Kravendaven

Uranium December 1, 2006

Just today I was surfing the internet when I stumbled upon a news article about the legal selling of Uranium within the United States.  This just strikes me as very humerous, and at the same time potentially dangeous.  The site, United Nuclear ( http://www.unitednuclear.com/), is selling radioactive ore that has a range potency.  The ore costs from $15 for low level to $200 for ultra high level.  I am not sure if the site is reputable, but you can take your chances.  Remember to also purchase the correct safety equipment.  Happy experimenting!

Photoshop November 8, 2006

Anyone who is anyone knows that Photoshop is one of the best programs in the market that will allow you to edit and create pictures. I have used it for absolutely every image file that I have ever created for the web. It is filled with useful filters, brushes, and tools and the possibilities are endless.

It is easy to be able to manipulate a picture, but in order to manipulate it to make it look real is more of an art. Photoshop offers many tools such as blur, sharpen, and smudge. These are primitive tools that will help only a little bit. It also offers the clone stamp and pattern stamp. You can select a certain area of the image and clone it to another part. This helps if you want to get rid of an imperfection that is part of a large picture.

Another useful tool would be the pen tool. This allows you to create a path or a mask and will curve lines with the help of handles. It takes a little pratice, but soon you will be able to follow any path you want. These paths can be stroked with any type of brush, color, thickness, and hardness. They can also be turned into masks. One useful thing about masks is that you can use it to put a picture behind the mask and only show where the mask allows.

Along with a plethera of tools, photoshop offers filters. If you want to add a certain artistic touch to your creations, then you can easily add a filter that will make things look much different. You can do anything from swirl, lens flare, pixilate, and many other effects.

If you are stuck and don’t know how to create the right look or are trying to make something such as clouds or fire, then stress no more. Photoshop is used in a variety of places and therefore have tutorials posted online to show you how to virtually do anything that you want.

Maya 8 November 1, 2006

Maya 8 is a program that is used to make high end three dimentional scenes.  It is used in the professional movie making world to create annimation as well as special effects.  It is a very useful program but can be difficult to learn.  It has a very sharp learning curve.  You really have to learn a lot about it before someone can use it sucessfully.  At a first glance, it can look impossible to do anything because of the sheer complexity of the interface as well as how different menu sets, views, and pull down menus there are.  This is not the case at all, you can do almost anything… Once you learn more about the program that is. 

Maya 8 has really changed  from the previous versions.  Pull down menus are more spread a part than before with more features.  This can especially be seen in the polygon menu set.  Polygon has been split into two different pull down menus making it harder to find things in the begining, but you pick up quickly on their genius behind splitting it apart.

One thing that is very useful is the shelf.  It is customizable and has little icons that represent the most useful things in that specific menu set.  You can also add the functions that you tend to use often.  Another thing that I like about maya is the IPR rendering.  It is something that will render a small portion of the screen and keep rerendering it in real time.  It is especially useful for textures and lighting.  It makes it much easier than rendering the whole scene over and over again.  It also saves a great deal of harddrive space. 

I am still a beginer at using Maya 8, but I would jighly recomend the program.  It is very useful , just a little hard to learn in the begining.  My suggestion would be to get a book on it and go through any tutorials that maya 8 has provided for you with the software.  Overall, I would score this very high in my books and I am looking forward to getting good with it.

Dreamweaver October 17, 2006

I am one person who started to learn HTML on his own.  It was about six years ago when I decided that since all my friends had webpages, I was going to make one for myself.  I wanted to do it right, so I used the internet and searched for self HTML tutors.  I learned it pretty quickly and since then, I have always used Notepad to edit HTML files.

Recently, The College of New Jersey required me to use Dreamweaver to edit a website for an entry level course.  After using it, I have formulated some opinions on the software.  Overall, it is a very useful program but have some little flaws in my eyes.

Dreamweaver MX has the design and coder views.  This allows you to see what the site looks like in a browser as well as shows the code.  Since I write mainly in code, I tend to keep the coder section almost maximized, only glancing at the design section from time to time to make sure I typed things correctly.  In addition to these views, you can see your webpage in an external browser that is installed on your computer. 

Dreamweaver MX also allows you to download and upload things from the server where your information was held.  This beats notepad simply because I didn’t have to get an external FTP client to upload my site.   Another feature would be the capibility of dreamweaver to understand the difference between HTML files and other files such as CSS and PHP.  It will even help you code in these languages.  It would suggest code as you type it which helps if you generally know the language.  Dreamweaver can even help you do more complex things like XML, ColdFusion, Java, VB, and preformatted designs. 

Some little flaws would include its lack of a virtual server.  PHP is server side technology and becoming more popular in various web applications.  When I was experimenting with it, I had to either upload it to a server or download a program that would use my computer as a virtual server and mimic a real one. 

Another flaw that I could see would be when you are typing code.  It tries to autocomplete code.  When you type a tag out, it will automatically close the tag.  When I create a webste, I tend to type out the content first, then go back and format the text.  This made things complicated since I would have to copy and paste the end tag where I wanted it, which often times would be much farther in the text.

Overall, Dreamweaver is a good program that I would recomend to edit webpages.  It can organize, upload, download, and format you site with just the click of a few buttons.  It may take a little while to get used to, but after you learn the program, it becomes very easy to edit anyone of your webpages.

Threat: Hackers October 9, 2006

Hackers are people just like the rest of us, except their definition of fun is using a computer to gain access to other computers and take information or leave their mark.  The problem is that they have gotten more numerous and malicious recently.  It has been proven that no matter what computer is hooked up to the internet, where it is located, what security it is behind, or how many firewalls you have to go through, any computer can be hacked.  It is just a matter of time. 

Recently, the BIS (Bureau of Industry and Security) was attacked and caused them to disconnect from the internet.  They are in charge of U.S. exports and have connections with the military.  These computers were hacked and then the hackers installed rootkits and other applications.  These applications would transfer information from the computer to the hacker.   Formatting and deleting the rootkits are not enough, sometimes the applications are embedded in the BIOS.  The government has decided to replace the infected computers with brand new ones.  They have also installed new security measures and now it is just a waiting game before they get attacked again.

Website Design Mistakes: October 6, 2006

1.  Font problems:  You should have high contrast between the font and the background.  People tend to strain their eyes in order to see whats on the page, or just go to a diferent page when there is low contrast.  Also size you text accordingly.

2.  Flash:  Flash is seen all over the place and can get very annoying and cumbersome to load for narrow band connections.  To make your website look better, avoid using flash and try color, font, and design changes.  These are more pleasing to the eye because they don’t flash or blink and load much quicker.

 3.  Links:  You should keeps links like they were originally designed.  Linked text is usually underlined and a different color.  Also try to differentiate between links and visited links.  Opening pages in new windows can get very annoying.  Try to avoid this whenever possible.

4.  Size:  Webpages with a lot of media tend to take a while to download even on broadband connections.  People are in a hurry these days and do not want to wait to view content.  Some remedies would be limiting the use of large pictures by using thumbnails, but still provide a link to the larger picture if the use desires.  Also link to videos rather than putting them in without warning the user that they are going to be there and take time to load up. 

5.  Confusing navigation:  Make sure that people can easily navigate through your site.  The best sites are the ones that are very simple.  This provides all the content on one page, so that people don’t have to scroll, and makes it easy for a non experienced web-user to go about your site.

 6.  CSS usage:  CSS is a powerful tool that will help anyone create a website that is pleasing to the eye and simple.  Use CSS to format your websites rather than tags inside the HTML that code for the font.  This makes it easier for you to go back later and change your site with the press of a few buttons.  This way you can keep your users interested becuase of the color, font, and design changes that only cost you a few moments of your time.

 7.  Target audience:  Targeting your website to please 7 year old children with little bunnies won’t work on adults if you are trying to sell blood pressure medication.  Make sure that you keep your target in mind.  Try to think about what would attract them to your site, what would please them.  Often most web designers want to put what they want in a site and never think about who they are trying to communicate with.

 8.  Amount of material:  Too much on one page may make user confused.  Most people don’t want to have to search through a page to get what they want and often will leave without really looking if the infomation is not right in front of them.  For this reason use links at the top and bottom of the page.  Also, if you can try to split up a page that you would normally have to scroll through into many pages or use anchor tags to help users find what they want.

Most design flaws tend to come from people just not thinking and just making the website.  Before you actually make one, just sit down, relax and use that brain of yours.  Think about your audience, content, color scheme, font, organization of content, and multimedia.  Plans things out and your site in the end will come out much better and more organized.  Also use your friends to find out how things look or sound as you progress.  What is pleasing to your eye might seem discusting to someone else’s.

Security flaws: October 5, 2006

Hackers are prodding more and more into popular web browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer. They exploit these flaws to gain valuable information such as credit card and bank account numbers. It was often thought that Internet Explorer had the most flaws, but recently it was discovered that Internet Explorer only had 38 flaws while Firefox had 47 and 12 in Apple Safari. Using these flaws, hackers are concentrating more on home computers and end users knowing that they are easiest to attack. If this continues, it might lead to a decrease in online banking and purchasing.

Hello world! October 5, 2006

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!