ISGMLUG

Way back when, when the internet was just a baby, people really needed to know XML, HTML, CSS, PHP, or any other computer language in order to make a website, or properly use the internet or computer for programs. It is now the 21st century, and even though some may still need to manually use XML or SGML, most programming can be done without knowing much computer language. Don’t get me wrong though, you may still need to know and use XML along with other programming language in order to make a great program or a great website. However, if you just want to create something simple, like a simple website or app, there are many tools available today that you can use to help you.

XML is mostly used for site-mapping. There are programs now which can do that automatically. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to know XML or SGML either way, but for those with no time on their hands, it can be done easily for you. Nowadays, mostly anything on the computer or the internet can be done automatically, thanks to today’s technology and tools. For example, if you wanted to run a flight simulator program, you can simply just download one yourself, instead of creating one from scratch. A real flight simulation can be expensive and are rare, but a flight simulator, like the Pro Flight Simulator can give you a real, life-like flying experience at just a fraction of the cost. Thanks to technology, you no longer need to know confusing HTML to play or run programs like pro flight simulator. All you need to know are just some controls to run the program. You don’t even need to build a flight simulator yourself to experience a real flying simulation.

There are of course real usages of XML around and computer programmers around the world still use them very effectively. Sometimes, XML is known as a smart document and can do wonders for the computer language. There are still a ton of things you can do with XML and other computer languages, which is still around today. If you want to learn more about XML or other computer programming languages, you can learn them either online, or by going to a local college.

These days, computer science is a big topic in colleges and universities. You can learn a great deal of information about computer science right from your computer as well. It does help, however, by getting assistance from a teacher that knows what he or she is doing. So, by going to a school with a great deal of computer knowledge, you may benefit a lot and also learn a lot about computer science as well. There are several universities that are solely dedicated to computer science and programming skills. If you really have a strong desire for programming or computer science, it is highly advisable to start attending these schools. Not only will you learn about XML, but you will learn all sorts of languages and computer science. You can experience the computer and the internet with a great deal of knowledge of programming by learning from great computer science schools.

I had some time to kill and a silly problem to solve, which means here’s some more SimpleXML fun for you:

The Problem: It’s not really a “problem,” but FeedBurner’s FeedCount^TM image is a rigid 88 pixels wide, and I wanted to include it on my homepage under the “syndicate” heading, an area that I’ve defined in my template as having only 80 pixels in width. The 88 pixels were throwing things off, so I used the width attribute of the HTML img tag to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it just squeezes the image, making the text in it appear fuzzy.

The Solution: FeedBurner conveniently provides what they call their “Awareness API,” which is a RESTful interface to retrieve (as XML data) the same exact information displayed in the FeedCount^TM image. Since I wanted to maintain the same kind of image (because it’s a recognized look-and-feel for FeedBurner feeds), I simply fired up an image editing program, shuffled things around a bit until the image was a nice, clean 80 pixels wide, and saved it as the base image (shown to the right) I would use for generating an image similar to the one FeedBurner provides.

Then, I wrote a script to grab the FeedBurner data (using SimpleXML) and used PHP’s image functions to open the base image, write the FeedBurner circulation data to it, and save it to use on my site. I simply have a cron job that runs this script once a day to keep my image updated.

Here’s the code. Enjoy!

[code lang=“php”]
<?php
// Get the XML data from Feedburner
$sxe = new SimpleXMLElement(‘http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=ramsey’, NULL, TRUE);
$readers = (string) $sxe→feed→entry[‘circulation’];

// make sure it’s a number
$readers = is_numeric($readers) ? $readers : ‘0’;

// 39 is the base position; 6 the width of each char
$xpos = 39 – (strlen($readers) * 6);

// Create the image from the base image
$img = imagecreatefromgif(‘feedburner-base.gif’);
$color = imagecolorallocate($img, 0×00, 0×66, 0xCC);
imagestring($img, 2, $xpos, 2, $readers, $color);

// Save the image
imagegif($img, ‘feedburner-readers.gif’);
?>
[/code]

This is more or less same way in which QR Codes are generated.

Note that I determined the numbers used in lining up the text in the image by trial-and-error. I played around with it a bit to get things right. The $xpos variable is my attempt to right-align the text because you can only specify the left edge of the text with the x coordinate.

Over the last 10 years we have seen a lot of attempts to use XML based webdesign solutions, where people easily can modify their entire webdesign just by updating a few XML files. The point of these systems was to enable users with no knowledge of coding, HTML or design to easily change the look of their websites within certain limits. Most of these functions have now been moved to various CMS systems instead. However most of these systems turned out to be too complicated for most of the users or the possibilities was to limited to be of much use. Instead most of the webdesign features have now been moved to stylesheets which can easily be updated with little HTML knowledge. According to Michael from Webdesign won’t be seeing any new major XML based webdesign CMS systems in their future. However XML is still widely used in various Flash applications and will most likely still used for this in the next few years. For some reason flash never moved on to use stylesteets as most HTML based webdesigns did but instead kept the XML standard for those wishing to change the webdesign of their flash sites in an easy and simple way. With all the XML libraries for flash and seeing how Flash slowly being outfaced we can expect XML to still be a major factor with Flash for several more years to come.

With the introduction of HTML5 and flash becoming less and less popular we can expect to see fewer XML files in modern webdesign but that doesn’t mean the XML standard is dead, it is still widely used for many other applications such as config files, site maps and other places where structure is an important issue, but for pure webdesign it will be forgotten in the near future.

Not everyone has to go to college to get a good job. The whole Internet age has opened up so many new job avenues that aren’t covered in colleges today. For instance, where do you go to learn about Internet marketing jobs, social media jobs, SEO jobs, building websites, and any of the hundreds of other jobs related to the online world? Certainly not college!

Today any high school senior who is looking for a job might try their hand at getting their foot in the door doing something Internet related that will lead to a higher paying job on the edge of technology later on. There are tons of Internet jobs that require zero college experience and instead require only that you know your field of expertise. When it comes to the Internet and all the opportunities to make money related to it, today’s colleges are NOT the place to study and prepare. 

Many teens are quick learners when it comes to coding and building spectacular looking websites. Much of their experience can be gotten on their own and the rest can found when they get some entry level job in the industry. Better yet, some entrepreneurial teenagers and twenty somethings are starting their own businesses and striking out on their own. If you are good at something Internet related and have skills, there are people that are willing to pay for those skills. 

There are a handful of websites such as elance, odesk, and rent a coder where anyone can get started making money on their own by freelancing. This is a great option for youngsters who want to strike out on their own and make a side income or even try to make a full time income. The demand for coding and building websites has never been greater. 

College has always been the preferred route to a career and it still is for most. However college is extremely pricey and there are other alternatives out there. A job in the Internet industry is one of those options. 

A new site recently cropped up utilizing PHP and JavaScript with AJAX to help calculate your paycheck and taxes.

Asking if a person has head of the payroll calculator is somewhat misleading question. An individual needs to make sure that someone that he knows there is far more than one paycheck calculator. It can also mean different things to different people. The most obvious type of paycheck calculator lets someone know what his paycheck will be.  There is another type that lets someone determine what his projected salary will be if he chooses a certain career path. 

The latter type of paycheck calculator is more useful to someone deciding on a career path. An individual needs to know if the amount of money he makes in his chosen career or on a new career path will be sufficient to his needs. Most people live from paycheck to paycheck, but an individual also wants to make sure that he can stop living in this manner. This is particularly true if he plans on going into debt. If he is going into college or a trade school, he wants to know if he will be able to pay his student loans back when he is finished. The second type of paycheck calculator, or rather, salary calculator, can help him with this task.

An individual does not need a lot of education to determine which type of calculator he wants to use.  He just needs to make sure that he has the right one for his particular needs.  Most users can tell this before they plug in any information. If someone is looking for his paycheck amount, and it asks for his title and where he lives, he will probably get an annual income figure. The hourly wages, salary and state indicate that the paycheck total will be.

Technology is moving at an increasingly fast pace. New developments in technology have meant that things are being designed, tested, and made more quickly than they ever were before. It also seems as if as soon as you buy the newest piece of technology it is already outdated because the company is already working on something more advanced to better it, and stun the competition.

We can see this in business, and particularly how businesses are marketing themselves on the internet. As Googles algorithms evolve and change, such is the advancement in technology; businesses have to become increasingly aware of how they are marketing themselves. For example the old technique of keyword stuffing is now a dangerous thing to do and can see a website penalised.

There is a focus on social networking, and letting people find and share your business pages organically. At the moment, this is one of the best things to happen for your business, in terms of internet/online marketing. Of course this can be a difficult thing to do for small businesses or people keeping blogs as they may not be able to generate the same online presence as a big company through social networking.

However, it is only a matter of time before people find cheats and shortcuts to gain traction when it comes to social media marketing which will lead to social networking sites having less influence on page rank and quality.

It is important to try and stay one step ahead by reading blogs and forums that discuss where online media marketing is heading, especially for small businesses. But, be aware of this as many predictions may be wrong. If something is coming up across the board, it will generally be reliable.

For anyone learning about external network attacks, hacking and how to protect your networks one of the most famous attacks they will study is probably the SYN flood.  Not only has it been used for many years, it was also one of the attacks that brought fame to the world most famous hacker - Kevin Mitnick.

It was in Feburary 2000 when it briefly became one of the most well known attacks online.   The SYN floods were behind the DDoS attacks which briefly took down website like Yahoo and other major sites.  In truth the system and network administrators have come a long way from those days and vast improvements have been made to block these methods.   The SYN flood is certainly not dead though and is used all across the internet to this very day.

Nowadays however the SYN flood, is pretty much a brutish network attack utlising vast network resources like huge botnets to bring a server to it’s knees.  When an attacker starts making connections to a server using the SYN flood attack then he has no intention of completing any of the three way TCP/IP handshakes.   The goal is to exceed the limit set on a particular service for the number of connections waiting to be established.  In a SYN flood attack none of these will be completed by the attacker.  SYN/ACKS will be generated until the limit has been reached.  The server will normally drop the connection if the handshake is not completed but it does wait some time normally around a minute.

When that minute i reached the connection is closed, the memory released and the queue count is decreased by one making room for new connections.  However if the SYN flood attack sends enough connections quickly enough the queue is never decreased and is kept full.  One of the big difficulties in tracking and stopping these attacks is because the attacker will almost always use a fake ip by spoofing their network address. This is because the goal is to simply keep the server so busy that it will eventually fall over, the connections are immaterial and the attacker has no need to receive the reply. 

Intrusion detection systems however have become much better at picking up the signatures of these packets.  They are frequently formed by software that produces errors in the packets that it forms.  Normally because it is fairly irrelevant to the originator if the packet is crafted properly as the sole intention is to use up system resources.  Although Kevin Mitnick will always be associated with these attacks to be fair his was much more elegant.   He merely silenced one part of the TCP connection and then impersonated as the silenced party to receive the reply.

The role of checksums in IP headers is actually very important.  THey are used to make sure that data is not corrupted during it’s journey from the source address to the destination.  TCP/IP uses a specific algorithm to check the data which involves dividing the checksum data in separate 16 bit fields.  Every one of those fields has a 1 complement performed on it and all of these are added together.  The final value of this caluclation is considered the checksum.

You can see  the checksum in the 10th and 11th byte of the IP header.  It only includes fields in the IP header.  The major difference of this method to other protocols is that the checks are performed ’en route’ by the individual routers that make up an IP packets journey. Normally embedded protocols would work out their checksum at the destination.  

So what happens if the checksum doesn’t match?  Well nothing complicated the affected datagram is simply discarded.  This is one of the difficulties in troubleshooting IP problems as the host isn’t even informed of the issue.  The idea is that error reporting is performed by the higher layer protocols which have better error management built into them.  Of course it’s not always needed, if you’re streaming video across the internet like this - http://www.proxyusa.com/bbciplayerabroad2012 then the odd malformed packet is no big deal but with critical application data then you’ll need to get other protocols involved.

The algorithm is quite a simple one, and some criticise it’s simplicity.  So why isn’t the algorithm a bit more complicated which is able to give a reliable check?  Well the problem is that this checksum computation is completed for every packet that a router or network device receives.  A simpler algorithm is essential for one factor and that is speed.  It really is a very fast algorithm and for a 16 bit checksum fairly reliabel on the whole.  Of course if you want to delve deeper in the inner workings of theIP checksum then it’s worth checking out the RFC - here’s the link - RFC 1071.

A new standards-based application utilizing JSON, AJAX and PHP has been launched that shows you how to master your finances by pre-paying your mortgage.

Additional payments or mortgage prepayment can generally be a smart way to reduce your mortgage expenses. However, the impact of additional payments will depend mainly on the remaining term of your mortgage. So, without first objectively assessing the impact of extra cash on your mortgage, you should not assume that prepayment will be beneficial in your case. Also, you should not ideally strain your financial resources to make extra payments.

Here are some tips to manage mortgage prepayments.

No impact on monthly payments

Extra money to your lender will not reduce your monthly financial commitment to your lender. So, any expectation that additional money reduces monthly financial commitment is misplaced.

Understand your mortgage amortization schedule first

You can create your own mortgage amortization schedule with the help of an amortization calculator. Your mortgage amortization schedule gives such details as monthly payments, principal and interest components, pending principal amount, current mortgage interest rate and the remaining mortgage term.

Impact of extra payments

The extra payment you make will lower the principal amount due. So, the interest expenses and the total number of monthly payments will also reduce.  Specific amortization calculators can calculate the impact of extra payments on the mortgage amount.

Prepayment could, depending on the remaining mortgage term, interest rate and principal amount, significantly reduce the interest burden on you. For example, on a 15-year mortgage of $65,900, if you make a prepayment of $10,000, the expense on interest payments could come down to about $22,000 from $34,000.

However, if you are about to close your mortgage term, prepayment may not be such a beneficial option because the interest expenses have significantly reduced by then.

While prepayment could be useful to reduce the mortgage expenses in your case, you should not compromise on other priorities such as retirement savings and educational savings to make payments to your lender.  See this Amortization Calculator to help yourself make an informed decision.

For many years there appeared to be a stubborn resistance to any kind of advancement in technology. Look at the fury and uproar any time a new film or music format comes out. But now it seems to have turned a corner with people lining the streets over night in order to get the latest tech.

This acceptance has seen a huge iflux of people miving their music, films and entertainment over to the technological spectrum with many even embracing the social side as well using sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest click here for an example.  It is exciting to think what could be coming next as it was not so long ago that very few of us even had mobile phones and even then thats what they were, phones. Now you have a camera, mp3 player and computer in your phone, it is barely used to actually call anyone these days. If this is the kind of speed we can expect to see development moving at it will be interesting to see what comes next.

We have all become rather dependent on these products and it would be very near to impossible to imagine going back to a time when these kind of technologies were for sci fi programmes.

I recently was able to spend some time with the folks who run the San Diego Chiropractor Directory and came away from the experience with my eyes opened about the possibilities when it comes to coding.

I always thought code would be a nice way to sell some stuff, make a living and eventually if I were lucky, make a really cool video game.

No longer.

These days I realize code and my skills at coding can help people actually live longer.  My SD chiropractor told me that putting medical information online was the best thing that anyone could do in order to save lives.  Of course, to put that type of information online, you literally have to have some significant code in order to do so.

Sounds like a fun project for someone interested in coding right?

The development is generally outstanding but maybe not always civilized. The premises in question are of the form: “Our degree of technological progress is second to none. Upon reaching this degree, we also need to prepare our society for peace, Data Mining and also to ensure the peace, technology should be revised to foster the policy of war.” Technological progress that is pushed in this direction establishes a dangerous precedent for other societies that fear a condition to their individual sovereignties. They truly are pushed to also foster a war technology. In the domain name of culture, this manner of development is perhaps not praiseworthy, nor could it be morally justifiable. Since it is perhaps not morally justifiable, it is socially irresponsible. An inspection of the premises will show that it is a problem that is posed by the last one. The final assumption may be the decision of two previous premises but is perhaps not in just about any way rationally deduced. What it demonstrates is really a passionately deduced conclusion, and being so, it does not be reckoned as a conclusion from the rationally prepared mind, at least at the full time at which it was deduced.

A society that advances according to the above mentioned presuppositions - and particularly according to the conclusion - has transmitted the mind of non - negotiable superiority to its people. All along, the energy of passion dictates the pace of human actions. Whether in engagements or willed partnerships, the principle of equality fails to function just as a result of the superiority syndrome that grips the leader and the led. And a distinct society that will not share in the collective sensibilities or passion of such society has, by the expected sense, turn into a potential or real enemy and faces confrontation on all possible fronts. The majority of what we find out about the current world, of class, via the media, is dominated by state-of-the-art technology. Societies which have the most of such technology will also be, time and again, claimed to function as the most sophisticated. They are able to also use technology to simplify and move ahead a knowledge of life and nature in a different direction, a direction that has a tendency to remove, just as much as you are able to, a previous link between life and nature that was, in several respects, mysterious and dangerous. This last point will not necessarily mean that technological progress is really a mark of a superior culture.

What we have to understand is that culture and technology are maybe not conjugal terms. Civilized people might have an innovative technology or they may perhaps not have it. Culture is perhaps not simply a matter of science and technology or technical infrastructure, or, again, the marvel of buildings; in addition, it needs to do with the moral and mental reflexes of individuals in addition to their degree of social connectedness within their own society and beyond. It is from the overall behavior make-up of people that most types of physical structures could possibly be created, so too the question of technology and science.

The most important element in web design is to have the rare ability to separate the design process from the implementation phase of web development. Once you’ve sieved through the websites basic functionality. That involves creating a balance between user needs and performance. Although you may have to trade elements of one off for another, this balance has to be maintained to ensure that you get the right blend of both, without jeopardizing the efficacy of the final product. A good web development can be as useful as the all too famous cordyceps sinensis, and can have as much value as you want it to. Amazon web store can be taken ss an example of a great web development of an e-store which sells anything starting from pens to herbal medicine (eg. Cordyceps).

What you need to bear in mind is; web design is one slight step in the interlocking web development process that includes dozens of intricate processes and fine detailing. There are design methods that simply act as a guideline, by which the designer can get an idea on how to start, and govern the overall use of information space and texture; this with regard to packaging and linking.

Website design is no easy task. You have to take account of a lot of variant factors, know your target audience, as well as base your decisions on the intended purpose of the particular website. A web designer has to figure out how to work within website parameters to achieve the company goals.

What you need

Versatility-which essentially points to your websites ability to utilize any manner of marketing plan-like back-linking to social media.

Efficiency-ease of use. If you run an e-commerce website, how easy is it for your consumers to maneuver around, how efficient is your multi-categorization, and how good is your overall service delivery.

Face Value; the web is all about what people think when they see your home page. Bear in mind that it is 25% harder to read on the web, and chances are, no one will take a second look at your website if it has 14 billion words on the front page. Put up some photos, maybe a video, change it up.

Conclusion

You need to get people interested. You need the right information-relevance here is key. When you think about a good web design and development process, you need to build from some basic principles-Purpose and objective statements, domain information and target market information. The plan here is to blend all these design elements into an action plan.