Saturday, November 2, 2024

Goodies to Go! Newsletter #325

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Goodies to Go ™

              
February 21, 2005 — Newsletter # 325

 

     This newsletter is part of
the internet.com network.

                 
http://www.internet.com

 

          Please visit https://www.htmlgoodies.com

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A Note about Email Filtering:
All Goodies To Go
newsletters are sent from the domain “internet.com.”  Please use this
domain name (not the entire “from” address, which varies) when configuring
e-mail or spam filter rules, if you use them.

 


Featured this week:

 

*   Goodies Thoughts – Website Picture
Protection
*   Q & A Goodies
*   News Goodies

*   Feedback Goodies
*   Windows Tech Goodie of the
Week 
*   And Remember This…

 


Website Picture Protection

 

You have gone out and taken a set of beautiful photographs.  You have
spent painstaking hours with your graphics program to create sharp looking,
visually stunning graphic effects and you have labored to put them all together
on your web pages.  You are very proud of your work, and justifiably so —
the result is breathtaking!

 

And so, your site is published on the web.  Response is great! 
Your friends are very impressed, as are a couple of new business
prospects.

 

Then, after a few weeks, you receive an email from a friend who has seen
your pictures on another site.  You contact the offending webmaster who
insists that they didn’t get the pictures from your site, but rather got them
from an “open license” website.  They give you the address and when you
check it out you find to your horror that all your hard work has been taken and
published with the claim that it is public domain.

 

Looking at the download counts you see that thousands of people have made
copies of it, and you realize that there is no way you are going to be able to
track them all down and prevent their use.

 

You contact the folks running the “open license” site and tell them about
it.  They are profusely apologetic and immediately remove your work from
their site.  They tell you that the items were submitted by one of their
subscribers who certified that they had full rights to them.  They give you
the subscriber’s email address: flybynight666@youha.com   Oh
great!  You contact Youha who confirm that the free account was created,
used once to send email to an “open license” website, and was never used
again.  “We can resolve the user’s IP address for you, however,” they
continue, helpfully.  “It’s a place called the “Five Hundred Seat Internet
Cafe” located in the center of Metropolis.

 

You now realize that you are totally done for.  Your sweat and toil
has been filched and made to look like it’s available to anybody.  If
somebody looks at your site now, they well think that you simply use public
domain stuff rather than being impressed by your skills and talents.  If
you start over, how can you prevent the same thing from happening again?

 

And there’s the question.

 

How do you protect your pictures and graphics?  The answer is not
popular.  The answer is, “you don’t.”

 

There are JavaScript techniques to disable the right click; there are
masking techniques whereby another, transparent image is superimposed over the
one you wish to protect; there are mouseover and mouseout techniques that flip
the image to something else when the mouse is over it, or change the page
completely as the mouse encroaches; there are a variety of other coding
techniques that people have come up with to prevent downloads.  None of
these techniques works.

 

The reason is simple.  When the browser is going to take you to a
page, it makes a request of the website’s server, which responds by sending down
all the files associated with the requested page.  The browser puts these
into its cache directory and starts to assemble them for display.

 

Regardless of the methods used to make capture off the displayed page more
difficult, the individual files remain in the cache until they are purged. 
This purging could happen after some number of days, at some specified time or
when some particular event, such as closing the browser, occurs.  This is a
user controlled option.  Any pilferer worth their salt knows how to control
the cache, where to find it, how to locate any picture or graphics files they
are after and how to copy them out.  If the page can be displayed, they
images can be saved.

 

I’m sorry if this is bad news for you, but it is a basic fact of
life.  If this is a concern for you, you might want to refocus your efforts
into the content on the site, and reduce the effort that goes into the
graphics.  If you want to have the pictures out there, but want to make it
as hard as possible for somebody else to use your work, consider building a
complex Flash or LiveMotion file, or something similar, that contains your
identification information along with the pictures.  This will help to stop
all but the most hardened, and for them, it might just be too much work to be
worth it.


Thanks for Reading!


– Vince Barnes

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Q & A Goodies
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Questions are
taken from submissions to our Community
Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a
question by going to
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/

 


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X   Please take note:    X

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We have had a number of people indicate that their email client programs
are interpreting code examples in this newsletter as actual HTML code instead of
text.  To overcome this problem and to enable everyone to read the
newsletter, there is a period after the “<” in each tag.  If you cut and
paste to try out code examples, please remember to remove the periods. 
Wherever we intend you to use “<.” in your code, the example will show
“<..”.  In this way, you will be safely able to use a global edit to
change “<.” to “<“.  Thanks to all of you for your patience with
this; if this technique creates an undue problem for you however, please let us
know via our feedback address (see Feedback, below).


*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community.
 The
answer was provided by one of our Mentor Volunteers.

 


Q. I have som stand alone HTML program that reside in multiple laptop
computers located in my client’s fleet of vehicles.  I am attempting to
find a program or script that will act as a hit counter so I can analyze the
traffic and identify the pages or sections  visited or more importantly,
those that are not.

 

A. You might find that cookies would provide the feedback you are looking
for. Take a look at this HTMLGoodies page:
http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/beyond/cookiecount.html
 

*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community.
 The
answer was provided by one of our Mentor Volunteers.
    

Q. I would like to be able to create clickable buttons at the top of my page
to link to different places further down the page.

 

A. Add this link code to your button image:
<.a
href=”#link1″><img src=”yourbuttonname.gif”><./a>
Then where
you want it to link to, add this anchor code:
<.a
name=”link1″><./a>
When you click the button it will jump down on
the same page to the anchor.

*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community.
 The
answer was provided by one of our Mentor Volunteers.
    

Q. I have a folder, and inside that folder is a webpage and images used on
the webpage. There is another folder inside that folder, and inside this folder
is another webpage.  I want to use the images from the previous folder. Is
it possible to link them in locally? Or do I have to use an absolute link?

 

A. You can link to documents in other directories by specifying the
relative path from the current document to the linked document. For example, a
link to a file “my_file.html” located in the subdirectory “files” would be:

    <.A HREF=”files/my_file.html”>My
File<./A>
If you wanted to reference an image in another folder you can
use relative paths also. For instance your page resides in a folder named
“pages” and you want to reference the image that is in another folder named
“images”. Both folders reside on the site in the same level. The reference would
look like this: <.img src=”../images/my_image.jpg”>
This tells the
browser to look up into another folder named “images”  [The two dots mean
“my parent folder” – Ed].
If the page were in a folder named “folder2” and
this folder was in the folder named “pages” the reference could look like
this:
<.img src=”../../images/my_image.jpg”>
This tells the browser
to look two folders up for another folder named “iamges”.
These are called
relative links because you are specifying the path to the linked file relative
to the location of the current file. You can also use the absolute pathname (the
complete URL) of the file, but relative links are more efficient in accessing a
server. By using relative links you make your site more portable. You can do all
of your work building your website on your local computer and when you upload
the entire site to the server, all of the links will work. If you use absolute
links then you run into the problem of having the files still linked to your
local computer.

*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community.
 The
answer was provided by one of our Mentor Volunteers.

 

Q. How do I move stuff where I want it on my website? I put the html in the
scripts area but when I go to my site everything is in the top left
corner.

 

A. By default, text and images will be placed at the top and to the left.
There are tags for positioning, and stylesheets give more control. Sometimes
tables are used for precise layout. I suspect tables would be the most useful
thing for you right now, so have a look at the tables tutorials. https://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/tbl.html


*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community.
 The
answer was provided by one of our Mentor Volunteers.
    

Q. How do I make animated GIFs?.

 

A. Basically, you make each frame as a separate image, and your graphics
application combines them into one file. Imageready can do this. Shareware sites
may have Microsoft GIF Animator, which I’ve used and works adequately. There
will be other applications for animating GIFs. Probably shareware sites like
Nonags and Tucows are your best bet. If you’re willing to learn Flash or
Livemotion, they make animations which are smoother and smaller. 


*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community.
 The
answer was provided by one of our Mentor Volunteers.
    

Q. Can  you use Visual Basic for making baners?

 

A. Visual Basic is not the program you should be using for creating
banners. Take a look at PhotoShop( http://www.adobe.com ) or Paint Shop Pro( http://www.jasc.com )


*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community.
 The
answer was provided by one of our Mentor Volunteers.
  
Q. What
function returns the square root of a number?

 

A. That would be Math.sqrt(arg) where arg is your numeric variable. 
There is a whole list of Math Object methods in Joe’s book starting at the
bottom of P159.


News Goodies
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Intel Chip to Drive TCP/IP
[February 18, 2005] The company embeds its
I/O Acceleration Technology as a way to let a CPU do its job and ignore network
traffic.
Read the article:
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3484511

 


ChoicePoint Data Theft Fallout Spreads to 145,000
[February 18,
2005] ChoicePoint responds to pressure to let more people know if identity
thieves have their data.
Read the article:
http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3484501

 


RFID is Inevitable But Dicey
[February 18, 2005] Burton Group says
security and privacy concerns remain despite RFID momentum.
Read the
article:
http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3484471

 


All Your Security, Baked Into One Appliance
[February 18, 2005]
Unified threat management devices emerge as the hot new gadget at the RSA
Security Conference.
Read the article:
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3484531

 


Java Imaging Code Unleashed
[February 18, 2005] New APIs and I/O
tools are helping Sun push its Java-everywhere message to medical, commercial,
network and government imaging markets.
Read the article:
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3484436

 


An ‘Optimal’ View of Windows
[February 18, 2005] Optimal Access
would like to make your Windows life a little easier.
Read the
article:
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3484491

 


Analysts Skeptical of Qwest Claim
[February 18, 2005] UPDATED:
Experts aren’t convinced a Qwest-MCI merger would clear government review before
a Verizon-MCI combination.
Read the article:
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3484371

 


Sun’s Trusted Solaris 10 Coming This Year
[February 18, 2005] The
company bets big on its user rights management, predictive self-healing, Solaris
containers, and a new cryptographic framework.
Read the article:
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3484241

 


PDA Market Up or Down?
[February 18, 2005] New results from Gartner
dispute IDC’s numbers on decline in the sector. It’s all in how you count the
devices.
Read the article:
http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3484291

 


IBM to Sprout More Dev Centers Abroad
[February 16, 2005] The time
is ripe for more centers, as enterprise software booms in China, Russia and
Brazil.
Read the article:
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3483716


 
 
 
Feedback Goodies

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Did you ever wish your newsletter was an easy two way communications
medium?  Ploof! It now is!
If you would like to comment on the
newsletter or expand/improve on something you have seen in here, you can now
send your input to:

 


 

We already receive a lot of email every day.  This address helps us
sort out those relating specifically to this newsletter from all the rest. 
When you send email to this address it may wind up being included in this
section of the newsletter, to be shared with your fellow readers.  Please
don’t send your questions to this address.  They should be sent to our
mentors: see https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/


Thanks for all your feedback!

 


Windows Tech Goodie of the Week 

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Source Code Viewer ASP.NET Sample Code

 


 

This sample shows you how to read a text file off the file system and
display the source code in a browser.  In addition to illustrating the use
of a StreamReader object, it also includes some basic error handling to handle
things like people specifying the wrong filename.

 


*** AND ***

 


An Easier Way to Highlight the Rows of a DataGrid on MouseOver

 


 

This article examines a surprisingly simple and clever way to utilize the
hover feature of CSS to add row highlighting to a standard DataGrid.

 


*** AND ***

 


Writing a Custom Membership Provider for the Login Control in ASP.NET
2.0

 


 

In ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, you can quickly program custom
authentication pages with the provided Membership Login controls. In this
article, Dina Fleet Berry examines the steps involved in using the Login control
with a custom SQL Server membership database.

And Remember This …
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On this day in…

 

1431 England began the trial of Joan of Arc; 1804 Richard Trevithick
successfully ran the first rail locomotive, the Penydarren locomotive, in Wales;
1857 the US issued the Flying Eagle cent coins; 1857 the US Congress outlawed
foreign currency as legal tender in the US; 1874 Benjamin Disraeli replaced
William Gladstone ans British Prime Minister; 1885 the Washington Monument in DC
was dedicated; 1916 the Battle of Verdun began (WWI – 1 million casualties);
1922 Britain granted independence to Egypt; 1925 the first issue of “New Yorker”
magazine was published; 1931 Alka Seltzer was introduced; 1947 E.H. Land
demonstrated the instant developing camera in NYC; 1924 24,000 rolls of Beatles
wallpaper were sent from the UK to the US; 1970 the Jackson 5 made their TV
debut on American Bandstand; 1981 Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed the “Yorkshire Ripper”
for his murder of 13 women, was captured;  1988 actor Dudley Moore married
Brogan Lane;

 


Born today were: in 1915 actress Ann Sheridan; 1924 Premier of Zimbabwe
Robert Mugabe; 1925 film director Sam Peckinpah; 1927 humorist Erma Bombeck;
1931 actor Larry Hagman; 1932 King Harald V of Norway; 1934 actress Rue
McClanahan; 1935 actor Mark McManus; 1937 actor Gary Lockwood; 1943 record
producer David Geffen; 1946 Tyne Daly; 1946 Alan Rickman; 1953 actress Christine
Ebersole; 1958 singer Mary Chapin Carpenter; 1961 actor Christopher Atkins; 1966
British actress Bronwen Booth; 1971 actor Jose Solano; 1979 actress Jennifer
Love Hewitt;

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