analyse, roll eyes 120° northeast, write, build, share.

Global Networking: The more the merrier

2009-04-04T11:50:00.026-05:00

Let's try to think simple on a macro scale. You are an international company with the intention to sell your product(s) continously in time with updates, accessories, newer versions.

Example 1:

Sony Playstation
Average price: 300 USD
Average game price: 60 USD

In countries where children and teenagers do not have the opportunity to spend 60 dollars per game; almost every computer shop you can easily have your PS tweaked with a microchip that allows you to buy bootleg copies of games for prices in the range of 1-3 dollars, depending on the country. Is this an unknown or unstoppable flaw of Sony production that drives the executives crazy? Do they start their meetings like: "I would like to address our concerns on our production department's lack of incompetency..." or "We are hiring unlicensed engineers from Taiwan and Russia to investigate this issue".

I would certainly doubt that.

Knowing that in order to globalize their product and establishing brand loyalty, they have to first get inside your house. Networking will continue, product will be spread, more gaming contracts will be made, that teenager without a single licenced software in his possesion throughout his life will get older and with his financial status changed he will go buy a new licenced console, with licenced games.

Congratulations you're networking throughout the world.

Example 2:

Microsoft Windows
Average Price: 100USD

In theory this is even easier to prevent any kind of unlicenced usage. You simply attach a serial number to all copies of Windows product you publish and whenever the consumer decides to use the product you can match the serial numbers in your database with the one that client is using:
No match, no Windows.

But they won't do that.

Which one is better? Selling your product only to a certain amount of people who can afford your products, or your system to the whole wide world? Forget about products; it is a lot more than that. Knowledge, information, compatibility. Even to an extent that courses or institutions that people pay to go and learn your softwares because they are the ones used on a large scale of companies.

So if you were cackling with joy over one of the 8 billion photomanipulations of Bill Gates cycling over the internet, you probably have another thing coming; he probably manipulated your head with Benjamin Franklin numerous times already.

What makes you think you need a Schattenjaeger?

2009-03-18T11:32:00.015-05:00

Any calls for me Gracie?

Way before Half Life and Unreal conquered and changed teenagers' taste of entertainment drastically, point and click adventure games were in their prime during the 90s. Milestone games such as Day of The Tentacle, Monkey Island, Police Quest, Larry, Beneath a Steel Sky, Gabriel Knight were only a few carrying the flag along with others. The probability of missing to click on something logical or totally absurd (monkey island, totally monkey business) could have been resulting you to lose like hours or days with frustration of going everywhere on the map and clicking on everything possible, yet still no dice(literally). But in the end finding out the solution -either intentionally or unintentionally would have been causing one to act like a crazy person going berserk which would have been absolutely worrisome to the observing parents in the 4 meter radius. (see related time line:"parents following computer age and their children from TV era").

Sierra Entertainment was leading the industry with specializing on the specific genre and have taken one step further with FMV(full motion video) games such as Gabriel Knight The Beast Within, Phantasmagoria which were revolutionary for it's' gameplay, real graphics and most importantly deep storyline. Their success encouraged acclaimed games like Byzantine the Betrayal and Sanitarium which were arguably the last great examples of the adventure games and the genre itself started to diminish at the hands of FPS (first person shooter) genre led by Half Life and Unreal which rooted from Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem and Doom.

Apparently gaming studios still find it more profitable to make FPS over FPS and it is not very encouraging to see adventure games blossom again but who knows maybe someone will realize forming a great storyline like Gabriel Knight or Sanitarium will always receive interest and pay off greatly in these copycat ridden times.

WWW: Denominator for you, me and 1,463,632,359 other people

2009-01-08T11:37:00.012-06:00

On December 25, 1990 Tim Berners-Lee established the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student staff at CERN which have led to the world wide web. It is a common misconseption that they have invented the internet.

Well, they did not (see Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn).

The internet and all tools they needed to initially create the idea was already there.

The missing piece (or habitat actually) was the absence of a denominator for people to meet. Berners-Lee describes the inefficiency of information transfer while working at CERN as"it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee".

"Well, I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.

Because people at CERN came from universities all over the world, they brought with them all types of computers. Not just Unix, Mac and PC: there were all kinds of big mainframe computer and medium sized computers running all sorts of software.

I actually wrote some programs to take information from one system and convert it so it could be inserted into another system. More than once. And when you are a programmer, and you solve one problem and then you solve one that's very similar, you often think, "Isn't there a better way? Can't we just fix this problem for good?" That became "Can't we convert every information system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can read?" And that became the WWW."

World's first server

What he basically did was, accumulating the info he had with years of experience, observed and analysed the situation, thought about a more convenient way to use a variety of tools and here you go you just connected HTTP, IP, DNS, TCP/IP and ended up creating something 1,463,632,361 people use: WorldWideWeb.

"I want you to know that you too can make new programs which create new fun ways of using computers and using the Internet.

I want you to realize that, if you can imagine a computer doing something, you can program a computer to do that.

Unbounded opportunity... limited only by your imagination.

And a couple of laws of physics.

Of course, what happens with computers is that you have a basic simple idea and then you have to add things on to it for practical reasons. So real-world computer programs can end up with a lot of stuff in them. If they are good, they are still simple inside."

It actually is simple if you are proficient with the tools you use as they were parts of your body. The important part is getting there, which requires years of patience, resilience and devotion.

Basic example on login sequence and carrying data between forms: Welcome Marty McFly

2009-01-07T19:35:00.004-06:00

Let's give a simple example on carrying data between forms by saying hi to our guest login star "mmcfly".

Let's micro manage for a second:
We have 1 user: "Marty McFly", who has the properties: "id, name, password" to login. So we need a database to keep his info and a class to define this info on our program.

We name the database: "myDatabase", name the table: "user" and columns:"userId, userName, userPassword".

Back to the code side, our "login" class keeps definitons:

private int userId;

public int UserId
{
get { return userId; }
set { userId = value; }
}
private string userName;

public string UserName
{
get { return userName; }
set { userName = value; }
}
private string userPassword;

public string UserPassword
{
get { return userPassword; }
set { userPassword = value; }
}

It's time to log Marty in.

We create an instance of the login class and fill it with Marty's information.

login logg= null;

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection("server=.;database=myDatabase;uid=userId;pwd=password");

SqlCommand com = new SqlCommand("select userName, userPassword from login where userName=@userName and userPassword=@userPassword",con);

com.Parameters.AddWithValue("@userName", textBox1.Text);
com.Parameters.AddWithValue("@userPassword", textBox2.Text);

con.Open();

SqlDataReader dr = com.ExecuteReader();

while(dr.Read())
{
logg=new login();
logg.UserName = dr["userName"].ToString();
logg.UserPassword = dr["userPassword"].ToString();
}

con.Close();

We have just called the login information from database, matched it and wrote it on our instance of login class so we can use it anywhere we want.
If the info we have entered is true we can now use the information on another form:

private void frmChangePw_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

label3.Text = (frmLogin.logg as login).userName;

}

which means in literal words: when loading this form, take the value of our "logg" instance from login class and use the "userName" property for the label's value.

You can carry any data you would need for your own scenario. In this one, Marty clicked on "mmcfly logged in" link and now he can change his password if he thinks "einstein" is too predictable for Doctor Brown.

New Feature! No need to ring anymore, you can Google search it in case you lose your cellphone

2009-01-06T10:38:00.011-06:00

Consider that you are living in a county and you will drive to a friend in another county nearby. Would you go to downtown first and then go to the address, or would you go directly to the address you want? I was more than surprised to see how many people have gotten the habit of surfing the net by google searching the addresses they already know. Maybe they don't use favorites/bookmarks feature, or maybe the net got so fast, it is easier to google search it without thinking about it. One thing is for sure, Google has reinvented the idea of a search engine more than a decade ago and people have changed their surfing habbits accordingly over years. Maybe they didn't have to analyse things in depth too.

First years of internet era genius webmasters or advertisers had thought that it would be a good idea to choke the internet user with overwhelming amount of ads on their sites and expect the recently dazed to click on their links by accident or just popping it up their face automatically. However Google designed all of their services as lean as possible, even their ads which were not randomly appearing to the user, but appearing regarding the user's keywords so it would be relevant the the person itself.

Primary search engines would only search the keywords typed in and return results in random order or maybe with an algorithm obviously didn't work, since users had to go further to tenth page and still may not find what they would look for. Google collected statistics of people who searched the same or similar keywords and have developed an algorithm returning the results mostly clicked on.

While major e-mail providers still were very non user friendly and would provide only 10 MB's of storage, Google offered 1 GB of storage on March, 2004, to it's Gmail users with the service of being free of ads, able to transfer larger files, revolutionary chat-like automatic mail categorization feature.

With the fact that internet users around the world are enjoying Google's services, it is always good to have competition for both consumers and competitors. Google had the idea of simplicity to get where they are. Maybe it's time to actualize that bright idea dwell in mind but never got the motive to do so.

Internet Explorer: Time to go open source?

2009-01-05T15:08:00.007-06:00

Unfortunately Internet Explorer still continues to be the worst nightmare when experienced users for any reason had to deal with/use regular users' internet browsing. Being bundled to undeniably the largest spread operating system Windows OS, regular users don't tend to look for any other web browser since they do not feel the lack of user friendly usage or speed with the couple of minutes they spend online surfing the net, or hours spent on only on a couple of popular websites.

Therefore worst nightmare for an experienced user starts when there is no other web browser icon visible on the computer when they are asked to fix something or help with some content on a website. Despite the fact that it may only be a loss of total 20 seconds, it still is like feeling bad for your friend when they still keep their two word reminders in a huge Word document instead of a .txt.

Blue :Internet Explorer (68.15%)

Orange :Mozilla Firefox (21.34%)

Gray :Safari (7.93%)

Yellow :Google Chrome (1.04%)

Red : Opera (0.71%)

Green :Netscape (0.57%)

Aqua :Other (0.24%)

Source:Wikipedia

United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and 20 U.S. states have opened a lawsuit against Microsoft on May 18, 1998, for using it's monopoly power to force users to use it's own browser and win the browser wars since it was obvious to people then, browsers were going to be extremely important with the following years to come.

However despite more than a decade being passed after browser wars, Microsoft failed to create a better surfing experience for Internet Explorer users, being slower comparing to it's competitors and having a non user-friendly interface with a lot of irrelevant popups, information and crashes for it's users' to deal with.

Site Layout: Floating elements gone missing

2009-01-05T11:59:00.010-06:00

While designing your website if you would want to use floating elements and place other elements under it, all browsers except Internet Explorer ignore the floating elements and resolve as if they don't exist. This is not because Internet Explorer has an extended technology the others lack to comprehend, quite the contrary, IE is being proactive for you and resolving something that you haven't indicated yet.
Whenever you would want to place for instance a footer under your floating content you would have to clear the floating elements by adding the following div:

right before the element you are placing beneath.
If you want to clear only left or right floating elements, you can change clear:both accordingly.

Jumpstart: How to approach site layout

2008-12-26T08:46:00.000-06:00

Designing a well thought site layout may be more important than you think, when your projects get deeper than you assumed. Beside the fact that it usually gets deeper than you initially thought (project never stays as it is), clients have the tendency to demand something at the very end of the project and expect it to be magically happening with one click. So you probably would not want to change the whole layout when your client wants some part of the website wider, shorter, completely out, completely in or some other option which is slightly possible.
It may be handy to keep in mind that in order to increase control over your website, it's vital to divide it into several div's rather than trying to control it as one big division and trying to move things around. This way you will adjust only the related division in case of a change.
We can give a simple stylesheet example such as:

body
{
background-image:url("bg3.jpg");
font-family:Corbel;
font-size:medium;

}
#main
{
background-color:Teal;
margin:0 auto;
width:1200px;
height:640px;

}

#above
{
margin:0 auto;
width:1000px;
height:300px;
margin-top:15px;

}

#below
{
margin:0 auto;
width:1000px;
height:300px;

}

#upLeft
{
background-color:Aqua;
width:500px;
height:300px;
float:left;

}

#upRight
{
background-color:Silver;
width:500px;
height:300px;
overflow:auto;
}

#lowLeft
{
background-color:Lime;
width:500px;
height:300px;
float:left;
}

#lowRight
{
background-color:Fuchsia;
width:500px;
height:300px;

}

which should turn out like:

Ugly huh? Now it's up to you to adjust anything you may want from there. You may divide the site according to your needs. It may be a good idea to give margin to your main background division to make it appear in the centre depending user's screen resolution.
You achieved this with:

margin:0 auto;

which automatically places the div in the middle of the screen measuring it according to the right end of the screen.

Whatever changes you may do, it would be time saving and less complicated to do them at the stylesheet and leave the code side to your form, this way in long term you will know what is written where and you may adjust it according to your needs without spacing out from your on hand work, just like the same logic behind Data Access Layer(DAL).

How to create contact forms for your websites

2008-12-24T22:48:00.001-06:00

Let's start with something simple. You want to create a contact form for your users but having trouble with your hosting provider, because they either charge you or just having problems using their SMTP clients. No worries, Google provides free SMTP service, because they are simply a caring and giving community to all of their users worldwide. No that's not true, they literally are making money of you because you're reading your mails. But you can't blame them because they are providing better service than others can you? You write a leaner and user friendlier search engine or e-mail account and you will make money on the rest of the world too.

Back to our case, if you want your users to send mails throughout your site without publishing your e-mail address you will have to use these following classes:

MailMessage
MailAddress
SmtpClient
NameValueCollection
NetworkCredential

Let's say your form is as following:

When the submit button is clicked we will have to use a SMTP client to send our mail.
Following code should do the trick:

MailMessage msg = new MailMessage();
msg.From=new MailAddress(TextBox5.Text,"");
msg.To.Add("yourAddress@gmail.com");
msg.IsBodyHtml = true;
msg.Subject = ("My contact form");
msg.Body = (TextBox1.Text + TextBox2.Text + " @ "+ TextBox5.Text + " has submitted the following information:
" + TextBox3.Text +"
"+ TextBox4.Text+"
"+ TextBox5.Text+ "
Regarding: "+ DropDownList1.SelectedItem+"
"+ CheckBoxList1.SelectedItem.Text);

SmtpClient sc = new SmtpClient("smtp.gmail.com", 587);
NameValueCollection col = new NameValueCollection();
col.Add("info", "inf");
msg.Headers.Add(col);

sc.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("yourAddress@gmail.com", "yourPassword");
sc.EnableSsl = true;

sc.Send(msg);

Here you go, you've got a mail from your user. Gmail uses ports 465 and 587 for SMTP access. You should adjust your mail body according to your needs.

off we go

2008-12-24T21:31:00.000-06:00

encounter bytes and strings more than protein based organisms and love it. you've much to give and take. let's begin.