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.

Sports highlights: India v New Zealand 1st Test, Day 1

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...