Hello folks, after a long time.
Funny thing, its actually has been a long time and the last time I designed the pencil sketch of the box and today after I designing a 3D version of the same box with wood and it has been a quite a good number of days in between.
But I want to mention here that the design I am posting here is a 3D rendering I designed from scratch based on the pencil sketch.
And I will keep trying to post more blog posts in here in the fields of interst and would appreciate the inspiration from you with your comments.
Doing it in 3D
Pencil Art work ; Abundance
Further enhanced version
Once again I went back to my drawings and drew somethings of a more abstract nature and after a scan of the sketch I added digital enhancements using Photoshop. In this art work the photoshop impact is heavy as it added more quality and flare to otherwise an ordinary graphic.
Enjoy!
Shot at Comic Character drawing; Wolverine
The transformation from the original scanned copy of pencil drawing.
Learn Yahoo Finance
Hello guys!
How have you been? I apologize for not being relatively active in the blog in the recent past. But the good news is today I am going to write about another lesson on Yahoo Finance, in the series of learning how to use Yahoo Finance for your investment purposes.
As you can see in the picture, we are talking today about Historical Prices section in the yahoo finance. Just like an eleven year old can tell you, its the past values for a stock.
In this section you can set your own date range for a company's stock on Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Dividends only basis. One important thing to mention in here is that prices listed here are end of the day prices and they are already adjusted for Dividend and Stock split.
At the bottom of the page you have the opportunity to download this data set to an Excel compatible file.
So thats all on Historical Prices section on Yahoo Finance.
Personal Finance, better balance your income to expense
Personal Finance education or making people aware of better personal finance management skills, still I found to be a topic need addressed for the time being.
Typical example of ciaos of personal finances effect on economy goes like this...
Poor personal Finance management > Individuals borrowing money on credit > Poor planning cause individuals to not able to pay the borrowed money back in time > Banks that lend money in trouble > Banks asking for help from the government to survive > Bailout plan from Gov using tax payer money > Government debt sky rockets
The circle goes on and on as long as Banks continue to lend money to individuals that has no long-term solid means for repaying.
2nd 10 day Results for Traffic Counter experiment
From the results for the day 11 till 20th, as you can see in the chart above, clearly shows a difference between categories. On the last column I have the percentage of that data set as of the highest data set, which is Statcounter.
We are 2/3 way to completing our experiment and so far in both occasions it seemed clear that StatCounter is the only site that record the traffic data relatively accurate. (In this case it means higher numbers -- the numbers that others failed to track)
If you have any other questions about this experiment as we progress to the last part, please feel free to ask them in the comments section.
How to use restrict access & blocking other PCs on LinkSys router WTR54G
Have you had situations where you are watching something or surfing web and the internet is really slow on your DSL/Cable modem and you share the connection with other people or you think other people accessing your wireless is whats slowing it down?
Linksys router and several other routers comes with internet access restriction features and also bandwidth limit features. In this post I will talk about Internet restriction and Mac filter, how to put these into good use to stop unauthorized access to your internet boradband connection with WTR54G Linksys router.
First access your wireless router from http://192.168.1.1 and with your username password, on default its "admin" you will see a window like this...
To use Wireless MAC filter
What this feature does is, it filter certain MAC addresses or block certain MAC addresses from accessing your wireless internet. The MAC address we are referring in this example is your computer's MAC address.
Note: to find out your MAC address; run cmd (command prompt) type "ipconfig /all" it should be referred to as Physical address.
Back in the router page, go to Wireless > Wireless MAC filter
Select Enable, and pick whether you want to prevent the PCs or permit only listed PCs. Then click "Edit MAC filter list" and enter all the MAC address you want or you dont want to access your wireless internet.
Click save changes. and you have just successfully stopped other people from using your wireless.
To use Access Restriction
Access Restriction (AR) will completely disconnect the internet of a certain PC you want you can also specify what time you want this to happen, on what days.
Go to your router access page;
Click Access Restriction
First Edit the list of PCs you are targeting in this AR. Save the list and close. (always save the list or else it would not record the MAC ids) You can allowed up to 10 of these AR policies with WTR54G model router. Give it a name Under "Enter Policy Name" select whether you want to deny or allow and the Days, Times, even web addresses. When everything is done select "Enable" on Status and save changes.
These two techniques are very powerful to a certain level in restricting internet access from your connection to unauthorized computers. But of course there are computer hackers out there who always find ways to creep through these barriers and locked doors and that's what makes the world!
Borrowing money (Loans) Simple version for Eager Learners
Borrowing money or on credit or taking a loan to pay it back later, all these terms refer to the same concept. And in this blog post I am going to break it down for you to understand the deep structure of what happen with borrowing money.
When you are borrowing money from a bank or an institution, you will be borrowing a large portion of money and will divide this into equal parts and pay it back over time with an added fee. This is called the interest on a loan or a credit.
On the opposite side, this is how banks make money. By lending to people and receiving interest on them over time.
There is a "Time value of money" concept involved in the simple money borrowing situation. In other words the Interest you are paying for bank loan (after 1 period) is the value of money over that one period, which you didn't pay until the end of the 1st period. So longer the money stays the higher the time value of money becomes.
It also refers to receiving XX today being equal to receiving YY over periods in the future because of the time value that is taken into account for the money.
For example lets assume you are planning to buy a new Car and you don't have enough money, so you decide to consult a bank as to a potential loan program. For this example lets say you need another $30,000 for the car, that you need from a loan.
Assuming that you met all the criteria the XYZ bank agrees to lend you money at 5% APR.
what is APR?
Annual percentage rate. Now if the bank say you have to pay the $30,000 in 10 years with equal payments of $3000 every year, the APR is the annual interest that will add onto the annual payment. So in this case your interest payment for a year is....
$3000 x 5% = $150
so total payment is $3150 per year.
Important part here is before you accepting the loan and enjoying your hot wheels, you should thoroughly consider whether you can meet these annual payment requirements. Because you can not meet the annual payment with interest, the bank will apply late fees, and that will lead to more other fees before you go "over draft" and into default. So called the "snowball effect".
Little insight: The United States current economy's main cause -- AIG and other big financial institutes failures -- is lending money to individuals and approving them for loans when it seemed from a deep look that they, not in any shape or form, would have been able to meet in the payment requirements in distant future. Yet were approved and the banks now suffer from the imposed-upon defaults.
So in recap, when you borrow money you will be given a certain set period to pay it back with added interest to each period. It is very important to identify whether one can meet the payments sufficiently before accepting a loan.
What is RSS, Simple version for eager learners
RSS, Real Simple Syndication.
There has been exponentially increasing number of web blogs and news websites in today's world. But in this enormous information jungle how are you going to find the information that you need, the information that matches your taste??
In old days, what used to be was, people go out there and watch TV and read newspapers to get the information from out there. Which involve reading the entire Newspaper, meaning more time spent to find what you like. But now with the invention of blog everyone has the capability of producing high quality content that may prove a great value to you, to your knowledge base. This had made it difficult to find the information you like and that has a higher value to you.... and that's when the RSS comes.
RSS with the familiar icon like this is the solution for today's world to have those content that have a great value to you, to come to you and not you having to go out there and spend hours finding content of importance.
With a reader like Google Reader (or NewsGator, My Yahoo) you can stay upto date with your favorite sites and blogs for the information that you value. And RSS or the xml version of the websites and blogs makes it easier for these Syndication readers to capture those information and bring it to the reader's website so you only have to visit Google reader and have the luxury of reading latest articles and blog posts of all your favorite blogs and news articles,
all at one place.
Add ashPresentom to your newly created Reader now!
10 days update of traffic counter experimental study
It has been 10 days since we started the experimental study to find out which traffic counter is more accurate (well relatively accurate). As I mentioned in the introduction experiment page, I will be posting results every 10 days from the date we started the experiment, today I will be posting the results here.
Results
So clearly from the table we can see that Statcounter had recorded more hits and pageviews than any of the other two.
If we assume our determinant is Page visits (Total views), Google Analytics have the lowest, which in other words (for this experiment) means it had recorded the lesser of visits to ashPresentom over last 10 days.
If we assume our experiment determinant is Page Views, in which case sitemeter becomes the lesser to have recorded a low number of page views.
It has only been 33% of our expected experimental period and these results are starting to clearly tell us which site measure website traffic accurately.
Additions after 10 days
I have added to the site after 10 days another 2 FREE website traffic counters you can find out there. In selecting the counters I paid close attention to the way they display results and easy installation and navigation.
New additions are;
4. ShinyStat (http://www.shinystat.com/)
5. GoStat (http://gostats.com/)
Anna Faris iPhone Wallpaper
This blog post will feature Anna Faris in iPhone Wallpaper. She cast in the recent movie Observe and Learn as the character of Brandi. Enjoy!
Click here to download the iPhone wallpaper
How to make hover button for website (mouse rollover button) with CSS/HTML
Today's post is going to focus on creating a roll over button using CSS and HTML just like the one you see above. And I will go over getting it to work with IE as well.
In website designing, website designer care a lot about website loading time and pay a great deal of time coding in a way it would make the site load faster. For instance if you want to do a rollover button, where you would have a button like this (inactive)
and switches into this image once you move your mouse over the image (button)
You would have to have two different pictures loaded into viewers computer to show this, meaning longer time to load two images as oppose to one.
Lets look at the file sizes of these two images;
They both are in gif fully optimized form,
inactive image is 4.21KB and the active image is 4KB. Total of 8.21KBs
What if you could use only a single image which has both rollover and inactive images in a single image??
Like this one..
This combined image is 7.53KBs not much of a difference but it is something. And loading a single image is always faster in website world than loading more images.
How do you make a rollover button with single image with both active and inactive images in one. First of all you have to design this button with precision. In the above button it has width of 400 pixels and height of 100 pixels which is 50 to one and 50 to other.
After you have designed the button image using this CSS and HTML code you can easily.
CSS code for this feature
HTML to in the body
Portions that make this code work in IE is "display:block" and associating the image to "a" rather than using <img> or linking to <div>.
Break down of the roll-over CSS effect;
With this code we are telling to move the background image of <a> tag to move up by describing its new position which is starting from bottom-left corner.
"a:hover" is the CSS hover or mouse roll-over associated code we use here in CSS.
Fast and Furious 4 poster design
Featured here is a poster design of the lastest action movie, Fast and Furious 4, by aj designs. If there are enough requests there is a possibility of producing a wallpaper based on this poster. So let me know...
Rachel Mcadams iPhone wallpaper
iPhone Wallpapers blog posts series.
As iPhone becoming an added gadget in people's lives, there had to be a certain amount of specialty be granted for enhancement of its usages and outlook. ashPresentom will assist our dear viewers in colorizing and adding killer graphics to your iPhone background with series of iPhone wallpaper backgrounds following this blog post. So check out again for our future iPhone background wallpapers.
Note: content here published under ashPresentom iPhone wallpaper blog posts series are a sole property of ashPresent.blogspot.com. These can only be republished with the mention of ashPresent.blogspot.com. 
Download Rachel McAdams iPhone Wallpaper
State of Fear by Micheal Crichton
Great novel by Micheal Crichton, talks about Global Warming. I found the topics discussed in the novel to be of truth, and the provided references to articles clarifies Crichton's points across.
A speculation of the global warming as discussed in here, writer takes you on a course where you will see the elite planning events that create world catastrophes artificially, such as detonated blasts in Antarctica that creates huge ice bergs, and Cavitation generators in use to create undersea land slide that trigger a Tsunami from Solomon islands.
Group of fully aware people find clues to these events and follow them in an attempt to stop these catastrophes from happening. On the other side, elite plan conferences focusing global warming -used as a state of fear to control humans- are expecting these catastrophes which will help them prove their point across to humans that Global warming is causing these events.
Fascinating script and story line, Crichton expressively provide statistics and build the story to a great phenomenon.
aP Novel rating of
4.7/5.0
Download eBook version of State of Fear by Micheal Crichton
Click here
Other Novels Featured on ashPresentom
Simple Genius by David Baldacci
Hour Game by David Baldacci
The key for readable clean Typograhpy
Achieving readability is relatively easy; all it takes is to follow a few key practices. A readable Web page can go a long way with your users, and readability has a huge impact on their experience. Designing for the Web is all about making the user’s experience as pleasant as possible. Here are 9 tips that will help you work towards readability.
1. User-Friendly Headers
Headers are a key element in typography, Web and print alike. As mentioned, they are part of the text hierarchy and a major factor in scannable content.
First off, header size is just as important as the size of the body text. Going too big with the header with a large amount of content can throw the user off balance when reading and cause them to lose their spot. It will ultimately ruin the flow of the content and be a distraction. Headers that are too small will ruin the hierarchy of the article, too. If the header is too small, it will not draw the user’s attention as it should.
Next, it is important to provide ample space between the header and body text.
2. Scannable Text
I have already mentioned “scannable” text many times, and you have surely heard it elsewhere. Scannable text goes hand in hand with readable text. Making copy scannable consists of good use of headers, hierarchy and focus points to guide the user through the content.
So, what makes copy scannable? Well, there are many factors, most of which have already been mentioned. Header size and position, body text size, text line height, text contrast and the way focus points are differentiated all impact how scannable copy is.
Focus points are certain elements or objects within the layout that attract, or are supposed to attract, the user’s attention. This could be a header, a graphical element, a button, etc.
3. White Space
In content-heavy layouts, spacing contributes to the readability of content. White space helps to offset large amounts of text and helps the user’s eyes flow through the text. It also provides separation between elements in the layout, including graphics and text.
In the example below, white space and only white space is used to separate text elements. The layout is very clean and efficient. The user’s eyes flow from text element to text element with ease, because of the large amounts of white space.
4. Consistency
Consistency is often regarded as an important technique for usability, but it also applies to readability. Consistency in the hierarchy is important to a user-friendly layout. This means that all headers of the same importance in the hierarchy should be the same size, color and font. For example, all < h1 > headers in an article should look identical. Why? This consistency provides users with a familiar focus point when they are scanning, and it helps to organize the content.
5. Density of Text
Density of text refers to the amount of words you place in one area. Density of content has a major impact on your content’s readability. Density is affected by spacing options such as line height, letter spacing and text size. If you find a balance between all of these so that the content is neither too compact nor too widely spaced, you will have perfect density that is both readable and scannable.
6. Emphasis of Important Elements
Another key factor is emphasis of certain elements within the body content. This includes highlighting links, bolding important text and showing quotes. As mentioned, focus points are essential in Web typography. By emphasizing these objects, you provide focus points for the user. These points and objects help break up monotonous text.
Scannable text is extremely important. By providing these focus points,, you make the body text extremely scannable. Bolding key lines of text immediately attracts the user’s eye and is therefore a very important element in presenting important information.
Pictured below is an article from UXBooth. This article uses bolding and italics to point out important information in the article. This is a very readable article and very easy article to scan for information.
7. Organization of Information
Believe it or not, the way you organize information in an article can strengthen readability. Users are guided with ease through content that is properly organized because information is easier to find. This veers into issues beyond the scope of this article but is still very important.
8. Clean Graphical Implementation
Every text body needs some sort of visual support, be it an image, icon, graph or illustration. Placing the graphic in the article can be challenging. Sufficient space is needed between the graphic and text.
If the graphical element is an image, then a clean border is a good idea for providing a clean separation from the text. Borders can help guide the user’s eyes and are good for adding style to content. It is important, however, to keep borders in content simple. They should have a subtle color palette and shouldn’t be too large.
In the case of graphical elements such as icons and illustrations, space is the only separator that should be used. The content should move cleanly around the graphic without disrupting the text.
9. Use of Separators
Separators are a simple and easy way to divide text into sections in a clean and organized manner. They can be used to divide hierarchy elements, such as headers and body text. They can also be used to divide content into sections.
The simplest form of divider is a single line. These are most often used to divide hierarchy elements and are very useful for making subtle divisions that still play a big role in readability.
Another common way to divide content is to use boxes. Text boxes are excellent for separating unrelated content on a single page. They help move the user’s eyes through a complex layout. Below is an example of this on Pixelmator’s website. It uses boxes to separate content in a clean way. Notice how the boxes are defined by their background instead of a border.
10. Good Margins
You hear people say that you should use white space, but why? White space actually helps draw the user’s eye to the text. The blank area (white space) forces the eye to focus on the text. So white space will influence the flow and readability of content. Margins are one of the best white space elements and support text elements well. Margins on either side will force the user’s eye to focus inward on the core content of the article.
Margins also support the article in another way. They help separate content from the rest of the design and layout. Text shouldn’t bleed into other layout elements, especially if it is a long article. Margins help define the article and its separation.
References:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
Embed RSS feed into a html webpage part 2
In the previous webdiv topic about RSS feed we talked about including someone else's RSS feed into your website. In those examples we used sites like feed2js, whome take your xml feed link and convert xml to html and show the results in a java script format.
Disadvantages of this option:
Since it is a third part site, they have an allocated amount of bandwidth for a day or for an hour for each of these tasks. So if your site is heavily visited and would show this RSS feeds regularly, there is a higher chance you would exceed this bandwidth limit and have a blank space.
One alternative for this is to try the server side solution, which in most cases is download and upload to server type of operations, but could get complicated with the number of files involved.
Site like www.feed2js.org, you can download this script files and the converter files. This you will install into your server, now it will use your own bandwidth and will not run out of it as fast.
Another solution is a site called www.grazr.com This site will provide an animated/interactive widget formed using your RSS feed link, which can be placed in your website quite easily. I have tried this and it has not run out of bandwidth limit for me yet.
www.wowzio.com, www.springwidgets.com are two more websites that provide a widget from your RSS feed link.
Website visitor counter testing on ashPresentom
There are numerous website counters today used by bloggers and other website publishers to track their visitors and in-depth analyze what their visitor's did in those websites. Today we are not going to compare those stat counters on their features, but what we are going to do today is, to see which stat counter is the most accurate.
At ashPresentom we receive at an average of about 60-70 visits per day according to statmeter.com website which we have installed in here. Because of this relatively good number of visits, I am going to be using ashPresentom as the subject for this experimental study. 
In this study I am going to be testing Google Analytics, Sitemeter, and Statcounter some of the best counters out there that are free for use. I have installed the required codes to this blog, to enable these counters, at 12:00 am on April 1st and we will use the data from April 1st till April 30th, 11:59pm.
Most of the time, if a website received a visit of less than 1 second, some counter's code fail in recording this as a legitimate visit. This will create inequality between traffic counters. A more defined goal of this experiment at ashPresentom is to find which statcounter provide an accurate reading of site visitors out of the three options we used.
At the end of first 10 days, second 10 days, and last 10 days I will record the numbers in here for aP viewers to have a look at how this experiment is progressing.
In the meantime if you feel there has to be added, another big player from "free traffic counter" group, please feel free to let me know. I will be able to add additional options to this experiment at the end of 1st 10 days and 2nd 10 days to maintain the accuracy of this experiment.
Note 0.01: Parameters of this experiment is; Page views and Total visits.
Simple Genius by David Baldacci
ashPresentom Novel Review.
Today's novel we are going to review is Simple Genius by David Baldacci. This book is the 3rd of the Sean King and Michelle Maxwell series. Specialty about today's novel review is that I am going to include the "Novel level of appeal, excitement, and suspense" graph.
Making of the "Novel's level-of-appeal graph"
As I mentioned above this will be an approximate and an average of the level of excitement and appeal as you read the novel. When I design this graph I will recall the novel from my memory and prescribe a number out of 10 for that part of the novel. I will divide the novel into 30 periods for the above process. Since the ranking will take the full judgment of my own senses and feelings, the graph can be used only as an approximate implication of the novel's level of appeal. Without further ado, here is the Novel's level-of-appeal graph.
aP Overall Ranking:4.7/5
Yet another great novel by David Baldacci. Story start from the last book, and the things going on in Michelle Maxwell's live in the first part of the story and how it evolve around level of appeal to the reader, I have described in graphical form above.
The story in this novel focuses on a drug scheme run under the covers orchestrated by CIA in particular. The location of this drug operation take a great importance in history as to a place where World war German soldiers were kept and tortured. In the vicinity is a facility that strive to design the next generation of a supercomputer, thus surrounded by Genius scientists. The investigative work for Sean King starts with the murder of one of the Scientists involved in Baggage town.
This was the scientist who discovered an secret tunnel made by German captives to escape from the prison facility, and what he saw was put into a secret code, which was programed to his daughter, Viggie. Who was also a genius with the capability of finding primes of big numbers in head at the age of eleven. Although she lived in her own world and space out of real life at times, Sean King and Michelle maxwell had to get the secret code or hints for revealing the code from her.
Altogether a great story line and fantastic use of codes and mystery hunting.
Networking computers, software update news
In my computer networking mini-educational blog post series I talked about connecting two computers in a way that it would share single keyboard mouse and allow control of both computers on above mentioned basis. The program we used for this operation is win2VNC and VNC server program.
I was recently able to find out the updated version of win2VNC program which allows further added functions to our networking capabilities.
Click here to download the program. (win2VNC version 1.4.1)
Floral Graphic with overlay of pencil floral painting
With the increased visits to ashPresentom on the area of floral Graphics, which seemed to have taken the viewers attention to a greater extent, I decide to post this simple digital graphic. This graphic shows the blend of Pencil floral graphic with vector graphics and added blue effects.
To make this post interesting; in creating this graphic I used Photoshop effects such as:
- Motion blur of rendered fiber to create speedy lines effect.
- overlay effect to show certain parts of floral graphics on top of an underling graphic.
- Color dodge effect, one of my favorite in PS, I used in creating the burning yet diffused outterglow of fonts.
Although this graphic is focused on floral portions, it also have a hidden grunge effect that I created using overlay and color dodge, which makes this a very appealing work of floral.
website compatibility across browsers
In my previous Web div posts we talked about importance of a header section for a website before we went over RSS feeds on a website. Today post will focus on compatibility of a website across browsers, and some techniques used by website designers to allow a similar view from different browsers.
With Google Chrome being the newest addition to website browser family, it has become more tactful for today's website designers to develop websites that will have a consistent look across all those browsers. Because these browsers are designed differently they react to website codes differently, which makes all these troubles.
Why is it that important to care about how a website look in a different browser?
Take a look at this graph below.
This shows the percentage-wise browsers used by ashPresentom viewers in the past times. As you can see not all of them use a single browser to view ashPresentom, so it is very important when designing a website to pay close attention to across browser compatibility.
How to solve this issue?
It is impossible to make sure your website has a consistent look with all browsers and all their current and previous versions. Although you should at least test with top browsers such as FireFox, IE, Opera, Chrome.
Easy solution is open all the browsers and test every code you enter with all those browsers to make sure they look the same. This could be a time consuming process.
Another more famous alternative is the W3 quality assurance website validating service. To perform this, during your coding process you will define the document type you use, which allow validation of the code for errors through w3 website.
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
"Why specify a doctype? Because it defines which version of (X)HTML your document is actually using, and this is a critical piece of information needed by browsers or other tools processing the document.
For example, specifying the doctype of your document allows you to use tools such as the Markup Validator to check the syntax of your (X)HTML (and hence discovers errors that may affect the way your page is rendered by various browsers). Such tools won't be able to work if they do not know what kind of document you are using.
But the most important thing is that with most families of browsers, a doctype declaration will make a lot of guessing unnecessary, and will thus trigger a "standard" parsing mode, where the understanding (and, as a result, the display) of the document is not only faster, it is also consistent and free of any bad surprise that documents without doctype will create." - www.w3.org
In today's blog post we talked about the importance of maintaining a website compatible across various browsers and solutions to over come this barrier.
Related Topics:
Importance of a header to a website
Learn to use Yahoo Finance: part 3
In this post we look as Options section under Quotes. Call option is in which the Buyer of the security has the right but not the obligation to buy the securities at a set price or exercise price at a certain time. Put option is exactly the opposite; the sellers side. And the Bid price is how much the buyer is willing to pay to buy the option. Just like previous Ask is the exact opposite.
Alright with that preliminary understanding lets look at the Options page of Yahoo finance. Yet again we look at Dell stock.
"View by expiration" is when the option expires.
Both the Call and Put option have similar information, so lets look at the Call option.
Strike - is the price at which the option is exercised. In the case of Call option, if you buy the option and the price of the security goes up, our strategy to make the best profit is exercise the Call option and buy the security at $5.00 (Strike price) and sell it on market for higher.
Symbol - has the symbols of all the different options with different values.
Bid - is the price the seller of the option would get.
Ask - is the price the buyer of the option would receive to purchase the option.
Vol - represent the number of those options available.
Open Int - "The total number of options and/or futures contracts that are not closed or delivered on a particular day. Or the number of buy market orders before the stock market opens." - investopedia.com
In this blog post we talked about Options section in yahoo finance -call and put options. And we went over what each column of the page means to an investor or a trader.
How to add RSS feed to a website using Javascript
In the aP last web div blog post we talked about the importance of header section of a website. Recently, I was in a demand to find out a way for including automatically updated News and Topics section from a favorite news website and include those topics with a link on a separate website.
This function is made easier with the RSS feed culture and it uses a xml format file that include news topics and short descriptions.
There are several free websites that allow you to enter the RSS feed xml link and generate a java script that will convert and provide you a code that you can include in your site to show those latest news in your site.
Here are some of the codes from RSS feed generator sites.
www.rss2java.com (excluding the first 2 (') signs)
'<'script language='Javascript' src='http://www.rss2java.com/feed.php?number=5&date=1&desc=1&html=1&new=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds2.feedburner.com%2Fblogspot%2FaP'>'<'/script'>'"
Customize this code:
- 'http://www.rss2java.com/feed.php?number=5&date=1&desc=1&html=1&new=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds2.feedburner.com%2Fblogspot%2FaP
- "number=5" <-- is the number of last topics/blogposts that will show
- "date=1" <-- (1) show date, (0) hide date of the post
- "desc=1" <-- show description of the topic
- "url=" <-- is where you would type in your required RSS feed link to be used for for this function. Be sure to replace "://" to "%3A%2F%2F" so java can understand this.
Option 2:
< script type="text/javascript" src="http://p3k.org/rss/proxy.r?frameColor=black&textColor=black&_=1238121698248&titleBarColor=
lightblue&compact=&fontFace=&align=&showXmlButton=
&maxItems=5&boxFillColor=white&titleBarTextColor=
black&width=200&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds2.feedburner.com
%2Fblogspot%2FaP&" >< /script >
Option 3:
Feed2JS.org
http://feed2js.org/index.php?s=build
Option 4 (AJAX version):
Google ajax Feed API.
http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/index.html
Thats it for today's Web div posts. Join aP next time with another exhilarating blog post.
How to increase computer's speed after adding extra RAM
Lets assume your RAM memory is 512MB. What would happen if your computer run out of this memory space?
Computers are designed to run multiple tasks at the same time today which is no news for us. When computers run multiple tasks it requires more random access memory aka RAM memory to save temporary data into. And when this memory runs out it uses swap files to store data. The rule of thumb is have twice as big swap file as the physical ram memory size, thus it will have extra space to store data during multi-task operations.
But for computers games, its a different story. These guys would run only one program and they would like to have the maximum speed they can possibly get from the computer solely to run the game. In which case they would argue against larger swap file.
So lets assume you had 512MB ram and you added another 512MB card to the RAM slots, but you dont really feel like its picking up any speed in processing operations. For additional RAM to take effect it will need higher swap file space. Simply increasing the swap file space can your new RAM card worked what it suppose to do.
Steps to increase the swap file size.
01. Click on the Start menu
02. Then right click on My Computer
03. Go to Properties
04. Go to Advance Tab
05. Click Settings under Performance section
06. Click Advance tab
07. Go to Settings under Virtual Memory section
08. Under "Pagin file size for selected drive" select drive your operating system is running on. At most cases this page file size is set to a custom size.
Select "System managed size" to allow your computer to allocate desirable amount of space for random memory purposes.
Related topics:
Networking computers together
Why is the header of a website important
Header of a website has its importance in serving by holding valuable information that otherwise would have to be accessed from the body. Header in any case not pertaining to websites, either a document or a letter or a poster is an important part. Its main idea is to provide a valuable quick summary and theme or the title of what the rest of the document is going to be.
Header of a website is identified beginning with "< head >" and ending with '<'head'>', thus what is inside these two tags and the content of a header of a website. On a well scripted website, header usually contain markers such as '<'meta'>' '<'title'>' '<'base'>' '<'link'>', all these inside '<' head '>'
'<'title'>' this tag contain the title of the website, just like the title of an essay that goes in the header. Everything inside this markup tag you code into the header, will be shown on title of a browser when you visit the website. Therefore it is important to have a title for a website, so it can be easily identified by the viewer.
'<'meta content'>' in the meta content tags websites can usually insert keywords relating to website and description of the website, which will not be shown anywhere else on the website, or rather which is invisible to a simple viewing of the website through a browser. Yet this markup serves a great task in providing these keywords and descriptions of a website for search engines to optimize websites for search rankings as well as for descriptive bookmarking of the website.
Code to add a website description to the header;
'<'meta content="ashPresentom an educational consortium which serves in enlightening the viewers" name="description"/'>'
Next we look at '<'link'>' tags.
It is a great way to increase the website load time by separating other types of codes such as CSS, Javascript, etc. '<'Link'>' tag comes handy in these cases.
Code to load a CSS stylesheet from an external link:
'<'link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="css/stylesheet.css"'>'
In this case the website will load stylesheet.css file from css directory and be readily available for the site to use. If the CSS code happened to be rather large in size implying a longer time to load, you might have noticed in certain occasions website changes its view of tables and etc. as it load.
Another great use of the '<'link'>' tag is to add a favicon to your website. Favicon is the small icon that shows up on address bar and on tabs as well as bookmarks next to title. It gives a certain flair to a website and help improving its brand recognition. You can make your own favicon in photoshop to be in a square of roughly 75 x 75 px and use a website like www.favicongenerator.com to convert the jpg file to ico and have your own favicon.
Code for adding a favicon
'<'link href="images/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon"/'>'
In this code, website will retrieve the favicon.ico file, which has your favicon, and place on the website appropriately.
Also another code goes in the header are loading javascript files from external directories.
Code to load javascript:
'<'script src="js/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"'>'
Next we look at '<'base'>' which specify a default URL and a default target for all links on a page.
'<'base href="http://ashpresent.blogspot.com/images/" /'>'
'<'base target="_blank" /'>'
In this blog post we talked about importance of a '<'head'>' in the website and break it down into pieces to better understand why things are there for. This conclude the educational post of WEB div.
NOTE: these tags (') has been placed outside < markups to avoid confusion with the blog site's coding and the post.
aP Novel Review: Hour game by David Baldacci
Yet another great novel by David Baldacci. Story line very well written in a suspense thriller investigative serial killer based novel. As being the second of the Sean King and Michelle Maxwell series, two ex-secret service agents build their relationship together while working at their private investigation firm.
Genius serial killer who leaves a wrist watch on the dead body representing the order of the deaths, by time by an hour. Doing those murders in a mimicking style to represent great serial killers of the past. At one point you will start thinking, is this going to go till 12 O' clock (meaning 12 deaths)? Yet all the killing initiating as a revenge for disregard for his twin brother's medical condition while he was eighteen, in the Battles family. Author has put great thinking in murdering and covering their tracks, for all the murders involved.
Good use of numerous, yet feasible and interesting theories introduced as the serial killer run progress, in solving that, which were Sean King's and Michelle Maxwell's task at hand. As always with all the stories, things have to come to and end somewhere, and so it does in this great thriller. Every plot and every covered tracks solved at the end and justice served.
aP rating for this novel: (based on level of suspense and thriller action)
4.3/5
NOTE:
Thank you very much Mr. David Baldacci blog for mentioning our review of your great book in your blog. (http://davidbaldacci.com/ontheweb/?p=1070)
Website developing: the Web div series introduction
Today I am going to start the latest ashPresentom mini-educational series called "Web div". This post today will give an introduction to the upcoming blog posts pertaining to Web div topic area.
What is web div?
As descriptive a title it can be, web div will be a blog posts series which are going to be providing expert knowledge in website developing. The languages covered through these posts will remain mainly to HTML and CSS while I will slightly touch on java script and php on occasions. Thus simply put web div series will focus on great lessons on website developing.
Venturing a new idea in tough economic times
We have been discussing stock market movements over past couple of months. But for the last couple of weeks the results have been much pleasing than the older. Yet the times are still tough. Consumer's sendings has find it yet difficult to rise to its previous levels which is a key for a new venture.
The saying goes, if you can pull it off in tough times like this, you will shine forever. If you generates a great idea and a business based on it, and some how put the cogs together to pull out a great revenue, that business would be highly regarded. And would be easily pushed to the top of the list.
But the idea, the striking idea is what the main problem seemed to be in this tough times. Almost the industries are effected as they all at the end of the value chain struggle to sell the products and services.
The IT industry though was one of which yet to be harmed heavily, thus giving some potential for new ideas. If the economy continues to rise as it has been for past couple of weeks, it will definitely be something to look forward for not only Americans but the world!
live India Vs. New Zealand 5th ODI (streamng)
Note from aP: please be understandable these streaming video links disconnected by the broadcasters under no circumstances and may no longer appear to be working and ashPresentom will try our best to post updated streaming links.
Thank you for visiting ashPresentom. enjoy the entertainment!
India all out for 149 an unexpected twist in the tail. Will their bowling be strong enough to restrict the defiant New Zealand team from gathering 150??
- considering India hasn't lost more than 4 wickets in past 4 attempts this match makes an exception, yet doubtful of the outcome. Whether if its the pitch and would provide a similar result for NewZealand as well, is a question and will be answered when NZ start batting for the second inning seemingly quite capable target of 150 runs.
Learn to use Yahoo Finance, Part 2
Today's post we look at Real-Time section under the Quotes section on Yahoo finance left-side panel. Just as the word goes, this section shows you the real-time trading prices for a stock. In this example I have used Dell stock.
In this case last traded price of Dell stock was $9.36 right before the stock market closed at 4pm on Friday. It also shows the percentage change of the stock for the day and bid and ask prices.
Bottom also contain the block book of bid and ask prices list. Unfortunately in this example as the market was close the real-time trading prices were not shown in here.
That is all for todays yahoo finance, join ashPresentom next time for more educational blog posts on the yahoo finance.
aP Novel Review: Split Second by David Baldacci
# Mass Market Paperback: 512 pages
# Publisher: Vision (September 1, 2004)
# ISBN-10: 0446614459
# ISBN-13: 978-0446614450
# Genre: Thriller, spy stories.
aP Rating: 3.8/5
After reading the Camel Club series by the same author, the Sean King and Michelle Maxwell series starter novel would be ranked little below the great Camel club books which are filled with action and mastermind investigations.
The story picks up in a slower pace and level of action and striving thriller acts. But once you are half way into the story it greatly enhances the activity levels and interest of the reader. Novel has a great plot and a story line. Excellent criminal plan put into action in an attempt to capture the lost lover-criminal act on behalf of trying to win back his love. Story has a mastermind discoveries in an attempt to solve the main investigation. Sadly the great novel, failed to maintain a great ending, yet still a good ending.
Thats is for today's novel review from ashPresentom.
Connecting two computers together: part 4, remote access to a computer from anywhere
In previous topic we talked about connecting two computers together using hardware solutions and be able to access each others hard drives.
What we are going to talk today is, another great functionality of computer networking, remote access to another computer. As you may know, or have tried, there are variety of these type of software solutions. Because of the larger number of solutions available in achieving this task, in this post I will be ranking those software solutions based on their user-friendliness, features, and security.
Best remote access software
Links to above programs; TeamViewer, realVNC, logMeIn, gotomypc, pcAnywhere.
Other good programs that didnt make it to top 5 list.
UltraVNC
CrossLoop
Unyte Remote desktop server with a Java applet viewer and IM integration.
mRemote manage VNC and RDP connections on Windows.
rdesktop command-line client for UNIX/Linux.
And the Remote Desktop windows application.
See also:
VNC software connections in remote desktop
FinAnalysis, part 4: Operating Margin
It has been a while since aP talked about ratios of importance to Financial analysis. In previous topics we talked about Gross Margin, EBIT, and ROA and ROE. All of which are important ratios in analyzing profitability of a firm.
Operating Margin in simple equation is;
= Operating Income / Revenue
Definitions
"It is a measurement of what proportion of a company's revenue is left over, before taxes and other indirect costs (such as rent, bonus, interest etc.), after paying for variable costs of production as wages, raw materials, etc. A good operating margin is needed for a company to be able to pay for its fixed costs, such as interest on debt." - wikipedia.com
"Operating margin is a measurement of what proportion of a company's revenue is left over after paying for variable costs of production such as wages, raw materials, etc. A healthy operating margin is required for a company to be able to pay for its fixed costs, such as interest on debt." - investopedia.com
Implication
This ratio gives an idea of how a company generate its income from operating activities on the basis of total revenue or net income. Example: an Operating Margin of 25% means, a company generates $0.25 for every dollar of sales revenue.
As with all the ratios this is another ratio that can be used to compare revenue between different companies in the same industry.
aP Review Divine Justice by Dald Baldacci
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (November 4, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0446195502
ISBN-13: 978-0446195508
Genre: Thriller, Suspense
ashPresentom Review: This book complete the David Baldacci's action filled Camel Club series-it is the fourth book of the series. It was a common for all camel club novels to be loaded with heavy action and suspense, and Divine Justice, found no exception to that norm.
The main character, Oliver Stone (John Carr) continue to show his masterful killing skills and maturity again in this novel. Novel is well served for its title, well deserved justice was granted for Oliver Stone after 30 years of running for his life, after being opt out of the Tripple-Six division of US Secret Service. In this novel, Stone who created the Camel club, comes for his own rescue to a place in the middle of no-where called, Divine, VA.
If you happened to follow the series in order, the story will make lot of sense and you will enjoy it even more. aP recommend this novel, including the entire series for readers starving for suspense and action while enjoying great write.
Connecting two computers together over network: part 3, the hardware solution
To provide a summary of what has been covered through "connecting two computers" posts,
In part 1 I provided a basic idea of connecting two computers together mainly using softwares over a network. Two software programs I talked about are Maxivista and vnc programs. What we tried to achieve in part 1 was to connect two computers together and be able to control both computers by a single mouse/keyboard.
Part 2 covered, the next step in connecting two computers together, the ability to access respective hard drives again over the network. In this case using the Microsoft workgroup.
Today I am going to talk about hardware solutions; to access other computers harddrive using relevant hardware.
Option 1: USB data bridge cable
This is a special Ethernet crossover cable, not a regular USB A/B cable. In fact you should not connect two computers using a regular USB male/female cable, that would severely damage your harddrives. The bulb in the middle avoid that damage and provide necessary support for connecting two computers to access each other's data.
When you purchase this cable it will always comes with relevent software CD that fullfill the task.
Option 2: Ethernet cable. Usually in this case computer A will be connected to Internet and will have a dual Ethernet hook up PCI or two Ethernet cards, allowing Ethernet in and Ethernet out. Ethernet out, will go into Computer B. This will allow Computer B to access files from PC A and also access the internet. This is also called cross-over cable method. (Descriptive tutorial from Microsoft)
Other options are, network Router, Switch and Hub.
Apart from connecting two computers over the network there are other options to perform the similar task using computer hardware. In this blog post I talked about using USB data bridge cable, Ethernet cross-over cable, and Network hubs. I hope you enjoyed today's post about connecting two computers together. Join ashPresentom next time when we talk about remote access technology to computers from anywhere in the world.
If you have any feedbacks or would like to suggest additions to ashPresentom, please feel free to use the comments section. Until next time this is ashPresentom.
Unemployment rates for February; How bad is it?
Businessweek's report on the release of unemployment data.
"The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 8.1% as the economy lost 651,000 jobs in February, the Labor Dept. reported on Mar. 6. While the report showed the deepening recession was continuing to batter the nation's wage earners, the numbers were lower than some of the most dire predictions. The January unemployment rate was 7.6%.
The government also revised upward the number of jobs shed by the economy in December and January, meaning that the jobs picture has been worse than the original data indicated. Stock markets gained on the report, with the Dow Jones Industrial index rising more than 1.5% in morning trading before falling back.
"Job losses were large and widespread across all major industry sectors," the Labor Dept. said in a news release, noting that payroll employment has declined by 2.6 million positions over the past four months. The largest job losses came in professional and business services, manufacturing, and construction. Health care, one of the few bright spots in the employment sector, had a net gain of 27,000 jobs." - By Phil Mintz and Peter Coy (businessweek.com)
8.1% unemployed of the total work force of United States, does that sound bad? Of course it is considering the level it was before, and this higher level unemployment make a clear comparison to days of 1930s. The important part about this is, not all the job categories suffer the same level of unemployment rates. But on average it does look a dark image on countries unemployment.
"If part-time workers who can't find full-time jobs are counted in, along with those who have simply given up looking, the rate would be 14.8 percent, the highest in records going back to 1994." - By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer
More statistical data from the same above mentioned article (as of February 2009);
- bachelor's degrees or higher : 4.1%
- w/o high school diploma : 12.6%
- African Americans : 13.4%
- Hispanic : 10.9%
It definitely look ugly for the lower educated job seekers-the labor jobs. Reason being companies most unable to afford the pay for their workers, although they are the major part of their work-force. On the other hand recruiters have also cut down hiring new undergraduate by 22% (according to businessweek). Not necessarily the people with bachelor's degree or higher possess a greater chance in the economy.
Stock market tumbling analysis for the first week of March (excluding Friday)
As the investors worry about banks and GM stock market kept continuing its dreadful falls further bringing the countries economy as of the beginning of March. This blog post will solely provide analysis of the situation.
The area colored in red is the fall for the month of March so far, as we have yet to experience what Friday will bring on DOW Jones Industry Index. 
This Chart shows the numerical changes of the first week of March. It just seems the way the economy is moving, none of the Economic bail out plans happened to design a change in the pattern. One would think with the help of Millions of dollars of tax payers money lend to Troubled Assets, they would show at least a slight improvement, which clearly was denied of the fact when AIG beg for another Bail out money.
I believe these companies required to be extensively restructured, and force extreme cautious on internal money management or some sought. It is to be given thought that US consumer base is in fact declining as far as the consumer purchases go. Consumers now expand its purchasing power only to essential items, which eliminate the possibility of economy stimulating consumer sales for companies. But I believe the Stimulus plan we talked in previous blog post, will have a good impact as to stimulate the country's economy. Because where they are getting those billion dollars to fund bail out plans, there is not going to be more of those soon or later...
How to get Apple OS X Leopard Stack dock for Windows, and other docks
Stack effect on Apple dock was an addition in its Leopard version. Manipulating this effect on windows was somewhat an old topic. But there has been recent enhancements in the docks for windows area and in this blog I wish to talk about stack dock and the circle dock for windows operating system.
Stack Docklet:
If you are new to this area, Manipulated docks for windows has been allowed through several programs. Two of the popular and more efficient ones are Object Dock and Rocket Dock.
First install either program;
Object Dock: Download Object Dock from http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/.
RocketDock: Download latest version of RocketDock from http://files.punklabs.com/RocketDock/RocketDock-v1.3.5.exe.
Install the stacks effect to Dock program;
Download stack addon files from, http://matias.securityconsultant.com.ar/StackDocklet-preview-FileSystemFoldersOnly.zip
Unzip to this folder and copy files to C:\Program files\RocketDock(or Object Dock)\Docklets
Now you should see a StackDocklet subfolder inside the Docklets folder.
Run the dock program right-click on the dock and you should be able to see "add stack" There you have it, if you didnt know how to do this, you should be good to go now.
Circle Dock:
Here is an improved program of the original Stack dock for windows. You can find more information about features and download from, Circle Dock.
Drawbacks of manipulated OS X stack dock:
- Program and animation definitely takes up more memory to function.
- If you click a stack icon from the dock, when the stack open either as a span or grid, while still open, if you move your mouse over to another icon and click that, the stack would still stay there and would not disappear unless you rerun the program.
Manipulated programs have their own glitches and will never equal the original OS Dock, but it will appease your needs.
Learn to use Yahoo Finance: part 1
Yahoo finance is a real-time stock market display website. This site is used mostly for college level finance classes as well as investment classes. If you signed up with a yahoo.com email address it will let you pick stocks and develop your own portfolio and watch the performance. This site is only for displaying of market-performance and not for trading securities.
Today's blog post I will introduce what each of the terms reflect in yahoo finance website.
On top left, shows the real-time DOW Jones and Nasdaq index's percentage changes for today.
For demonstrate the layout of Yahoo Finance, I pulled out Dell Inc stock.
Last Trade: is the price or the value of a share of Dell for the trade time mentioned in the line below.
Change; reflect the percentage change of share price from the starting share price of Dell stock.
Prev. Close; is the last share price at which Dell stock was closed the day before.
Open, is the price at which it was open today.
Bid and Ask; Ask price is always higher than Bid price, which means if an investor to buy a Dell stock he would pay the Ask price, and if you sell a stock you will get Bid price. The difference between Bid and Ask price is called the Spread and is kept as profit by the broker.
1yr Target Est, is the estimated price of the Dell stock in 1 year from now.
Day's Range, shows the total fluctuation of the stock price of Dell for the day. The line below that is 52 weeks combined range of price fluctuation. This will give a potential buyer of Delll stock an idea of how high the stock price has been over last 52 weeks, as well as how low is has been.
Volume is the number of shares trading at the moment. This is also the number of outstanding shares of Dell, which is less than the Authorized shares. And companies will not always sell all their authorized shares.
Next Lines, Avg Vol (3m): average volume of shares traded over past three months.
Market cap, or market capitalization is a quick way to estimate the value of a company. Also is the Stock Price x Number of outstanding stocks. Roughly, if market cap is larger than $5 Billion is it called "Large Cap", $1-5 Billion is "Mid Cap", and $1 Billion or less being the "Small Cap".
P/E(ttm), in general P/E is the Earnings Yeild, price of a share relative to its earnings, which gives a percentage return metric. In ttm basis, means the current market price is divided by "Trainling twelve month" earnings per share. This look at the past 4 Quarters of earnings for Dell.
EPS (ttm), once again looking 4 Quarters back for the earnings per share.
And the last line "Div & Yield" is past divident payments.
Also the graph on the right side shows days progress of Dell Inc.. Stock price in a graphic format. Below the graph you can see "1d 5d 3m ..." clicking these each will display and explicit graph for the selected period of time. For some investors looking at a graph tells more than numerical values. In the next topic I wish to cover other components on Yahoo Finance real-time stock viewer website. Please feel free to flood the comments with your feedbacks and questions.
Connecting two computers together over network: Part 2
On a previously published blog post I covered how to connect two computers over the network and have a single keyboard and mouse to control both computers, so as the mouse would disappear, when moved out of the screen, and appear on the other computers screen, allowing both computers to be controlled.
To achieve this I presented to you several options;
Maxivista, vnc programs, and hardware choice.
The topic we are continuing today is ideal for someone who want to develop a dual screen setup, but does not have a dual output VGA card, or find no use for investing money in such devices.
If you remember from that previous topic, I mentioned that file transfer between computers were a difficulty. After much research in today's topic I am glad to tell you that I will be covering how to achieve this step- the file transferring between computers over the network.
Note: this will require both computers running on Windows XP or at least windows.
What we are going to do is create a "workgroup" over the network and connect both computers to the workgroup by which allow them to share folders, files, or even a whole drive.
The below link will provide further information in creating a workgroup and sharing files over network: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323386
Questions that you might incur during the process:
Q: Work group not showing up in "my Network Places"
A: if you know you have created the workgroup and added other computers to this work group, restart both computers and this will remove additional work groups and show up the correct work group.
Q: I added several workgroups how to I delete a workgroup?
A: Go to Start> right click My computer> Properties > computer name tab and click "change" then under "member of" select workgroup and change the name. If you know you only want a single workgroup and its name is "XXX" put that as member of workgroup name. Restart the computer after all done.
Q: How to setup permission for the shared folder?
A: Open my Computer, Tools> Folder options> View tab, scroll down under advance settings, deselect "Use simple sharing settings" click ok.
go to My computer > Right click on Shared Documents and select "Sharing and Security"
- The option should be selected to share this folder. If you want only one other user to access the shared folder with permission, Select and type 1 for "Allow this number of users"
- Click "Permissions" and Add a user and select how much control you want the other user to have.
Q: Does the Network Driver need to be copied and installed on all the other computers that need to connect to workgroup?
A: Not necessarily, but you will have to create a Home or Office workgroup group in all the other computers and give the same name as Workgroup name. That should be enough to get all the computers connected to workgroup.
If you happen rise with any other questions during your process to achieve a perfect connection between computers, feel free to write them up here.
The Broker by John Grisham
Amazon review:
Before he was sent to federal prison for treason (among other things), Joel Backman was an extremely powerful man. Known as "the broker," Backman was a high roller--a lawyer making $10 million a year who could "open any door in Washington." That is, until he tried to broker a deal selling access to the world's most powerful satellite surveillance system to the highest bidder. When caught, Backman accepted prison as the one option that would keep him safe and alive, since the interested parties (the Israelis, the Saudis, the Russians, and the Chinese) were all itching to get their hands on his secrets at any cost. Little does he know that his own government has designs on accessing that information--or at least letting it die with him. Now, six years after his incarceration, the director of the CIA convinces a lame duck president to pardon Backman, and the broker becomes a free man--and an open target.
aP rating: 3.8/5
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Pages: 368
aP review: John Grisham as a well recognized writer does a grand job in writing a grand thriller and spy novel; The broker. The story does contain several aspects of a highly entertaining action and suspense novels. Only part where I found the novel to be veering away from this theme was when the writer use pages explaining how the main character Joel Backman learned Italian. In other words, this novel will also provide you a good Italian language learning lessons. I liked his writing style of starting from the peak of the story, starting the story with a mysterious story, and continue the story while in the mid parts go back to the past and try to fill in the gap between past and present. Later parts of the novel again picks up on the suspense and running-for-life action which counter-balance the lack of action during Italian lessons. Overall quite good suspense novel by John Grisham.
How to earn extra cash while at college?
Most of you interested in this subject have definitely explored the web and local for opportunities to earn extra few bucks while you are at college. In today's blog post I will provide a list of ways to earn few extra bucks while at college from my own experiences and from other blog sites.
College students during sleepless nights of college work spend hours studying and reading trying to ace their exams. During this hectic college life if you can make a few bucks by doing something that would only take couple of your hours or a small effort, would favor the odds of winning college students liking in participating in those cash earning activities. College students live on very small budgets, unless of course you prefer a luxurious life style which would be infeasible for a small budget. But a couple of bucks means a lot to most college students, it could help them pay for a midnight snack, or to enjoy an event or simply get drunk… yes I said get drunk.
I was one of the college students that lived on a small budget, so every opportunity to earn couple of bucks meant a lot to my budget and so will it be for most other college students.
1- Although 18 credit hours or 20 credit hours is an extremely heavy work load for most majors, for some college students finding time for a part-time 20 hours per week small retail or food service related job would definitely earn a good income on a monthly basis to pay for rent and food and other accessories. (Part time job)
2- If you live in a dorm, keep an eye on the bulletin board. Not only in dorms keep and eye for all the message boards on campus outside and inside buildings and classrooms. There can be opportunities that would make you some cash.
Things that will appear on message boards that would earn you some money are;
Experiments - Department of business, engineering, psychology etc. get grants all the time which are invested towards good use to improve academia. These are then used by masters of graduate students to perform experiments for their researches, for which they need participants. These participant finding attempts will only find the message boards across campus, providing college students the opportunity to make extra money.
Some example of these types of experiments is; finger print study, economic study, speech study. These would get you $10-20 for a session
3- If you hate needles then this is not the way to earn extra cash for you. Plasma donations can earn you somewhere from $10 to $40. This as the officials at plasma donation center would advice can be performed repetitively twice a week by a healthy individual. This option is only available if you are AIDS free and STD free and all the other diseases transmit through blood. But if you are going to hit this option be ready to let a thick needle pierce through your arm. With all that information, I would rank think option as the Last resort for money.
On the easy donation of bodily items, another area is sperm donation. Now this leave to individuals who want their kids running around the world (I said world because you will never know where this sperm is going to end up). Someday the child will want to know their dad which will come to haunt you down or it may not. If that doesn't bother you there is your choice, with an extra earnings of ranging from $1-200/week.
4- There is also bone marrow donation. More money for more pain you have to resist.
These options below are taken from other websites.
1- Tutoring students for few bucks
2- Sell things on eBay
3- Secret shopper
4- Surveys sites, inbox dollars, sendearnings (earn cash for checking emails and taking surveys)
If you are a college student and hoping to make few extra bucks for the weekend I hope this post helped you look for things around campus that you haven't thought about before.
Does 2008 Stimulus payment effect your tax returns?
Most people while filing for 2008 tax returns, when filing all the income they made, start to wonder if they should include the stimulus money they received during 2008 (bush administration).
The answer is; is should NOT be included as income (- IRS)
Here is the information relating to this topic extracted from IRS.gov.
"Most people received the maximum Economic Stimulus Payment in 2008. However, some people may be eligible for a first time credit or for a larger payment than they were eligible for last year.
This amount is called a Recovery Rebate Credit . You'll need to have the amount of your Stimulus Payment from last year so you can figure out whether or not you're eligible to receive this credit.
How Can I Find This Amount?
To use our secure online tool to find the amount of your Economic Stimulus Payment from last year, you'll need the following information from your 2007 tax return:
* Your Social Security Number
* Your 2007 Filing Status
* Number of Exemptions claimed on your 2007 tax return
Take me to How Much Was My 2008 Stimulus Payment? "
Technology: How to connect two computers (dual screen) over network
How to set up a Dual-Screen workstation with an additional computer.
What we try to achieve: connect a laptop or another computer to an existing computer and have the ability to control both computers with a single mouse and keyboard. (Without any hardware, but over the network)
If you have another laptop or a pc computer sitting around and is wondering how you can connect the two computers and use each computers' own processing power individually to multi task and speedup your working environment, there is a very easier way to accomplish this dream of yours. In today's blog post I will cover all the possible ways to achieve this.
If you do have a dual display supported video card, what you will be doing is using a single PC and spread out the processing power between activities and expanding the working area horizontally, with the use of an additional screen. But what we are trying to do is take advantage of two separate high speed computers and use their individual processing power separating while having the capability to control them with single input devices and eventually setting up a DUAL-Screen workstation.
Option 1: Maxivista.com
The program available on the site is non freeware software and has all the capabilities we are interested in, dual screen, single control, and mirror screening, all the functions done over the network. So if you want to pay some extra bucks for few more extra features, this is your best bet.
Options 2: vnc programs
You can use win2VNC and a VNC program such as ultraVNC, RealVNC, or TightVNC to accomplish the single input control feature.
Links: http://fredrik.hubbe.net/Win2VNC.exe - win2VNC
Instructions for usage: you will have to install win2vnc on the computer that you wish to have the control and a VNC program on the other computer which you are going to be controlling using the other computers' input devices. Both computers have to be connected to internet and relevant IP address will be shown after the program in run, which later will be needed in connecting each other.
Advantages:
- Share input devices (Mouse, keyboard) to control both computers and clipboards.
- Use each computers' own processing power to perform tasks, yet both are connected together to allow single control.
- Dual monitor setup/workstation
Disadvantages:
- Most of the VNC programs I tried excluding maxivista do not allow mouse scrolling function on the controlled computer, but only on the controlling (main/server) computer.
- Even though both computers seemed connected, you are only controlling the computers, thus no applications or windows can be shared. This is what you have to really understand, each run on its own.
- You can not transfer files between two computers using these VNC programs although you can use other file transfer programs such as teamviwer etc. to connect the computers and transfer files.
Option 3: using hard ware gadgets.
FYI: This feature is knows as FVM which stands for Keyboard, Video, Mouse control. Mostly used for controlling several servers with a single mouse, keyboard and a monitor.
If you have further questions about the Over network Dual monitor work station, please feel free to ask them in the comments area.
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