Antonio Wells. Web & Multimedia Designer

Poverty – Blog Action Day 08

With over 20,000 bloggers uniting today to not write about their blog’s niche, but about Poverty. My perspective is about Poverty at home… Here in the United States. Yes, it’s true we see those public announcement-type infomercials urging people to give same amounts a day to help children in Africa or India (And we should). But my focus is on everyday Americans deprived of common necessities that determine the quality of life.

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After surfin’ the Web this week, I found a few Web Design related contests worth mentioning and competing in.

1. Lost and Taken’s Political Poster Design Contest – Over $1000 in Prizes!

Design a political poster using Lost and Taken’s textures and win over $1000 in Prizes.

Contest Deadline: 10/30/2008

Enter the Contest Here:

http://www.lostandtaken.com/2008/10/political-poster-design-contest-over.html

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Have you seen the Cooliris plugin (formerly knows as PicLens) for the web browser? It shows photos and videos in a Full-Screen 3D Wall. You can scroll, pan and slide the 3D wall to preview pics/vids.

It’s a browser plugin you install to enhance the viewing experience. Alternatively, they offer a solution to incorporate it into your website called Cooliris Lite, which launches your photo/video gallery in a full screen user controlled slideshow.

What’s cool about it is, you can view pics/vids from popular websites in a rich interactive environment. For example, once the plugin is installed on your web browser, you can go to Google or Flickr and search images… Hover over the image and notice a blue “play button” icon appears, which is an indicator of a Cooliris enabled website. Click the button and the 3D Wall environment streams endless photos to scroll, pan, enlarge, search, and share. This also works the same on YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, MySpace, PhotoBucket, Picasa, plus a host more.

I applied Cooliris plugin to my Daugther’s photo slideshow website. Check it out!

Google Chrome Browser

Google Chrome is their new Web Browser to compete with browser giants Internet Explorer and FireFox. I downloaded the beta version and installed it on my Vista Ultimate machine then realized a few things.

One… From a Web Designers’ perspective, I really dont care for another web browser to test my designs in. Its bad enough to have to test for multiple browsers, but if I know Google, they will gain considerable market share in the next 2-4 years.

At the time of this post Wikipedia reports IE with 74% usage share and FF with 18%. Whereas, W3 Schools reports IE with 51% browser stats and FF with 48%.

Two… It boasts crashing less but I played around with it and in 5 minutes, seemed to crash it. It seems the beta version can’t handle “Printer Friendly” pages. Tried it on 3 different websites I created: NAMYnot Multimedia Inc., AXA Assistance USA and Plan D Real Estate. On all 3… it crashed!

That said, I do like the several features:

• Address bar with AJAXed Google search integrated
• Dynamic Tabs that allow you to easily reorder and pull into new windows or back as Tabs again
• I like the theory of the Crash Control, if one tab crashes it wont crash the whole browser, but unfortunately I was able to crash the browser within 5 minutes. But hey… it is beta, so I’m sure Google with work it out.
• I dont care for the New Tab Page as it shows a thumbnail screenshots of your recently visited pages with list of recently bookmarked sites. If you’re on sites you’re not supposed to be on (if you get my drift… >:), it displays. But they do have Incognito Mode you can set for this not to show up.

So for you PC peeps, you can download Chrome (Beta) for Windows and try it.

Yeah… Yeah… Yeah… I using a premade template. But gimme a week or so… and I’ll have a kick ass personal blog design. Stay tuned, as I’ll give the “Concept to Completion” step-by-step insight on how I will build it.

I’ll bring The Sexy to this thing…

Edited Sunday, 10-5-2008…

I brought the sexy, see Fresh

This morning at work I set an hour of time aside to watch the live web cast for the Adobe Creative Suite CS4. This new software suite really surpasses all versions of Adobe software and spoke to me. There were several features an various software that I absolutely fell in love with.

I will start with a few:

Speech Search in Premiere Pro absolutely blow me away! Adobe invited a guest to test a pre-released copy of CS4 in which they applied it to a small film they shot in a tapeless environment. They showed an example of finding a specific place on the timeline of a searched keyword. If you’ve ever dealt with video production, and your director asks you to splice in that shot where a certain phrase was mentioned… you would agree that it’s very time consuming to filter through logs, scripts and hours (or possibly days) of video footage. Now you can search a phrase and not only does it popup, it has a karaoke stylefollowing with the timeline playback. I’m really interested in seeing how accurate the Speech to Text recognition engine is, but definitely useful!

Content-Aware Scaling was very impressive and much needed a few years ago. This feature would have saved me alot of time and is absolutely genius! Say for example you have a portrait image that you would like to scale horizontally to wide landscape or panaramic. Usually doing this will stretch and make the image appear fat. But this feature scales proportionatly sections of the image that should be scaled while other portions remain intact.

The Bone Tool in Flash will allow for a sprout of interactive 2D animators! If you are familiar with how bone/sketeton tools work in 3D programs, this has the same principle yet in the 2D arena. Now it would be very easy to animate a character running versus manually tweening each object or writing actionscript.

There are plenty of other feature enchanements across the entire suite but these highlighted features were the most impressive to me. I will definately be upgrading to CS4 soon!!!

So on 6/8/2008 I try to access my company website and noticed the account was SUSPENDED and immediately wonder why? Of course I cant send/receive email as the server is suspended. After calling in I learned server CPU resources were up to 35%, which violates their policy. The only note I about the problem was:

“Some PHP script located within your account was overusing the server resources, (CPU – 35%). Please, remove this script or stop using it.”

They reinstated the account. Upon examining the files, I noticed nothing wrong. But assumed it had something to with the new installation of a CMS for the website.

This morning, I browsed the company website from my mobile phone and noticed at the bottom about 4 pages of Spam text and links, which was not viewable in a normal browser as it was a hidden DIV. Upon accessing the server, I noticed the directory “nupl” under “modules” directory. More importantly, there was a sticky file there called “block.php” with permissions set to “000″. Meaning only the server root can change it.

After we got the permissions changed, we got the source and found the little hidden devil. The file derived from c99shell.php which seems to be a file to upload other files, search, make directories, and make files automatically on your web server.

It also added the below in the “modules/Filemanager” directory with several thousand HTML Spam files and images to directory “crs” and “postlet”…

I was nice enough to email the victim site that my site was Spamed from: http://www.argraff.biz/. Their website was the victim of the same Trojan. The bot is sneaky, it collects its own victim network to launch its spam attack.

These are the bastards takng credit for it: http://ccteam.ru