A few hours after Googling for a fix, I couldn’t find any useful information. However, this error happened with me in the past and it as due to the desynchronization of the “AUTH_KEY”  on wp-config.php file and the “wp_default_secret_key” in my language file (wp-content/languages/en_US.php).

I went to the en_US.php file and it was ok, the keys were equals. So I deleted this file, just to see what would happens. Voilá! It was working again.

So, the fix is as simple as:

rm /<installation folder>/wp-content/languages/en_US.php

I have started thinking about producing some Kiteboarding T-Shirts and perhaps start a small Kite Wear Company about six months ago. As a software developer, I am comfortable with computers and I thought I could do the designs myself, after watching some Illustrators Tutorials on the internet. I quickly realized that I was completely wrong. I have no skills neither talent to create artistic designs. Thus, I went to the Auto Tracing Tools, such as Corel Trace and some others.
Their result were even worse than my manually generated designs.
I had no choice, if I wanted to produce high quality t-shirts, I would have to hire a professional designer.

I did some budged estimates and I almost gave up due to the high cost to produce a vector design. It was about U$100,00.  To be honest it is not  that expensive for an established company. However, I don’t have a company, I was not even thinking about opening one. I was willing to produce small quantities of 5 or 10 different designs. In this case, the U$100,00 for images would be too expensive.
In order to produce T-shirts with good quality and an affordable price, we have to find and talented and affordable  designer and a base image to start.

Requirements

This paragraph is to explain what are the requirements involved in the life-cycle of the t-shirt production, such as tools, prototyping, vectorization, printing, colors, fabric types and cuts.

- Basic understanding of vectorization tools like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw
- A good designer capable of producing vector images
- A way to prototype before producing large quantities
- A good silk screen company
- A good fabric provider

Tools

You can’t use regular images like JPGs to print using silk-screen, this image needs to be converted to the vector format.
The Silk Screen process consists in the separation of every color in an image and printing them one after the other. so, it requires you to provide a way to print every color in separete
There are some tools that can convert an image to vector automatically, such as Coral Trace, but unfortunately the result is almost always with low quality.

I prefer to use Adobe Illustrator because it is user friendly, but keep in mind that most of the silk-screen companies only have Corel.

Finding a good designer

I have no doubt that hiring a consultant designer is the best way to get exactly what you want and with high quality. However, professional designers are usually expensive and not suitable for small projects. I have found consultants charging an average of U$100,00 per job. By job I mean, a complete T-shirt design without review limitations.
So, I started browsing the web for cheap alternatives, as always. In this journey I have passed through several designers, charging from U$5,00 to U$40,00. Most of them are natural from India, China and Russia, Pakistan, etc.

- PGConversion.com:
These guys are amazing. They charge U$26,00 to convert and JPG to vector and U$40,00 to convert and JPG and add their creativity to a complete T-shirt design. They also offer unlimited reviews in this price.
My first try with them was to convert and picture to a vector and that was the result after 2 or 3 reviews:

Before

After

In a second try I gave them a more complex image to be converted and asked (and payed more) them to use their creativity. It took about 20 reviews, has cost U$40,00 but the resulting vector was pretty good.
Although the result is very good, it is a JPG to Vector conversion as usual, without many creativity. I had to provide all the elements in the picture:

Base image

First version. (Nice, but too many colors for a T-Shirt)

Final version after about 20 reviews.

- RentACoder.com:
ReantACoder is a auction web-site for developers. You can offer you skills and hire skilled developer and designers. They provide a very good interface to add your requirements and instructions on how to get them done well and without frustration.
The main advantage of RaC is the price. You can get vectors as low as U$5,00. Off course you get what you pay for.
I have asked for samples in all my auctions. If you don’t ask for a sample you might get an “auto-traced vector”.
It is worth the try, specially if you image is simple.
The conversion below has a cartoons style and its cost was only U$10,00.

Before

After

Prototyping

The Silk Screen companies usually require you to print a minimum quantity of 20 units. Imagine if there is a small mistake in the entire production. You would end up with 20 brand new pijamas.
Fortunately there are two good ways to prototype. Imaging prototyping and with a Inkjet printer.

The imaging prototyping is simple as putting your art over a clena T-shirt picture in your preferred image editor. You can use this clean pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frankllin/tags/tshirtbackground/ (These are not the best T-shirt color in the world. I would appreciate you someone could provide me other colors)

After that you can print a sample in a  T-shirt Printer and avoid the most common mistakes. There is a “T-Shirt Kiosk” in a shopping mall closer to my home, which has a Brother GT-541 printer and charges U$12,00 per t-shirt. The result is usually poor, lacks for the white color and the cost is slightly higher than Silk Screen, but the advantage is that you can print a single unit before sending your artwork for production.

These are the mistakes that I look when prototyping:

• Position and alignment of the image.
• If the combination of colors fits well in the fabric.
• If my art has more details than a printing can handle.

Finally,  a good Silk Screen Company has to provide a sample. If they don’t provide you samples, find another company. Believe me, without a sample you build a collection of pijamas.

Printing with Silk Screen

A t-shirt is generally printed with silk-screen, which requires every color to be printed separetelly. that is why we need to use vectors and not flat images, so the colors can be separated and printed one by one.

ps. I write this blog in English willing to practice my Eglish writting skills. I will appreciate if you post a comment either with fixes or pieces of advice.

Requirements

• A Cellphone with credit and its USB cable
• Java version of SMSLib (download of sources here)
• Apache Jakarta Commons.Net required by SMSLib
• Slf4J also required by SMSLib.

Introduction
It is possible to use a programming language to send Hayes Commands (aka AT commands) through the serial port to a cellphone modem, plugged into a PC . With these commands the cellphone can send SMS.

We could do the connection with the Serial port and write every AT command programatically. However, it is complex and would require learning the the AT Commands list.
In order to avoid this complexity you can use the SMSLib, intead of writting it manually.

Installing

• Configure the Java communication library according to the SMSLib Installation guide
• The installation guide tells how to build SMSLib with Ant. I prefer building it with Eclipse. Thue, I have imported the sources to a new Java Project inside of Eclipse.
• Add a reference to the Slf4j library and Commons.Net library in the recently created Eclipse project.
• Connect the cellphone in the computer. You can use USB, BlueTooth, IrD, etc.
• Find out what is the COM port associated to the new connection and its baud rate. Keep it in memory.
  On Windows: Contro Panel -> system -> Device Manager -> Modens. Right click on the modem, tab Modem and get the value of “port”. This value is similar to COM3.

Running a sample
The SMSLib comes with some good samples. The SendMessage class is the simple one. Open it and make the following modifications in the instantiation of SerialModemGateway:

- Change the cellphone number to a valid one.
- Change the COM port and the baud rate with the value you me memorized before.

The result is something like this:
new SerialModemGateway(“modem.com3″, “COM3″, 115200, “Sony Ericsson”, “W580″);

If you are looking for a SMS server, the class ReadMessages is a good beginning.

Limitation
A regular GSM modem is slow and can send about 6 messages per minute.

Ok, I know, you should be saying: “Who cares?”