Month: January 2009

Don't be alarmed if it looked like the entire internet was infected with something earlier this morning—Google apparently tagged every search result, including its own sites, as something that "may harm your computer." The glitch seems to be fixed now (11:50 a.m., EST), and the tips we received from watchful readers came in between 9:52 and 10:20 a.m. EST. We'll update if any official word on what happened comes out of Mountain View. Thanks to Jim and Andy for the screenshots, and to all the readers who tipped us. Update: Google has put out the official word on what happened this morning. In a nutshell: A small bit of human error resulted in a falsely identified internet full of malware.

Driving is a fact of life for most of us, but it doesn't have to be just another chore. Make the most of your driving time with these ten tips for streamlining your time in the car.

Tattoo You (1981) (1/11)

The future is now. Sometimes, we don’t look outside our little angle of it, and that means we miss some possibilities. Other times, we realize something’s out there and we have part of the puzzle, but we’ll catch a different view that gives us even more. I’ve compiled a list of 100 possibilities and things happening out there on the Internet that might be of interest to you. You may have even more to add. Please do.

In this tutorial, we'll manipulate a picture so it looks like a woman burning in flames. The idea behind this manipulation was to create a nice looking illustration, only by using simple techniques and tools such as the Brush tool and Warp command. I hope you enjoy the tutorial and try it with your own stock imagery.

l_b8c44024e4a5f719a00b20dc12da16c7.jpg (JPEG Image, 502×799 pixels)

Fisher has fictionalized her life in several novels (notably Postcards from the Edge), but her first memoir (she calls it a really, really detailed personals ad) proves that truth is stranger than fiction. There are more juicy confessions and outrageously funny observations packed in these honest pages than most celebrity bios twice the length. After describing how she underwent electroshock therapy for her manic depression, Fisher then sorts through her life as her memories return. She predicts that by the end of the book, you'll feel so close to me that you'll want to divorce me. At one point, this daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher (one an icon, the other an arm piece to icons) hilariously diagrams her family tree of Hollywood marriages and remarriages to make sure her daughter's potential date is not a relative. Revealing that at 15 she got a vibrator for Christmas from her mother, she writes,

The title of Carrie Fisher’s funny, sardonic little memoir is a bit misleading. Drinking seems to have been the least of her problems. Pills were more her thing, and for a while hallucinogens. As a teenager, she dropped so much acid that her parents called in the greatest LSD expert they knew: Cary Grant. Her parents were Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and that was part of the problem. They were the Jennifer and Brad of their day, the tabloids’ favorite couple, with Elizabeth Taylor, for whom Mr. Fisher left his wife and family, eventually taking on the role of Angelina, plusher and without the tattoos. “You might say I’m a product of Hollywood inbreeding,” Ms. Fisher writes. “When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.” Though Ms. Fisher now lives next door to her mother, and is on good terms with her father, neither was much of a parent. He was too busy dating, getting married and having face-lifts. She meant well enough, but was first and last a performer.

Star Wars Infinities is a group of mini-series published by Dark Horse Comics, which tell non-canon alternate events that branch off from the events of Star Wars Episodes IV-VI. The individual Infinities stories are unrelated to one another.

LifeChurch.tv is a multi-site church with campuses all across the country as well as a campus that meets entirely on the Internet. The mission of the church is to lead people to become full devoted followers of Christ.

Text of President Barack Obama's inaugural address on Tuesday, as delivered.

FireScope is a Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug, to extend it with reference material for HTML and CSS. The extension's core functionality is centered around a new Reference panel, which contains a search tool for looking up HTML elements, attributes, and CSS properties. The extension also hooks into context-menus in the HTML and CSS panels, the DOM crumbtrail, and the Inspector, adding options to look up a selected item (ie. search for it in the Reference panel) or to view a code example.

MichaelsMusicService.com – Making Old Music Live Again

I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama's inaugural address. To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file. My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes. Use the controls to zoom and pan around the photo. You can also double click to zoom in and double click again to get even closer.

This is the second tutorial in a series on photographic retouching. The first part was all about evening skin tonal values and removing blemishes. In this part I will take you through everything else. So, as a result it's a long video (40 Mins). Originally written for www.whiteinkblog.com .In this tutorial I will complete a professional photographic retouching from start to finish. Before watching please note that there is a lot of information in this video to absorb, so watch and re-watch areas that you find more advanced. This is a 40 minute video, I'd recommend pausing it at regular intervals before continuing so that you fully understand all the processes. Some of the areas covered in this video are:

Wooo! Finally we are on dfGallery 2.0. We now commit to you that this gallery will be one of the coolest Free Flash Galleries. v1 with 200,000+ downloads was the hottest topic on our site and we hope to see a lot with this too. This is just the alpha release and we expect lots of feedback to get this to its best possible.. The reason for this gallery to be cool is not just its UI but the way it is built and architected. We have an amazing theme engine built to support custom themes with multiple skins for each. The administration console built on CodeIginter lets you manage multiple galleries and albums of different types. Soon we will have a dedicated section on the site where the community can contribute themes and skins. Till then enjoy this beautiful work by us 🙂

Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov. I'm Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog. A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and his new administration officially came to life. One of the first changes is the White House's new website, which will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world. Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future. WhiteHouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement. Just like your new government, WhiteHouse.gov and the rest of the Administration's online programs will put citizens first. Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:

Protecting images online is a difficult, almost impossible, mission to accomplish. At the end, the image is there and a "print screenshot" command can grab it & no way to stop this. But, there are various ways to harden the process & make it not worth trying like disabling right clicks, using images as backgrounds, adding watermarks to them & more.

See that footer, way down there? It's stuck to the bottom of the page even when thin on content. Otherwise it would be floating halfway up the page. Cross Browser Support for Sticky Footer Code This sticky footer solution is working in all major browsers, including Google Chrome!. It works with floated 2-column layouts and we don't get overlap in resized browser windows unlike older solutions you find when you Google sticky footer. And you don't need an empty push div.

The Washington Post has reported that Heartland Payment Systems, a payment processor that services "more than 250,000 businesses," has had more than 100 million transactions compromised via malicious software that was installed on its network; it will likely turn out to be the largest data breach ever reported. The "good" news is that the criminals were only capturing credit card numbers, the names on the cards, and expiration dates—the info encoded onto the magnetic strip on the card. Because no addresses, SSNs or PINs were stolen, the prospect of full-blown identity theft is pretty small—which must explain why Heartland isn't offering any sort of credit monitoring package as compensation. Instead, their CFO says, "We recognize and feel badly about the inconvenience this is going to cause consumers."

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's first public act in office Wednesday was to institute new limits on lobbyists in his White House and to freeze the salaries of high-paid aides, in a nod to the country's economic turmoil. Announcing the moves while attending a ceremony in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to swear in his staff, Obama said the steps "represent a clean break from business as usual." The pay freeze, first reported by The Associated Press, would hold salaries at their current levels for the roughly 100 White House employees who make over $100,000 a year. "Families are tightening their belts, and so should Washington," said the new president, taking office amid startlingly bad economic times that many fear will grow worse.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's first public act in office Wednesday was to institute new limits on lobbyists in his White House and to freeze the salaries of high-paid aides, in a nod to the country's economic turmoil. Announcing the moves while attending a ceremony in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to swear in his staff, Obama said the steps "represent a clean break from business as usual." The pay freeze, first reported by The Associated Press, would hold salaries at their current levels for the roughly 100 White House employees who make over $100,000 a year. "Families are tightening their belts, and so should Washington," said the new president, taking office amid startlingly bad economic times that many fear will grow worse.

WASHINGTON (Jan. 22) – President Barack Obama is ready to trumpet Hillary Rodham Clinton's installation as secretary of state while turning to veteran politician and dealmaker George Mitchell to guide the new administration through the Mideast thicket. It amounts to a new-look U.S. foreign policy by four senators — Obama and Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden, who served together until after this year's election, and Mitchell, who served much earlier as Senate majority leader. Obama was going to the State Department Thursday to join Clinton in addressing diplomats there and — very likely — setting forth major elements of the administration's emerging national security strategy.

KSDK — A police-owned vehicle that was stolen Wednesday afternoon according to police has reportedly been recovered. The car belongs to the Metro East Auto Theft Task Force. Police said the vehicle was stolen by a man in the vicinity of Wood River. Investigators said they were investigating an auto theft ring when it happened. The suspect, identified as Derek Union, was apparently leading police to a location where they could find stolen and wrecked cars. When an officer got out to take pictures, Union wriggled his way out of his handcuffs, got into the front seat and took off.

“The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray. The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries. A craze of treasure-hunting has swept through the remnants of the Great Underground Empire. It’s a dangerous time to be a newly-unemployed traveling salesman, but it’s also a great time to try a bit of adventuring.”

This Firefox extension lets you download BitTorrent files with a single click. Version 1.0 has been built from scratch and is based on the popular libtorrent library, resulting in amazing performance. || Supercharge your web downloads! By using state of the art acceleration technology, this extension will speed up your downloads up to 10 times.

Well, we’ve solved our latest credit card validation problem and it seems like a good time to give a quick recap of the lessons we’ve learned during this whole sordid process. Things that nobody bothers to tell you, not even the people you’re paying to do just that. This is 2008, but credit card processing is a technological throwback to the Dark Ages.

From the official wget homepage: "GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without Xsupport, etc." While you can get Windows binaries from Heiko Herold's page, the binaries here are tweaked a bit so they operate somewhat better on Windows. The following changes, compared to the official distribution, were retained/added since 1.8.2: * Statically linked with (masm optimized) OpenSSL 0.9.8i, which makes wget.exe completely stand-alone. * Compressed with UPX 1.07 for smaller filesize It seems the rfc1738 problems on Windows (see below) were fixed in wget 1.9, so there is no longer a need to edit the source code.

A REVOLUTIONARY AND EASY TO USE MUSIC PLAYER THAT PLAYS AUDIO ON YOUR WEBSITE. Adds audio to your site with one line of HTML Uses simple, easy-to-hack HTML instead of complicated proprietary markup, ushering in the REAL Media Web Magical floating design never gets lost, is available when you need it, gets out of your way when you don't need it Automatically finds all audio links on your page, turning your page into a playlist Plays all your blog entries with a single button click Allows you to put the play buttons where they belong: IN CONTEXT Keeps the user in the page rather than sending them away to a media player Picks up your images and adds them as cover art Requires no download, install or maintenance

POWER SOURCES DIVINE: Sorceror-Kings and Primordials (Elemental-Lords) are the only one who fill this power source. They are no Gods who can touch Athas. ARCANE: Action to Preserve and to Defile are unique arcane aspect on Athas. Arcane Magic defile the land by default. To preserve the land is to consciously make an effort to shape the magic. Defile = No action. Land die within a Burst around the caster. At-will powers/Heroic Arcane Rituals = Burst 1; Encounter powers/Paragon Arcane Rituals = Burst 3; Daily powers/Epic Arcane Rituals = Burst 5. Preserve = Minor Action. Done before (take slowly the magical energies) or after the spell (give back what's left of it) PRESERVING & DEFILING HEROIC FEATS Preserving Magic: You now preserve with spending an action to do it. Defiling Magic: Every time you defile, you now gain your Int modifier as temporary hit points from the leftover power of the land that you keep.

The WordPress 5-minute install is great, nothing complicated about getting your blog up and running (most of the time). But once you install WordPress there are a number of other steps that you need to take in order to get the most from your blog. Use the following as a to-do checklist for your future installations and you'll keep yourself right. 1. Change the Admin Password and Manage Your Authors Wordpress gives you some random concoction of a password that you're *never* going to remember so the first thing you need to do is change this to something memorable. Manage your user settings via the Users panel, and you can add any additional blog authors here.

Behold the Greatest Workstation of All Time: the Emperor. I mean, come on, anything that looks like it can control a turbolaser battery or fire a giant anti-matter death ray must be the greatest workstation of all time, period. But according to Patrick Laflamme Duval—business developer for manufacturer Novelquest—the name is not a Star Wars nod, but a reference to the emperor scorpion's tail:

The Sexy Curls jQuery Plugin! is an open-source jQuery plugin by Elliott Kember which lets you share in the beauty of the page fold. You want a demo page? You're looking at it. The source code is available at GitHub.

If you're a webmaster and you've ever needed to submit your link to an online directory or link exchange which limits the number of characters or number of words that you can use for your site description, you surely know what a nuisance it can be to add up words or characters! For that reason, we offer the following "cut and paste" free online word count and character counting tools together on one handy page to help you to quickly determine the number of words and characters contained in any phrase.

Your domain name is a powerful business asset. Are you doing everything you can with it? Does it help you compete online? Answer 3 quick questions to find out!

I know that there are many resources regarding this topic but there are never enough. This post is dedicated to small snippets from WordPress that will make your life easier. Or maybe my life easier and in this case I want to have them in one single post. In a way I’m trying to help you and in another I’m trying to organize this stuff for myself.