All This and Everything Else

DVD Review: The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)

2009-04-29T09:32:00.000-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

The Day The Earth Stood Still three-disk edition is the latest release of the 2008 version of the classic 1951 movie of the same name. This version comes with a copy of the original black and white, a copy of the 2008 remake, and a version that can be loaded to personal players and computers.

The basic story line of the 2008 version is the same as the original. A humanoid alien visitor named Klaatu comes to earth with a warning that he must give to all of the earth's leaders. The warning is that if we don't change, it could result in the earth the human race being eliminated. Much of the situation that occurred in the original version occurs in the remake, including Klaatu being shot, taken into custody, and escaping to move among the earthlings.

Beyond this, the representations of the two stories are drastically different. In fact this could be called a tale of two movies. The original classic is well done, has a great cast including Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, and Lock Martin. The storyline is well thought out and there is the right balance of acting, tension, and realism to make it believable. The quality of the video and the sound are re-mastered very well for a film more than 55 years old.

The 2008 version, which stars Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates, John Cleese, and Jaden Smith, is not so good. I can't quite decide if it is meant to be a political statement, to sell products, or a vehicle to show how many special effects can be done in a single movie. One thing I can say is that it is a mess

First, the acting was substandard. To me Reeves is an actor who, in the right role like Matrix, or Speed, can be very good. In a bad role such as here, he is flat and uninspiring. It was to the point of it being painful to watch. Connelly is good, but her role as a scientist/step mother to an even more annoying child (more on this in a minute) is nothing near as good as Neal's role in the original. This has more to do with the role itself than Connelly's acting abilities.

Jaden Smith's character was downright horrible. He plays Connelly's stepson, who is constantly complaining, whining, and rude. His father was killed in the war, and this is clearly a political statement about George Bush's wars. They even go on to make the point that he wasn't a soldier but only a builder. The child is constantly doing things that causes everyone trouble. It was one of those roles that made me want to scream at the screen. He is nothing like the endearing child in the original.
Another problem I had concerns product placement. It seems like every five minutes there was an advertisement for a product like Apple, Honda, Coke and all sorts of logos. There is even a five minute segment filmed in a McDonalds. It was ridiculous.

Then there is the whole global warming thing. In the original, the reason for the aliens' visit was because we had atomic technology which could threaten to kill off humanity if left unchecked. In this remake, they come because we have created global warming? They claim that there are few planets that can support life and we are ruining this one. Hello! Does anyone not think that wiping three billion humans off the planet won't have some consequences to the ecosystem?

The final problem was with the special effects. It is obvious that the producer and director did not understand the original. Beyond the great story and acting, the reason the original worked so well was the combination of limited the special effects and the power of the story itself. Yes, the effects they had available in 1951 were limited, but they used just enough to drive the story. Here the special effects take control at the expense of the story. While some were done quite well, there were just too many and without purpose.

There are a lot of bonus features that come with the DVD set, including "Klaatu's Unseen Artifacts," "Build Your Own GORT," "Deleted Scenes," "Re-Imagining the Day," "Unleashing GORT," "Watching the Skies—In Search of Extraterrestrial Life," "The Day the Earth was Green," and, "Audio Commentary by Writer David Scarpa."

Bottom line is that The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008) is a movie that I could not wait to end. Even if there had been no original with which to compare it, this would have been a bad movie. I can accept a movie, even if it is political, as long as it is entertaining. I can't if it is annoying, preachy, and it tries to take on a classic. The one redeeming quality of this edition is that you do get a copy of the original. If you look at the rest of the disks as bonus features, it makes it an acceptable deal. I give it two stars.

Technorati Tags: Movie,DVD,Science Fiction

Book Review: The Story Of AC/DC: Let There Be Rock, 2nd Edition by Susan Masino

2009-04-27T09:29:00.001-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

With the release of their first album in eight years, there was bound to be a resurgence of interest in AC/DC and their 30-plus year history. In The Story Of AC/DC: Let There Be Rock , author Susan Masino updates her biography and documents the band's history which began in Sydney, Australia in the early 1970s all the way through the new Black Ice album, released October 2008.

While The Story Of AC/DC was first published in 2006, it has been updated to include what the band has been doing in the last three years. Masino first met the band during their first American tour in 1977. Over the years she has remained in contact with them and interviewed them many times.

The book begins with the story of the Young's, who were actually born in Scotland, and their move to Australia under the Assisted Passage Scheme of 1947 which, because of job scarcity, allowed them to move for a nominal fee. The book follows their rise first in Australia - and then the world.

First, what I liked about the book is that it is very well researched, and the author is very knowledgeable about the band. As with any good book on a topic like this, there much insight that is to be gained from its reading.

One of the things that I had previously known included the fact that Malcolm and Angus Young's older brother George first broke on to the music charts with "Friday on my Mind," which hit number 16 in the U.S. charts and number 6 in the U.K. What I didn't know was the impact it was to have on AC/DC.

Another is that Angus Young, the one in the school boy knickers' gyrating around the stage, is a teetotaler. He has never touched anything stronger than a cigarette. The book also includes background on how the whole schoolboy thing came about and some of the other colorful costumes that were tried before he settled on this one.

There are a lot of good tidbits about the band, the history, and other insights into one of the most popular hard rock bands of all time. There are also a lot of pictures of the band throughout this time and this version also comes with a CD that includes interviews with each member. This even includes the late Bon Scott, with the interview was done in 1977.

The main thing that I had a problem with in The Story Of AC/DC is that throughout there are what I call cut-outs. This is where the author inserts comments by using italics. This seems to break the flow of thought. I wish that she would have incorporated these pieces of information as part of the dialog of the general book. It sometimes seems that she is first fan, then biographer.

Outside of that, I found it to be a good read. The book covers pretty much every aspect of the band's history. I do think that you will get a good appreciation for the band and the fact that they had to work hard to get where they got to and even then, life dealt them blows that could have done in lesser bands. If you want to learn more about the life and times of AC/DC then The Story Of AC/DC: Let There Be Rock 2nd Edition is a good place to start.

Graphic Audio Review: The Green Lantern: Hero's Quest By Dennis O'Neil, Based On The Series From DC Comics

2009-04-03T10:53:00.001-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

Before I start, The Green Lantern: Hero's Quest is somewhat of a controversial story because it chronicles a parallel universe take on The Green Lantern and his history. I am not going to discuss the take on the story, but rather the quality of the story itself.

In this universe, the Kyle Rayner is a lazy slacker. He is an underachiever who lives in the basement of a disgusting building, and barely has food to eat. He is a graphic designer who has little hope for the future. One night, while at a nightclub, he goes out into the alley for some fresh air and is confronted by a little blue being who gives him a Green Lantern ring, and from there his life is changed forever.

Different from the other JLA Graphic Audio books I have reviewed here in the past, The Green Lantern: Hero's Quest is told in first person. In fact, at first, the way the book starts was a little shocking.

As the story went on, I became more comfortable with the difference and once again I was treated to a Graphic Audio performance that really brings you into the story. The combination of sound effects and artistic vocal performances creates what Graphic Audio calls a “Movie in your Mind” and is truly what The Green Lantern: Hero's Quest is.

When the Justice League of America (JLA) learns of the existence of a new super hero, they are concerned, and so one day Superman shows up at Kyle's apartment to determine his intent. Kyle is then invited to come to the JLA satellite to meet the other super heroes and is eventually invited to work with the JLA on a trial basis and is given a special button for being summoned.

Kyle receives a call to come to the JLA satellite, and as soon as he arrives the satellite disappears. He is now called into question by Batman about the disappearance. He now must determine if he is willing to take on the challenge to be a hero. To do so, he must take it upon himself to find out the origins of The Green Lanterns, find out what happened to Earth's original Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, and perhaps even save the universe.

As I said before this story is different from the others. While overall it is entertaining, it is a bit uneven and slow at times. But because it is character-driven, and is told from the first person point of view, you get real insight into the mind of Kyle Rayner. As the story goes on, you find that you are caught up and can't let go. Then of course there are the performances of the actors that give it that movie feel.

The quality of The Green Lantern: Hero's Quest and performance are the reason I will be coming back to Graphic Audio products. By using a whole cast — over 20 performers — you don't get one person trying to sound like many different voices, you get unique individual characters. It is this that makes it great.

You can also check out some of their other series as well. If you want you can listen to a sample, or purchase the GraphicAudio Book from their on-line Store. The story comes three ways: standard CD (the version I reviewed), MP3 CD, and downloadable WMA with digital rights management.

Technorati Tags: Audio Book,DC Comics,Green Lantern

Graphic Audio Review - Wonder Woman - Mythos By Carol Lay, Based on the Series from DC Comics

2009-02-19T07:48:00.001-06:00

When a honeymooning couple, diving near the Bermuda Triangle, find a strange island, the husband becomes strange. It is when the man discovers the male counterpart to Themyscria or Wonder Woman's Paradise Island that he becomes really distant. When the wife's oxegen supply becomes damaged, he sends her back while he continues to explore. When the wife returns back to their boat, the island is no longer there, and she cannot find her husband.

When Wonder Woman finds out about the missing man, she decides that a trip home to help in the search is exactly what is needed. But when she discovers that there is an island that mirrors her own Themyscria, containing only men instead, it sets in motion things that are beyond her control.

Once again I was treated to a Graphic Audio performance that really brings you into the story. The combination of sound effects and artistic vocal performances creates what Graphic Audio calls a "Movie in your Mind" and that is truly what Wonder Woman - Mythos is.

As always, the Justice League of America (JLA) is there to help when things get out of hand, but this time even Superman, Flash, and Green Lighting succumb to the powers of the all male island. When Superman is commanded to capture Wonder Woman, he has to do as he is commanded.

I really like this series of the JLA books. I like the fact that they spend some time developing the backgrounds of the characters of the Justice League. There is also a good balance between focusing on the Wonder Woman and still keeping the others of the JLA involved.

The story builds slowly and deliberately without feeling slow or paced. There is action from the beginning, but it is a natural build where everything is taken in steps. Soon you find that you are caught up and can't let go. Then, of course, there are the performances of the actors that give it that movie feel.

The quality of the story and performance are the reason that I will be coming back to Graphic Audio products. By using a whole cast, over 20 performers, you don't get one person trying to sound like many different voices; you get unique individual characters. It is this that makes it great.

You can also check out some of their other series as well. If you want you can listen to a sample, or purchase the GraphicAudio Book from their on-line Store. The story comes three ways; standard CD (the version I reviewed), MP3 CD and downloadable WMA with digital rights management.

Technorati Tags: Graphic Audio,Wonder Woman,JLA,Justice League of America

Music Review: Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys - The Tiffany Transcriptions

2009-01-24T08:31:00.001-06:00

Technorati Tags: Bob Wills,Texas Playboys,Music

Written by T. Michael Testi

While Bob Wills had been playing music since he was a very young child in Texas, it wasn't until he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1934 that he formed "The Texas Playboys." It was here that they began broadcasting noontime shows over the 50,000 watt KVOO radio station. Their Monday through Friday shows became an institution in the area. They also played every Thursday and Saturday nights at Cain's Ballroom which was where the broadcasts where recorded at as well.

From 1935 to 1938 Wills refined his band, and their sound by adding musicians like steel guitar wizard Leon McAuliffe as well as horn, reed, and drum players to the mix. In 1940, they released "New San Antonio Rose" and it sold over a million records becoming the signature song of the Texas Playboys. Because they were a two-in-one unit; a small fiddle band, and a swinging big band, they could play a wide range of music from big band, western, swing, pop, and Dixieland.

After a brief stint in the Army, he moved the Texas Playboys to Hollywood and continued to refine the sound of the band. Because of the great depression, World War II, and the great dustbowl, they found a lot of fans from Oklahoma and Texas that had relocated and were an enormous draw in California. During this time Wills also began making more creative use of electric guitars.

In 1944, Cliff Johnson, a staff announcer for Oakland's KLX radio station and someone who disliked anything country, was asked by management to "take one for the team." They wanted him to host a western show. After finding himself volunteered, he took on the moniker "Cactus Jack" and began playing what little country and western music that the station's library had.

It was at this time that a friend introduced him to Wills music. They lent him a cardboard box full of Wills records and when he began playing them, the station was deluged with requests. After listening to so much of this music, soon Johnson was hooked. Wills found out about Cactus Jack and soon the DJ was promoting Wills and the Playboys around the bay area.

In 1945 Wills, Cactus Jack, and businessman-songwriter Clifford Sundin founded Tiffany Music, Inc. to create a series of transcriptions; pre-packaged radio shows featuring Wills and his Texas Playboys. The goal was to sell these shows to subscribing stations who would present them with local advertisers. This steady series of programs would require the band to record scores of tunes, not just their hits, and bandstand repertoire, but entirely new songs, and at a record pace.

They revisited their old recordings, wrote new ones, covered tunes from other acts, and just make stuff up on the spot. Quite often they would record the session's right after a tour while they were playing at the top of their form. The Tiffany Transcriptions are these recordings that took place during 1946-47 and since they were recorded on 16 inch vinyl disks, the had more freedom to perform than they did on the more restricted 78 rpm singles that were tradition at the time.

The Tiffany Transcriptions is a box-set that contains 10-disks covering 150 songs. This is the first time that this collection has been put together as a set and it contains written testimonials from those that Wills music inspired. These include people like Ray Benson from Asleep at the Wheel and Ranger Doug from Riders in the Sky.

As I said this is a 10 disk set and each disk is packaged in an individual sleeve that contains the album cover, liner notes from various individuals either about the sessions, or about how the sessions and Wills influenced them, and photos. There is also information on the sessions such as who was there, where and when it was recorded, and on the back is the listing of all of the songs. There is also a 16 page booklet with more information on the history of the sessions.

I was always a fan of the later generations of Western Swing such as Asleep at the Wheel, and while I had heard some of Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys, and liked what I had heard, I was not familiar with what I would now call the "true" sound of Bob Wills. After listing to The Tiffany Transcriptions I found that I absolutely loved this aspect of the music.

The quality of the recordings is very good considering the time and equipment that was available around in the mid-forties. They have that natural radio sound to them that makes them take on a nostalgic tone. Don't get me wrong, the recordings themselves are very clear and clean.

Because of the nature of the recordings and how they were performed, the songs themselves give off a "live" feel and are less restricted than their Columbia and MGM counterpart releases that Wills put out during this time. Most seem to agree that this sound reflects more of their live performances. I would agree that there is a lot of natural energy to these recordings.

If you like the music of Bob Wills and The Texas Playboys, if you like country music, western swing, big band, or old time music, you will absolutely love The Tiffany Transcriptions. Even if you don't like one or all of the above, I suspect, that like Cactus Jack, if you start listening to it, you will find yourself liking it. For this I have to give it five stars. Go get it!

Video Training Review: Dreamweaver CS4 Essential Training with James Williamson from Lynda.com

2008-12-30T10:28:00.000-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

Dreamweaver is the Web development application from Adobe Systems and to get the most out of the program, it's important not only to master the application, but also to understand fundamental concepts of modern Web design.

Dreamweaver CS4 Essential Training attempts to do just that. In this training series, James Williamson covers everything from site structure to the value of standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. He also shows how to create clean and accessible code in Dreamweaver, as well as how to publish compelling content. This course lasts 10.25 hours divided into 18 lessons.

Lessons 1-3 cover the basics of Dreamweaver. This includes the theory of basic site structure, what is an index page, an overview of Web design practices, and explanations of XHTML, JavaScript, and CSS. You will also get an overview of the Dreamweaver interface, as well as a lesson on setting up and managing a site.

Lessons 4 and 5 gets you started with the creation of new documents, what DOCTYPE declarations are, setting up new document preferences, and how to work with starter pages. You then learn the basics of adding text and structuring content, creating lists, getting text into Dreamweaver, and importing Word documents.

Lesson 6, "CSS Foundations," now goes to the heart of the fundamentals of using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Understanding some simple rules of using CSS will help you create more efficient style sheets. Here you will explore the anatomy of a CSS rule, setting the preferences, understanding the selectors, and working with external style sheets.

Lesson 7, "Controlling Typography," is important so as to have the ability to get your point across. In this lesson you will see the units of measurement that Dreamweaver will provide for you use. These include font sizing, weight, and style as well as line height, vertical spacing, padding, and alignment of text.

Lesson 8, "Working with Images," begins with how best to manage your images. In Dreamweaver, these are called assets and it is very important for you to manage them so that you can find them when you need them. You will also see how to place them on a page, customize them via CSS, integrate with Photoshop, and even alternate Photoshop workflows.

Lesson 9, "Creating Links," explains that without links, working with the Web would be a pretty tedious task. So creating links is very important for the structure and flow of your site. In this lesson you will see how to create links, set preferences, how to use named anchors, and how to create CSS-based rollovers.

Lesson 10, "Controlling Layout with CSS," will show you that although you may be intimidated in using CSS, that it is in fact easier to control a site by using CSS than it would be otherwise. This is all accomplished by using proper site layout. You will start with the basics, and then learn about structuring and various types of positioning.

Lesson 11, "Working with Tables," examines that while tables are out of favor for creating layouts, they are still needed for the presentation of tabular data, and in fact are one of the best ways of presenting this kind of data to the user. You will begin by reviewing table structure, importing data, styling tables, and adding user interactivity to tables.

Lesson 12, "Working with Forms," starts out with how forms work. Forms are one of those things that allow a user to pass information to your site. While this does not get into processing form data, it does show you how to create assessable forms, set their properties, insert fields, lists, radio button groups, checkboxes, text, and submit buttons. It also covers some form interactivity and the use of Spry validation widgets.

Lesson 13, "Building Templates," is a two step process. First you save the file as a template, and then you save the editable regions. In this lesson you will learn how to properly build a template by proper planning, creating new pages from the template, applying templates to existing pages, and modifying a template.

Lesson 14, "Adding User Interactivity," is important in that it allows you to create engaging user experiences for those who come to your site. You must meet the enhanced user expectations for site design if you plan on retaining the user. Here you will learn about different things that you can do enhance user interactivity.

Lesson 15, "Working with Flash and Video," is very important to a Web site, and the fact that Flash and Dreamweaver have worked together for a very long time makes it very convenient. Here you will see how to insert Flash files, set the properties, and how to encode your video for best performance. Lesson 16, "Automating Efficient Workflows," is all about helping you work smarter when using Dreamweaver. Here you will learn some important tasks to accomplish your job.

Lesson 17, "Coding in Dreamweaver," show you how to edit your code by hand when you need to in Dreamweaver. Here you will learn to set code preferences, use hints, add comments, and find syntax errors. Lesson 18, "Managing Sites," examines what you need to do to run your site, to check for broken links, handle browser compatibility, and synchronize your site.

James Williamson does a very thorough job of taking you though most everything you need to work with Dreamweaver CS4. Now if you are and old hand to Dreamweaver and really only need to know about the new features, there is also a two-hour package called Dreamweaver CS4 New Features from Lynda.com as well by the same instructor.

You can get this package one of two ways. One is as a DVD training package Dreamweaver CS4 Essential Training and the other is part of the online training experience at Lynda.com. The DVD Training Package is $149.95 USD and includes Dreamweaver CS4 Essential Training as well as containing all of the exercise files.

The online training Dreamweaver CS4 Essential Training comes in three flavors. Monthly at $25/month gets you all of the videos that are available online (approximately 21,811 videos on 318 topics at this time). Annually at $250 per year or Premium at $375 per year which get all the videos as well as all of the exercise files. Take note that the exercise files are not included with the monthly or annual subscriptions. They are included in the Premium subscriptions and the standalone DVDs.

You can use Dreamweaver CS4 Essential Training as a training program for the individual student, as well as the college or vocational teacher looking to supplement their educational materials. It is of benefit to anyone who needs help understanding Dreamweaver CS4. You can also try out a couple of the videos for free at Lynda.com.

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Dreamweaver,Web Development

Software Review: Adobe Master Collection - Premiere Pro CS4 from Adobe Systems

2008-12-29T09:33:00.000-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

This is a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) Master Collection. When Adobe released CS4 this fall, they not only released single version products, but also six separate suites of products. They are Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Web Standard, Production Premium, and Master Collection. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.

What do you need to run Adobe Premiere Pro CS4? On a PC you need a 2GHz or faster processor, Windows XP SP2 or Vista; on Mac, PowerPC G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.11 – 10.5.4 (Leopard), 512MB RAM, 1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with 16-bit video card, 10GB hard drive space for installation and DVD-ROM Drive.

Adobe Premiere Pro is a real-time, timeline-based video editing software application. It has gained acceptance within the film and video industry and has been used in part in such films as Dust to Glory by Dana Brown and Superman Returns for the video capture process and so, as the name implies, it is a professional-level editing package.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 attempts to reduce the complex process that is video production. It does this by including copies of the products Adobe OnLocation CS4 and Adobe Encore CS4 to try to make each step of the video production more efficient and giving you more time to work your story.

So what is new with Premiere Pro CS4?

• End-to-End metadata workflow – will let you add metadata to clips both on set with Adobe OnLocation, and while editing via Premiere. This will give your workflow greater project intelligence as you can use the new speech recognition technology to create text-based metadata that you can use to organize your assets.

• Speech Search – this technology offers you the ability to turn the spoken dialog in your clips into text-based metadata which will make your video searchable. No more hand entering key words. Now through voice analysis, keywords can be automatically added, allowing you jump directly to the frame that you are after.

• Tapeless Camera Support – now lets you use video that has been captured directly to disk and opens the door to new workflows that save time and maintain a higher quality throughout the production process. You can now import and edit content from Panasonic P2, Sony XDCAM EX, and HD cameras directly, which will save you a tremendous amount of time.

• Dynamic workflow – use in conjunction with other Adobe tools gives a more tightly integrated toolset in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. For example, this will eliminate intermediate rendering when moving sequences into Adobe Encore CS4 software, and take advantage of new support for Adobe Photoshop files with video and blend modes.

• Batch encoding - in the background using Adobe Media Encoder, a separate, included software application that automates the process of creating multiple encoded versions of your source files and sequences. You have the ability to manage priorities and control advanced settings for individual files.

• Redesigned OnLocation – is now cross-platform with a new Adobe-standard interface. Save time and take the tedium out of logging with shot lists and metadata-based project intelligence. Now you can take your footage right in and it can automatically be logged for you.

• Editing Efficiency – now available through the inclusion of more than 50 new editing enhancements provided to streamline your workflow. Things like applying an effect to multiple clips, applying multiple effects to multiple clips, copy and paste transitions, and more precise editing and communications with clients based on the use of timecodes is all here to help you be more efficient.

• Blu-ray Disc authoring – now lets you create high-definition Blu-ray discs with Encore CS4. Working with the same interface used to create standard-definition DVDs, but now incorporating advanced Blu-ray features like pop-up menus and subtitles and dual-layer burning.

• SWF output – gives you the ability to create SWF file versions of your DVD and Blu-ray projects for the Web, complete with DVD interactivity, menus, URL links, and customizable HTML templates, all without opening another application.

• Final Cut Pro project import – will let you complete your Final Cut Pro project in Adobe Premiere Pro. Use Final Cut Pro XML interchange to transfer projects directly from Final Cut Pro to Adobe Premiere Pro without conversion or re-rendering. It will preserve your commonly used effects and transitions.

Premiere Pro CS4 is really a major upgrade to an already great product. Significant in this release is the ability to import and edit AVCHD Files. This is huge with regard to the new camcorders that are coming out. The increased integration into the Adobe family of products is also welcomed. For example, no longer do you have to render your Premiere Pro timeline before you can bring your video into Encore. The time you will save with this one feature alone will pay for the upgrade many times over.

The interface change to OnLocation is a welcome feature as well. No longer do you have to deal with the cumbersome methods of the previous version. Also welcome for Mac users is a native version of OnLocation.

The metadata is another prominent feature. The ability to view and input information about a clip or its source is fantastic. You can store and track copyright information and much, much more. And it can be taken through the workflow. Add to this the Speech transcription; Adobe calls it metalogging. It analyzes a selected clips audio and translates the words to the metadata panel. There are several languages that it can transcribe, including four varieties of English.

Then there is the Media Encoder that allows you to batch process media files, you can convert a MP4 file into Flash, and in fact it automates the whole process of creating multiple encoded versions of your source files. While there may not be a lot flashy, high profile new features, filters, etc, there are a whole lot of time-saving, workflow streamlining advantages that come with Premiere Pro CS4. These alone make it worth the upgrade and so I highly recommend Premiere Pro CS4.

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Premiere,Premier Pro,Video,Production

Software Review: Microsoft Expression Studio 2 - Expression Web 2

2008-12-26T09:14:00.000-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

This is the first of a series of three reviews that will cover what is contained in the Microsoft Expression Studio 2 Collection. Expression Studio is the latest version of Microsoft's development design set. In Studio 2, there are five programs that are geared to Web and application developers and designers. The products include Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media, and Expression Encoder. The goal is define what each product does and provide information of what it can do for you.

What do you need to run Expression Studio 2? On Windows you need an 1GHz or faster processor, Windows XP SP2 or Vista; on Mac, a PowerPC® or multi-core Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.11 – 10.5.4 (Leopard), 1GB RAM, 1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with a 24-bit video card, 2GB hard drive space, and DVD-ROM Drive.

Here I will look at Microsoft Expression Web 2. Expression Web is a HTML Editor and general Web design program that was developed to replace Microsoft FrontPage. It is targeted toward professional Web site developers. It allows the authoring of Web pages using XML, CSS, ASP.NET, XHTML, XSLT, and JavaScript. Differing from FrontPage, it uses its own rendering engine, and contains accurate standards compliant rendering.

In Expression Web 2, you have an editing screen that toggles between design screen, straight code, and split screen with the editing screen at the bottom. While it retains some similarities to FrontPage, it really is totally different under the hood. Instead of inserting jacked up tags and code, it really builds nice CSS-based code that is easy to maintain. It is also pretty easy to build larger sites by using templates.

So what is new with Expression Web 2?

• PHP Support – now will let you work with PHP sites and provide the standards-based features to this platform. You can just open up a PHP page and start creating. You get syntax color coding and full InteleSence control to help you choose functions and global variables, as well as tool tips that provide information about parameters. Once you have PHP on your system, you can also preview your pages locally without having to upload to a server.

• ASP.NET Support – has been enhanced as well to not only support ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, but AJAX support as well. AJAX is the essential technology for creating a modern state of the art site in which the full page refresh is no longer needed and gives it a more responsive, dynamic feel. You can now work with any ASP.NET Control as well.

• Photoshop Support – will let you import a Photoshop PSD file and choose what layers are converted. You can also re-edit the file in Photoshop and easily update your Web optimized graphic file. When you insert the PSD file, Expression Web will optimize it for Web use, and any time you change the PSD file, it will automatically re-optimize it using the update from source functionality.

• Silverlight, Flash, and Windows Media Support – gives you the ability to add rich Internet applications to your Web pages by using a simple insert command, or via drag and drop. Expression Web will make sure that your content is standards-based when it is added to your page. You can use Flash, Windows Media, or Microsoft's new cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering rich media, and interactive applications.

I found that Expression Web 2 was very intuitive and easy to use. I especially like the fact that it creates pretty efficient Web sites and doesn’t add a lot of bloat like FrontPage used to. The opening up to non-Microsoft platforms is great. The ability to work with PHP and Photoshop are an enormous plus, as are the updates to work with the latest and greatest Visual Studio (2008).

If you order the Expression Studio 2 Subscription, you not only get the five products in the Studio, you also get a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista, and a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio Standard Edition as well, along with a year worth of updates.

One thing that I had a problem with is that I installed the demo, signed up for the subscription, and they sent me a set of permanent disks. The problem I had was that I then had to uninstall the demo to install the live version. It would have been better if I could have just put in a key, but in the overall scheme, not a biggie. On the upside from this problem was that I called tech support, and the person was very helpful in explaining what I needed to do.

I think that if you are into Web development, and especially if you work with Microsoft products, then I can easily recommend Microsoft Expression Web 2.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Expression Studio,Expression Web,Web Development

Software Review: Camtasia Studio 6 from TechSmith

2008-12-25T09:08:00.001-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

So what is Camtasia Studio? It is the premiere screen recording system on the market today, and it has just gotten better with the release of Camtasia Studio 6. It is a complete software solution for creating high-quality training videos, presentations, and screencasts that can be shared on the Web, CD-ROM, as well as on portable media players such as the iPod.

Camtasia Studio 6 runs on Microsoft Windows XP or Vista, requires DirectX 9.0 or later, 1.0GHz Processor (2.5GHz is recommended and needed for PowerPoint and camera recordings), 500MB RAM (2GB recommended), 115MB of hard drive space. There are other specialized requirements for specific needs.

TechSmith started out in 1987 as a custom software company who developed for the Windows platform. Responding to a demand for screen capture utilities, they created SnagIt in 1991. Over time, SnagIt offered some video capture capabilities and these eventually became Camtasia in 1999. In 2002, it became Camtasia Studio, which was enhanced with a suite of tools. In November 2008, the latest version — Camtasia Studio 6 — was released.

What does Camtasia Studio actually do? It automatically records exactly what a user sees on the screen. It records what they say, and how they interact with any Windows-based application or Web site. It can be used to record training videos, marketing information, or support instruction.

Once you have your video recorded, Camtasia Studio 6 has the tools that will allow you to edit your video and share it in a variety of formats. These include Flash (SWF), fixed media such as CD and DVD, as well as on portable media such as the iPod. If you want, you can see a short overview of Camtasia and how it can be used.

There were two main goals that Camtasia Studio wanted to address for this version. First were larger projects. As people became more comfortable with creating videos, they started creating larger ones. The larger they got, the more sluggish the editing became. The second area was as new technology keeps being introduced, Camtasia needed to create higher quality videos with smaller file sizes.

So what is new with Camtasia Studio 6?

• Finer control over effects – will help you get your timing down. You can control the duration of transitions and callout fades right down to a tenth of a second.

• Tilt Video effect – will give you the ability to let your videos pop! By being able to change the angle and bring some things closer to the screen and putting others in the background, you can force some items to grab attention where the attention is needed.

• Overhauled presets – like Web, blog, and iPod have been upgraded to have High Definition video capabilities. Three others — YouTube, HD display, and Screencast.com, which are new presets — also take advantage of the new format which replaces FLV. They all default to a MPEG-4 AVC (H.264 ACC) file coupled with a Flash player. This means the HD quality with the smallest file size possible.

• Edit MOV files – from a digital camera or previous project. You can now bring it into Camtasia Studio and edit it on the timeline. As long as it is a self-contained MOV file, you can edit it.

• Screencast.com – is the fast and easy way to get videos from Camtasia to the Web. With the new Screencast.com preset, you can direct content into your sharing folder of choice. What's better, you get a free 2GB storage, 2GB bandwidth account absolutely free.

Camtasia Studio 6 is an all-in-one solution for creating audio-video screencasts. You can import media, record from your screen, or record video from your Web cam. It provides the ability to include quizzes as well as other information into your presentation. It is SCORM compliant. There is also a PowerPoint plug-in that allows you to take your presentations and turn them into video form.

Camtasia Studio 6 also has a lot of tutorial videos (go figure) that break down specific topics and focus on helping you get up to speed fast. They also have on many of the screens a button that says "Assist Me" that will display instruction, and a button "Show Me" which will take you to a video about the topic. The latter really saves you time from having to try to find the tutorial somewhere else.

If you are looking to get into professional video creation, then Camtasia Studio 6 is the right product. If you own Camtasia Studio 5 should you upgrade to 6? In my opinion, the separate audio and video clips are worth every penny of the upgrade. This alone will save hours of editing/re-recording time. Add to that the better performance for working with larger recordings, the HD video ability, and the finer control over the effects all make it an easy decision to upgrade. I highly recommend Camtasia Studio 6.

• Separate audio and video tracks – will now let you detach your audio from your video so that you can fix mistakes much easier than ever before. So say you mispronounce a word during your recording. In the past you would have to either leave it in or re-record your video. Now you simply detach your audio from your video track, cut out the bad section, and drop in the new.

• Added hotkeys – will save you a lot of time. Now with seven customizable hot keys, if you want to add a callout to the current spot on the timeline, just hit "C" on your keyboard. If you want to zoom, hit the "Z" key.

Technorati Tags: Camtasia,Screen Capture,YouTube

Audio Book Review: JLA - Exterminators By Christopher Golden, Based On The Series From DC Comics

2008-09-16T12:01:00.001-06:00

By T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

JLA: Exterminators, which was first released in book form in 2004, starts in the early days of the Justice League when a strange metallic-tasting rain fell on the United Kingdom. A race of aliens appeared to be attacking Great Briton and the JLA did not really understand why, but after a time they were defeated — all except one whose head was kept on ice by British intelligence.

We then fast forward to the present when a surge of metahuman creatures begins to appear. What is triggering their appearance is not readily apparent, but soon we understand that it has something to do with that invasion of ten years ago.

Once again, I was treated to a Graphic Audio performance that really brings you into the story. The combination of sound effects and artistic vocal performances creates what Graphic Audio calls a "Movie in your Mind," and that is truly what JLA: Exterminators is.

At the time of that early rainstorm, when the newly formed Justice League was fighting the group of invading giants from outer space, their actions stopped the invading hoard, but did they do the right thing? Did they save the world, or just delayed the inevitable?

Now Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, The Flash, The Green Lantern, and the rest of the Justice League of America must figure out what is going on with this new generation of metahumans — some good and some evil — and how to stop the destruction.

The questions to be answered are what caused this outbreak? How to stop it? And can they figure out what went wrong ten years ago? You will have to get the Graphic Audio program to find out!

One of the things that makes JLA: Exterminators work is the fact that while most of the DC comics are American-centric, this takes place in England — which gives it a refreshing edge. Also, the characters have some depth and emotion and as such, come across as three-dimensional. Finally, there is a character, Ian Partington, an ordinary Brit who develops super powers and then becomes friends with everyone in the JLA. The character development along this thread is just great and really makes this story work on many levels.

The quality of the story and performance is the reason that I will be coming back to Graphic Audio products. You can also check out some of their other series as well. If you want, you can listen to a sample, or purchase the Graphic Audio Book from their on-line Store. The story comes three ways: standard CD (the version I reviewed), MP3 CD and downloadable WMA with digital rights management.

Music Review: Grayson Capps - Rott 'N' Roll

2008-09-16T11:16:00.000-06:00

By T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Born of the prostitutes, alcoholics, vagrants, and drifters that inhabit the music of Grayson Capps and the Stumpknockers, the term Rott 'N' Roll; as well as the title of his latest album, is a reflection of the style of music they create. The Southern soul, mixed with back-country stomp, and spiced with road-house blues, brings out a down home American appeal.

Grayson Capps first discovered music in Alabama where he was born and raised. His father and friends would sit around getting drunk, telling stories, and playing acoustic guitars to the songs of Hank Williams, Tom T. Hall, Woody Guthrie, and others. While on scholarship at Tulane University, he took up playing music. He formed two bands that had moderate success and even opened shows for the likes of Keith Richards and Crowded House.

After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005, Capps moved to Franklin Tennessee. With the need to produce a new album, he recorded Wail & Ride. While this album included his band the Stumpknockers, it also included other musicians and had a more studio sound and quality to it.

Rott 'N' Roll on the other hand, is more about capturing the real sound of Grayson Capps and The Stumpknockers. The album was made at his home studio in Franklin and many of the songs were done in single takes. The band features Tommy MacLuckie on Lead, Josh Kerin on Bass, and John Milham on Drums. The album was produced by Trina Shoemaker.

Rott 'N' Roll has a definite different feel to its predecessor Wail & Ride, yet it retains all of the quality of writing and musicianship. There is a certain feel that a group of musicians have when they have spent a lot of time on the road playing together night after night. Grayson Capps and the Stumpknockers have that sound.

The songwriting is as good as ever ranging from the simplistic "Sock Monkey;" which by the way was written by the lead guitarist Tommy MacLuckie, and is pure punk country fun, to the incredibly deep lyrics of the songs "Ike," "Arrowhead," "Guitar," and "The Waltz."

There are the songs that are there just for the fun of it such as "Grand Maw Maw" and "Big Ol' Woman;" both of which include a drunken chorus of rednecks whom it was said found their way to the sessions. There is also an insightful and very well done poem "Fear Fruit Bearing Tree" which goes to show what an articulate writer can do when making a biting political point.

Finally, there are the songs in which it really is the music that drives the them such as in the driving "Big Black Buzzard," the stomping "Sun Don't Shine on Willy," and the equally driving instrumental "Bacon."

What struck me most though, was that each piece had its own identity; its own personality and place on this album. Some grabbed you by the collar and made you take notice like "Back to the Country" with its complex lyrics and great tune. While others sneak up from behind like "Psychic Channel Blues" which builds and has some subtle, yet biting lead guitar licks and really worked for me.

What I like about Grayson Capps and The Stumpknockers is that it is not a manufactured sound. It comes across as genuine and edgy and totally unique. The songs paint pictures that leave indelible images in your mind. Of the thirteen tracks on Rott 'N' Roll, there was not one that I did not find a reason to enjoy for one reason or another. If you want some great down home southern blues with a bit of Rott 'N' Roll, then you need to give this album a spin.

Song list for Rott 'N' Roll

Back To The Country
Arrowhead
Gran Maw Maw
Psychic Cannel Blues
The Waltz
Big Black Buzzard
Ike
Sun Don't Shine on Willy
Big Ole Woman
Guitar
Fear Fruit Bearing Tree
Sock Monkey
Bacon

Software Review - SnagIt 9 from TechSmith

2008-07-29T11:16:00.001-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

SnagIt 9 is the latest release of TechSmith's screen capture program. With this version there have been quite a number of changes since the previous iteration, and this time it is really as much of a makeover as it is an upgrade. In fact, they have rebuilt SnagIt from the ground up.

SnagIt 9 runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 or later, requires Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, 1 GHz Processor (2.4 GHz is recommended), 512 MB RAM (1 GB Recommended), and 60 MB of Hard Drive space.

TechSmith originally started out in 1987 as a custom software company who developed for the Windows platform. Responding to a demand for screen capture utilities, they created SnagIt in 1991. Over time, SnagIt offered some video capture capabilities and these, in turn, became Camtasia in 1999. The current version of SnagIt (9.0) was released in June 2008.

SnagIt enables Windows computer users to capture anything they see on the screen. You can then edit and combine those screenshots and share them by using your favorite applications including Microsoft Office and via e-mail.

With SnagIt, if you can see it, you can capture it. Depending on the mode that you use it in, you can capture a small section of a screen, a whole window, multiple windows, or a whole scrolling webpage. There are 11 preset buttons that let you target what you want to capture, whether it's just a region, some text, or the whole enchilada. You can even create your own custom presets.

SnagIt lets you edit your captures by adding things like text and arrows, highlighting sections of your image. You can output to a printer, clipboard, file, e-mail, PDF, and Flash as well.

So what is new with SnagIt 9?

• New more fluid workflow – replaced the old linear workflow and now gives much more freedom to use SnagIt the way you want to. If you want to capture screen after screen, you can without having to save each shot before you go on to the next. If you want to capture and edit, you can. This is one of my favorite updated features to this version.

• Combining multiple images – now much easier using the open captures tray. You can drag and drop screen captures on to the canvas and make your edits, enhancements, and off you go.

• Auto store – a complement to the fluid workflow in that you can just capture, capture, capture. Everything is now stored for you. No longer do you have to save and rename before the next capture. When you are done, you can handle it all then. So much easier than ever before!

• Visual Search pane – now keeps track of what you have captured so you don't have to. If you can remember a detail like when you captured it or from what Web site, SnagIt will help you find it.

• Tags & Flags – lets you mark your projects so that when you are ready to put them all tog

ether you can find them. No need storing them in separate folders; just tag and flag them.

• New editing interface – heck it is a total UI makeover and makes it look and work in the new Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon style menu interface. One of the more challenging aspects of this version is figuring where things are now compared to the prior version, but once you get use to it, it is a snap.

SnagIt 9 is one of the most comprehensive and powerful screen capture applications available for Windows. It offers a lot of tools for organizing, simplifying, and editing your captures. It is incredibly easy to use, is customizable, and offers multiple views.

I work online a lot and I find that it is much easier to grab a screenshot, mark it up, and send it to someone than it is to try to describe something. If you prefer to try it before you buy it then there is a 30-day trial available. To purchase it new, it is $49.95 for a single user license. If you own a prior version it is $24.95 to upgrade. But until August 12, 2008, it is only $19.95.

If you find yourself capturing screenshots on a regular basis, then owning SnagIt 9 is a must. This is highly recommended.

Technorati Tags: SnagIt,Screen Capture,Software,Images

Software Review: XMLSpy 2008 From Altova

2008-07-24T13:42:00.001-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

MLSpy 2008 is the latest version of Altova's integrated development environment (IDE) for XML. XMLSpy allows programmers to create XML-based applications and Web services in a more dynamic and easier to understand environment. The version that I am reviewing is XMLSpy 2008 release 2 which came out on May 7, 2008 and it is based on the Enterprise version. There is also a Professional version and if you would like to view the differences between the two, you can check out the feature comparison list.

What is XMLSpy 2008? It is a XML development environment for designing, editing, and debugging enterprise class applications that involve XML, XML Schema, XSL/XSLT, XQuery, SOAP, WSDL, and Web service technologies. Its aim is to be a productivity enhancer for J2EE, .NET, and database developers. Along with being an XML editor, it offers a code generator, file converters, a debugger, a profiler, and integration into Visual Studio .NET and Eclipse.

One of the other main features XMLSpy includes is the ability to edit XML documents in multiple formats. I personally think that this is one of those kinds of features that once you get used to it, it's hard to work without XMLSpy. You can look at your XML document as a text doc, a grid format, and as a WYSIWYG view. Next it has a built-in well-formedness checker and validator. If there is something wrong with your document, you don't have to wait till it fails and then try to figure out what is wrong with it; XMLSpy does it for you.

You also have intelligent editing such that if a schema is associated with your XML document, the auto-completion feature of Text View provides help in editing. There are structural editing features like line numbering, indentation, bookmarks, as well as expandable and collapsible element to aid in navigation.

You can create schemas quickly and easily, there is support for XInclude and XPointer, a built-in XQuery 1.0 processor, and you can transform your XML document as well. You have debuggers, project management, database import, and the ability to compare XML files. If you are using Java, C++, or C# to manipulate data in XML, you can generate code containing class definitions for the schema. That is a lot already.

So with all this, what's new with XMLSpy 2008 Release 2?

• Very large file support – has been enhanced to work with much larger files. These result in a reduction of memory consumption by up to 75-80% as compared with the prior version when opening and validating XML documents in text view. This now means that you can work with files 4 to 5 times larger than before. This will be very beneficial to those with databases and other large applications.

• Detailed find-and-replace in XML Schema editor – now adds to the robust find-in capabilities that already exist in XMLSpy by adding the ability to find-in Schemas. Here you can find within single schemas and across complex multiple schemas as well.

• Enhanced XSLT details in info window – now places an XSLT tab in the XMLSpy info window which provides information for developers working with XSLT stylesheets. This tab allows you to view the associated schema and XML Instance files as well as any included or imported XSLT documents. The toolbar buttons allow you to organize some or all of the files into an XMLSpy project or even add the files to a ZIP archive.

• New XSL Outline entry helper window – complements the XSLT tab and aids in the optimization of XSLT development. When working with a XSLT 1.0 or 2.0 stylesheet, it lists the templates and functions in the current XSLT file as well as those in any included or imported file. Here you can view or edit each template's mode, priority, and associated comment directly in the XSL outline window.

• Support for Java, C#, JavaScript, and VBScript in XSLT 1.0/2.0 engines – now allows those who embed program code in Java, C#, JavaScript, or VBScript to add advanced functionality to their XSLT stylesheets. Now, not only can you take advantage of XMLSpy's XSLT editing and transformation capabilities, but you can also test, perfect, and optimize them using the XSLT debugger and XSLT profiler.

• Support for SOAP 1.2 – now allows you to create and test Web Services messages using SOAP1.2 by checking the appropriate box in the SOAP request settings dialog.

• Project generation for Visual Studio 2008 – gives you the option to generate a Visual Studio 2008 project file when generating C# or C++ code in XMLSpy.

• Visual Studio integration extended to include Visual Studio 2008 – now offers seamless support into Visual Studio 2008.

XMLSpy 2008 is available from Altova. It is $1090.00 USD for the Enterprise version and $539 for the Professional version. Still unsure, you can download a 30 day trial version as well.

If you work with XML with any regularity then you need to do yourself a favor and check out XMLSpy 2008. Right out of the box it will begin to save you time and money in making sure that your data is correct and allowing you to see your data in a whole new way. As you progress in your learning of XMLSpy 2008, you will find yourself using more and more of the toolset and becoming even more productive. I highly recommend XMLSpy 2008.

Technorati Tags: Altova,XMLSpy,XML,Web Services,Visual Studio,SOAP,Software,Programming

Software Review - NetAdvantage For .NET Suite- NetAdvantage AppStylist 2008 Volume 1 From Infragistics

2008-07-21T15:11:00.001-06:00

Technorati Tags: NetAdvantage,Infragistics,AppSylist,Presentation Layer,Software,Development

Written by T. Michael Testi

This is the third part of a three-part series that will cover what is contained in the NetAdvantage For .NET Suite. The three products are NetAdvantage for ASP.NET, NetAdvantage for Windows Forms, and NetAdvantage AppStylist. You can go online to explore more about the products in this suite. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and what it can do for you.

Infragistics over the years has positioned itself as a leader in the development of the presentation layer technologies. By creating high quality, reusable presentation layer tools for ASP.NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Tablet PC, and Java Environments, they are able to provide their customers with the ability to accelerate the development process by reducing development time.

The NetAdvantage For .NET Suite is compatible with Visual Studio 2008, and Visual Studio 2005. It works with Microsoft Windows XP and Vista. Infragistics products are subscription-based which gives you updates and upgrades for the period of the license, usually one year. So when you see the terminology "2008 Volume 1", this means it is the first release for this release of the product for that year. The license is also developer-based which means that the developer can install it on more than one machine, but they are the only one who has the right to use the license.

So what is NetAdvantage AppStylist? It is a revolutionary product that lets application developers and graphic artists peacefully coexist within a company. It allows each to do their job without stepping on or getting in the way of the other. It allows one to determine and develop the functionality while the other designs the look and feel and branding.

NetAdvantage AppStylist is really two products in one. One is for ASP.NET and the other is for Windows Forms. It is a standalone application that works outside of the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE and therefore allows visual designers to create and edit style libraries for use with these Infragistics products. It is meant to allow graphic designers to collaborate more efficiently with developers in creating polished, professional applications.

The Application Styling Framework (ASF) divides the space between the developer space and the designer space to let each accomplish their tasks. The designer should not be concerned with how the developer implements the design and the developer should not be concerned with any aspect of the look and feel of the application. By reducing the job cross-over, NetAdvantage AppStylist can speed development.

Some of the features of NetAdvantage AppStylist include

• Styling similar elements – such that when a graphics artist wants the column headers on a table to appear like the column headers in a list or tree without having to re-specify these setting for each control, they now have that ability from within their own IDE.

• Target components by type – will let a regular appearance to be applied across all controls of a particular control type without the developer having to tediously go in and change all of the properties within an application.

• Target individual instances – lets you change individual instances of a control type to look different than the others all without the developer having to change anything within the application.

• Coexistence with the Infragistics Object Model – In Windows Forms it merges its style settings with those of the control at appearance resolution time. On the Web, it is based on the client machine as part of their browser's routine CSS class resolution.

NetAdvantage AppStylist For Windows Forms will make the graphics artist feel right at home and allow them to become productive much more quickly through tooling that has been designed to work like the graphics media programs that they are already familiar with.

To work with NetAdvantage AppStylist you create/open a style library and base a new style library on an existing template. You can then customize the color palette of the style library. In the past, these color changes would need to have been coordinated between the graphics and applications designers, which really means that when the graphics designer wanted a change, the developer would have to stop work and make these modifications.

Then, to see the results of the changes, the graphics designer would have to wait until a test build has been completed to see the results. Now, in NetAdvantage AppStylist the graphics designer has access to every control and UI interface available so they can see what things will look like.

Once everything is complete, the graphics designer saves the style as an .isl file which the application designer then includes into the Windows Forms code. The developer then can implement it with as little as a single line of code: Infragistics.Win.Appstyling.StyleMangager.Load("MyStyle.isl");

When the application starts running, the appearance is defined by the new Style Library. Throughout the system, all controls are now updated to use the new styles without the possibility of errors or missed controls. If the graphics designer changes their mind on something, they just present an updated .isl file.

By technological differences, NetAdvantage AppStylist For ASP.NET works a little differently from the Windows Forms version. Here the style libraries are folder-based instead of file-based. Designers use .wsl files that describe the contents of their style library, but because the style library is now composed of separate .CSS and image files organized by style set and control type, style libraries can span multiple files in a nested folder structure.

Those appearance settings that can be styled for the Web conform to the style properties as defined by CSS and supported by major browser vendors. By defining a style using a Web site's web.config file, the new style can be set without ever taking down the site or rebuilding it.

From there the workflow is basically the same as it was with Windows Forms. You begin with a template and modify it to the look and feel that you want. You then save the .wsl file and then update your site to take advantage of it.

I think that this is a tremendous addition to anyone using either NetAdvantage for ASP.NET or NetAdvantage for Windows Forms. Even if you are not using a graphics designer and the developers are doing the layout, this will be a tremendous productivity boost to anyone.

There are two licenses that you can purchase NetAdvantage AppStylist. First is with Priority Support for $1,195.00 USD, and Standard for $695.00 USD. For the Studio it is $1,490.00, and $995.00 respectively. Priority support includes one year of priority phone, 24-hour chat and rapid response online support. As an added bonus, with either license, along with the updates, upgrades, and product releases, you also get the C# code for all ASP.NET tools and designers. You can even download an evaluation copy. There are no features disabled during your evaluation period.

If you are tired of having to repeatedly go back and forth with designers on your ASP.NET or Windows Forms application interfaces, having to spend more time then you want on the look and not enough time on what really counts—the product—then I highly recommend you take a look at Infragistics NetAdvantage AppStylist.

Software Review - NetAdvantage For .NET Suite- NetAdvantage For ASP.NET 2008 Volume 1 From Infragistics

2008-07-16T12:29:00.001-06:00

Technorati Tags: NetAdvantage,Infragistics,AppSylist,Presentation Layer,Software,Development

This is the second part of a three-part series that will cover what is contained in the NetAdvantage For .NET Suite. The three products are NetAdvantage for ASP.NET, NetAdvantage for Windows Forms, and NetAdvantage AppStylist. You can go online to explore more about the products in this suite. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and what it can do for you.

The NetAdvantage For .NET Suite is compatible with Visual Studio 2008, and Visual Studio 2005. It works with Microsoft Windows XP and Vista. Infragistics products are subscription-based which gives you updates and upgrades for the period of the license; usually one year. So when you see the terminology "2008 Volume 1", this means it is the first release for this release of the product for that year. The license is also developer based which means that the developer can install it on more than one machine, but they are the only one who has the right to use the license.

So what is NetAdvantage For ASP.NET? It is a toolkit for creating ASP.NET Web-based applications. It contains an extensive set of over 35 visual and non-visual controls including AJAX grids, charts, toolbars, menus, listbars, trees, tabs, and much more.

The NetAdvantage For ASP.NET is a complete toolset for building the presentation layer of your ASP.NET applications. The ASP.NET Controls and components are built on server-side and client-side architectural frameworks. They communicate and interact using JavaScript objects and XML. The server-side is designed to operate within the ASP.NET Framework and much of its functionality is derived from classes, structures, and events in the framework. The client-side objects are implemented as JavaScript functions on the pages that are invoked at the time that each event occurs.

So what is new with NetAdvantage For ASP.NET?

• Full Support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – is new in NetAdvantage For ASP.NET. Included is support for the integrated development environment (IDE), and all .NET controls and components have been tested within this new environment.

• Aikido Framework – is the first release of Infragistics new Web User Framework. It is an architecture built into NetAdvantage For ASP.NET that supports the creation of lightweight, cross-browser, XHTML and CSS-based AJAX controls. Currently based on the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX extensions 1.0 and ASP.NET 2.0, it is meant to remain aligned with the new ASP.NET 3.5 programming paradigms as they arise. The goals for this framework are to provide high-performance, standards compliance, major browser support, and the ability to make the object model simpler to understand and employ.

• Web Splitter – is a new ASP.NET splitter bar that provides a clean and elegant way to separate content within your Web application. It gives your user the ability to resize, expand, and collapse the content contained with the content pages. You can split horizontally, vertically, and resize your content panes.

• Web Dialog Window – can display as a simple DIV section in your HTML page and is able to bypass many of the pop-up blockers that are present in today's browsers while still appearing to the end user as a pop-up window. You can set the dialog box to behave as a modal or modeless dialog to better control your application. There is a customizable header, and it resizes just like the dialogs on your desktop. You can tell it where you want it to appear on the page. And it takes care of remembering whether the user has minimized, restored or maximized its appearance.

• Web Image Viewer – is a new sliding image control that provides end users with an easy-to-use Web interface for viewing images that can also serve as a navigational control. The images can be oriented horizontally or vertically through a single property setting. There is a custom configurable animation behavior that determines how the images appear as they are scrolled through. It can be data bound to a custom data model that has the file path to use for accessing the images, the target URLs when they are clicked, as well as the tool tip to be displayed.

• ITypedList Data Binding for WebGrid – is a new grid and combo box control that fully support data binding against the ITypedList interface,

• Web Hierarchical Data Source – is a non-visual control that lets you combine disparate data source controls such as SQL data sources, Access data sources, etc. The designer wizard takes you through step-by-step identifying the parent-child relationships. It then exposes the multiple sources as a single data source to other ASP.NET controls.

• Web Chart – adds a tree map chart type. This gives you the ability to display large amounts of data sets as nested rectangles where the size of the rectangle regions correlate to the importance of the data the rectangle represents.

• Web Slider – is a new control that is an AJAX-enabled track bar that lets you present users with an easy-to-understand way of entering data values that are incremental and are confined within a range.

As with NetAdvantage for Windows Forms, NetAdvantage For ASP.NET, it can seem quite overwhelming when you first begin. Infragistics though, has put together some really good help documents to get you started. In the case for NetAdvantage for .NET Studio, you are provided with a getting started guide and then a developer guide which takes you through the best way to learn the product. Since this is a subscription-based product, you are also shown what you need to do to upgrade your application as new releases are made, as well as how to deploy your application.

There are two licenses that you can purchase NetAdvantage For ASP.NET. First is with Priority Support for $1,290.00 USD, and Standard for $795.00 USD. For the Studio it is $1,490.00, and $995.00 respectively. Priority support includes one year of priority phone, 24-hour chat and rapid response online support. As an added bonus, with either license, along with the updates, upgrades, and product releases, you also get the C# code for all ASP.NET tools and designers. You can even download an evaluation copy. There are no features disabled during your evaluation period.

If you are tired of having to repeatedly design your ASP.NET application interfaces, having to spend more time than you want on the look and not enough time on what really counts (the product), then I highly recommend you take a look at Infragistics NetAdvantage For ASP.NET.

Software Review: NetAdvantage For .NET Suite- NetAdvantage For Windows Forms 2008 From Infragistics

2008-07-03T14:50:00.001-06:00

Technorati Tags: NetAdvantage,Infragistics,AppSylist,Presentation Layer,Software,Development

Reviewed by T. Michael Testi

This is the first part of a three-part series that will cover what is contained in the NetAdvantage For .NET Suite. The three products are NetAdvantage for Windows Forms, NetAdvantage for ASP.NET, and NetAdvantage AppStylist. You can go online to explore more about the products in this suite. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and what it can do for you.

Infragistics over the years has positioned itself as a leader in the development of the presentation layer technologies. By creating high quality, reusable presentation layer tools for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF), Tablet PC, and Java Environments, they are able to provide their customers with the ability to accelerate the development process by reducing development time.

The NetAdvantage For .NET Suite is compatible with Visual Studio 2008, and Visual Studio 2005. It works with Microsoft Windows XP and Vista. Infragistics products are subscription-based which gives you updates and upgrades for the period of the license; usually one year. So when you see the terminology "2008 Volume 1", this means it is the first release for this release of the product for that year. The license is also developer based which means that the developer can install it on more than one machine, but they are the only one who has the right to use the license.

So what is NetAdvantage For Windows Forms? It is a toolkit for creating Windows Forms. It is contains an extensive set of over 50 controls and components that have been designed to provide you with the ability to create modern user interfaces for your Windows Forms applications.

The NetAdvantage For Windows Forms toolset is built on the Presentation Layer Framework (PLF); a layer that resides between the Microsoft .NET Framework, and the NetAdvantage Windows Form Elements. Some of the advantages of providing this layer is that it gives you a more stable, more consistent, and more extensible environment such that you can derive your own classes from any public component class that is not sealed, and it contains a shared set of common assemblies. It also means that once you have learned some of the Windows Form controls, the rest will require little effort.

While it is beyond the scope of this review to go through each and every feature, I will try to provide some highlights to the product. You can check out the Infragistics site to explore a more complete list controls and components. The NetAdvantage For Windows Forms consists of the Toolset which includes the Frameworks, which, as explained above are build upon the PLF, the Code Libraries that are a repository of the .NET objects that augment a given application, the Assemblies that map the control to the DLL, and the Controls and Components that you will include within your application.

The NetAdvantage For Windows Forms gives you the ability to change the look and feel of your controls and components. When learning how to use this package you will be presented with ways to set the visual styles and behaviors by using presets, themes, and appearance objects to your applications.

You can also upgrade your existing Windows Forms projects with NetAdvantage For Windows Forms so that you can make changes where you need to, and add new functionality as time permits.

So what is new with NetAdvantage For Windows Forms?
• Full Support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – is new in NetAdvantage For Windows Forms. Included is support for the integrated development environment (IDE), and all .NET controls and components have been tested within this new environment.

• Vista Veneer now supports on WinTree. – This takes what was provided in version 2007 Volume 3; the Microsoft Windows Vista look and feel for the WinToolbarsManager components, and now provides them on the WinTree control. In the Windows Vista Display Styles include Scolling, Expansion indicators, colors, tool tips, and headers

• Select Nodes from any Level – is now available is to allow users to select as many tree nodes as they want in as many different levels of the tree control. This does not require any additional work on your part. You can manipulate the selected nodes collection based on the tree nodes coming from different levels.

• WinTrackBar – is a totally new track bar control that allows your users to choose values from a range; but not just a single range, rather as many as your application requires. It comes with a full array of looks and feels. If you are using the Office 2007 theme, this includes the ribbon style, and the collapsible Outlook pane. You can also style the control to implement your own Windows Vista track bar.

• New Close Button – has been added to the WinTab and WinTabbedMdiManager controls that will allow you to add tab closing functionality much like is found in Firefox and Internet Explorer tabs; this exists in the newer versions of each where you can have multiple websites open at one time and subsequently close each tab.

• WinListView – has been enhanced to allow end users to resize each column, resize by double clicking the right side of the column header, as well as controlling the resize process through the API. The AutoFitColumns turns this on, and the ColumnAutoSizeMode handles how the control reacts with the double click. By using the PerformAutoSize method, you can auto size whenever you need to.

Is there learning curve to using NetAdvantage For Windows Forms? Of course there is. As with any development product you need to spend the time to learn the it and integrated it into your workflow. This package was build under solid development principles that makes the learning curve diminish as you get deeper into learning the product. There are also a lot of helpful designers like the UltraWinGrid Designer that will help guide you through some of the many choices available.

When you first get into NetAdvantage For Windows Forms, it can be quite overwhelming, but Infragistics has put together some really good help documents to get you started. In the case for NetAdvantage for .NET Studio, you are provided with sections that pertain to the studio as a whole as well as for the NetAdvantage For Windows Forms product. They do a good job of presenting where you need to go to get started learning.

There are two licenses that you can purchase NetAdvantage For Windows Forms. First is with Priority Support for $1,290.00 USD, and Standard for $795.00 USD. For the Studio it is $1,490.00, and $995.00 respectively. Priority support includes one year of priority phone, 24-hour chat and rapid response online support. As an added bonus, with either license, along with the updates, upgrades, and product releases, you also get the C# code for all Windows Forms tools and designers. You can even download an evaluation copy. There are no features disabled during your evaluation period.

If you are tired of having to repeatedly design your application interfaces, having to painstakingly change the look and feel of controls and components, or having to spend more time then you want on the look and not enough time on what really counts; the product, then I highly recommend you take a look at Infragistics NetAdvantage For Windows Forms.

15 Ways Microsoft Can Reinvent Itself for the Post-Gates Era

2008-06-26T17:13:00.001-06:00

Its cofounder is retiring, its latest big product has been vilified, and potential partners are spurning its advances. So what does Microsoft do to remain relevant? Here are 15 ideas.

A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software. That, Bill Gates has often said, is the vision on which he and Paul Allen founded their software company in 1975. There's debate over when the mantra was first articulated--the earliest known instances go back only to the mid-1980s--but this much is undeniable: Microsoft made that audacious goal a reality.

Today, as Gates prepares to step down from day-to-day management of the company, another fact is clear: The modern Microsoft remains a company in search of a second act. True, it remains one of the world's most profitable enterprises, raking in more dough in its 2007 fiscal year than Apple, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and Adobe combined. But the cracks in the Microsoft hegemony aren't just showing, they're growing.

Read it all...

Google launches new iGoogle and artist themes

2008-06-26T17:10:00.001-06:00

It looks like Google just launched the new version of iGoogle that developers have had access to in the sandbox for a while now. The new version is great — and it gives developers a lot more flexibility when creating their gadgets because now it’s possible to make a full page view.

Read it all...

Software Review: Setup Factory 7 From IndigoRose

2008-06-25T14:33:00.001-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

If you read my review of MSI Factory 2 you would have found that it is a Microsoft Windows Installer; product that is aimed at creating 100% pure .MSI format installers and at that job it works great. But by using a Windows installer, you are governed by certain criteria that all Windows installers must follow. What about if you want more freedom and flexibility? What about if you want to do some things during installation that the Windows Installer doesn't allow? This is where Setup Factory 7 From IndigoRose steps in.

Setup Factory is a proprietary installation program that does not require the Microsoft Windows installer to be installed on the user's machine, and because it is able to make its own decisions, offers more freedom and flexibility in the creation of your installations. In fact, Setup Factory gives you the ability to deploy software products, data files, graphic images, or pretty much anything else that you want to distribute.

Setup Factory 7 is fully compatible with all versions of Windows from 95 through Vista. In an effort to conserve space, I have listed the requirements at the bottom of this review for both the design environment and the run-time application (the installer).

So, what's new with Setup Factory 7?

• Install any file anywhere with Setup Factory by simply dragging and dropping your files and folders into the project window. The program will maintain your folder structure, automatically query version resource information, create shortcut icons and, by using CRC-32 checking, insure data integrity.

• More compact single file setups let you deliver smaller and faster files. The approximately 450KB runtime overhead (including install) is smaller than the others. This smaller file creates a faster install and makes it easier to distribute by LAN,CD/DVD, and even floppy disk.

• Customizable Install Wizard screens give you a library of more than 20 different templates to choose from and a pre-built wizard sequence that works for a majority of installation tasks. You have the availability of check boxes, radio buttons, and edit fields to popular screens like license agreements, serial number verifications, etc. You can add and remove screens at will, and each screen has a real-time preview so that you can see the results of your changes.

• Themes and skins give you pre-made themes to customize your screens and you can even create your own. You can configure everything from fonts, banner images, body and background graphics, control colors, and more.

• Background window options let you choose between the traditional setup style or the "Run-in-the-background" style. You can customize the background window with gradients, images, color washes, headlines and footer text with 3D effects as well.

• Action Library now gives you over 250 easy to use actions so you can program your install to do what ever you need without being a programmer. These actions handle everything from text file editing to system registry changes. You can execute programs, call DLL functions, query drive information, and more.

• Action Wizard gives you the ability to select the action you want from a list, fill in the requested information and the wizard will do the rest.

• Scripting engine, based on the LUA language, gives you everything you need to do just about anything in an install. This language contains loops, conditions, functions, variables, and more that you can combine with actions to create very powerful installers that can accomplish any task.

• Color Syntax Highlighting Action Editor will allow you to work with the scripting language like a professional. This includes code completion, syntax highlighting, as you type action prototypes, and even context sensitive help.

• Expandable with Action Plugins will extend the product in very powerful ways. You can add support for databases, XML, data encryption, and FTP file transfers. These plugins are available through IndigoRose as well as third parties. You can even create your own with the plugin development kit.

• Dependency Modules & Runtime Support lets you add support for third-party technologies such as VB5, VB6, DCOM, JET, MDAC, Visual C++, and more. Since you have control over the detection and installation of each module, you can adjust the behavior to suite your requirements.

• Flexible Uninstaller has been improved so Setup Factory can automatically uninstall anything that it has installed, or you can customize it to take full control of what happens during the uninstall.

• System requirements checking can be enforced by checking a few boxes. These checks include operating system, memory, screen resolution, color depth, administration privileges, and more.

• Serial numbers, security, and access features are provided by a number of features that will help you manage access to your software including serial number lists and date-based expiration. Your installer data is compressed using proprietary algorithms and only accessible to those who supply a valid serial number, or as always, you can roll your own system.

• Packages, categories, and install types will let you create much more complex and multi-part products. You can group products and features into a single installer. You can even use categories into logical components.

• International language support is provided right out of the box. Installers created with Setup Factory can automatically determine the language of the client operating system and adjust the display of the screens and message accordingly. As long as it is one of the supported languages, you supply the text and Setup Factory takes care of the rest.

• Built-in spell checker that will take the embarrassment out of typos that can creep into your project. What's more is that there are dictionaries available for over a dozen languages.

• Even more, such as silent installs, log files to track of details, unattended builds, comprehensive users guide, and video training CDs.

I found Setup Factory 7 very easy to use and it flowed in a very natural manner. I really like the way that you can just drag and drop your files into the project window and click build and you can be done. You can even have a project wizard that will walk you through the process.

There are a lot of options that I did not get an opportunity to try out, but that just goes to show how feature rich this product is. Setup Factory 7 can give you both aspects, a simple quick installer, as well as a full featured product with a scripting language that hands you the ultimate in power.
Setup Factory 7 is available from IndigoRose for $495 USD or you can download a 30-day trial version as well. No matter the level of developer you are, Setup Factory 7 can deliver your product. I highly recommend Setup Factory.

System Requirements and Design Environment

The minimum and recommended system requirements for the Setup Factory design environment are:

Minimum

Windows 95 (OSR2), 98, Me, NT 4.0 (SP3), 2000, XP, Vista
Pentium 120 MHz
128 MB RAM
800x600 SVGA display with small fonts setting enabled
20+ MB free hard drive space
Video card set to 16 bit color or greater
Mouse

Recommended

Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista
Pentium 4 or equivalent
256 MB RAM or greater
19" monitor @ 1152x864 or 21" monitor @ 1280x1024 (1280x960 if supported by your video card)
High-performance video card
DirectX 8.1 or higher
Sound card
Mouse

Run-time Application (Built Installer)

The minimum system requirements for the Setup Factory installer are:
Minimum

Windows 95 and up
486 processor
32 MB RAM
640x480 SVGA display
Video card set to 8 bit 256 color or greater (recommended)
10+ MB free hard drive space

Note: The following HTTP actions require Internet Explorer 4.0 or greater: HTTP.GetConnectionState, HTTP.DownloadSecure and HTTP.SubmitSecure.

Software Review: MSI Factory 2 from IndigoRose

2008-06-23T15:52:00.001-06:00

Reviewed by T. Michael Testi

Just because creating software can be hard, that doesn't mean that delivering that software has to be harder. But that is just what it is when you don't have the right tools to do the job. MSI Factory 2 is the latest version of IndigoRose's Microsoft Windows Installer product that is aimed at creating 100% pure .MSI format installers.

MSI Factory 2 works hard at making the creation of professional installers faster and much more hassle free. It is meant to be easy to use without the complexities of the MSI database tables, sequences, and components. By using its drag and drop abilities, the customization of some dialog boxes via the visual editor and one-click build, it creates a single installer that works on any version of Windows from 95 to Vista.

MSI Factory is not to be confused with IndigoRose's Setup Factory which I will look at in a separate review. Whereas MSI Factory uses Microsoft's Windows installer service which must be installed on the end user's system, installers of this type must abide by the rules of the Windows Installer technology. Setup Factory, on the other hand, creates its own custom installations and has independent flexibilities.

So how does MSI Factory work? You start off with making either an installer project that creates a full installation package, or a Merge Module Project that is used to create a merge module database. A merge module is a Windows installer database file that is used to describe installation logic that will be merged with a larger Windows installation package. Merge modules are used to deliver shared code, files, resources, registry entries, and setup logic to applications as a single compound file.

Once you select the install, you browse to the files that you want to include and add them. From there you can select options in the following categories: "Files" where you can add, remove and set properties of the files, "Projects" where you can adjust the settings, components, features, folders, and media settings with regard to the project, the "Requirements" of the install such as launch conditions, searches, and merge modules, the "User Interface" that includes the dialog boxes, languages, and styles of the dialogs presented to the user, and the "System Editors" which handle the registry changes, INI files, shortcuts, file operations, environment variables, services, ODBC, XML, and custom actions. Finally you also have control over extensions such as IIS. Once you have everything set up correctly, it is just a matter of building the project.

So, what's new with MSI Factory 2?

• Next Generation Installer – now fully leverages WiX complier technology giving you easy access to the same technology that Microsoft uses for creating installers for Microsoft Office and SQL Server. In fact MSI Factory is the first visual setup builder to fully use Microsoft's WiX compiler technology.

• Intelligent Development – now takes the MSI Factory IDE's focus to the files that you want to distribute as opposed to abstract concepts like components, features, sequences, and GUIDs. This makes it possible in the case of simple installs to just drop files, press build, and deliver.

• Bootstrap Wrapper – is a unique, fully scriptable .EXE bootstrap wrapper with LZMA compression and over 300 actions including HTTP downloads for real flexibility in an MSI based installer.

• WiX – compatible source projects with integrated support for WiX fragments and extensions.

• Dialog Editor – provides visual editing for quickly customizing the interface. It includes 22 different control types such as check boxes, radio buttons, and bit maps that will allow you to create fully customized dialogs.

• System Editors – give you an extensive list of actions including registry editing, shortcut icons, INI files, the ability to set file permissions, and more.

• Enterprise Ready – by giving you the features for team and enterprise development. These include automated builds, processor directives, pre/post build steps, and integrated support for WiX fragments and extensions.

Personally I found MSI Factory 2 very easy to use and much more intuitive than the native .NET installer. You have an incredible amount of control over virtually all aspects of your MSI install.

As of the time of this review, they have not updated the videos for version two, but the videos for version one are still on their site. I did have some sound quality problems with the videos when using my Firefox browser, but under Internet Explorer they worked just fine. The help is primarily a compiled Microsoft help file that also links you back to the videos and to a FAQ page on the IndigoRose website. They also have a pretty dynamic forum where you can get answers to questions.

MIS Factory 2 is available from IndigoRose for $495 USD or you can download a 30 day trial version. If you are looking for the ability to create Microsoft Window Installer files quickly and easily and especially if you want to use the new WiX technology, then you need MIS Factory 2.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Design Environment:

Windows 2000, XP, Vista
Resolution: 1040x768
500 MB RAM
40+ MB free hard drive space
.NET Framework 1.1
Windows Installer 2.0

Runtime (Built Installer):

Windows 95 and up
Project based Windows Installer version installed

Software Review: XMLSpy 2008 From Altova

2008-06-20T15:53:00.001-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

XMLSpy 2008 is the latest version of Altova's integrated development environment (IDE) for XML. XMLSpy allows programmers to create XML-based applications and Web services in a more dynamic and easier to understand environment. The version that I am reviewing is XMLSpy 2008 release 2 which came out on May 7, 2008 and it is based on the Enterprise version. There is also a Professional version and if you would like to view the differences between the two, you can check out the feature comparison list.

So with all this, what's new with XMLSpy 2008 Release 2?

• Support for SOAP 1.2 – now allows you to create and test Web Services messages using SOAP1.2 by checking the appropriate box in the SOAP request settings dialog.

• Project generation for Visual Studio 2008 – gives you the option to generate a Visual Studio 2008 project file when generating C# or C++ code in XMLSpy.

• Visual Studio integration extended to include Visual Studio 2008 – now offers seamless support into Visual Studio 2008.

XMLSpy 2008 is available from Altova. It is $1090.00 USD for the Enterprise version and $539 for the Professional version. Still unsure, you can download a 30 day trial version as well.

Software Review: Vue 6 Infinite From e-On Software

2008-06-09T09:39:00.001-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

Vue 6 Infinite is the professional version of e-On Software’s Vue 3D product line which is used to create realistic 3D environments. In total there are five versions of Vue. Easel is the entry level version for newcomers to 3D graphics. Esprit is designed for artists and illustrators. Pro Studio is geared for the advanced artist. Infinite is designed for the professional 3D animator and production studio. And xStream is the integrated solution; this is a version of Infinite that can integrate directly into other 3D applications such as Maya, 3ds, Lightwave, and Cinema 4D. To see all of the differences, you can check out the comparative matrix from e-On software.

The main difference between Vue 6 Infinite and xStream is that Vue 6 Infinite is meant to run as a standalone product and xStream is built to run in other products; other than that difference, the features are the same.

Vue 6 Infinite runs on Windows (2000 or greater) or Mac (OS X 10.3 or later) with 2 GHz or faster recommended, 1 GB RAM (2 GB or more recommended); an OpenGL enabled graphics card is not required but highly recommended with 1024x768 in 65K colors/16 bits (24+ bits recommended), and 200 MB free hard disk space. Multi-processor rendering is only available on all multi-processor OS X, 2000, XP Pro and Vista systems.

Originally developed by French College student Nicholas Phelps in 1992, Vue was created to construct animated landscapes. e-On Software was founded in 1997 with the release of Vue d'Esprit 2. Embraced initially by artists and animators, it has now become a feature in Hollywood and has been used to create scenes in such movies as Pirates of the Caribbean II and the Spiderwick Chronicles as well as for television shows such as those produced by the Discovery Channel. It is also finding its way into advertising and the fine art industry.

So, what's new with Vue 6 Infinite? A lot! Since this latest release is actually version 6.5, I will focus more on these items, but you can check out the complete feature list.

• EcoSystems Generation II – lets you directly paint over surfaces with pressure sensitive tablets. You can create stacks of layered EcoSystems, change the size and color on the fly, and control everything right down to individual instances. You can have multiple layers, each with its own complete set of parameters for easy control of separate populations. The new affinity setting allows control of one layer by another. You can even choose from EcoSystem display modes.

• Unlimited Overlapping Spectral Cloud Layers – will allow you to create complex and realistic cloudscapes. The spectral atmosphere engine is capable of rendering volumetric clouds with lighting and shadows. Spectral cloud layers are 3D renditions which allow you to create everything from thin ground fog to massive cumulonimbus.

• New Cloud Lighting technology – lets you set local lights that affect spectral atmospheres and clouds. Create true to life thunderstorms, searchlights or illuminated objects that fly through clouds.

• Faster Atmosphere rendering – lets you render spectral atmosphere animations faster than ever before with a new optimized anti-flickering technology.

• High resolution rendering – is now capable over a network of computers. The render control panel gives you precise control over every parameter which gives you the flexibility to do what you need without sacrificing quality. You can render in stand-alone mode or via network rendering. You can even integrate Vue 6 Infinite into a render farm that is capable of running several different applications.

• Animated Graph Editor – now lets you animate using keyframes, time curves, tangents and interpolation. It has been redesigned to give you all of the tools and controls you will need to create your animations. Along with traditional techniques, you also have an animation wizard that lets you create path animations as well.

• Omni and Directional Ventilators – give you much greater control in creating wind and special effects. These two new wind generators enhance the ability to create localized wind effects that can be linked to the movement of other objects in the scene.

• SolidGrowth 4 – Plant rendering technology will let you can produce flicker free animations. This is based on random growth technology so no two plants of the same species will ever look exactly alike. It also simulates the different color tones found in nature for greater realism. There are over 50 plant species (grass, shrubs, trees, etc) and you can develop your own, or purchase more online.

Vue 6 Infinite is nothing short of incredible! At first blush, one might look at this product and say that this is really only useful for animation and film production, but that would not be taking into account all of the other industries that could benefit from its use.

For example, if you are a builder, architect, landscape designer, or other professional that needs to emulate an environment, Vue 6 is the perfect application to model your design and/or prototype as a proof of concept design. If you are in advertising, what better way to provide backgrounds and other layout art without having to go on location or pay a high dollar firm to do equivalent work? The uses are endless.

With five different versions of Vue 6 ranging from $99 to $1035 USD there truly is a version for everyone and considering what this product can do, each is well worth its price.

If you want to see what some have done with Vue 6 Infinite you can check out the gallery that is located on the e-On Software website. There is also a pretty active community forum available as well. I very highly recommend Vue 6 and especially Vue 6 Infinite.

IN3: Google Health 2018: Worst Case Scenarios [PMR, Privacy, HIPAA, Wellness]

2008-06-06T10:43:00.001-06:00

Here is an interesting article about what could happen if Google is allowed to move forward with their plans on organizing patient medical data. It is a little scary to me to put this in to the hands of someone other than the patient. But considering how careful everyone is with their own data, that could be as scary as well.

"ANALYSIS Google Health organizes a patient's diverse medical data into a coherent on-line personal health record (PHR). The visceral reaction of many to the privacy concerns is revealing: most people think they need to keep medical data secret because they're covering something up -- with employers, insurers, loved ones, maybe even themselves. "

Read it all...

For equal balance...

"ANALYSIS Google Health organizes a patient's diverse medical data into a coherent on-line personal health record (PHR). At base, it's a simple convenience, good record-keeping for important information that puts the patient in control of his own data. But as the growth of the World Wide Web has shown, standardized digital information -- cheaply networked, easily accessible, interoperable and extensible -- is the foundation for great new ideas, disruptive applications and boundless innovation. Looking ahead a decade of Internet time, here are a few possible applications."

Read it all...

Then you decide...

DVD Review - Joseph Campbell: The Hero's Journey - A Biographical Portrait

2008-05-30T15:06:00.001-06:00

Reviewed by T. Michael Testi

Joseph Campbell: The Hero's Journey – A Biographical Portrait is a documentary about the life and works of Joseph Campbell, the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. During his life Campbell was known as an American Mythology professor, a writer, and a lecturer who revolutionized the fields of comparative mythology.

Joseph Campbell was born and raised in White Plains, New York in an upper middle class Roman Catholic family. As a child he was fascinated with American Indian culture. He taught himself everything he could about the culture and focused on the mythology of the Indians. During the 1920's he spent time traveling in Europe and became highly influenced by the Lost Generation; a group of American authors such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos, as well as the avant garde artists of the time such as Matisse and Picasso.

It was during this time that he realized that many of the myths throughout the world had similar threads and this became the theory of the journey of the archetypal hero. It is this theory that formed the basis of his 1949 seminal classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This is also the book that filmmaker George Lucas credits with helping him to form the stories of the Star Wars films; Lucas is shown giving credit to Campbell in this film. At the same time Campbell came to understand the myths that defined his own existence.

Joseph Campbell: The Hero's Journey – A Biographical Portrait is a film that is 57 minutes long and is narrated by Peter Donat. It is 4:3 full screen format and contains no bonus materials. It mixes much of its time between interviews with Campbell, listing to him lecturing, and historical footage so as to put time frames in perspective.

Joseph Campbell: The Hero's Journey – A Biographical Portrait is the kind of film that needs to be watched multiple times to really get all that Campbell has to offer. The lectures and interviews appeared to have happened in the 70's and 80's (based on hair and clothing styles), but you can tell what an captivating speaker and storyteller he was.

The biggest problems that I had with Joseph Campbell: The Hero's Journey – A Biographical Portrait is its length. In my opinion it is too short. You get a good representation of his life from a young age to around the time of World War II and then you have him lecturing in the last decade of his 83 years, but not anything in between.

If you have seen my reviews on Mythos I and Mythos II you will know that I really like Campbell's work and have a high degree of respect for the man and what he has done for reclaiming myth for the modern generation. If you don't know about Joseph Campbell the man, I highly recommend Joseph Campbell: The Hero's Journey – A Biographical Portrait.

Software Review: MSI Factory 2 from IndigoRose

2008-05-29T13:52:00.001-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

So, what's new with MSI Factory 2?

• Bootstrap Wrapper – is a unique, fully scriptable .EXE bootstrap wrapper with LZMA compression and over 300 actions including HTTP downloads for real flexibility in an MSI based installer.

• WiX – compatible source projects with integrated support for WiX fragments and extensions.

• System Editors – give you an extensive list of actions including registry editing, shortcut icons, INI files, the ability to set file permissions, and more.

Personally I found MSI Factory 2 very easy to use and much more intuitive than the native .NET installer. You have an incredible amount of control over virtually all aspects of your MSI install.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Design Environment:

Windows 2000, XP, Vista
Resolution: 1040x768
500 MB RAM
40+ MB free hard drive space
.NET Framework 1.1
Windows Installer 2.0

Runtime (Built Installer):

Windows 95 and up
Project based Windows Installer version installed

Fortune Cookies

2008-05-27T15:22:00.001-06:00

I found this one at xkcd - Enjoy

Music DVD Review - Classic Albums: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

2008-05-20T23:18:00.000-06:00

Written By T. Michael Testi

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is former Beatle John Lennon's first official solo album. It was released in 1970 after having issued some experimental albums with Yoko Ono and Live Peace in Toronto 1969. This album was recorded simultaneously with Yoko Ono's debut album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. It was recorded at Ascot Sound Studios and Abbey Road Studios using the same musicians and production team for each album.

It is said that Lennon was suffering as a tortured individual when this album was created. He was done with the Beatles and all that they stood for, and was looking for music that was much more real, and perhaps less plastic. He had begun to see Dr. Arthur Janov whose controversial "Primal Scream" psychiatric treatments had the medical establishment raising their eyebrows. Lennon took this therapy into the studio and produced a primal masterpiece.

Classic Albums: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band examines in detail the creation of this album and the effect it had on music, and the people who created it. This included Ringo Starr on drums, Klaus Voormann (a member of Manfred Mann, and old friend from the early Hamburg years of the Beatles) on bass, and Billy Preston; sometimes referred to as the fifth Beatle on piano. And of course Lennon himself on guitar.

The video uses detailed analysis and new interviews with Yoko Ono, Ringo Starr, Klaus Voorman, and Abbey Road studio engineers Phil McDonald and Richard Lush. Also included is Dr. Arthur Janov, and Rolling Stone founder Jan Wenner.

Along with interspaced live footage, the DVD also includes interviews with peers and relevant fixtures in the music scene, as well as with those who were just part of the party. The track listing include excerpts from "Mother," "Hold On," "Isolation," "I Found Out," "God," and "Working Class Hero."

I found Classic Albums: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band to be entirely entertaining. There are quite a few "little seen" clips of John Lennon at different events. One really rare segment is John and Yoko's appearance on "Parkinson" in July of 1971.

One of the coolest parts of Classic Albums: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is the time with the engineers. Here they pull out the multi-track tapes, and while playing them they isolate out specific tracks so you can hear Voorman's bass riffs, Starr's drum lines, or even Lennon's blood curdling screams. There are even shots of the EMI Tape boxes which show the dates of the recordings. Very cool inside stuff.

If you are a Lennon fan, a fan of rock musical history, or even just a history buff, Classic Albums: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is really a must own DVD. It is extraordinarily well done, and definitely worth the price of admission.

Music,Review,John Lennon

Tuesday Items

2008-04-21T18:54:00.000-06:00

Posted by AT&EE staff

Did you ever try to build a house of cards? In general I always found it kind of hard. Well Bryan Berg has taken it to a whole new level. In fact he holds Guinness book of world records for building structures out of cards. Check out his site.

Did you know that today is Glen Campbell and Jack Nicholson's birthdays? You may know that Earth day first happened today in 1970, but it is also the anniversary of the first use of poison gas in 1915. It is also the day that the largest Lollipop was created weighing in at 3,011 lbs. You can check everything that happened on this day at BrainyHistory.com.

I talked about the Loft Cube on Friday, today we have the Moco Loco house. From the site:

Compact four-rooms-in-one house.
Designer Luigi Colani has created a space-saving house with a six square meter cylinder inside that contains a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. The cylinder rotates left or right bringing the room you want into view of the main living room. There's a separate toilet and a small hallway, and everything is controlled with a remote. The house was designed for young professionals who need minimal space while they focus on career...

Read it all...

House of cards,History,Brainy,Moco Loco,Houses

Friday’s Curio’s

2008-04-18T15:44:00.001-06:00

Posted by AT & EE staff

Did you ever want that feeling of living in a modernistic dwelling that is minimalistic as well as portable. You might try a Loft Cube. Who says that you can't take it with you?

Ever see a two-dollar bill? Check out this story "The 2 Dollar Bill"

We have all seen timelines of history, but have you ever seen the timeline of the Big Bang Expansion?

Speaking of timelines, HyperHistory is an expanding scientific project presenting 3,000 years of world history with an interactive combination of synchronoptic lifelines, timelines, and maps.

Thats it for today.

Energy: Solar Balloons, Too Good To Be True Adopted

2008-04-16T08:34:00.001-06:00

Posted by AT & EE Staff

When most of us think balloons, we think, "I never should have had children." But these solar balloons are a lot more promising than their carnival counterparts. Constructed of photovoltaic fabric, the soft tank is filled with helium and tethered by power wire above a home, saving space on the ground while optimizing sun exposure. But it's not just the physical footprint that makes the technology so appealing. It's the price per watt.

Read it all...

German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA's asteroid figures: paper

2008-04-16T08:12:00.001-06:00

Posted by AT&EE Staff

German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA's asteroid figures: paper

This artist's rendition released by NASA shows an asteroid belt. A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA's estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated.

Read it all...

Astroids,Astronomy

10 Ways the Internet (As We Know It) Will Die - GigaOM

2008-04-07T14:45:00.001-06:00

Posted by AT&EE Staff

10 Ways the Internet (As We Know It) Will Die - GigaOM

We often think of the Internet as a platform for unfettered global communication, where information flows freely, innovators can launch new applications at will, and everyone can have a voice. But it’s unlikely that our children’s Internet will look anything like what we have now.

How might the Internet as we know it die? Here are 10 possibilities.

1) Someone subverts the Domain Name Service. The Internet relies on DNS. But if someone broke — or worse, subverted — the fundamental way in which we find web sites, we wouldn’t trust URLs any more. Phishing would be easy. Own the DNS and you own the Internet.

Read it all...

Internet

Dial D for Disruption - Forbes.com

2008-04-07T09:41:00.000-06:00

Posted by AT&EE Staff

Want to build a phone company for $100? Give Mark Spencer a ring.

In a research park outside the low-key bustle of downtown Huntsville, Ala. Mark Spencer finishes his barbecue and resumes wreaking havoc on the multibillion-dollar phone equipment business.

Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ), Nortel or Avaya (nyse: AV - news - people ).

"We have to figure out ways to get into everything: Carriers, businesses, equipment companies," says Spencer. "For better or worse, I don't tend to think small."

Spencer, who is all of 29 years old, is poised to disrupt the $7 billion market for office telecom switches (often called PBXs) much the way the Linux open-source computer operating system crushed the price of business computing and brought woe to established leaders such as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) and Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ). Read it all...

Telecom,Astrisk,Software

Book Review: Programming WPF: Second Edition by Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths

2008-04-03T07:22:00.000-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

Window Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the foundation for the next generation of Windows applications. WPF represents the best of the control-based Windows world that is tied with the best content-based Web world. Added to this is the graphic performance of DirectX and the deployment capabilities of ClickOnce and you now have a whole new world of applications just waiting to be developed.

While this is still uncharted territory — and no one knows where it will lead in five, ten, or fifteen years down the road — if it is anything like the last 15 years of Windows programming, it will be interesting.

Programming WPF is for developers and assumes you have some experience with some sort of programming environment. Knowing how to program in .NET and C# is pretty much required. Windows Forms, XML, and HTML are also recommended. You will not be taught how to program here. Programming WPF is a hefty 863 pages and is contained in 18 chapters. Don't drop it on your foot!

Chapter 1, "Hello WPF," begins in traditional style with the basics of the WPF technology and a whirlwind tour of the features that will be covered in the following chapters. This way you can see how everything fits together before getting down into the details.

Chapter 2, "Applications and Settings," focuses on the bigger picture. Some of the items covered here are application lifetime, keeping track of open windows, and application states and settings.

Chapter 3, "Layout," discusses the tools that manage the visual layout of your applications and how to use the tools. By handling many of the mundane tasks such as resizing and handling localization, developers can focus their attention on the more critical portions of layout.

Chapter 4, "Input," now takes a look at how to make your application respond to user input. Here the authors take you through some low level input handling as well as the higher-level command system.

Chapter 5, "Controls," describes the controls built into the WPF Framework and how they form the building blocks of a user interface, as well as how you can adjust their properties, and even use templates to replace the whole look of the control.

Chapter 6, "Simple Data Binding," examines how to use WPF's data binding features to connect the user interface to your underlying data. By the use of WPF's data binding engine, you will get more features with less code.

Chapter 7, "Binding to List Data," continues the tracks laid down in chapter six by now showing how binding works with lists of items as well as how to bind with hierarchical data. This includes expanding a single data source into a set of target UI elements, as well as working with XML and relational data.

Chapter 8, "Styles," is a powerful mechanism to control your applications appearance while ensuring consistency. Just as with a word processing document, in which a style is a set of properties applied to ranges of content, a WPF style is applied to visual rendering content to change appearances.

Chapter 9, "Control Templates," examines the capabilities available for customizing the appearance of your user interface and the controls it contains. By using control templates, you can replace the complete look of the built-in controls without changing the existing behavior.

Chapter 10, "Windows and Dialogs," discusses the WPF window class, how it works, and how it provides the facilities necessary to build your dialog windows.

Chapter 11, "Navigation," shows that although WPF supports traditional navigation, it also supports web-like navigation. This includes navigation between content, one page at a time. Here you will learn how to use these services, as well as how to use the XBAP deployment model.

Chapter 12, "Resources," explains how to use the mechanisms for managing styles and themes, as well as binary resources, such as graphics. Here you will use resources to plug in visual features where they are needed to ensure the right look and feel.

Chapter 13, "Graphics," describes the powerful drawing primitives available within WPF. This is not just for designers. Now it is easy to add graphical elements to your design. Because WPF's graphics capabilities are now so vast, this chapter just scratches the surface of what is available.

Chapter 14, "Text and Flow Documents," focuses on the text services available wherever text is used. Discussed here is the text object model that defines how text is formatted. Also described is the FlowDocuments used to present large volumes of mixed text and graphics optimized for screen viewing.

Chapter 15, "Printing and XPS," takes a look at how printing in WPF is tied to the XML paper specification. XPS not only lets you spool your print, but you can send the XPS file to someone else via email as a preview of what the printed output will look like. Additionally, because of the powerful support, you can now use the majority of the graphical features in print, as well as on screen.

Chapter 16, "Animation and Media," describes the animation facilities contained in WPF that allow most of the visual aspects of a user interface to be animated. This is helpful to let the user know the application is still active, as well as providing for transitions from one view to another.

Chapter 17, "3D Graphics," can be hosted in the user interface, as well as projecting 2D and user interfaces on to 3D surfaces. This chapter does not look at how to create 3D graphics, but rather how WPF does 3D graphics.

Chapter 18, "Custom Controls," shows you that even though one of the benefits of WPF is that you do not have to write custom controls as often, when you do need to you still can. This chapter will show you how to write custom controls and other common element types.

While Programming WPF does not go in to deep detail on all topics, it does get deep enough on most of the topics to give you everything you need to know to get up to speed and working with WPF. The authors provide a good blend of clear and concise writing, concrete examples, and helpful code to make a good learning experience.

Programming WPF is a book that serves two masters. First, it provides an excellent introductory text for those who are new to WPF. Sure, you have to have experience programming, but this book will get you up to speed in a logical manner without much pain and with reference to the past. Second, it provides a good reference book that covers the topics of WPF. When you are up to your knickers in molasses, it will provide a great reference book to refresh your memory, so it retains its usefulness long after.

While WPF is going to take Windows programmers to territories yet undiscovered, Programming WPF is here to make sure you get started down that road with an owner's manual and a set of maps. If you want to learn WPF, then Programming WPF is a great place to start.

.NET,C#,WPF

Scientists Aim for Origami Space Flight

2008-03-27T15:17:00.001-06:00

Posted by T. Michael Testi

Written By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Associated Press Writer

KASHIWA, Japan (AP) -- Japanese scientists and origami masters hope to launch a paper airplane from space and learn from its trip back to Earth.

It's no joke. A prototype passed a durability test in a wind tunnel this month, Japan's space agency adopted it Wednesday for feasibility studies, and a well-known astronaut is interested in participating.

A successful flight from space by an origami plane could have far-reaching implications for the design of re-entry vehicles or space probes for upper atmospheric exploration, said project leader Shinji Suzuki, a professor at Tokyo University's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Suzuki said he was skeptical a decade ago when he first discussed with experts the idea of sending into space a craft made in the tradition of Japan's ancient art of paper folding.

Read it all…

News,Origami Space Flight,Japan

Trapster turns your cell phone into a police detector

2008-03-27T10:09:00.000-06:00

Posted by T. Michael Testi

By Josh Lowensohn – March 27, 2008, 11:33 AM PDT

Skyhook Wireless' geopositioning can be useful, but rarely does it save you from a $400 speeding ticket. A start-up named Trapster is trying to change that.

The company has taken a creative spin on using geopositioning to help lead-footed drivers avoid known and newly discovered speed traps and other police dragnets. By installing the application on your mobile phone you'll get heads up on speed cameras, red-light cameras, hiding places, and live police while out and about. The application uses Skyhook Wireless' Wi-Fi and cell tower location positioning system to keep tabs on where you are while you're driving around. It also blends in GPS to give you more precise positioning on city streets.

The data comes from other tipsters on the Trapster network, and is updated frequently. Creator Pete Tenereillo tells me there only need to be about 10 active users in each city to provide a reasonable amount of coverage for live police and new traps on major thoroughfares, a number which has already been met in places like Rhode Island, Florida, and San Diego.

Read it all...

The Web's best free stuff

2008-03-26T09:44:00.001-06:00

Posted by T. Michael Testi

From InfoWorld

There has allways been a wealth of free downloadable applications out there. Even before the internet, people just felt the need to create and keep it free. This article shows the current batch of the best of the bunch.

By Preston Gralla and Erik Larkin, PC World, IDG News Service

March 24, 2008

Free: It's the magic word for an ever-expanding wealth of downloadable software and online services. Free doesn't necessarily mean good, however, and hunting for freebies can mean sifting through a lot of junk.

That's where we come in. We surfed, clicked, and installed to find sparkling free gems capable of planning your time, keeping you in touch, and tuning and securing your PC, not to mention glitzing up your desktop, helping you stay productive, and entertaining you with music, videos, photos, and games. We paid special attention to programs and services you may not have heard of before.

Read it all...

Web,Free stuff,Applications,Shareware

Software Review -Visual Studio 2008: Professional Edition From Microsoft

2008-03-26T03:56:00.000-06:00

Written by T. Michael Testi

Visual Studio 2008: Professional Edition is the latest incarnation of the integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft Corporation. It can be used to develop console and GUI applications as well as Windows Forms Applications, web sites, web applications and web services for all platforms supported by Microsoft Windows, .NET Framework (compact as well), Microsoft Silverlight, and Windows Mobile. It includes a code editor, an integrated debugger, and other built in tools for professional software development.

Visual Studio 2008, as well as prior versions, does not support any programming language, solution, or tool per-se, it does provide for those functionalities to be plugged into the IDE. Depending on the edition, included within the package are the languages Visual C/C++, Visual Basic, and Visual C#. Also supported are XML/XSLT, HTML/XHTML, JavaScript, and CSS. It also includes Visual Web Developer which is used to create web sites, web applications, and web services using ASP.NET using either VB.NET or C#.net

Visual Studio 2008 comes in several editions which target certain core users.

• Visual Studio Express Edition are a series of free lightweight IDEs that stripped down versions that target specific languages with one each for VB, C++, C#, and web development. They contain a small set of the tools compared to the other systems and are geared for students and hobbyists.

• Visual Studio Standard Edition provides and integrated IDE for all supported products; it supports XML and XSLT editing and creates deployment packages that only use ClickOnce. It has no integration with Microsoft SQL Server, can only consume Add-ins for extensibility, and has no mobile development support.

• Visual Studio Professional Edition has all of the features of Standard Edition and adds SQL server integration, mobile development, remote debugging, and adds macro's and packages to Add-ins for extensibility.

• Visual Studio Team System Edition adds to the Professional Edition features team collaboration functionality items such as metrics and reporting tools. There are five versions of the team systems; Architecture, Database, Development, Test, and Team Suite; the later includes the prior four Team Editions functionality.

The version that I evaluated is Visual Studio 2008: Professional Edition which is probably the one that is most used in small to mid-sized professional development environments. It contains all of the tools needed to create professional applications for both the desktop and the web.

Visual Studio 2008 was released to MSDN subscribers on November 19 2007 and generally released in early 2008. The focus of this version of Visual Studio is on development of Windows Vista, 2007 Office systems, and Web applications. It also brings a new language feature: LINQ, new versions of the C# and VB languages, a Windows Presentation Foundation visual designer, as well as improvements to the .NET Framework.

The goal of this release was to reduce the complexity of building, managing, and deploying all types of applications and by such giving developers more time to focus on solving development challenges. By supporting several languages it will allow programmers of all backgrounds to rapidly create superior end-user experiences.

So what is new in Visual Studio 2008?

• .NET Framework 3.5 – builds on the .NET Framework 3.0 with enhancements to feature areas such as the base class library, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Windows Cardspace, as well as LINQ, ASP.NET AJAX, and other improvements.

• AJAX Support – now provides developers with all the tools that is required to create quality AJAX enabled web applications. ASP.NET AJAX improvements include content linking support, JavaScript Library enhancements, and browser history support. It also makes Silverlight easier to integrate into ASP.NET Projects. Adding AJAX functionality to a site reduces or eliminates the need for the page to be reloaded every time the users click on a button or select an item.

• LINQ Support – also known as Language Integrated Query will allow developers to query data sources like ADO.NET, SQL, and XML. Included are three LINQ implementations: LINQ to SQL which allows users to write queries to retrieve and manipulate data from a SQL Server, LINQ to XML which provides a new way to construct and write and read XML data in the .NET language of choice, and LINQ to Datasets which makes it easier and faster to query data cached in a dataset object. LINQ generally out performs SqlDataAdaptor and reasonably close to SqlDataReader. Considering the additional benefits of LINQ, this is great news.

• Targeted .NET Frameworks – now allows you to target the .NET Framework that you want. In Prior incarnations of Visual Studio, you could only target the released version. VS 2002 only worked with .NET 1.0, VS 2003 only worked with .NET 1.1 and VS 2005 only worked with .NET 2.0. Now you have a choice. You can select between 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. This means when you update your existing application to work with VS 2008, you can stay with the .NET 2.0 Framework and so your clients won't have to upgrade their system. If at some point later you want to update to .NET 3.5 select it on the properties page. Unfortunately, because of significant CLR engine changes, you cannot go back to .NET 1.x.

• Integrated Testing – now has integrated testing facilities into Visual Studio 2008 as opposed to having them as an add-on. In the professional version you can create and run two types of tests. First there is unit testing, to check if a specific method of production code works, for regression, or smoke testing. Then there is ordered testing that allows you to run tests in a specific order.

• Window Presentation Foundation (WPF) – is aimed at helping developers create attractive and effective user interfaces. Most software developers are more effective with technology than design. In the past the developer would have to integrate some combination of Windows Forms, GDI+, Direct3D, and other technologies together to create an interface. WPF attempts to handle most of that for you. Not that you won't have to still use other technologies, but rather by providing a broad range of functionality into a single technology, WPF can make creating a modern user interface significantly easier.

• Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) – is the next generation programming platform and runtime system for building, configuring, and deploying network-distributed services. In the past you have had ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), Web Service Enhancements (WSE), Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ), Enterprise Services/COM+, and .NET Remoting. You also had to make a choice of which one to use. With WCF you no longer are limited to one technology or one programming model.

• Window Presentation Foundation (WPF) – is the programming model, engine, and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on Windows. It contains support for both system workflow as well as human workflow within a wide variety of scenarios such as line of business workflow, interface workflow,

• Visual Designers – comes with an XAML based designer, Visual Studio Tools for Office designer which supports the development of InfoPath, Visio, and PowerPoint, as well as Word, Excel and Outlook, WPF Designer to help with WYSIWYG design of UI, a LINQ to SQL Designer, an updated XLM Schema designer (shipping separately)

• Office Based Solutions – are available in VS 2008 Professional edition. You can use these to build Microsoft Office-based solutions that are reliable, scaleable, and easier to maintain. By using WPF, WCF, and LINQ and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) you can build a wide range of customer solutions. These new technologies make it easy to build solutions that were difficult, or impossible in prior versions.

• Enhanced Collaborations – between designers and developers make it much easier to create more compelling user experiences. Designers can use Microsoft Expression Web to design a User Interface (UI) and then turn it over to the developers with faith that the subsequent developed business logic code will result with UI design remaining intact.

• Improved Mobile Development – within both the Professional and Team systems makes it even easier to extend desktop applications to mobile base devices. Along with .NET Framework 3.5, there are enhanced mobile Windows Forms controls that make it easy to modify and optimize mobile applications' screens to support the mobile devices' smaller displays.

• Silverlight Support – is included via a Silverlight SDK and Silverlight Tools for VS08. This is a rich internet application technology that includes a subset of WPF.

• JavaScript Intelesense
• Nested ASP.NET master page support at design time
• Rich CSS editing and layout support within the WYSIWYG designer
• Split View Designer for having both source and designer visible at the same time

OK, as with any release of a new version of Visual Studio, there are two questions that need to be answered. First, is this early release ready for prime time, and second is it really worth the upgrade? I have been running Visual Studio 2008: Professional Edition for a few weeks now and I have not experienced any problems that could not be traced back to my own fault. In doing some web research, I did find a hot fix that is posted on the MSDN blog that is a performance fix with regards to some sluggishness when working in Design View, but everything on this release appears to be pretty clean.

The next question on is this version worth the upgrade? My personal opinion is that it is most definitely worth the upgrade. I guess that if you are writing console apps in unmanaged C++ you can probably skip the upgrade, but if you are doing anything modern especially with regards to application or web development, you will be letting your competition get the upper hand if you don't upgrade.

The WPF, WCF, and LINQ are alone worth the upgrade and when you add VSTO, JavaScript Intelesense, Multi-Framework, and ASP.NET AJAX, to me it becomes a no-brainer.

So what are the downsides? The two that come to mind are the dropping of support for VBScript and Classic ASP. This means that there will be neither Intelesense help nor highlighting for either of these types of code. This will be a significant problem for those shops that still support these platforms. According to Microsoft, they recommend running Visual Studio 2005 along side of 2008. Now this is not an all is lost proposition. As of this writing word has it that Microsoft is considering restoring this functionality in a service release, but those who are still maintaining older sites will want to keep their existing tools. The other is the lack of support for .NET Framework 1.X. That would have been the cherry on the sundae, but not a deal breaker since no prior version had the multi-framework support.

Bottom line, if you are a Microsoft shop, I would most definitely upgrade and begin all new development using Visual Studio 2008 to take advantage of the new technologies. Once you are comfortable using Visual Studio 2008 I see no reason not to upgrade your existing projects. My experience has been that the upgrade is rather painless with relatively few actual code changes.

For those who are maintaining older versions of Visual Studio, I would seriously consider making the move to Visual Studio 2008. Even for those who thought that Visual Studio 2005 was a bit problematic, I would suggest that they take a good long look at 2008.

My impression is that Visual Studio 2008: Professional Edition; and probably all of the editions, are very, very solid. It is a strong upgrade; perhaps the most decisive upgrade in a long time. I believe that, with very few exceptions, users of prior versions will find a significant feature to justify an upgrade. If you have never used Visual Studio, now is a great time to check it out. I highly recommend Visual Studio 2008: Professional Edition!

Visual Studio 2008,C#.NET,VB.NET,C++.NET,ASP.NET,Programming

Google Deal Said to Bring U.S. Scrutiny

2007-05-30T11:30:00.001-06:00

Posted by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

From - New York Times

Written By STEVE LOHR

The Federal Trade Commission has opened a preliminary antitrust investigation into Google’s planned $3.1 billion purchase of the online advertising company DoubleClick, an industry executive briefed on the agency’s plans said yesterday.

The inquiry began at the end of last week, after it was decided that the Federal Trade Commission instead of the Justice Department would conduct the review, said the executive, who asked not to be identified because he had not been authorized to speak. The two agencies split the duties of antitrust enforcement.

An F.T.C. spokesman said yesterday that the agency did not comment on pending inquiries.

The deal, involving powerful forces in their respective niches of the online advertising business, prompted privacy advocates and competitors to raise concerns after it was announced last month. Those concerns and the deal’s size made a preliminary investigation all but certain, according to antitrust experts.

The F.T.C. has also issued Google a detailed list of questions, the industry executive said. This step, known as a "second request" for information, can suggest that a proposed acquisition raises more serious antitrust issues. But legal experts said the request is mainly a sign that the agency is closely scrutinizing the Google deal. Read more...

News,Google,FTC

World's largest MP3 store launches

2007-05-30T11:27:00.001-06:00

Posted by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

From Boing Boing:

PayPlay has just launched "the world's largest MP3 download store" -- a store selling more than 1.3 million indie music tracks, with a search engine that allows you to search for your fave artists and get similar indie artists in the catalog. Previous to this PayPlay sold only DRM-crippled WMAs for $0.77, the MP3s sell for $0.88. I guess that we could take that as a tacit admission that DRM makes music worth less, but it does seem a little weird to charge a premium for music that doesn't treat you like a crook. The service says that this reflects the cost of retooling to host MP3s instead of WMAs. Another unfortunate legacy is the service's name, which reflects a time when the business was built on DRM and tried to offer artist the opportunity to get paid for their work. But "PayPlay" doesn't really sell the service to the public, who don't perceive having to pay as a benefit. Read More...

News,Music,MP3,PayPlay

The new Microsoft Coffee Table...

2007-05-30T10:19:00.001-06:00

Posted by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

You gotta check this out. From Popular Mechanics is the video of Microsoft Surface; the first completely new computing platform since the PC. Hear the story about Microsoft's new product...a coffee table.

From the press clipping

" The software giant will announce at the D5 conference today that it’s built a new touch screen computer—a coffee table that will change the world. Go inside its top-secret development with PopularMechanics.com, then forget the keyboard and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on. " Read more...

The final days of Google

2007-05-29T09:31:00.001-06:00

Back in the 1990s Bill Gates said the company that would eventually beat Microsoft probably had yet to be founded - some people believe that company is Google. But what about Google itself, who will kill Google? An interesting analysis of who is most likely to form "the next big thing".

read more | digg story

reddit has been hacked

2007-05-29T09:28:00.001-06:00

Digg competitor reddit has just been hacked with a major XSS exploit. Interestingly, reddit's founder was aware of the exploit months ago, but neglected to fix it.

read more | digg story

Top 20 Temporary and Disposable Email Services

2007-05-29T09:27:00.001-06:00

Now a days Internet has become a home to spam. Millions of spam bots crawl the web daily to find email addresses and then bombard them with spam emails thus destroying their efficiency and creating problems for users. The best solution to this is to get a temporary or disposable email inbox which automatically expires after a certain time period.

read more | digg story

Facebook Launches Facebook Platform; They are the Anti-MySpace

2007-05-25T08:16:00.001-06:00

Facebook is giving an unprecedented amount of access to developers. The API would allow, for example, a third party to recreate Facebook Photos, the most used photo application on the web. Users could then remove the default Facebook Photos and install the third party version instead. There will be a special applications area on Facebook where users can browse and add third party apps. But there is also a crucial viral component - when a friend adds an application, it is noted in their news stream on their profile. Clicking on the item brings you to the app, where you can add and/or interact with it yourself.

read more | digg story

Bill Gates & Steve Jobs Set For Historic Conversation

2007-05-25T08:15:00.001-06:00

Although Gates made a famous phone call to Jobs in 1997 and the two shared a stage briefly at a 1983 Apple promotional event, the two industry icons have never had a public conversation. Issues such as whether it's wiser for a company to partner or build everything itself. Or the primacy of software versus hardware in personal computers. Or which is more important: how easy it is to use a product or what it can do once you figure out how?

read more | digg story

20 WordPress Themes That Don't Disappoint

2007-05-25T08:14:00.001-06:00

We’ve compiled a list of 20 WordPress themes you might have missed, or that deserve a second look. All the themes are free to download.

read more | digg story

Top 10 Ways to Use del.icio.us

2007-05-25T07:50:00.001-06:00

Del.icio.us is an excellent system for archiving your favorite information from across the Net, tracking hot topics, and discovering new and useful sites. The power of del.icio.us comes in the form of it’s “collective intelligence”, which is constantly adding, reviewing, and filtering new information.

read more | digg story

25 Killer Code Snippets every Good Designer Should See

2007-05-18T10:07:00.001-06:00

Round up 25 of the Best CSS, scripts, html, javascript, Ajax and widgets that you can use on on your website or blog (Part 5) .....

read more | digg story

5 Most Outrageous Inventions Ever

2007-05-18T10:02:00.001-06:00

Including the "Twirl-a-Squirrel"

read more | digg story

The First Terabyte Hard Drive--Review

2007-05-18T10:01:00.003-06:00

The terabyte era arrives, with Hitachi's 5-platter, 10-head 7K1000 hard drive. ExtremeTech puts Hitachi's latest hard drive on the bench and let you know how it performs.

read more | digg story

Torvalds tells Microsoft to put up or shut up

2007-05-18T10:01:00.001-06:00

Torvalds, the leader of the project to create the Linux kernel, was contemptuous of Microsoft's claims and has asked Redmond to name the infringements so that their veracity can be challenged and workarounds found.

read more | digg story

Google Wins Appeal on Copyright of Nude Images

2007-05-17T14:51:00.001-06:00

A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that Google did not infringe on the copyrights of an adult publishing company by displaying thumbnail images of its nude photographs, handing Internet search companies a victory by allowing the display of such miniature pictures in search results. This should mean that if you use thumbnails in your websites or blogs, the same fair use could be claimed.

read more | digg story

Scammers gaming YouTube ratings for profit

2007-05-17T14:34:00.001-06:00

Spyware researcher says scammers are inflating the popularity of videos on YouTube and other sharing sites, often as a lure to Websites loaded with malicious programs

read more | digg story

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Lists and CSS

2007-05-17T10:57:00.003-06:00

Step by step CSS list tutorials, this takes you through the process of building background image lists, rollover lists, nested lists and horizontal lists.

read more | digg story

Speed matters. Why don't other sites get this?

2007-05-17T10:57:00.001-06:00

I spend a lot of time optimizing our site for speed - and the customer payoff is huge. I spend almost as much time wishing other sites would do the same thing. Alexa says our pages take .9 seconds, median, to load. Let's see how the other big photo sharing sites stack up, shall we?

read more | digg story

New process generates hydrogen from aluminum alloy to run engines

2007-05-17T10:49:00.001-06:00

A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline.

read more | digg story

ReadyBoost doesn't really "Boost" Vista all that much.

2007-05-17T10:48:00.001-06:00

Windows Vista's Windows ReadyBoost sounds too good to be true, and based on our extensive lab tests, it is. The technology promises to let you speed up Windows by plugging an inexpensive USB flash drive into your PC. But we found that while ReadyBoost may speed up Vista a tiny bit, it can also slow it down in some instances.

read more | digg story

ABC to Stream HD Shows Online [1280x720]

2007-05-17T10:43:00.001-06:00

Disney-ABC Television Group claimed to be the first major television programmer to stream HD video online, at 1280-by-720 resolution.

read more | digg story

Wireless USB is the Future

2007-05-16T14:09:00.001-06:00

Forget cables; the way you'll connect devices to your PC will be wireless. That's according to new research from In-Stat which predicts that Wireless USB will become the way to connect kit to your PC by 2008.

read more | digg story

MySpace News Brings Us Painful Screams of Silence

2007-05-16T14:08:00.001-06:00

New poster child for the ghost town effect: MySpace News, the social news site brought to you by your billions and billions of friends at MySpace, the most popular social networking site of ever.

read more | digg story

XM Suspends Opie and Anthony, Fails Subscribers

2007-05-16T14:07:00.001-06:00

By suspending Opie and Anthony, XM has violated its promise to subscribers.

read more | digg story

Most Addicting Flash Game You'll Play This Week

2007-05-16T08:30:00.001-06:00

your a worm....or something, but you're moving really fast and trying to avoid dots that kill you. weird. addicting.

read more | digg story

Design Concept: Whoa! SLIQ is One Sexy Phone Concept

2007-05-16T08:29:00.001-06:00

It's been a while since a cellphone has filled us with as much lust as this SLIQ design. It's a concept by Mike Serafin with no keypad and what he calls an "advanced touch interface." It better be pretty advanced, because we haven't been all that impressed with touch interfaces thus far.

T.

read more digg story

Understanding Apollo

2007-05-15T12:13:00.001-06:00

Basically, Apollo creates a new type of runtime bringing web apps to the desktop for a richer, more interactive environment. So far we have Finetune (a desktop music player similar to last.fm or Pandora), eBay's Apollo desktop (Project San Dimas) and Adobe Media Player (a web TV app, a video aggregator, using RSS, and player at heart).

read more | digg story

David Pogue's ''It's All Geek to Me'' debuts Friday

2007-05-15T10:45:00.001-06:00

This Friday, The Science Channel debuts "It’s All Geek to Me," a new weekly series that brings Mac fan, O'Reilly author and The New York Times personal-technology columnist David Pogue's expertise on the world of technology to television.

read more | digg story

Web sites where You can submit free article for publication

2007-05-15T10:41:00.001-06:00

One method for getting high-quality links is to write quality articles and submit them to other web sites for publication. Each article should include a link back to your web site. These links are better than links from link pages, because there tend to be very few outbound links on the article page.

read more | digg story

Top 20 Social Bookmarking Sites Ranked By Traffic - May 2007

2007-05-15T09:36:00.001-06:00

If your looking for the best sites to help drive traffic to your blog or just looking for the latest informational gem on the web. Here are the top 20 largest social bookmarking sites ranked by a combination of Compete and Quantcast data. For each site, they show unique U.S. monthly visitor data as well as respective rank as of 5/15/2007.

read more | digg story

Audio Book Review: Rogue Angel - The Spider Stone by Alex Archer

2007-05-15T06:54:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Rogue Angel: The Spider Stone is the third installment of the Alex Archer series, Rogue Angel. This story revolves around the West African slave trade of the middle 1700's, a group of Hausa warriors who died in the 1860 Civil War era Kirktown Georgia, an ancient map that exists on the legendary Spider Stone, and the African warlord who will stop at nothing to get it.

Once again I was treated to a Graphic Audio performance that really brings the listener into the story. The combination of sound effects and artistic vocal performances creates what Graphic Audio calls a "Movie in your Mind," and that is truly what it is.

The story begins when Annja Creed, the reincarnation of Joan of Arc via Joan's legendary sword, is called to investigate a significant find by fellow archeologist, Professor Noel Hallinger. The bodies of sixteen slaves from the Civil War era were found in a warehouse that is scheduled to be torn down. What is unusual is that these slaves have warrior weapons, and have apparently been murdered 150 years ago.

We quickly find out that others know of the Spider Stone and will try anything to get their hands on it. Most notably, the Yoruban warlord, Tafari, will stop at nothing to grab the fortune for himself. It is said that the trickster spider God Anansi, bestowed the stone upon the Hausa and that the map leads to a great treasure, but will Annja survive long enough to find it?

I think that Rogue Angel: The Spider Stone may be the best so far. The author has found a solid voice in the character and it shows in both the voicing as well as the story progress. This, as with the previous two volumes, is a good blend of action, adventure, supernatural powers and history. The rich characters that populate the story truly make it worth listening to; whether it is Roux (who makes a cell call), Garin (who has a prominent role in this story), or some of the new characters such as the old wizened woman Janeiba, or the Homeland Security agent, McIntosh, that bring the story to life.

The quality of the story and performance are two of the reasons that I keep coming back. You can also check out some of their other series as well. If you want you can down load of MP3 excerpt, or purchase the GraphicAudio Book from their on-line Store. The story comes three ways; standard CD, MP3 CD (the version I reviewed), and downloadable WMA with digital rights management.

Microsoft SQL Server "Katmai" Announced

2007-05-15T06:44:00.000-06:00

Microsoft SQL Server “Katmai” Builds on Proven Success of SQL Server 2005, Empowering Customers to Manage the Data Explosion
Vision for next release of SQL Server announced at Microsoft’s first Business Intelligence Conference.

read more

(Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Temporary Projects in Visual Studio 2005

2007-05-15T06:39:00.000-06:00

If you ever wanted to do a quick temporary project in Visual Studio 2005, let Donn show you how.

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(Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

The Standards Way to Do Dynamic Data

2007-05-15T05:36:00.001-06:00

Somewhere in between presenting static information graphics and complex, interactive data dashboards there's a need for a way to visualize moderately dynamic data on the web. Oftentimes the solutions you see implemented are clunky, for example, manually creating multiple frames of various data points and uploading them by hand.

read more digg story

(Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Top 10 Things Microsoft Loves and Hates About Open Source

2007-05-14T15:38:00.001-06:00

Over the years, Microsoft has had some pretty harsh words (and actions) for the open source community in general and for Linux in particular. And with news this week that the company reportedly wants open source software users to pay royalties on 235 alleged patent violations, the relationship is obviously changing.

read more | digg story

Brian Shaler: "Writing Tools for Digg Users: The Inevitable Digg Effect"

2007-05-14T15:10:00.001-06:00

"Digg.com is an ideal target for creating instant gratification content. You can come out of nowhere and have tens of thousands of new users in 24 hours. An inevitable woe is the Digg Effect -- a sign of success and often the key to server failure." Sharing a programmer's experiences with and advice about avoiding the Digg Effect.

read more | digg story

Top 10 stupid online business ideas that made someone rich

2007-05-14T15:02:00.001-06:00

We all know of the pet rock, the hula-hoop and mood rings all had two things in common, they were stupid and they made the developer rich. Well here are the ten stupidest online businesses that made people rich.

read more | digg story

Stealing IS a crime, right?

2007-05-14T14:48:00.001-06:00

One of the web's greatest photographers, the Icelandic _rebekka, is having her photos ripped off and sold on ebay and elsewhere by http://www.only-dreemin.com . Companies need to know that posting a photo to the internet DOES NOT make it public domain! Let's shut them down!

read more | digg story

Book Review: Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz

2007-05-13T11:55:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

In the past two years, Ruby on Rails has shaken up the web development industry by providing an application framework whose goal is to increase the speed and ease of web development. Computerworld named it number one of the "Five Hot Technologies of 2007." Ruby on Rails, often shortened to RoR or just Rails, is an open source project that is written in the Ruby language.

The goal of Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications is to shorten the learning curve for your ramp up to Rails. The platform is well suited to design-oriented people looking to build web applications as well as to those who are unhappy with the languages and/or frameworks they are currently using. The author clearly states "I don't expect you to be an expert programmer - this isn’t a pro-level book"

The book is divided into twelve chapters that guide you methodically toward developing a social website application. In fact, the application that you develop is based on the popular story-sharing web site Digg.com.

The first four chapters get you started in understanding what Rails is and how to install it; there are instructions for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. You then get introduced to Ruby, a scripting language that you will use to develop your Rails application before you get into the Rails framework.

In chapter five you actually begin to develop the application, called Shovell. Here, Lenz describes using the Rails model generator to create a "story" model so that everything else can be built around it. He also discusses views and you then build a controller to handle communications between models and views.

Chapter six adds functionality via form helpers as well as building unit and functional test cases. Chapter seven looks at Ajax to add voting functionality and Web 2.0 for good looking effects. Chapter eight covers protective measures, or how to manage users and user's rights.

Throughout the core portion of the text, as well as the remaining chapters, the author is also, indirectly, teaching you about dynamic website development. You have HTML, CSS, XML as well as databases and both server and client code. I believe that by using Rails and the features of both Ruby and Rails, it makes this integrated learning almost seamless.

The remaining chapters cover more advance topics such as writing your own helpers, using callbacks, and creating complex associations. There is also more on unit and functional testing. The author describes the use of plug-ins and how they can add functionality to your site. He also describes benchmarking and debugging your site and then finishes up with deployment.

What you will learn from Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications:

• Build and deploy a complete Rails web application
• Use Rails' Ajax features to create slick interfaces.
• Reap the benefits of a best-practice MVC architecture.
• Work with databases easily using ActiveRecord.
• Create a user authentication system.
• Use object-oriented concepts like inheritance and polymorphism.
• Use migrations to manage your database schema without data loss.
• Achieve maximum code reuse with filters and helper functions.
• Analyze your application's performance using the Rails logging infrastructure.
• Benchmark your application to determine performance bottlenecks.
• Much, much more…

This is a perfect book if you are looking to get into Web 2.0 development and want a step-by-step guide to bring you up to speed. It does a good job of introducing Model-View-Controller architecture as well as laying out testing methods as being important with the implementation of unit and functional testing. Finally, I like the clear, concise and entertaining style that the author uses in presenting his material.

Book Review - Everyday Scripting With Ruby: For Teams, Testers And You by Brian Marick

2007-05-13T11:51:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Everyday Scripting With Ruby is a book that is geared toward the computer user who is not afraid to scale new heights to try to improve their skills. The premise is that people who use computers routinely do many repetitive tasks that would be better offloaded for a computer to do. Often they think that programming it themselves is too hard, and they cannot justify hiring someone to write a program to handle their menial tasks. Using the Ruby language, anyone who is comfortable with a computer can now learn automate these tasks with a little training.

Ruby is an object-oriented scripting language that originated from Japan. It takes some of the best features from some of the best languages and combines them to make a simple and easy to use yet powerful system for processing tasks. It is freely available as open source software and is available on many platforms including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Everyday Scripting With Ruby targets three audiences. First the "Tester," the person who is involved with the development of software but thinks that programming is too hard. The second target audience is the "Analyst" or someone who manipulates a lot of data. With Ruby scripts, they can automate mundane tasks and free up more time for more rewarding things. Finally, this book is for the programmer who hates to use complex programming languages to accomplish these smaller tasks.

The book is divided into an introduction and five sections. The introduction and getting started section is an overview of what will be accomplished and the best method for success. It will also provides assistance for installing Ruby on a computer and making sure that everything is running correctly. The next sections build four separate projects with the purpose of enhancing the reader's skills and building his or her knowledge of Ruby.

"The Basics" is a project that will teach the reader how to create a system to compare two text file "inventories." The reader is given an old file and then needs to create a new file. The goal is to create a dynamic script, that when run, will note changes in the two files. While the program is somewhat trivial, it teaches a lot of important concepts within the Ruby language without getting bogged down on a complex project. The techniques would be handy for automatically comparing differences in many other files such as logs.

"Growing a Script" is about creating project that "reaches out to a version control system"; in this case the VCS is Subversion, an open source product that saves its files in text. While this would not work for the VCS that I use, it does a fine job of teaching the reader how to manipulate text files.

"Working in a World Full of People" introduces the reader to Ruby's power of Screen Scraping. That is, visiting a website and scraping the data and putting it into a comma separated value file (CSV) that can be used by a spreadsheet or to import into a preferred database program. The programmer can get into some real meaty issues of file manipulation and the use of regular expressions to parse data.

"The Accomplished Scripter" works on a project called "Watchdog" that monitors long running tests and programs. It will teach the reader how to install and configure Watchdog. In this project the reader will be learning how to work with frameworks and modify code to manipulated for custom uses. The project teaches the reader how to send text to instant messengers or email with the status of a project. Here the reader learns how to handle inheritance, working with superclass' as well as subclasses.

"The Back of the Book" contains the glossary, solutions to exercises, and the bibliography.

Everyday Scripting With Ruby is a well written introduction to the Ruby language. While it may be too simple for an experienced Ruby developer, an experienced programmer coming to Ruby would find it easy to read and a good place to learn Ruby incrementally. Some one who is not a programmer by avocation, but enjoys mucking around a computer, will find it a wonderful treat!

Book Review: The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks and Techniques by Corrie Haffly

2007-05-13T11:45:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

If you are like a lot of web developers I know, you can work with HTML, you can work with databases, you can work with the language with which you program, whether it be PHP, Ruby, ASP.NET, Java or any of the other popular web languages. You are probably even gifted at what you do. Where I have seen a lot of people cringe is when the development manager or customer comes in and says, "I need a new button that looks like this!" Or, "Can we get a background that looks like my wood floor?" Or even, "Can you make that text curve around that globe and make it look like it in motion?" I can already see that deer-in-the-headlights look on your face. "I..I..I am a programmer," you stutter. "I'm not a graphics designer! I can barely spell Photoshop!"

Have no fear. Corrie Haffly is to the rescue with her book The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks and Techniques. This isn't your typical Photoshop book. This book is really focused toward web developers: those who are comfortable with the programming aspect of web design but may have limited experience with graphic side of web development. The author begins from the base and works up providing you with the ability to actually learn how to create useful items for your web design.

The book is contained in nine chapters that start you out by showing you around in Photoshop, getting you comfortable with navigation and learning some basic techniques. In chapter two, you will begin learning the basic skills that you will need to grow in you use of Photoshop. Most of these are simple skills that show you how to work with layers, shapes and documents. You will learn how to sample colors from image files, fade images, and work with drop shadows and transplant backgrounds.

In chapter three, you learn how to make buttons - something frequently needed in web design. You learn to make simple flat buttons, beveled buttons as well as ones that are chiseled, embedded, metallic, plastic, glass, and have a watery feel. Once you complete all of these, you will be on your way to creating your own effects and designs.

Chapter four is about creating backgrounds. These include striped, pixel, brushed metal, wood-grain, stone and paper. You'll be emulating, your boss's wood floor in no time. Chapter five works with text, here you will be wrapping, stretching, curving, and warping text. You will make it glow, outline, glass, adding shadows, patterns, changing shapes and making it move.

In chapter six you work with images. You will be able to adjust tones, whites, contrasts and make colors more vivid. You learn to lighten or darken areas on an image, combine images, clean up dust or scratch marks, match lighting or fix red-eye. Chapter seven guides you into manipulating images to create a magnifying effect, make the foreground standout, put a picture into a product box or curved surface, as well as making product photos for an eCommerce site.

In chapter eight involves building a new web page-sized document. Using the techniques learned in the book, you will be able to create all of the images, backgrounds and menu items to navigate your web page. You will see how to slice and dice your layout, optimize, and save the elements to use on your website.

Chapter nine completes the book with advanced techniques such as automation, batch processing and animation, instructing how to watermark photos, work with layer sets and create a web photo gallery.

The Photoshop Anthology is not really a book for photographers, graphic artists or illustrators. Although each of these groups can certainly learn techniques from this book, it is not to whom this book is aimed. This is really a book for web developers and web designers. It is really a must read for those who can do the programming side of development but are intimidated by the graphic side of web design. Through her solution-discussion method of explaining each of her techniques, the author provides a firm foundation from which to tackle your graphic fears.

Book Review - Learning MySQL by Seyed M.M. "Saied" Tahaghoghi And Hugh E. Williams

2007-05-13T11:34:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Learning MySQL is geared toward those people who don't know a lot about deploying and using a database management system, or about developing applications that use a database. By using MySQL, the leader of open source database management systems, along with the PHP and Pearl programming languages and this book, the authors attempt to provide a readable introduction to managing data.

The book has 18 chapters divided into six parts. To work with this book you will need a computer that is running Window, Linux or the Mac OS X operating system; a web server, the one introduced here is the Apache web server; and the PHP and Pearl languages for programming specific tasks to MySQL. Each of these is available for free on the web, and described in the book in the introduction.

Part one provides the overview of the book's content and focus. The authors describe how MySQL fits into the realm of information management tools and technologies. They explain how to set up your system and how to configure the software on differing systems. Finally they introduce the text-based interface to MySQL Server and how you can use it to control almost every aspect of the program.

Part two, Using MySQL, begins with the how-to of proper database design. You will learn how to determine what features your database will need and how items relate to each other. You will learn how to read data from existing databases, how to create new databases, what queries are, how to use them and how to nest them. You will find out about importing and exporting data as well as internal information on how MySQL process a query. You will also be given an overview of how to prevent unauthorized access to your data.

Part three, Advanced Topics, will teach you how to back-up your data and how to recover from a loss if your hardware does crash. You will learn how to use configuration files to fine tune the behavior of your MySQL server. It is here that you will also discover performance tips that can improve your overall performance.

Part four, Web Database Applications with PHP, will explore the world of database applications beginning with an introduction of the PHP language and how it can be used to work with your MySQL database. Then the authors, by designing a wedding gift registry, will show you the basics of designing your application.

Part five, Interacting with MySQL Using Pearl, present an easy to use introduction to the Pearl programming language. By using the Pearl DBI module to connect to MySQL data, you can import, export as well as store and read information. They finish up by creating a Pearl CGI module to create dynamic web pages that can interface with a MySQL database.

Finally there is an appendix that contains the entire source for the wedding gift registry. You can also download the source as well as other items such as useful links, feedback and errata found in the book.

If you are wanting to learn how to work with databases and feel intimidated, Learning MySQL may be just the ticket. It is well written, easy to understand and develops in a logical, easy to follow manner. By the time you get through the book, you will have a good overview of SQL databases in general.

If like me, you are not a PGP/Pearl programmer and, don't really want to be, there is still almost 400 of the 560 non-appendix, non-index pages, that deal directly with setting up and running a MySQL server, and who knows, your eyes might drift and you may end up learning PGP or Pearl anyway.

If I had one complaint, it would be the appendix containing the source for the application. It is a personal pet peeve of computer books that I have had for almost 20 years. Put it on a disk, put it on the web, just don't put it in a book. I would have preferred to have a summary of commands as the appendix.

That being said, I think that if you want to get a good solid foundation into how to build MySQL server databases, manage and manipulate them, then Learning MySQL should be on your shelf.

Music Review: The Doors by The Doors

2007-05-11T13:04:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

In July of 1965 on Venice Beach California, two students of the UCLA film school decided to form a band after one of the studentS found out that the other was writing lyrics to songs. When Vox-Organ player Ray Manzarek asked Jim Morrison to sing one of the songs, a song called "Moonlight Drive," an ember of what would form into a group was alight. By September of that year, they formed up with guitarist Robby Kriger and drummer John Densmore and, taking the name from an Aldous Huxley book, "The Doors of Perception", where born The Doors.

The Doors were unusual in the annals of rock music in that while performing on the road they did not use a bass player. The bass lines where played by Manzarek on the newly invented Fender Rhodes Bass Keyboard. While in the studio, they often brought in studio players to perform the lines.

In January 1967, The Doors released their self-titled debut LP. This caused major commotion within the music circles of the time. Not only did it contain most of the major songs from their set, it included an 11-minute version of "The End", the band's keynote song. They recorded the album in only a few days during August and September of 1966.

This was an in-studio "live" album, in that almost all of the songs were captured in a single take. Morrison and Manzarek also directed a promotional film for their first single "Break on Through" in what turns out to be an early music video. Their second single, "Light my Fire", put them in league with The Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead as one of the top counter-culture bands of their time.

While these should be songs you know by heart and the mere fact that The Doors is one of those albums that deserves ranking on everyone's top 100 albums of all time, I understand that not everyone will have heard this CD.

For those who are not familiar with the brash, soulful, bluesy rock style that was totally The Doors, the songs; "Soul Kitchen", "The Crystal Ship", "Twentieth Century Fox", "Alabama Song", "Back Door Man", "The End", "Break On Through", and "Light My Fire" are all simply brilliant, with the last three being classics worth the price of admission. "The End", the controversial eleven minute masterpiece, will wow you with how fresh it sounds even today. The remaining songs deserve at least three or four stars as well.

This release of The Doors debut album, is a complete reengineering and re-mastering of the original version. The sound quality is superb. According to the liner notes, the speed of the album has always been slower that it was intended. This has been fixed and the mix is also clearer and more dynamic.

The Doors Song Listing:
Break On Through (To the Other Side) Soul Kitchen
The Crystal Ship
Twentieth Century Fox
Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)
Light My Fire
Back Door Man
I Looked At You
End of the Night
Take It As It Comes
The End

Bonus Tracks:
Moonlight Drive
Moonlight Drive
Indian Summer

Book Review: Rails Cookbook by Rob Orsini

2007-05-11T12:59:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Rob Orsini opens his book Rails Cookbook by saying that Ruby on Rails has revolutionized the process of developing web applications and has enabled web developers to become much faster and more efficient, which allows for quicker application development. It is my opinion that the O'Reilly Cookbook series has done the same for software development. The fact is that it allows developers to become faster and more efficient, which allows for quicker development by providing time tested tricks and pearls of wisdom; exactly what you need when you need it.

Rails Cookbook is meant for someone with web development skills, but who may be new to Rails. It is also for those who are trying to learn new techniques in Rails and want a clear, concise method to learn it without having to read an entire book. In this cookbook there are over 170 recipes broken into 15 chapters. Together they provide a wide range of solutions that will help you test, debug, and improve your application.

In "Getting Started" you will learn how to install, update and set up version control with Subversion. "Rails Development" will show you how to begin development in Rails by creating a rails project and introducing other add-ons to make development more efficient.

"Active Record" shows you how to set up a relational database to use with Rails as well as working with the concept of Active Record which allows you to define the logic of your domain model using Ruby. "Action Controller" teaches you how to handle the incoming requests and how they hand off each request to a particular action. "Action View" completes the triumvirate of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern by showing how the data is presented to the user.

"RESTful Development" explores the Rails world of building full-featured web services within the Rails environment. "Rails Application Testing" shows how being proactive in the approach to testing comes by writing the tests before you write the code - by thinking about what the code should not do, then creating a test to make sure that it doesn't.

"JavaScript and Ajax" ensures that the power of Rails makes it easy to deal with JavaScript and Ajax as well as some of the common effects that you can achieve using them. "Action Mailer" shows you how to set up an application to send emails as well as responding to incoming emails. "Debugging Rails Applications" will help ease the pain of debugging an application. You will learn of the many powerful tools that Rails gives to you to combat bugs.

"Security" covers things like SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) as well as securing ports. "Performance" will help you diagnose speed problems using HTTPerf to measure your web server performance, benchmark your code, and help you figure how best to work with page caching. "Hosting and Deployment" gets you over the hump of deploying a Rails application.
"Extending Rails with Plug-ins" shows you how to extend your Rails application by installing third-party software to accomplish tasks that the Rails framework was not designed to handle. Lastly, "Graphics" will help you to upload, store and display images using a database as well as aid in generating PDF files from a variety of source data.

Rails Cookbook will guide you through the traps and pitfalls of Rails development by providing you with the building blocks of source code to make any Rails application complete. The book will be an essential addition to your programming library.

Music Review: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers - In The Palace Of The King

2007-05-11T12:53:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

What can you say when a blues musician does a tribute to a legendary guitarist; in this case Freddie King, the bluesman from Texas? When they do it well, you can admire it, when it comes from the legend-maker, it becomes something to be truly treasured!

Spanning a career of five decades and creating the careers of hundreds of musicians over the last four decades, John Mayall, along with the Bluesbreakers, is putting out his 56th album this week. In The Palace Of The King is a tribute to the late Freddie King (1934-1976).

According to his first successful student, Eric Clapton, "John Mayall has actually run an incredibly great school for musicians." Some of his later pupils include Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac), John McVie (Fleetwood Mac), Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac), Harvey Mandel (Canned Heat), Kal David (Kal David Band), Aynsley Dunbar (Journey, Frank Zappa, Jefferson Starship David Bowie), Andy Fraser (Free), Larry Taylor (Canned Heat), and Mick Taylor (Rolling Stones).

It is only fitting that Mayall and company do this kind of album since they have been associated with the music of Freddie King from the beginning. According to Mayall, "So, it was a logical step for the band to record an album of songs written by him or closely associated with him". And from one of the songs on the album, "He was a big man from Texas, He played an even bigger guitar. He was the king of the Kings, born to be a superstar."

There is not a bad song in the bunch. They range from Don Nix's "Going Down"; probably the best known song, with a hefty back beat and furious bass to "Palace of the King" written by Nix, Leon Russel and Donald "Duck" Dunn, the energetic blues-rock ditty that has Mayall powering an upbeat vocal.

There are slow mercilessly powerful songs like "Help me through the Day" with its deep horns and sad emotion. And Mayall's original, "Time to Go" with smooth guitar leads playing off the sax and horn sections.

As far as a little more honky-tonk feel, you have "You know that you love me" and "I Love You More Every Day", and Mayall's other original "King of Kings". Here he provides a cacophony of piano leads trading into guitar leads which trade into sax leads.

At 73, John Mayall is still going strong with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. With the release of In The Palace Of The King, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers will be kicking off their 2007 international tour to support the album. If you can get to one of the numerous dates, then by all means get out to see this legend and master; the godfather of British blues. If you can't, then buy In The Palace Of The King, you will be glad you did!

In The Palace Of The King song listing

You Know That You Love Me
Goin' Down
Some Other Day, Some Other Time
Palace Of The King
I'd Rather Be Blind
Time To Go
Big Legged Woman
Now I Got A Woman
I Love You More Every Day
Help Me Through The Day
Cannonball Shuffle You've Got Me Licked
King Of Kings
Living On The Highway

Book Review: Programming WCF Services by Juval Löwy

2007-05-11T12:50:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a software development kit for developing and deploying services on Window. WCF, previously codenamed "Indigo," is a communication system to enable applications, in one machine or many machines connected by a network to communicate. It has been introduced as part of Microsoft's .NET Framework 3.0.

WCF is really a lot of things to a lot of people. To the Web Service developer, it is the ultimate interoperability solution. To the distributed application developer, it is the easiest way to make remote or queued calls. To the systems developer, it is the next generation of productivity-oriented features such as transactions and hosting that provide off the shelf plumbing for applications. To the Application developer, it is a declarative programming model for structuring the application. To the architect, it is how one can finally build service-oriented applications (SOA).

A WCF Service is composed of three parts: a Service class that implements the service to be provided, a host environment to host the service, and one or more endpoints to which clients will connect. All communications with the WCF service will happen via the endpoints. The endpoints specify a contract that defines which methods of the service class will be accessible via the endpoint; each endpoint may expose a different set of methods.

Programming WCF Services will teach you how to design and develop SOA-WCF-based applications. You will learn how to take advantage of built-in features such as service hosting, instance management, disconnected queue calls and security. Programming WCF Services breaks down into ten chapters and three appendixes. You will need to be an experienced developer who has a fair understanding of .NET and C# 2.0. You will need .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 as well as the .NET 3.0 SDK and .NET 3.0 extensions for VS 2005.

Chapter one, WCF Essentials, begins by explaining what WCF is, its concepts and building blocks. It then concludes with I discussion of the WCF architecture which is really the whole key to everything that is enabled through the remaining book. If you are unfamiliar with SOA, then you should read appendix A, An Introduction to Service-Orientation.

Chapter two, Service Contracts, is geared for describing how to design and work with service contracts. You will learn how to design and factor contracts that cater to reuse. Chapter three, Data Contracts, is dedicated to how the client and service can exchange data without ever actually sharing the data type itself or using the same development technology.
Chapter four, Instance Management, deals with answering which service instance handles which client's request. It provides the rationale for each of the instance management modes. Chapter five, Operations, works with the types of operations that clients can invoke on a service and the related design guidelines you will need to handle.

Chapter six, Faults, explains how services report errors and exceptions back to their clients. It also discusses the best practices of error handling and how you can extend and improve the basic error handling mechanism. Chapter seven, Transactions, covers the motivation for transactions in general as well as the many transactional services.

Chapter eight, Concurrency Management, describes the declarative way WCF offers for managing concurrency and synchronization for both client and service. Chapter nine, Queued Services, shows how your clients can queue up calls to services, thus enabling asynchronous disconnected work. Chapter ten, Security, demystifies SOA security by breaking down this multifaceted task into its basic elements.

Appendix A, Introduction to Service-Orientation, will give you the background needed to understand the overall concept of this book and to expand to a more detailed description of SOA and how to implement it. Appendix two, Publish-Subscribe Service, presents the authors framework for implementing a publish-subscribe event management solution. Appendix C, WCF Coding Standard, is a consolidated list of all the best practices along with the do's and don'ts to help you get off on the right foot.

A couple of points about Programming WCF Services, first, this isn't a beginners book; the author dives down into advanced material in spots almost without notice. If you are uncomfortable with this you may want to start with a more basic attempt first, whether from the web or from another book. That being said, if you want to become proficient using WCF, you will be buying this book eventually. You will find that this book will become both a reference as well as well as a guide.

The book is well thought out and presented. Löwy places the focus on the how and why of programming WCF without the hype of the technology. He gives you information that is not readily available anywhere else, and has given well engineered examples that will provide you the correct methods of working with WCF.

If there was one thing missing to this book is a contextual reference for existing users of previous distributed technologies. That is background on how this relates back to Web Services, Remoting, COM etc. All pretty minor overall.

If you are serious about getting on the next wave of distributed SOA and Interoperability, then Programming WCF Services will take you to the next level. The book is filled with examples and will guide you along until you are creating professional WCF services. If you want to go to the next level of WCF then Programming WCF Services is a great place to get started.

Book Review: Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers by Michael Schrenk

2007-05-11T12:47:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

According to the Michael Schrenk, the internet is bigger and better than what a mere browser allows. Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers was written to show you how to take advantage of the vast resources available on the internet. When you are regulated to the world of a browser, you are limited in what is available to you. Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers goal is to open up the Web and enhance you online experience.

What is the problem with browsers? It is a manual tool that downloads and renders websites. You still need to decide if the website is relevant to you. Your browser cannot think. It cannot anticipate your actions and won't notify you when something important happens. To accomplish this, you will need the automation and intelligence only available in a webbot; also known as a web robot.

Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers contains 28 chapters that break down into four sections. I will focus on the four sections highlighting the chapters as needed. What you will need to work with this book is a fundamental understanding of HTML, and how the internet works. It should be known that this book is not going to teach you how to program, or how things like TCP/IP; the protocol of the internet work. Pretty much any kind of Pentium computer running Windows, Linux or Mac operating system will do. You will also want to get PHP, cURL and MySQL, all of which are free on the internet. Again, this book will not teach you how to use these products, but rather use these products to teach you how to create webbots, spiders and screen scrapers.

Part one, "Fundamental Concepts and Techniques," introduces the concepts of web automation and explores the elementary techniques that will allow you to harness the resources of the web. It begins by explaining why it is fun to write webbots and how writing webbots can be a rewarding career. It tells where you can get ideas for webbot projects and talks about existing as well as potential webbot projects. You will learn how to download web pages, parse those pages, automatically submit forms, and how to manage large amounts of data. All of these topics will set you up for the rest of the book.

Part two, "Projects," expands on the concepts that you learned in part one. According to the author, with further development, any of these projects could be transformed in to a marketable product. The projects include; Price-monitoring webbots where you can collect and analyze online prices from any number of websites. There is an image-capturing webbots that will download all of the images from a website as well as a Email reading an email sending webbot. All in all there are eleven projects included in part two.

Part three, "Advanced Technical Considerations," explores the finer technical aspects of webbots and spider development. Here the author shares some hard learned lessons while teaching you how to write some specialized webbots and spiders. Here you will learn about spiders; a webbot that finds and follow links both within a website as well as those that crawl along the web searching out specific information. You will learn how to create snippers; webbots that automatically purchase items from places like auction sites when a specific set of criterion has been met. You will also find out how to deal with cryptography, authentication and scheduling.

Part four, "Larger Considerations," advises you on being socially responsible with your webbot development. Webbots need to coexist with not only society, but with the system administrators of the sites that you target. You will learn how to create webbots with stealth; webbots that look like normal browser traffic. You will also learn how to write fault tolerant webbots. Because the web changes constantly, your webbots will need to handle these changes. You will also learn how to create webbot friendly websites, writing pages that can be made secure from other spiders to protect sensitive data and how to keep your own webbots out of trouble.

Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers is a great book for learning about webbots and spiders and how they work on the web. It will introduce you to a wide variety of topics via the projects and you will be able to understand how the different technologies work.

I have one main complaint and one warning. First the complaint, in chapter 27, "Killing Spiders," we are told about robots.txt which is meant to keep spiders from trampling sensitive pages. Then we are told that we really shouldn't use them because that the use of Robots.txt is strictly voluntary, and that it might alert others to where the sensitive material are. I felt confused. If I don't use a robots.txt, other webbots will be trampling my site and if I do use it, I leave my self open for attack.

The warning begins on page four: "You may use any of the scripts in this book for your own personal use, as long as you agree not to redistribute them... and agree not to sell or create derivative products under any circumstances." This is total contradictory to what the author says on page 75; "Any of these projects, with further development, could be transformed from a simple webbot concept into a potentially marketable product." I'll leave it to you to determine what he means.

Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers, is a great book for the beginner to intermediate user of PHP and for someone who wants to get into web agents. It is a good overview and tutorial on the topics of webbots, spiders and screen scrapers and will have you understanding and programming them in no time.

Book Review: Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML and CSS by Ian Lloyd

2007-05-10T07:53:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Trying to create a web site can be a pretty daunting task, especially if you have never done it before. When my son's swim team asked me to do theirs, I was a bit intimidated. I was a application programmer and I had worked on some website stuff, but the web is a different beast. The questions were many: what tools do I need? how do I layout my pages? do I use tables? HTML tags to directly apply formatting?

One could use FrontPage or a similar product to automatically generate the web site, but that was never my style. I would have to go old-school. I wish I would have had Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way back then.

Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way is geared for the absolute beginner to web site design. However, you should be comfortable with a computer, you should use the web a lot, have seen a lot other sites, have a good grasp on what you want for your own site. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and it is the language that generates web pages. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it is what is used to format those pages.

Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way is set up into eleven chapters and an appendix. Chapter 1, "Setting up Shop," explains what tools you will need to get going. While you can buy tools to use, the author shows you how you can also get them for free.

Chapter 2, "Your First Web Pages," will teach you what makes a web page. You will learn about XHTML — the latest version of HTML — and about the basic requirements for creating a properly formed web page.

Chapter 3, "Adding Some Style," will introduce you to CSS. You will learn how to apply CSS to add color, change fonts, and generally improve the appearance of your page.

Chapter 4, "Shaping up with CSS," builds on chapter three to teach you about border styles and more advanced page layouts. You will even learn how to position elements using CSS.

Chapter 5, "Picture this! Using Images on your Web Site," teaches you all about image. You will learn about inline images, background images, as well as learning how to make images accessible for your blind surfers.

Chapter 6, "Tables: Tools for Organizing Data," will show you when it is proper to use tables, and especially when they should not be used. You will learn how to use CSS to make your tables more visually appealing.

Chapter 7, "Forms: Interacting with your Audience," will teach you about the proper use of forms to collect data from your user. Lloyd also shows how to use a free service to have data emailed to you!

Chapter 8, "Getting your Web Site Online," is all about getting your site hosted, uploaded, and presenting it to the world. Here the pros and cons are examined to see what approach will be right for you.

Chapter 9, "Adding a Blog to your Web Site," will show you how to do just that: create your own blog. You probably have an idea of what a blog is; a way to interact with other people. Whatever you think about this review, you can tell me in the comments. If you think I should have said more, or didn't like something that I said, you can tell me. I can then turn around and respond. Neat stuff!

Chapter 10, "Pimp my Site: Cool Stuff you can Add for Free," will have you spicing up your site with carefully executed cosmetic touches that won't break the bank.

Chapter 11, "Where to Now? What you Can Learn Next," will summarize the skills that you have learned as well as to provide a listing of sites that can take you to the next level.
The Appendix is an XHTML Reference guide that provides information on the elements that you are likely to use.

What I like about Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way is its quick and easy pacing, subtle humor, and straightforward manner. While this may be a beginners book, even the more seasoned of us learned, or perhaps I should say un-learned, quite a number of things along the way.

Book Review - SQL Hacks by Andrew Cumming and Gordon Russell

2007-05-10T07:50:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)
SQL Hacks works well because of the fact that it does what it says. It hacks. It gets in to SQL and shows you how to do things that you would have to, in many cases, search for hours to find out how to accomplish. This is not for the beginner, rather these books target more experienced users.

It is a collection of 100 hacks that, according to the authors, will help you to “get the job done”. They are not concerned with good database design or sticking to the rules. Their goal is to give you a better understanding of the breath of SQL and how different approaches to a solution can result in simple and elegant solutions.

This is titled SQL Hacks, because the authors have worked to make this volume and vendor/platform independent as possible. When there are differences, they take the time to reference back to SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and MS-Access when applicable.
While it would be time-consuming to list more than a few hacks, to give you an idea of the scope of the book, I will illustrate a few. There are some simple ones such as number 15 "Search for Keywords Without LIKE". Using the keyword LIKE will give you matches where an exact match is found. But what if you wanted to search for partial matches with a resulted weighting for the matches? Hack number 15 gives it to you. Since each of the major SQL systems do it differently, the authors show you how to do it with each of them.

A more complex Hack is number 41; "Copy Web Pages into a Table". Here the authors spend almost seven pages showing you how to use XSLT processing to take a web page and extract the data you require and insert it into a SQL Database.

The book is broken in to 12 chapters as listed below.
Chapter 1, SQL Fundamentals (6 hacks)
Chapter 2, Joins, Unions, and Views (8 hacks)
Chapter 3, Text Handling (4 hacks)
Chapter 4, Date Handling (5 hacks)
Chapter 5, Number Crunching (17 hacks)
Chapter 6, Online Applications (8 hacks)
Chapter 7, Organizing Data (9 hacks)
Chapter 8, Storing Small Amounts of Data (6 hacks)
Chapter 9, Locking and Performance (13 hacks)
Chapter 10, Reporting (13 hacks)
Chapter 11, Users and Administration (7 hacks)
Chapter 12, Wider Access (4 hacks)

To me, SQL Hacks is the classic reference book that you need to keep on the shelf, close at hand for those little jobs that come up and just need to get done. It also serves the purpose of giving you new ideas for solutions that perhaps, you may have thought could not be done.

Audio Book Review - Rogue Angel: Destiny by Alex Archer

2007-05-10T07:47:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

When I first heard about Rogue Angel: Destiny being a graphic audio book I, was skeptical. I have been listing to audio books for over five years now. I average between 30 and 50 per year and I know what works and what doesn't. When I saw the tag line "A Movie In Your Mind", I mean really, who do these guys think they are. It’s an audio book! A movie in your mind, get real!

Boy was I ever wrong. Simply put, this was probably the best-produced audio book I have ever listened to. Period! That is after listing to well over 2-300 audio books. In some ways this is akin to listing to some of the old radio dramas from the golden age of radio. Now if you think of the old radio shows as being like "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", well this is like "Star Wars" in comparison.

In Rogue Angel: Destiny, you have a narrator who is basically reading the main storyline. When dialog comes in you have actors filling the different voices. This much I have heard in other audio books and many times I have shied away from them because, in my opinion, it becomes a distraction. Here it really enhances the story.

The real power and effect come from the sound effects and background music that encompasses the story and gives it its movie-like quality. It is not the cheesy sound-effects that you may be use to in the old radio shows; rather these are professional quality sounds that you would hear in a movie. When someone falls, gets kicked, or is shot, it really feels like you are there. When the goat gets its neck sliced in the ritual, you hear the screams. (I do not, however, believe that any goats were injured in any way in making this book.)

Now to the actual story; Rogue Angel: Destiny is about Annja Creed, a 20-something archaeologist and explorer who works for a show called "Chasing Histories Monsters" to earn money to do more serious archaeology work. Her fascination with the myths and mysteries of the world lead her in search of the Beast of Gevaudan, a legendary wolf-like creature that killed between 60 and 100 people in the 18th century.

What she discovers is an artifact that will seal her destiny; a brotherhood of monks who are willing to murder to protect their secret; a black market occultist who wants to find millions of dollars in centuries-old blood money and a couple of shadowy figures - she is not sure if they want to help or kill her.

I try to pull myself back and separate the story from the performance, so the latter is not influencing the former. From that stance, I think that this is a good story. Obviously this is the first in a series and, to me, for a series to be good you have to have a minimum of two things; characters that you like, and a story line that both makes sense and is interesting.
Rogue Angel: Destiny has both interesting and likable characters in Annja, Roux and Garin. I assume (and hope) that they will be regulars, since their lives are intertwined together. And the story line is both interesting and informative. It contains historical data, interesting settings and cultural characteristics that give the story more realism.

A couple of minor points with the production were that two or three times when the background music and the sounds were a little louder than they should have been. You could still hear the narrator, but it took you out of the moment a little bit.

One other point, this story is rated for mature content. They make it very obvious on both the front and the back of the packaging. At least in this story, it is for all the violence and graphic gore that takes place. I commend the company for pointing this out in advance.

The quality of the story and performance are the reason that I will be coming back for the next Rogue Angel, due out in March of 2007. I will also be checking out some of their other series as well. If you want you can down load of MP3 excerpt, or purchase the GraphicAudio Book from their on-line store. The story comes three ways; standard CD, MP3 CD (the version I reviewed) and downloadable WMA with digital rights management.

Book Review: XQuery by Priscilla Walmsley

2007-05-08T08:15:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

As increasing amounts of data are stored, processed and exchanged using XML, the ability to access that data in an efficient, organized, and streamlined manner becomes ever so necessary. In the traditional data world, the standard is by using a SQL query, and as of January 2007 in the XML world, we officially have XQuery.

Written by Priscilla Walmsley, XQuery is for query writers who are familiar with XML basics, but perhaps not skilled in other XML-related technologies. It is both a tutorial as well as a reference book. It covers namespaces, schemas, built-in types and regular expressions. It also covers XQuery's support for filtering, sorting, and grouping data as well as how to use FLWOR expressions, XPath and XQuery tools for extracting and combining information.

While the book breaks out into 25 chapters and three appendixes, I will break it down in to its six functional areas. The book is approximately two-thirds's tutorial and one-third reference. It uses a running example that reflects many XML structures.

Chapters 1-2 are a high level overview of XQuery. In these chapters the author goes through what XQuery is, what it can do and lays out the example structures that will be used thought the book. She explains the design of the language as well as the data model.

Chapters 3-9 explore how to write fairly sophisticated queries with out using namespaces and schemas. Here she gets in to the building blocks that will be used to create your queries; that is, things like keywords, whitespace, function calls, and variables. You will learn to navigate input documents using paths, adding elements and attributes to results, selecting and joining using FLWOR's expressions, sorting and grouping, as well as advance queries.

Chapters 10-15 provide advanced concepts for those who want to take advantage of modularity. You will also look at XML namespaces, types, nodes and atomic values as well as learning about queries, prologs, and modules. You will get into schemas, static typing and the overall principles of query design.

Chapters 16-23 introduce advanced concepts for those who want to work with specific types of data, like numbers, strings, dates, URI's and processing instructions. There is discussion on working with other XML components such as documents, text nodes and CDATA as well as implementation -specific features such as serialization parameters.

Chapters 24-25 describe XQuery's relationship to SQL and XSLT by comparing SQL syntax with XQuery syntax and showing how to combine the two when it would be advantageous. The author also goes into XPath and XSLT and how they compare to XQuery.
There are three Appendixes; A which contains a built-in function reference, B covers the built-in types, and C provides a listing of error messages.

There is a lot of information contained in XQuery and it is obvious that Priscilla Walmsley both knows her topic, and is quite clear, concise and well versed on presenting the information in a logical style. While the book is aimed at the XQuery novice, it's usefulness as a desk reference makes it one of those books that you get to learn the topic, but keep forever.

Book Review - Linux System Administration by Tom Adelstein & Bill Lubanovic

2007-05-08T08:10:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Geared for the Linux pro or UNIX administrator, Linux System Administration was written to provide advice to manage a complete range of systems and servers. The authors were amazed at how many Linux users, for example, could not write a configuration file. Thinking there were many people who might want to learn of the extensive capabilities of Linux as an application platform, they wrote this book.

Linux System Administration is divided into 11 chapters and an appendix. Each chapter is a module in and of itself so that if you want to learn how to accomplish a specific task such as administering Apache, you can jump into chapter 6 and get going without having to muddle through the first five chapters.

Chapter 1, "Requirements for a Linux System Administrator," lays out the goals for the book and what you will accomplish by reading it. You will learn where to start, who needs you, and what system managers should know about Linux. Chapter 2, "Setting up a Linux Multifunction Server," will guide you through the system requirements, installation, how to login remotely, and how to configure the network. You will also learn how to configure mail, FTP services, and set up MySQL server.

Chapter 3, "The Domain Name System," gives you all the information on setting up the DNS server. By the time you are done with this chapter, you will understand installation, configuration, as well as be able to maintain and trouble shoot a server for any domain that you register. Chapter 4, "An Initial Internet-Ready Environment," will show you how to, by using ISPConfig, build a multifunctional, working internet server from a single, downloadable application. This will allow you to manage websites, perform email and file transfers all from a graphical interface.

Chapter 5, "Mail," explores how to build an email service for small to medium sites. You will use the Postfix server as the SMTP mail transfer agent, POP and IMAP to deliver your mail, and SASL for authenticating you mail. Chapter 6, "Administering Apache," introduces the Apache web server. You will learn how to install, configure, and administer Apache, PHP, and MySql server, as well as how to manage multiple websites, test for performance, and monitor statistics.

Chapter 7, "Load-Balanced Clusters," teaches you how, by using a group of loosely coupled computers that work together closely as though they are a single computer, you can improve speed, reliability, and scalability at a reasonable price. Chapter 8, "Local Network Services," gives you the information you will need to manage a host behind a firewall or gateway of a company. This will help you fix the things critical to your organization that really matter.

Chapter 9, "Virtualization in the Modern Enterprise," addresses an explosive growth area within the Linux community. It refers to one piece of hardware running multiple kernels on top of a lower layer of software which manages the access to the hardware. Chapter 10, "Scripting," shows you the ropes around creating and running scripts. These are the little time saver programs that you will create to perfume mundane repetitive tasks for things like service and processor management.

Finally, Chapter 11 finishes up with "Backing up Data." This is all about the things that you need to do when your system crashes. It will happen, and you will be prepared by using the tools provided here.

What I personally like about this book is that it can be digested a chapter at a time. Granted you need to be somewhat versed in Linux, UNIX, or even Windows Server background; that said, Linux System Administration will give you the tools you need to become a better administrator.

Book Review - Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson

2007-05-08T08:02:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

In the Ruby Cookbook preface, the authors begin by saying "Life is Short." Following with, and I paraphrase, "This book is meant to save you time… but a span of time is also a piece of your life. Our lives are better spent creating new things than… trying to solve problems that have already been solved." The authors hope that by writing this book, they can save you much more of your time than they spent creating the book. As has been my experience with the Cookbook series, their hope is well founded.

Ruby Cookbook is geared toward those who have some experience with Ruby or those who have a strong general background in other programming languages and are wanting to learn Ruby. If you are familiar with a number of programming languages, studying through the first ten chapters should get you up to speed quite nicely.

Ruby is an object-oriented scripting language that originated from Japan. It takes some of the best features from some of the best languages and combines them to make a simple and easy to use yet powerful system for processing tasks. It is freely available as open source software and is available on many platforms including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The Ruby Cookbook contains 23 chapters broken down into loosely six functional areas; Data Structures, Idiom and Philosophy, Storing Data, Applications, Programming Techniques, and Miscellaneous Techniques. You won't find these titles explicitly listed in the book, but for organization (and so I don't have to step through each chapter) I will present, my discussion using them. Each recipe begins with a problem statement. It then follows up with the solution so if you want, you can be done and get on with your life. There then is a discussion if you want to learn more about the solution. It ends with a "See Also" which will give you addition information if the discussion is not enough.

In data Structures (chapters 1 thru 6), the authors cover the built in data structures used by the Ruby language. They cover strings, numbers, dates and time, arrays, hashes, files and directories. These deal with strict algorithmic problems. Some are as simple as 1.10's "Changing the Case of a String", some are more complex such as 4.15's "Partitioning or Classifying a Set" in which you want to partition an array based on some attribute of its elements.

Idiom and Philosophy (chapters 7 thru 10) covers items that you may encounter when you cannot get the Ruby language to do what you want. You will learn things like iteration, blocks and callbacks. You will explore objects and classes, working with superclasses and abstract methods, modules and namespaces as well as reflection and metaprogramming.

In Storing Data (chapters 11 thru 13) you will focus on how to work with three popular forms of data storage; XML, HTML, graphics and database. You will extract data from a tree structure, convert from one encoding to another as well as convert an HTML Document to a text document. You will learn how to thumbnail images, present graphing data as well as generate PDF files. You will work with YAML, MySQL, and Berkley DB as well as learning how to prevent SQL Injection attacks.

Applications (chapters 14 thru 16) will explain how to work with internet services, web development and web services. Here you will explore sending/receiving mail, working with FTP and CGI. They explain working with Ruby on Rails development as well as interacting with sites such as Amazon and Flickr. They will show you how to creat a jukebox, a whiteboard and how to charge a credit card.

Programming Techniques (chapters 17 thru 19) tend to auxiliary tasks of programming such as testing, debugging, packaging and automating tasks. You will be shown how to create and run unit tests, how to use external resources and how to profile your application. You will learn how to package and distribute your Ruby application as well as automate tasks with Rake. Miscellaneous Techniques (chapters 20 thru 23) complete the package with items such as multitasking/multithreading, user interface, extending Ruby and system administration.

Will you have need for all 300 plus recipes in this cookbook? Probably not…today, but perhaps soon! With over 800 pages, there is something for everyone.

Music Review: James Blood Ulmer - Bad Blood In The City: The Piety Street Sessions

2007-05-08T07:56:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)
Following up on his 2005 release Birthright, the CD that was embraced by the music world as one of the most important blues records of the year, James Blood Ulmer is releasing Bad Blood In The City on May 8th 2007. As much as I loved Birthright for its "…blues at its finest", I like this album even better.

Bad Blood In The City was made in New Orleans, about New Orleans. It's about Katrina and the after effect to the people of New Orleans; especially the disenfranchised. Why now? Katrina is almost two years past and the city is coming back, they had football back last year, basketball is coming back this next year. The city is rebuilding and growing out of the ashes.
According to producer Vernon Reid, "For me, it seems more important to record this music now than right after Katrina. With the media no longer focused on it, this is when the tragedy starts slipping to the backs of our collective memories, but we can't forget what happened down there." Ulmer did write the majority of the songs from Bad Blood In The City during the days following Hurricane Katrina; while he was still promoting Birthright.

In December 2006, Ulmer and the Memphis Blood Blues Band entered the Piety Street Studios. The band consists of Vernon Ried on guitar, Charlie Burnham on fiddle, David Barnes on harmonica, Leon Gruenbaum on keyboards, Mark Peterson on bass and Aubry Dayle on drums.

Bad Blood In The City contains eleven songs, five of which are Ulmer originals. The sessions start with "Survivors of the Hurricane" performing a complex painting of the disaster that was Katrina. With a Clavinet grove and Vernon Reid's explosive guitar work matching Ulmer's biting lyrics "..they called themselves heroes for doing their jobs." This is a masterpiece!

When I first heard "Sad Days, Lonely Nights", the Junior Kimbrough tune, I was not sure if I liked it at first. It kept calling me back to give it one more listen and one more listen until I realized it was the hypnotic quality that kept calling me back like a siren's wail. "Katrina", is a biting commentary on the fact that the "rich and able" left the poor to fend for themselves. The track was cut in the dead of night and biting edges shows its gnarly teeth.

"Let's Talk About Jesus", is a wonderful gospel blues piece that really kicks it up a notch. Adding Irene Dasher, the voices blend in an old time harmony. Then, they do a rendition of John Lee Hooker's "This Land is Nobody's Land". This he turns into a modern day social statement. This is followed by Willie Dixon's "Dead Presidents". This provides a brief respite with its jumping rhythms and playful rhymes.

We are back to business with Howlin' Wolf's, "Commit a Crime" followed by Son House's "Grinnin in Your Face". Both interpreted in Ulmer style, power and fury. "There is Power in the Blues", Ulmer, one who is known to challenge the preconceived notion that the blues is a predetermined style, "uses the concept of the blues to feel our way around" with this song.
"Backwater Blues" is Ulmer's most traditional interpration of a classical blues number on the album. The CD closes out with "Old Slave Master", an Ulmer original that brings us back to the start.

Recognized as an elder statesman of the blues, Ulmer continues to define and redefine both himself and the brand of blues that he creates. Bad Blood In The City is a pivotal piece in that definition. As good as Birthright was, I think that Bad Blood In The City exceeds those heights.

There is a recording of James Blood Ulmer and Alison Krauss performing at Radio City Music Hall which shows the power in Ulmer's renditions. This can be found at YouTube.

"Bad Blood In The City" song listing

Survivors of the Hurricane
Sad Days, Lonely Nights
Katrina
Let's Talk About Jesus
This Land is Nobody's Land
Dead Presidents
Commit A Crime
Grinnin' in Your Face
There is Power in the Blues
Backwater Blues
Old Slave Master

Music Review: Traffic - John Barleycorn Must Die

2007-04-30T07:36:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Welcome to a new series entitled "Sounds from the Attic" in which I will attempt to conjure up the spirits of albums of the bygone past. These are albums that while, in some sense are classic, don't always get the recognition they deserve. They generally don't make most peoples top 100 list and quite often unknown by the younger music crowd, but should be.

My basic criteria is that the album is at least 20 years old; although I reserve judgment to highlight something a little newer, if it is more obscure. There should be some compelling reason to conjure up the spirit, if merely for my whim!

In this issue, I am pulling from the attic and dusting off John Barleycorn Must Die , the fourth effort from Traffic. This is an interesting album as, through an interesting twist of fate, it resurrected Traffic from insignificance and set them down the road to becoming future members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2004).

Traffic was formed in 1967 by former member of Spencer Davis Group Steve Winwood, Hellions members, Jim Capaldi and Dave Mason, and Chris Wood. The later three were also reported to have done session work with the Spencer Davis Group. Influenced by the early work of The Band, they retreated to a country house in Berkshire England to write and develop new material prior to making their debut.

They had some minor hits in the U.K. during 1967, but none in the U.S. Tension was already surfacing between Winwood and Mason; the two primary songwriters at the time. Mason did not want to collaborate with Winwood and eventually and this lead to his leaving the band before the release of their first album Mr. Fantasy in 1967.

Mason rejoined Traffic in 1968 for the recording of their second album Traffic. From there, they toured and in 1969 their album Last Exit was released. It was during the tour that Mason was fired and Winwood declared the he was breaking up the band.

After spending less than a year with Blind Faith, what might be considered the first super-group with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Rick Gretch, Winwood found him self in a contractual obligation to do a solo album. This is where John Barleycorn Must Die comes in.

At age 22, Winwood's original concept for this album was to be a solo album in which he plays all instruments and vocals. The record got as far as one backing track for "Stranger to Himself", before he broke down and called on the services of Jim Capaldi. After the two completed a second track, "Every Mother's Son", they brought in Chris Wood and Island Records chief Chris Blackwell to help with the production. Thus, Traffic was reborn.

John Barleycorn Must Die is a mix of genres including folk, jazz, and rock mixed in with psychedelic influences. It starts with the instrumental, "Glad". It has an up-tempo funky feel. You can feel the jazz and folk influences as it makes its way along. "Freedom Rider", is a ballad that showcases Chris Wood's talents on sax and flute. It is lively and upbeat and wonderfully hypnotic. "Empty Pages", showcases Capaldi's drumming skills in a funky, intense sound which is enhanced by Winwood's jazzy keyboard work.

This is one thing that I don't get, when the record companies re-master many of these albums, they feel the need to add "bonus" songs to add value. That is sometimes good, but many times it is bad. This CD has two, previously un-released cuts. There is probably a good reason that they were previously un-released. They weren’t that good. "I Just Want to Know" is one of these. It is a little over a minute in length and basically chants the title over and over. I wish that if they add this kind of drivel, put it at the end, so I don't have hear it when I am trying to listen to the original album.

Then comes "Stranger to Himself", this is the song that Winwood plays all of the instruments. Capaldi helps with some background vocals. It is a folk-funk song that gets you in the mood for the really laid-back folk classic title track "John Barleycorn Must Die". The flute work in this is suburb as the song builds with the acoustic guitar. You can almost imagine a couple of medieval troubadours playing in front of a campfire.

From there we get "Every Mothers Son", this is the track in which Winwood plays all of the instruments with the exception of Capaldi on Drums. It has a bluesy feel with some grinding organ from Winwood. The CD is finished off with the other bonus track, "Sittin' Here Thinkin' of My Love". This song is better than the first bonus, but I would have been just fine without it.

Ok, what makes this album worth pulling out of the attic? Well first, it is a wonderful album that stands on its own in the history of rock. John Barleycorn Must Die transposed Traffic from being just one of those bands who never quite lived up to their potential into a future hall of fame inductee. It became their first gold record (#5 in the US), it set them on their course to three more top 10 U.S. albums (Low Spark of High Heeled Boys at # 7, Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory at # 6, and When the Eagle Flies at #9).

It also changed the music industry in the sense that all of the original songs were in excess of four minutes. In the day, to get radio time, the general thought was that your singles had to be less than four minutes, really around three. It was from bands like Traffic that the new "Album Oriented" stations came about in the late 60s to early 70s and would eventually lead to the acceptance of songs like Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" and Skynard's "Freebird" to reach the airwaves.

As an added note, Chris Wood died in 1983 of Pneumonia; some say it was related to his drinking. He was 43. Jim Capaldi died in 2005 of stomach cancer at age 60. Dave Mason went on to a terrific solo career as well as joining Fleetwood Mac on one album (Time) and currently performs with The Dave Mason Band. Steve Winwood continues to work on new material; About Time was released in 2003 as well as a possible album this year He has also been working on session sets with the likes of Sam Moore and Christina Aguilera.

If you are in the mood for some freeform fun and to get a better feel for what made music Winwood and company so great, pick up a copy of John Barleycorn Must Die. You'll be glad you did.

John Barleycorn Must Die song listing
Glad (Winwood) 6:59
Freedom Rider (Winwood/Capaldi) 5:35
Empty Pages (Winwood/Capaldi) 4:47
I Just Want To Know (Winwood/Capaldi) 1:32 – Previously Unreleased
Stranger To Himself (Winwood/Capaldi) 4:02
John Barleycorn (traditional-arr. Winwood) 6:20
Every Mother's Son (Winwood/Capaldi) 7:05
Sittin' Here Thinkin' of My Love (Winwood/Capaldi) 3:24 – Previously Unreleased

Audio Book Review: Infinite Crisis - Part I by Greg Cox and DC Comics Miniseries

2007-04-30T07:33:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Infinite Crisis was a seven-issue limited series of comic books published by DC Comics beginning in October 2005. It was written by Geoff Johns and illustrated by Phil Jimenez. The series storyline was based on the 1985 series Crisis on Infinite Earths, and it revisits characters and ideas that were from the earlier work.

Once again I was treated to a Graphic Audio performance that really brings you into the story. The combination of sound effects and artistic vocal performances creates what Graphic Audio calls a “Movie in your Mind,” and that is truly what it is.

We enter the story just as the Justice League of America's watchtower has been destroyed and the heroes of the world are facing a variety of menaces. Maxwell Lord, the head of the O.M.A.C. project — a super-spy satellite that has been gathering information on the super heroes — found out that the Blue Beetle discovered the project and shot him dead when he would not be enlisted to the cause. In fact he was going to expose it.

When Lord tried to use mind control to get Batman to kill Superman, Wonder Woman stepped in and killed Lord. Now the O.M.A.C project has taken on a life of its own and is broadcasting Wonder Woman's "Murder" of Maxwell Lord while in the process trying to rid the world of magic and the super heroes who use it.

Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman are all feuding: Wonder Woman for killing Lord, Batman for being paranoid and developing the out of control O.M.A.C project, and Superman for not being there when people need him most. On this Earth, Earth one, is a dark and cold place where people are distrusting. Is there something that has gone wrong?

The only problem that I had with this book was that being unfamiliar with the story and the fact that there are so many characters, it was hard to keep up with at first. This is more of a problem with translating this kind of story from a comic book, where you can read the names and descriptions over again. On audio, you have to rewind if you miss something. Once we got through the initial barrage of who's who, the rest of the story works well.

The quality of the story and performance are the reason that I will be coming back for the Part II of Infinite Crisis. You can also check out some of their other series as well. If you want you can download an MP3 excerpt, or purchase the GraphicAudio Book from their on-line store. The story comes three ways: standard CD, MP3 CD, and downloadable WMA with digital rights management (the version I reviewed).

Audio Book Review - The Destroyer # 100: Last Rites by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

2007-03-26T11:49:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)
The Destroyer # 100: Last Rites has Remo Williams being led by his master Chiun, the current master of Sinanju, around the world to fulfill the 13 trials in an effort to complete the Rite of Attainment. To Remo, this is a nightmare that he does not want to enter, but if he is to ever find out who his father was, he will have to complete the tests whether he wants to or not.
The Destroyer # 100: Last Rites is another in a series of Graphic Audio novels that will keep you on the edge of your seat and biting your nails in anticipation of what is around the next turn.

The Destroyer is a paperback series created by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir about a U.S. Government operative named Remo Williams. The first novel was published in 1971 and it is one of the longest-lasting men's adventure series. In May 2007, a new Destroyer: Guardian Angel will be published. The series was also made into a movie in 1985 called Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.

Complete with the traditional political and social satire that the Destroyer series has been known for, The Destroyer # 100: Last Rites takes Remo bouncing around the world to perform the Labors of Hercules that stretch his warrior skills to the limit. Not to mention his male hormones, as he has women throwing themselves at him in an effort to have sex because of his enhanced Sinanju pheromones.

Some of the tasks he has to complete are to run with the bulls in Spain; only, in his case toward them and blindfolded. He has to clean off an island full of gull guano. Fight a Minotaur, move the Sphinx, defeat a polar bear, fight a Sumo, beat a giant squid, get the girdle of an Amazon and much, much more.
Again the quality of the Graphic Audio books is first rate, the story highly entertaining, humorous and both the narration and performance work very well to bring the story off.

You can download a sample MP3 excerpt, or purchase the GraphicAudio Book. The story comes three ways; standard CD, MP3 and downloadable WMA CD (the version I reviewed) with digital rights management.

DVD Review - Canned Heat: Live at Montreux and Boogie With Canned Heat: The Canned Heat Story

2007-03-09T09:18:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

If you are a fan of blues, especially the boogie blues that Canned Heat produces then you are in for a real treat with Canned Heat: Live at Montreux. This DVD is a recording of a concert that took place in 1973 and features the then line up of Bob "The Bear" Hite (Vocals, Harmonica, Bass), Ed Beyer (Piano), Henry Vestine (Guitar), Fito De La Parra (Drums), Richard Hite (bass) and James Shane (Guitar, Vocals).

The show begins with "On The Road Again" which highlights The Bear's great harmonica and bluesy vocals. The driving rhythms of Richard Hite and Fito De La Parra playing off the guitar work of Vestine and Shane give the band its power. And to make it boogie we have the piano work of Ed Beyer. This is really what Canned Heat is all about.

The next four songs feature Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown. This is a true bonus to the DVD to be able to watch Gatemouth at his best. Brown was a Louisiana/Texas blues musician who was a highly acclaimed musician on a wide variety of instruments including guitar, fiddle, mandolin and drums. In this performance it is just fascinating watching his play on the guitar and fiddle. Especially when he makes his guitar talk as he is mouthing the words. It is just amazing to see.

The sixth song, "Night Time Is The Right Time" highlights James Shane's vocals and guitar work. The remaining songs are vintage Canned Heat. It is pure enjoyment to watch.

The reason why Canned Heat has survived to this day is that they consistently reinvent themselves within the realm of blues boogie by the personnel of the moment and they let their personnel shine in the spotlight. It would have been easy for the Heat to fold after the death of co-founder Alan Wilson. Even easier to fold after the death of the icon Bob Hite, but Canned Heat still tours and puts out original material ("Friends in the Can"; 2003) after forty years in the business.

The other bonus of this package is the second DVD entitled Boogie With Canned Heat: The Canned Heat Story. This is a 140 minute documentary on the history of Canned Heat. It is told through the eyes of the drummer Fito De La Parra; the only remaining member of the group. De La Parra joined the band for the second album and has played on every album since then.

There is footage with John Lee Hooker from the time of "Hooker and Heat"; which subsequently gave Hooker his first album to make the charts. And also talks about the influence that Bob Hite had on the characters known as "The Blues Brothers".

The quality of both DVDs is very good as is the sound. Obviously, some of the footage on the documentary is not of high quality, but its importance is more of historical value. This is a must for anyone who loves the blues and even more important for those fans of Canned Heat.

Track Listing (Montreux 1973):On the Road AgainPlease Mr. Nixon w/ Clarence "Gatemouth" BrownWorried Life Blues w/ Clarence "Gatemouth" BrownOoh Poo Pah Doo w/ Clarence "Gatemouth" BrownFunky w/ Clarence "Gatemouth" BrownNight Time is the Right TimeLet's Work TogetherRock and Roll MusicLookin' for My RainbowMontreux Boogie (improvisation)

Music Review - The Sweet Escape by Gwen Stefani

2007-02-08T12:01:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

The Sweet Escape is the second solo effort by the pop-rock singer Gwen Stefani. Released in December 2006, it is the follow-up album to the enormously successful 2004 release Love.Angel.Music.Baby. that sold 3.7 million copies.

How do you follow up that kind of success with a second effort? Chances are you don’t! What one needs to do is create a good solid album. Something that you want to make - The Sweet Escape is this kind of album.

Originally Stefani did not want to do another solo effort. In fact, she has been working out with No Doubt but she had some tracks leftover from the L.A.M.B. sessions that she wanted to release. She took the tracks, which include "Wonderful Life" and created a different style of CD then her last one.

There will be many who feel that she is moving too far off the road that created her success, but sometimes the lack of change is what keeps an artist from being who they are and becoming something that their fans think that they should be. It is easy for a follow up to be nothing more than a rehash of the same material that created the previous success, The Sweet Escape is not a redux.

The down side with creating a fresh start is that you will have many fans who will want to downgrade the performances and down grade the album. To give this album its do, one has to come to it on its own merits and not strictly compare it to L.A.M.B.

Does The Sweet Escape stand on its own? I think that it does. On the first track, “Wind it Up,” she yodels to The Sound of Music tune “The Lonely Goatherd” –which by the way is a strange little ditty that I really like. It is part excitement, part clunky and really addictive. It harks back the L.A.M.B. album but is still different.

“Early Winter” is a driving ballad that is a bit dark but hauntingly wonderful. “4 In The Morning” is in some ways like the song “Cool,” slow and upbeat. “Wonderful Life” has an upbeat driving style to it and great lyrics. “The Sweet Escape” is a bit sugary sweet but comes off well. Akon makes a guest appearance on the track.

“Now That You Got It” is a song that, at first, I didn’t like, but the more I listened to it the more it grew on me. “Don’t get Twisted” is a great dance track though the lyrics are a bit strange. “U Started It” is fun but it takes some time to grow on you.

There are a few of tracks that, while they are not my favorite, are not bad. Those include “Orange County Girl,” which, while it has a good sound, just didn’t work as an OC rap song though I suspect many will disagree with me.

“Fluorescent” is just a little too much 80’s pop music. “Breakin’ Up,” while clever and starts off promising, just doesn’t finish and “Yummy,” which features Pharrell, has a good sound to it and is very catchy; the lyrics are a bit lacking. None of this would dissuade me from purchasing this album.

The grade I give this album is A- because of the effort needed to create an album that was different than her first. It would be easy to look at this CD and say this isn’t what I expected after Love.Angel.Music.Baby., but I admire an artist that puts it on the line and challenges both themselves as well as their listeners.

The tracks are listed below
Wind It Up
The Sweet Escape – Featuring AkonOrange County Girl
Early Winter
Now That You Got It
4 In The Morning
Yummy – featuring Pharrell
Fluorescent
Breakin' Up
Don't Get It Twisted
U Started It
Wonderful Life

Music Review: Deadsy - Phantasmagore

2007-02-06T19:35:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

What do you get when you cross Greg Allman and Cher? You get the goth-metal sounds of Deadsy. Fronted by Elijah Blue Allman, Deadsy is pure sound in motion. With a low and dissonant tone, Elijah’s low baritone style, Dr Nner’s synths and Carlton’s Ztar (a guitar synthesizer) give the music a surreal quality.

According to the band, Deadsy is an institution that was developed to purify and primify the human solution of sound and vision. It is adamantly committed to the realization of a comprehensive conveyance of simplicity and complexity's synergistic unions - a sort of "simplexity" or "complicity," if you will. This institution is comprised of five separate entities: academia, leisure, horror, war and science-medicine.

This band is surviving on perseverance and instinct. In 1995, as they were about to release a self-titled debut album under the Electra/Sire label, Sire split with Electra and Deadsy was left on the shelf. After a series of false starts, the band finally signed with Korn’s Elementree record label and in 2003 released “Commencement." The album debuted in the top half of the Billboard 200 and sold more than 100,000 copies.

Now after four long years, Phantasmagore is finally released on the Immortal label. Does it live up to the commitment? Absolutely! This is goth-metal shred at its best!

“Razor Love,” with its dueling guitars and addictive beat, is great. “Babes in Abyss” is a fast rock song with a great chorus and guitar work. “Paint It Black” is simply awesome. They have taken the Stones cover and made it their own. Complete with harmonium, tambour and sarongi. I would buy the album for these three songs alone.

There are slow melodic tracks like “Better Than You Know,” traditional Deadsy with a Gary Numan-like finish, “Phantasmagore” – which has an '80s style opening with Blue’s menacing vocals, and “The Last Story Ever,” slow dark and haunting.

There are rocking tracks such as “Time” –- they use parts of Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song” — and “Asura,” with its solid rock style. “Book of Black Dreams” is not my favorite, but it still has moments.

Deadsy first started separating themselves from the crowd within the L.A club shows and the avant-garde staging which earned them word of mouth. Now with the release of Phantasmagore, their legions shall grow even more.

The tracks are: Razor Love
Carrying Over
Babes in Abyss
Paint It Back
Better than you know
Book of Black Dreams
Asura
The last story of ever
Phantasmagore
Time
Health & Theory

My biggest problem with the CD is the cover art which does not represent them very well. Furthermore, there are no liner notes, but since I generally purchase an album for the music I can ignore this oversight.

My final grade on this CD is a good solid A

Book Review - The Book Of JavaScript - 2nd Edition by Dave Thau

2007-02-06T15:28:00.000-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

In his second go-around with The Book Of JavaScript, Dave Thau has knocked another one out of the park. The first book, published in January of 2000, while an incredibly good book, was showing its age. To say a lot has happened in the past seven years with regard to web development techniques would be an understatement. This book was long overdue.

For those who do not know, JavaScript is the technology that allows web pages to be dynamic, interactive and more flexible. There are other technologies such as CGI, VBScript and Flash, but these have limitations and are many times useful only in specific situations.

Make no mistake, this book is geared for the beginning user, but I think that there is also a lot for the more experienced user, as well as for those who are in need a refresher. The Book Of JavaScript is broken down into 18 chapters and 4 appendices. Major topics include: working with variables, browsers, rollovers, windows, timing, frames and image maps, validation, cookies and dynamic HTML. There is also over 150 pages that cover the new AJAX technology.

What I like about this book is that every topic is well written and covered in-depth. For example, in chapter seven, Thau explains about working with forms. He takes you from writing HTML forms, reading from the forms, writing to forms and triggering events from form elements. He goes into the use of the keyword “this” as well as using the “id” attribute and retrieving it using the JavaScript function getElementByID(). Each topic addressed and built upon in a logical progression.

Chapter 13 takes us in to the world of dynamic HTML or DHTML. He explains clearly what it is, why it is useful, and shows websites that make use of it. He explains how to use JavaScript to manipulate divs to make DHTML. Understanding that DHTML too big of a topic to cover here, he goes into it enough to give you the basics for use with AJAX.

The next two chapters are devoted to Asynchronous JavaScript and XML or AJAX. This is the new technology that allows web pages to act more like desktop applications. By the use of DHTML and the ability to download and display information, we can now present screens to the user that do not have the familiar submit and wait cycle.

At the end of each chapter is a summary and an assignment for you to practice your new skills. Instead of a companion CD, there is a companion website for this book. It contains all of the examples used in the book as well as freeware for use with JavaScript.

The author, Dave Thau, has been creating internet applications since 1993. He has taught programming to hundreds of artists, engineers and children. He is currently working toward a Ph. D in computer science at the University of California, Davis.

I find that this book is a very easy read. It is easy to understand and use. If you are new to JavaScript, if you want to refresh skills, The Book Of JavaScript is a great place to get you up to speed.

Audio Book Review - Brother Odd by Dean Koontz – Read by David Aaron Baker

2006-12-22T18:09:00.001-06:00

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Odd Thomas returns! This time he is not in the desert town of Pico Mundo, rather he is high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In this third installment of what has become the Odd Thomas series, we find him in reclusion at St. Bartholomew's Abbey where he has gone for solace and seclusion. While waiting for an oncoming snow storm – this is the first time that he has seen snow – he encounters bodachs. These are the dark entities that precede cataclysmic events and feed on the impending doom of others. The last time he encountered them, 19 people died. What are they doing at a monastery that caters to handicapped children?

“Loop me in, odd one” are the words spoken by a young girl who is in a deep sleep. These are word that Odd has not heard since the death of his girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn. It sends a chill down his spine.

By the time Brother Timothy is found to be missing, the snow is falling heavily and outside help is not available. The question is not about if something will happen, the question is when and how bad will it be this time. It will be up to Odd to solve the mystery and save the abbey. Odd is about to embark on a journey of mystery, wonder and sheer suspense that surpasses all that has come before.

For those who are unfamiliar with Odd Thomas, he sees dead people and other spirits known as bodachs. Normally, Odd lives in a little desert town known as Pico Mundo where he is employed as a fry cook, but has chosen to live at the abbey to help overcome the grief he has for his deceased girlfriend and the burden he set on himself that he could not save more people at mall.

The dead people that Odd Thomas sees are ones who can’t quite make it to the other side. One of the reoccurring ghosts is Elvis, who sometimes cries, sometimes tries to make Odd laugh but is always trying to resolve the sadness he has for disappointing his mother. Although Odd can see the ghosts, he can not hear them.

In the first book, Stormy died and Odd believed that after a lifetime of service to humanity, that he would one day be reunited in the after life with her. As in his prior books, Odd Thomas places his life danger to protect others. In this case it is to protect the young children housed abbey, most are handicapped and are incapable of living a normal life.

Brother Odd is more of a return to the first book, Odd Thomas which was published in 2003. Forever Odd, published in 2005 was a darker tale and much more introspective than this one. In Brother Odd, Koontz returns with a strong supporting cast including Brother Knuckles who was a mob enforcer, before finding his new calling. There is Sister Angela who has a “periwinkle blue stare” as well as Boo, a snow-colored hound who loves inclement weather.

This is Koontz at his finest. There is a wry sense of humor that runs like multiple threads throughout the story. As with his earlier books in the Odd Thomas series it is easy to find your self immersed in the development of the characters. They are loose, individual and really come alive with their rich dialog. The plot takes you along at an ever increasing pace moving faster and faster toward… Well, you wouldn’t want me to spoil it would you?

Odd Thomas has become one of the best serial fictional characters ever created. His calm demeanor and his dedication to his fellow souls in – both living and not - brings his personality to life. He is not pretentious and is always willing to undertake the challenges that life places in his path.

This unabridged audio version is performed by David Aaron Baker. An actor who has appeared on Broadway and on film, he has narrated all three audio versions of the Odd Thomas series. In this one Baker has slipped back in to the voice of Odd as smoothly as sliding into fuzzy slippers on a Christmas morning. His ability to weave in and out of the different characters makes this a wonder to listen to. I hope that he continues to bring Odd Thomas to life in the spoken word as Dean Koontz brings him to life on the page.

If I had one complaint with the story it is that it is too short. This is one of those rare moments that at the end, you don't want to be done. Even more, you can’t wait to go back. I hope that we will be going back soon!

I highly recommend Brother Odd. If you have never read (or listened to) an Odd Thomas story, get all three. You will not be disappointed.