22 videos (10hrs: 35mins: 30secs) will be provided in high-quality
AVI and .WMV format. - In other words, you get perfect quality and
replication of your instructors' screens. An easy-to-use table of contents
allows you to navigate to key areas you wish to focus on
22 iPod video files to watch Train Signal on the go! - A popular request
amongst our students who wish to study while they commute
(i.e. train, plane, bus). These 320x240 M4V files are compressed versions
of the original course, and play on any iPod that supports video
Also great for reviewing "on the job
22 MP3 audio files to listen to Train Signal anytime, anywhere. - Some of
our students have requested this option. Now, you can listen in the car or
while working out. Our MP3 files can be burnt to a CD or copied to a
portable device
Instructor Notes - These PDF documents, which can be printed out, contain
the slides used by the instructors throughout the videos. These documents
allow the user a quick easy reference to the instructors' notes on the
slides, and provides a place to make additional notes
Downloads
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b4a65b7/n/TrainSignal.Comp.TIA.Project.Plus.Training.part1.rar
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b4a65gh/n/TrainSignal.Comp.TIA.Project.Plus.Training.part2.rar
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b4a65h9/n/TrainSignal.Comp.TIA.Project.Plus.Training.part3.rar
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b4a661b/n/TrainSignal.Comp.TIA.Project.Plus.Training.part4.rar
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b58cf3h/n/TrainSignal.Comp.TIA.Project.Plus.Training.part5.rar
Microsoft's .NET 2.0 is a huge step forward in programming environments -- it's full of innovations that make your life as a developer easier than ever before. One of the biggest benefits is that you can get straight to coding features and functionality -- all the "plumbing" and groundwork you used to have to do first is no longer required. And that's just the beginning. In Exam-Pack 70-536: .NET 2.0 Application Development Foundation, instructor Garth Schulte walks you through the features and functionalities of .NET 2.0, using Visual Basic 2005. This series will give you a huge jump-start on developing applications in Visual Basic, on the .NET 2.0 platform.
On the job skills for VB.NET plus exam prep for MCTS exam
Exam-Pack 70-536: .NET 2.0 Application Development Foundation gives you real world skills you can put to use right away developing applications in Visual Basic, on the .NET 2.0 framework. Plus it maps to the exam objectives for Microsoft MCTS exam 70-536, to help you prepare for certification.
Prerequisites
A basic understanding of computers, such as A+ certification or equivalent knowledge is recommended before viewing this training.
Exam-Pack 70-536: .NET 2.0 Application Development Foundation contains:
- Introduction to Visual Studio 2005, Visual Basic 2005 and .NET 2.0
- Visual Basic 2005 Language Enhancements
- Managing Data with Variables, Types and Collections
- Object Oriented Programming Primer
- Creating and Using Generics
- Manipulating Text
- Implementing I/O Functionality
- Implementing Serialization
- Implementing Threading
- Handling Exceptions
- Integrating Diagnostics
- Data Access with ADO.NET
- Working with Assemblies
- Working with Reflection
- Interoperating with Legacy Code
- Building Windows Services
- Application, User and Data Security
- Using .NET Mail
- Deploying Applications
- Sample Application Overview - GoogleIT!
Downloads
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b4a667f/n/70-536.part1.rar
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b4a6598/n/70-536.part2.rar
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b4a6596/n/70-536.part3.rar
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b4a654f/n/70-536.part4.rar
e.g cp /* /home/*
would copy all files in that directory to the /home directory. An easy way to tell if a file is executable is to give the 'ls -l' command for a long listing. You may want to issue 'ls -l | more' if it's a large directory. Or alternatively 'ls -l | grep "filename".
In the first column you'll see something like this
-rwxr-xr-x the 'x' is what determines who can execute the file. The first 3 spaces belong to 'owner' the 2nd 3 spaces belong to the 'group' and the third 3 spaces belong to 'others'
the rwx represents the permissions for owner (rwx), group (r-x) and others (r-x). If you have permissions you can use the 'chmod' comand to make the file executable, but the extension won't change. (In UNIX any file can be made executable)
Issue './"filename"' to execute the file.
Recently I released a WordPress plugin for Google Analytics that adds a tracking code and dozens of various pieces of meta data to blogs. Since the release of version 4, I’ve updated it 6 times, to the point where it’s now at version 4.0.6. In this article I would like to share with you my experiences in maintaining this and other WordPress plug-ins and common good practices that I’ve distilled from that work.
The updates that I released had a couple of purposes, ranging from bug fixes to new features and fixes in documentation. While all of these are nice to talk about, the bug fixes are the ones you’ll learn the most from, so let’s start by going through these.
Website and Account Configuration
Almost as soon as I released the plug-in, people who updated were telling me that it worked wonderfully, and others were telling me that it didn’t work for them. Turns out I hadn’t tested the plug-in with a Google Analytics account that has only one website registered; I expected the websites to be an array. Fixing this bug was easy, but determining that this was the problem took a while.
Being able to log into a few hosts of people who gave me access to their back end and FTP so that I could test my fix proved invaluable. This enabled me to release 4.0.1 within an hour of the 4.0 release.
Another mistake I made was forcing everyone to reconfigure the plug-in. I assumed it wouldn’t be too much work for people, and it wanted to be sure the settings were clean, but it turns out quite a few people didn’t want to reconfigure. With 4.0.2, I came up with a way to inherit some of the settings and clean up the mess I made, and in 4.0.4 I made a change that I will add to all of my plug-ins:
Good practice #1: Don’t assume anything about people’s websites and external accounts.
Versioning Option Arrays
As a seasoned WordPress developer, I store all of the options for my plug-in in one option in the database, which is basically a big array. Why I hadn’t ever added a version number to these options is a mystery to me. Doing so makes it possible to do some very cool things: I can now add new features and set a default for these new features as soon as a user upgrades; I can show the user different messages based on the version they had before they upgraded; and more.
Good practice #2: Add a version number to your option arrays.
I’m still not using the WordPress option API stuff (check out this post by Ozh to learn all about it), which I probably should, but for now I find it easier to handle the saving and validation of options myself.
Don’t Release Too Soon
If you’ve got a bug that’s bugging a lot of your plug-in’s users, you’ll probably want to release a bug fix as soon as possible. I know I do. This caused an issue with my 4.0.3 release, though, because I didn’t properly test some of the code I introduced, causing me to have to release 4.0.4 just two hours later to fix a stupid mistake I’d made with booleans. Nothing is as painful as 500 people downloading a version of your plug-in that doesn’t actually work.
Good practice #3: Test, test, test before you release, even when you’re in a hurry.
Know Which Version People Are On
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been helping several people who said they were on the latest version of my plug-in but in fact were not. To remedy this, I’ve started outputting the version number in the comment that the plug-in outputs before the tracking code. Problem is, if people run a plug-in such as W3 Total Cache (which everyone should use by the way) or anything else that minifies their output, that comment will get lost.
There’s a solution for that, too: I’d already wrapped the script in <CDATA> tags, to help with Strict XHTML validation. Minifying will not occur within those CDATA tags, so I moved my “branding” comment to the CDATA section, and I can now always see, first, that my plug-in is active and, secondly, which version of the plug-in they’re using.
Good practice #4: Make sure you can see which version of your plug-in people are running.
URLs in WordPress
One of these things that can generate pretty awful bugs is a blog’s URL. Whether it’s due to people running their entire blog on https or “simply” running their blog in a sub-directory, it can cause headaches. It did for me in version 4.0.2 when I added URL sanitization: all relative URLs in posts and text widgets starting with a / were made absolute, in order to properly track these URLs. Tiny issue: I forgot about blogs in sub-directories, so a tiny portion of people would end up with links that used to go to /home but that now went to http://example.com/blog/home. I know, that was stupid; but that’s why I’m telling you: so you don’t make the same mistake.
Good practice #5: Make sure all URLs you use will work in all circumstances, whether WordPress is in a sub-directory, on a subdomain or just in the root.
Writing to the Root Directory
Somewhat related to the last issue, although I encountered this while developing my WordPress SEO plug-in, not the Google Analytics plug-in: if you write a file — say, an XML site map file — to the root of a website, and the website is actually a WordPress multi-site installation, things can go horribly wrong.
Check out the following scenario:
- User 1 writes and publishes a post on example.com/blog-1/.
- An updated XML site map for example.com/blog-1/ is generated, and example.com/sitemap.xml is updated.
- User 2 writes and publishes a post on example.com/blog-2/.
- An updated XML site map for example.com/blog-2/ is generated and example.com/sitemap.xml is overwritten.
See what just happened? The XML site map now contains only the posts from blog-2… This is exactly why the wp-content directory was created. There’s hardly ever a need to put a file in the root of an installation, and by not doing so, you make it far easier to run your plug-in in a multi-site/WordPress MU environment.
Good practice #6: If you’re generating files, generate them in the wp-content directory of your blog. Do not write files to the root directory unless you absolutely, positively have to. And if you do have to do it, make sure it doesn’t go wrong when your plug-in is active on multiple blogs in the same multi-site instance.
Rethink Your Filters
On the day that I released 4.0, I got quite a few feature requests, ranging from very simple to somewhat more complex. One that came in quite rapidly and caught my eye happened to be quite simple: the user wanted the same outbound link that in my plug-in tracks the content of an article to track in text widgets. Because I don’t use text widgets that much, it never occurred to me to do this. It was a valuable lesson, though:
Good practice #7: If you’re filtering content, try to filter it in as many places as you can, so that users get consistent results all over WordPress.
Never Assume
It’s true for everything, I guess, but especially true for WordPress developers: never assume. The seven best practices above mostly boil down to abandoning all assumptions about states, URLs and locations, and even about people knowing which version of a plug-in they’re using. Take all these matters into your own hands; your plug-in will be the better for it!
Source: SmashingMagazine and WebBlogToolsCollection
While you might associate working with images with big graphical programs like GIMP or Photoshop, ImageMagick is an entirely different animal. It is a suite of command-line programs for converting and manipulating images.
But why would you use a command line program to work with images, which are by definition, graphical? Well, for a start, you don’t have to load up a slow (and dare I say bloated) graphical app just to achieve a simple conversion task: you can fire off the command and have the result done in no time. Also, you can go to pretty much any Linux computer and know that ImageMagick is available — its ubiquity makes it a useful tool to know how to use.
So let’s jump right in to doing some simple, but useful, conversion tasks with ImageMagick.
Change format of a single image
If you have, say, a PNG file that you want in JPEG format, you can simply run convert with the source filename and the desired destination filename, and it will infer the desired format from the destination’s file extension.
For example:
convert source.png destination.jpg
Resizing images
To resize an image with ImageMagick, you can use the -resize command line switch to resize by either a percentage, or with the exact desired dimensions. Note that resize will preserve the aspect ratio of your image, even if you choose exact dimensions that are in a different ratio.
convert source.jpg -resize 75% destination.jpg
convert source.jpg -resize 800x600 destination.jpg
Apply heavier compression to an image
If you want to squeeze down the file size of an image in a lossy compressed format, such as JPEG, you can instruct convert to change the quality attribute.
convert big_file.jpg -quality 60% small_file.jpg
Batch converting from one format to another
So, say you have a folder full of PNG files that you now need in JPEG format. With many applications, you would have to go through the laborious process of opening each image and using Save as to save the file in the new format.
With ImageMagick and the command line, you can convert all the PNG files in the current working directory to JPEG like this:
mogrify -format jpg *.png
Trim off the edges of an image
If an image has too much space around the edges, you can use trim to automatically crop the image. This feature removes any edges that are exactly the same colour as the pixels at the corner of the image.
convert non_trimmed.jpg -trim trimmed.jpg
And there is more…
We really are only scratching the surface of this powerful suite of applications. There is extensive documentation on all its features and there is certainly more to explore if you find yourself using ImageMagick a lot.
Source: FOSSwire
