Category Archives: education

Professional web tools for the photographer

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Recently my partner had an interesting experience and I have learned a lot from it too. He was asked by Nancy Morrison to be a model for some portrait photography. Nancy used to be a dancer and then decided to photograph dancers. She has moved on to photographing actors and couples now. Her portraits are wonderful, but she has been able to afford nice lenses and has learned photography very well, it seems. She is now a professional photographer.

My partner did the session and the results are here

Nancy has used a site to create her galleries. It is called zenfolio. As you can see, it costs, but not much. You can try a free trial and then sign up for a basic package, or pay more for a professional package. I’m not sure which one Nancy chose. What’s interesting about this site is that people cannot download the pictures. Not only that, it is easy to navigate and looks attractive.
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Great tutorials for the newbie web designer

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Quackit teaches beginners how to create websites. They start off slowly, teaching you the basics such as HTML and CSS. Then they introduce you to more advanced topics so that you can add more features to your website.

It is similar to my own site, but has many more tutorials on css coding, xml, and

  • JavaScript Tutorial
    Learn how to add functionality and interactivity to your web pages.
  • ColdFusion Tutorial
    ColdFusion is a server-side programming/scripting environment used to build dynamic websites.
  • PHP Tutorial
    This PHP Tutorial demonstrates just how easy it is to create dynamic websites using PHP.
  • VBScript Tutorial
    This tutorial teaches you VBScript from the ground up – starting with the basics.

Database

  • Database Tutorial
    Learn the fundamentals of databases and database management systems.
  • SQL Tutorial
    Covers everything you need to know to get started in database programming using SQL.
  • SQL Server Tutorial
    Provides an overview of SQL Server – Microsoft’s enterprise database management system.
  • Microsoft Access Tutorial
    Use Microsoft Access to perform many typical database tasks such as creating databases, tables, queries, and more.
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Prezi – a visual web based presentation tool

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Prezi is a web-based presentation tool with so much more to offer than Microsoft Power Point.
It has built-in design tools allowing the effects of time, space and movement.
It is free if you only use 100 megabytes of storage space. These become public and have a watermark on them.

You can pay to have the watermark removed and the presentations will be private and you get 500 megabytes of storage space.
The next level of payment allows you to download to your desktop and have 2 megabytes of storage space.

What are they useful for?
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Phone scam

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You are probably aware already that there is a phone scam going around in Australia and  don’t know what other countries. I have heard it on the radio and several have been taken in by it.

What happens is that someone rings and says they are a technical support person who is a representative on Microsoft or Windows and they say you have a problem on your computer which is ‘pinging’ back to them. They ask you to go into Command on your computer and give you a command to run and up pops various reds and blues. Or they ask you to go to your Event Viewer. The event viewer is accessed by going to your Control Panel > Administrative Tools and then Event Viewer. Then they offer to fix this (non-existent) problem for  a price. These calls appear to be coming from India but if people ask for a phone number they get an Australian phone with an Australian name.

If you accept you will lose money for nothing AND have more malicious code put onto your computer.

Microsoft will never ring you. Nor will any other software technical support.  If you ask them to give you your computer’s IP address (those numbers you often see), they don’t seem to know them.

DO NOT give these scammers your credit card details or access to your computer remotely.

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The nightmare of the new hard disc drive

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Samsung HD400LD hard disk drive (400 GB storag...
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Okay, so I found that I couldn’t reformat my old hard drive because it was corrupted.

I backed everything up on an external drive. Backing up emails is easy, but restoring them is less so.

I bought a new 1 TB Sata hard drive over the internet.  Sata HDDs are much more common now that IDE drives and much easier to connect. As I installed it, I took photos of the old one within the case so I would remember how the wires went. I can’t find them this minute, because these photos are untitled.

I inserted everything correctly finding where the cables went.   I started installing Windows XP and pressed F2 to see Set up or BIOS. I saw that the new Hard drive was there. I changed the boot up sequence so that the computer would boot up from the Windows disc.

At a certain point the Windows disk would stop and it would say “no hard disc detected”. Installation has failed. I tried every combination of BIOs settings and boot sequences. No luck.

Finally, I rang a tech company and when the guy came out, all was well, except that my version of Windows did not contain the drives necessary for the motherboard and new HDD. So off it went to the factory and 3 days later at came back all fixed.

I’m restoring everything now. Thank God for the password reminders on web sites, because of all the folders in my outlook email account guess which one didn’t restore. My passwords!!

It’s very nice to see updated software from the web though.

So, if your motherboard is old and that only means a few years, then your search on the internet for how to change a HDD (which is easy) won’t bear fruit. If it is newer, it is a synch really.

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My site was hacked

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I received an email from Google to notify me that I had malware on my site. When I went to the offending pages I saw, “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer” No-one could see the information.

What to do?

The email had a link to Webmaster tools (You must have a Google account).

Click on your site

Click on Diagnostics > malware

You will see down the bottom : Problematic URLs

Click on details

It shows suspected injected code. Mine was an iframe linking to an ad.

Now you might be able to find this and delete it, but I just deleted the subdirectory (it was on a second blog of mine)

I changed my password for my FTP program and my control panel where I host my site. I scanned my site: nothing. So someone had accessed my control panel on my server or my FTP program.

I have lost the posts for this blog because I hadn’t backed it up, but luckily I wasn’t using it much. I’m not sure if the bad code could have been easily removed.

So, keep your virus program up to date, change passwords on your FTP and control panel regularly and back up your blog. Web sites are easier to fix.

Get a good firewall.

Good luck!

Oh, once you have fixed the problem you need to get your site reviewed by Google. Webmaster tools tells you how.

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…'

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lorem ipsum in typeface Helvetica
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Ever wondered how to do this on a mock up web site? What is lipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Here’s the interpreter?

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Bukisa

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Bukisa is a bit like Squidoo.

It is a convenient, one-stop community where members can find information and educational content. Content includes articles, videos, presentations, audio recordings and image slideshows. In addition, members are paid ongoing royalties for their shared knowledge contributions.

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Just discovered Zemanta

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A Splash of Sun
Image by Chris Gin via Flickr

Where have I been? Zemanta is wonderful. It can be downloaded as a Firefox add on. It can work on any blogging platform. It suggests photos (from Flickr) for your blog, tags and related articles from other blogs, including Amazon Books with your own referral ID on them. I love it. See the reblog sign down on the right. That’s what it does also. That’s how I discovered it. I reblogged someone else’s article.

Also it allows you to easily put your link on Facebook, Twitter and Mashable or almost anywhere you want.

And you can apply links to the content of your blog, which are mostly definitions from wikipedia or the URL addresses. You don’t need to code them. They just happen.

Below are some of the related articles.

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A useful tool for translation

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Lingoes V2.6.2 released Jul 16, 2009

The new version of Lingoes integrates cursor translator, looking-up in dictionaries and intelligent translation by creative zoned word translator. With selection of word or sentence in screen by cursor, it will translate as many as 23 languages of text into your native language. It’s very convenient to use, we believe the new technology will change communication method among people.
New features:

1. Mini windows
2. Innovative zoned word translator can translate as many as 23 languages of text into your native language(or other language)
3. Natural voice can perfectly pronounce word just like a native English speaker.
4. Provide plugin for Adobe Acrobat Pro
5. Support cursor translator more fluently in Firefox 3

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