short time Italian will be added, ideally in a few months the site will be available in German, Spanish, French and Japanese.

A multilingual blog is also on it’s way to be online. The blog will provide useful information on holiday destinations, tips and tricks for travelers and hotel reviews.

The concept and the name of the website is a “wizard”: both is its means of magic maker (here where the slogan comes from “do the magic .. get the best deal”) and of an easy-few-steps reservation assisted procedure.

The logo is a Hotel with four coloured stars: the stars represent the “magic” of the “wizard”. A variation of the logo is the same image in a postage stamp.

All the graphics has been made using Inkscape and Gimp. The site is written in HTML with some PHP, and JavaScript.

Artwork recognition, Plink.

admin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:54:49 +0000

The 12th of April the Plink’s blog announced that the project PlinkArt has been bought by Google!

Plink is an amazing application for mobile able to recognize any famous artwork simply by taking a picture. After reading the news I couldn’t wait to try it myself! In just 4 minutes I realized how amazing and revolutionary is this software! I took my HTC Hero, opened the “Market” application, typed “Plink” on it and in 2 minutes I had PlinkArt installed on my phone … I searched for any book around me and I found “Erotism” by the french writer Bataille, after taking a snapshot of the cover using PlinkArt in 30 seconds I got a list of results: all about the paining on the book’s cover. Clicking on any of the results I was redirected to Wikipedia where I could enrich my knowledge about the famous work of art.

After my excitement for this fabulous tool I wrote this article without thinking twice, stealing 10 minutes to my daily work.

Plink runs on any Android phone. According to Wikipedia the project has been started by Mark Cummins and James Philbin and won the Education/Reference category of the Google ADC2 (Android Developer Challenge 2). The project was at first awarded by Google with a donation of 100.000 USD and finally bought by the Mountain View’s company. I suggest all those who love art to try it!

OS for Human “Beans”

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:14:52 +0000

Browsing some coffee brands on-line I have noticed the similarity in between the colour scheme of Ubuntu Linux and the branding of some popular coffees (I love both: Ubuntu and Coffee).

Here is my Coffe Beans Ubuntu logo….

Hearts variations – Happy Valentine’s Day

admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:38:43 +0000

Happy Valentine’s day .. I am a disaster, all my life I made my partner crazy because I always forget of Valentine’s Day.
This year is special for many reasons, one of them is that Valentine’s Day coincide with the first day of the Year of the Tiger of the Chinese lunar calendar. This year most of young Chinese lovers have to give up the chance to have a romantic night and stay at home with their family to celebrate a much more important event… so, happy Valentine’s Day and happy Year of the Tiger (if you are tiger please take your precautions).

To celebrate this special day I spent some time drawing hearts.

Visit the Heart’s Gallery and feel free to download, play with, modify the .svg source file.

Eggs have emotions ….

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:02:58 +0000

A set of cartoon-style eggs’ sketched with Inkscape and The Gimp.

The .svg source files is free to download and manipulate to create your own “Eggs with feelings”!

See the “Eggs with feelings” entire gallery.

Bangkok – Royal Temple, Hua Hin Beach

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:23:04 +0000

Just back from a trip to Thailand, I spent few days in Bangkok and Hua Hin beach, 3 hours driving to the south.

See the complete Thailand: Bangkok, Hua Hin 2009 gallery.

See the complete Thailand: Bangkok, Hua Hin 2009 gallery.

Bangkok Royal Palace patterns

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:33:40 +0000

Few years ago I made a trip to Thailand and, as most of the tourists I went to visit the Bangkok Royal Palace. Here there are three patterns inspired by Thai decorations on the Bangkok Royal Palace.

Visit the complete Thai Patterns‘ gallery.
Or see the complete Thailand gallery.

Visit the complete Thai Patterns‘ gallery.
Or see the complete Thailand gallery.

A butterfly in the mangrove

admin — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:31:52 +0000

Another picture from the mangrove of Hongshulin (紅樹林)
See the complete gallery Hongshulin (紅樹林) Reds and Greens
See all patterns on this topic Butterfly’s Circles

See the complete gallery Hongshulin (紅樹林) Reds and Greens
See all patterns on this topic Butterfly’s Circles

Hongshulin (紅樹林), Reds and Greens

admin — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:32:50 +0000

The meaning of Hongshulin is “mangrove”: trees and shrubs growing in saline coastal habitats in the tropics and subtropics. The mangrove is a chaos of leaves and a universe hosting millions of strange creatures.

See the complete gallery Hongshulin(紅樹林) Reds and Greens

See the complete gallery Hongshulin (紅樹林) Reds and Greens

Palermo’s traditional market “Al Capo”

admin — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:53:53 +0000

A walk in one of the most famous Palermo’s traditional markets, “Al Capo” market. It’s located in the Capo area, an old area created by the Augustinians who first created the curch of S. Augustine in the XIV century. I desaturated all the colours of the market and spared the yellows.

See the complete gallery Palermo “Al Capo” Market

See the complete gallery Palermo “Al Capo” Market