To educate, inform, inspire

The Fall, 2009 semester is now officially concluded. I hope students had as much fun in the courses as I did. We covered some great topics and had  lots of interesting discussions during the semester. I wanted to take a moment and acknowledge a select group of students. In the […]

Today (December 15), 1994 marked the release of the first commercial web browser (which became Netscape Navigator). Although a beta version had been released in October (Oct. 13, I believe), this was the official launch date. Although AOL dropped support for this in 2007, this marked a milestone. Prior to […]

During the Fall, 2009 semester, I used Adobe ConnectPro for my online office hours in addition to the open lab we hold on Wednesday and Thursday nights for students in the ICC Web program. I did some tracking to determine how frequently students took advantage of these opportunities to learn […]

I recently obtained a new laptop and have been spending a fair amount of time  this week configuring it for various activities. Understand that I teach both web systems classes and security classes so I have to meet multiple needs. I thought readers might find this interesting/ humorous. It does […]

After deleting yet another 9 meaningless comments in this weblog, I must rant yet again on this topic. I realize these are simply bot programs that place meaningless drivel with comments to various sites. For those who care to read this post, there is a simple truth – even if […]

I recently reviewed the November OUCH newsletter for SANS. Bill Wyman put together an extensive list of commonly installed software products (and the patch sites for each). I thought it would be helpful to share this with readers. This is used with permission. If you do not subscribe to the […]

Here is another idea (again generated from Lynda.com training). In this example, one draws a simple shape in Actionscript (and colors it). Examine the linked working example. The copy button allows one to place another copy of the shape on the stage (and rotate it a bit for an interesting […]

Geocities is being closed by Yahoo! today. Back in the day, this was one of the most visited portals on the Internet (I think it was in the top 5 in 1998 or 1999). I believe Yahoo! spent over $3 billion on it in 1999 (back then, that was real […]

I am indebted to the Lynda.com training videos for these ideas and help with the code. In this example (again based on a Lynda.com example), I took the Pixel Bender effect and applied it to a simple photo editor. You can now upload your own photo (keep it relatively small) […]

One must be very specific in their answer. It deals with my Tweets. It is not a tag cloud (or a tweet cloud). It does have a specific term. If you think you know the answer, send me an email with the URL where one can create these. Hint – […]

Based on another Lynda.com video, I played a bit with bringing a Pixel Bender filter into Flash. This does require a link to the Flex SDK in order to work properly. The filter is brought in as a ByteArray. Examine the linked example and move your cursor over the image. […]

I was inspired this morning (after viewing a Lynda.com video) to try and create my own Flash 3D photo cube. Just follow the link (it will open in a new browser window/ tab). My photos were taken in Montana this summer (most at Glacier National Park in July). The bison […]