Wednesday, September 12, 2007
All About Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask
This is a very nice article about the unsharp mask. It does a nice job of explaining the technical theory and how to use the options available in this filter.
Sharpening Using an Unsharp Mask
While this filter is excellent alone, using it in conjunction with the high pass filter can really help a poorly focused image.
Photoshop • Tutorials • Comments (0) • Trackbacks (0) • Permalink
Are CAPTCHAs Useless?
I read a couple of interesting posts today about the effectiveness of CAPTCHAs:
Battling Comment Spam: Human Versus Human
These CAPTCHAs are just not working out
I had my doubts about how useful CAPTCHAs were once I read a while back about how people were being paid to solve them for spammers. I used to think it was a good idea, but now really doubt that they are really worth the trouble. People wanting to post real comments have another barrier, while spammers seem to just blow right past them. I would say my own success rate with actually being able to type them correctly the first time around is 80%. Like gun control, they seemed to be designed to harass the legit users and do little to deter the bad guys from pulling their tricks.
So for this reason, I disabled the CAPTCHAs in the comment and contact forms on one of my websites. I had very few comments when compared to my sites that don't use them, and I have a feeling that the CAPTCHAs were one of the reasons.
Content Management Systems • Comments (1) • Trackbacks (0) • Permalink
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Safari Books Online
I ordered my textbooks this semester from half.com over two weeks ago, unfortunately from one seller, and of course they have yet to arrive. In the meantime, I need them for my classes this week. I've ordered plenty of times from half.com, and haven't had this problem before. Then I see in the feedback comments recently posted for this particular seller that plenty of people have been complaining about slow shipping.
So, I decided to go with a Safari Books trial. For $40/month (or $36 if you go with the full year subscription) you can access thousands of primarily technology books online. Considering the amount of reading I like devoting to this subject...I'm considering it a worthwhile investment. And I don't have to pay for shipping or wait for the books to arrive. It is also very easy to save time by just copying and pasting the code right from the ebook rather than typing out out manually from the print edition.
Note: If you are a university student at a private or larger public university, you may be able to access Safari books from campus. I know that while I was still at UCONN I could access it from either the campus network or via VPN while off campus.
When I finally get the books I ordered on half.com, I will probably save the bookshelf space and sell them right away at cost. No more buying technology books online unless I can't find them on Safari Books.
Web 2.0 Layout Generator
From the website:
This page has nearly everything: Rounded corners, gradients, XHTML and CSS, a color scheme to make your eyes vomit, a trendy 'badge', Google Ads, whitespace galore and a big-ass dorky font. Pop in some AJAX and watch squillions of dollars roll in.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Windows Mobile 2003 Internet Explorer and Style Sheets
I decided to start playing with my Dell Axim X3i that I bought a few years ago. It has WiFi built in, along with Bluetooth. I noticed that while some websites were fine, others were a complete mess, including my BunnyOne Design website. It looked like it was rendering a mix of the screen and handheld versions of my style sheets. I was so shocked at how awful it looked. I had viewed the website in Dreamweaver's mobile browser preview, and it looked fine there...
So, I decided to do a little investigation. It turns out that for some reason, Pocket Internet Explorer is designed to read screen style sheets, and not handheld style sheets. (At least the version included on my Axim.)
I saw on a forum that someone suggested capitalizing Screen as a way of tricking this version of IE into ignoring screen style sheets. When I tried it, it worked.
The Code
Change the link to your style sheet from this:
<link href="../CSS/screen.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" />
to
<link href="../CSS/screen.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="Screen" />
This will make Pocket IE skip over your default screen style sheet, but at the same time allow desktop and laptop computers to access it normally.
