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While the survival of many commercial Web sites is in doubt because of declining advertising revenue, I often find the most comprehensive online resources to be one-person operations. A recent example: Steve Romaine's Cellular Information Site. One finds amazing sites like this one not just about mobile phones, but focussing on digital cameras, satellite television, and shortwave radio.
Another victim falls to the tyranny of Mattel? "What's really strange about this is that, to my knowledge, Barbie is a name. If someone names their kid Barbie, will they too receive a C&D from Mattel? Hmm... Well, if you want to read the C&D its here."
Interactive/On-line SQL Tutorial: Unique introductory SQL tutorial provides SQL instructions and also allows you to practice what you learn using the on-line SQL interpreter, providing you immediate results after submitting your SQL commands. You will be able to create your own unique tables as well as perform selects, inserts, updates, deletes, and drops on your tables.
A modern-day penny dreadful: Hacking is an industry, not just for black and white hat computer security experts, but for the mass media as well. Hackers are the modern-day equivalent of the gunslingers of the American frontier, exploited by the media and misunderstood by a public fascinated by them. The picture of Mitnick presented in Shimomura and Markoff's Takedown is no better then an account of Billy the Kid in a 19th century penny dreadful.
Don't purchase this book without picking up Jonathan Littman's excellent Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick. There are two stories to every side, and the Kevin Mitnick saga is no exception. Littman presents a much more complex and problematic account of Mitnick's supposed exploits, and the media circus that has surrounded him.
Creating Web Pages for Dummies: Every once in awhile a neophyte Web user who had never done any Web authoring asks me to recommend some books to get them started. These days, I suggest Creating Web Pages for Dummies.
Every once in awhile a neophyte Web user who had never done any Web authoring asks me to recommend some books to get them started. These days, I suggest Creating Web Pages for Dummies.
What I liked best about this book was that it more or less stuck to the basics. There is an awful lot to know about creating the Web; so much so, in fact, that it is easy for a knowledgeable author to overwhelm the reader. The other extreme, of course, is skirting over fundamental areas. Creating Web Pages for Dummies pretty much covers everything in enough depth for someone to put together a personal Web site fairly quickly.
Creating Web Pages for Dummies starts out by explaining the fundamentals of HTML and the Web, and then moves into more complex topics, such as how to pick an ISP. One of the great strengths of the book is its focus on a range of simple WYS editors. Web-makers who are just starting do not have to go out and buy a $200 or $300 Web editor; there are a number of very good and very usable tools out there that don't cost a dime.
This book is only a beginning; if you want to get serious about Web design, you'll have to move onto other, more advanced books. But Creating Web Pages for Dummies is an excellent introduction to the subject.
"The Nupedia encyclopedia is a public endeavor; its articles will be publicly accessible and distributable in accordance with our open content license, and it will be constructed by qualified members of the international public... Our goal is to create the largest encyclopedia the world has ever seen."
My design background prior to 1994 is exclusively in prepress graphic design and layout. Like a lot of paper designers who moved to the Web, I have never quite given up on the notion that a Web page editing application should be able to give me the same control over page layout that I enjoyed with Quark XPress and PageMaker.
I have tried most of the WYSIWYG HTML editors: PageMill, NetObjects Fusion, AOLPress, and then Microsoft FrontPage. While better than what had come before it, Microsoft FrontPage has always been crippled by overwhelming shortcomings.
First, the problem typical of WYS Web editors: HTML "correction" and poor code. All versions of FrontPage give an author access to the underlying HTML code, but not complete control over it. If there was only one right way to do something in HTML, that would not be a problem, but with three or four ways to centre something, how can FrontPage, or any other WYS editor, know which one is correct? An HTML editor should give the user complete control over all code. Pointing out errors is fine, but correcting them without asking is not.
Second, FrontPage takes advantage of proprietary Microsoft server-side extensions for such things as guestbooks and page counters. Cool stuff, and easy to use, but it isn't made clear to the novice user is that you will need to have FrontPage extensions installed on your Web server in order for the gizmos to function. A lot of ISPs don't want to do this, which is understandable when CGI scripts can accomplish the same things with fewer hassles.
Finally, FrontPage relies on Internet Explorere-specific JavaScript and DHTML. The first time I tried to slam out a page in FrontPage 2000, this problem bit me. JavaScript is a problematic thing: different Web browsers interpret it differently. It is important to use code that will be understood equally well by Explorer,Netscape, and other browsers. Some of FrontPage's JavaScript and DHTML effects are cross-browser, but many are not, and the interface doesn't tell us which is which.
I am not sure that FrontPage is an appropriate tool for either professional Web designers or people just starting out and creating their first page. On the high end is Macromedia Dreamweaver and text editors like Allaire Homesite, HotMetal, and BBedit. And for people just starting out I recommend a good free WYSIWYG editor such as Netscape Composer or Namo WebEditor, and some books on HTML.
When Peter Hunn was struck by the idea of creating his own radio, he assumed there would be books to tell him how to go about it. As anyone in broadcasting will tell you, radio technology sometimes seems like the closely guarded arcana of engineers and corporations. So he wrote a book, Starting and Operating Your Own FM Radio Station: From License Application to Program Management, a practical and entertaining narrative about building a low-power station, WHRC-FM, for about $40 000. It is such a shame that this charming and useful book is out of print. Nothing has ever quite captured the challenges of rewards of community-style radio as this book by Peter Hunn.
From Metafilter: "Naked Juice: Journal of a Tangerine Girl is the latest personal site to receive a cease-and-desist, after Chiquita Brands, owners of nakedjuice.com and the brand name Naked Juice, say there's potential confusion between this artist's web journal and their juice company. This is despite the fact that the journal is hosted on Jessi's own tangerinegirl.com, a site that obviously has nothing to do with fruit juice, naked or otherwise. Interestingly, though they've apparently claimed in a letter to Jessi that they own the trademark Naked Juice, only the word Naked is trademarked according to their legal page. Contact Naked Juice/Chiquita here."
I love the beginnings of things, and watching the DVD Landmarks of Early Film is the closest we will come to traveling back in time to the late-19th century. One has a very intimate and visceral sense of the subjects that are being recorded; in many of the selections, there is no sense of performance as one might see in a modern documentary, as the people being filmed have little or no idea that their activities are being captured.
Most striking about this collection was the obvious speed with which film created and refined itself as an art form, from Edison Kinestoscope films to the work of the brothers Lumière and Georges Méliès. While there is an awkward experimentalism to the very early films, one soon sees an amazing flowering of techniques and uses for the new medium. This is obviously a very well crafted collection, created by individuals who truly love the subject matter. The quality of the films is great, and the selection well thought-out.
I am a long-time Adobe Photoshop user; I remember using Photoshop 2.0 for Mac in the late-1980s to manipulate images for prepress design work. Even then, it was an amazingly powerful and inspiring application. Over the years it has only gotten better, with a feature list impossible to summarize and amazing extensibility and flexibility. Photoshop is one of those programs that makes the user feel that there is always more to learn, and that there are new creative things to be done.
Photoshop remains my prepress graphics tool of choice. My main beef with the current version (5.5) is the ImageReady component, which was at one point marketed as a separate product to handle Web graphic editing and optimization. ImageReady turns the already big Photoshop application into a behemoth; the resulting app is sluggish and quirky, and sometimes crashes my big office Pentium.
When it was time to upgrade Macromedia Dreamweaver from version 2 to version 3, we purchased the "studio" upgrade that included Macromedia Fireworks. I had seen a demo of Fireworks at a trade show, and was impressed enough to give it serious consideration, at least for specialized tasks such as creating complex Web page layouts and animations. That was five months ago. Photoshop and Fireworks are both installed on my computer, but I now use Fireworks for Web graphics about 80% of the time.
While Firework's feature set is similar to Photoshop/ImageReady, I feel the software is more focused on Web graphics, and the various features are easier to use. I also like the ability to manipulate images as individual objects, and the good support for vector graphics. Macromedia has obviously looked at competing Web graphics programs and adopted existing "best practice" in its software. The result is a tool with amazing range.
Fireworks facilitates a number of Web design processes that I had been using in Photoshop. For example, for more complex designs I would often do the entire layout in Photoshop, then slice the image up and dump the pieces into my HTML editor. To make this common practice easier, Fireworks has a slice tool and a Web layer; slices can be exported as individual graphics with accompanying HTML. Fireworks shines in a number of other areas as well: JavaScript rollovers, GIF animation, graphics optimization, object effects, and vector graphics.
Photoshop is clearly the standard by which other graphics programs have been and will be judged, but it isn't the perfect tool for everyone. It is certainly no tool for novices. It is expensive and requires a higher-end system in order to run properly. The feature set and some of the concepts will be overwhelming for those just getting into photo manipulation and graphics editing. If you are interested in Photoshop-like program that won't scare you to death, the obvious choice is the excellent Jasc Paint Shop Pro, available as shareware.
It sometimes feels like we're all still beta testing various digital imaging technologies, including digital cameras, but I bought a Kodak DC280 two weeks ago. Are the "dark ages" coming to an end? The DC280 appears to be a good mid-range digital camera, good for those who want to capture images for the Web. Biggest plus is image quality: this is the best camera in this price range that I tested, with two-megapixel resolution. Having quite a bit of hands-on experience with various Sony cameras, Donna and I were surprised by how clear the DC280's images were in a variety of lighting conditions.
This is not the perfect camera for all applications. For one thing, there are few manual controls on the camera for focus, aperture or shutter priority, and the optical zoom limited to 2X. This will mean that photo enthusiasts might want to look at something the next step up, such as the wacky-looking Nikon Coolpix 950. As others have reported, low-light shooting is not at the quality that one would hope for from a camera at this level.
Is this cool? Or do I just want too much? A happy marriage between my geek self and my designer/writer self? Is it possible? Is Macromedia Dreamweaver Ultradev the answer?
Lifted from MAtt at Metafilter:
Unbelievable news nugget of the day: my friend Matt Lavallee has been slapped with a cease-and-desist order from the Mattel Toy Corporation for his personal domain, mattl.com. I guess no one with a name that sounds like a misspelled company is allowed to buy domains from now on? Something needs to be done, corporations do not own the web.
Lynda Weinman and Jon Warren Lentz's Deconstructing Web Graphics.2 should be on every serious Web designer's shelf. There are many books about HTML and Web design out there, but few really distinguish themselves as essential. Deconstructing Web Graphics.2 is an exception. Like most of Weinman's work, the book strikes an excellent balance between inspiration and practical techniques. This is a good book for designers who have some experience with Photoshop or Fireworks and want to take the next step. Weinman focuses on case studies of various Web design challenges, and looks at such areas as DHTML, Flash, and Photoshop layers.
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