Day: February 19, 2010

It’s been a very interesting season on MTV’s Jersey Shore, and this is the first MTV show in quite a few years that has people buzzing the way they are about this reality series.

If you’re in the minority of people who still don’t know what this series is all about, here’s a quick rundown. A group of people in their 20s from New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island are picked out at random by MTV to share a beach house over the summer.

The place to be is the Jersey shore, and the town is Seaside Heights, a vacation destination where these NJ and Staten Island residents love to spend their weekends.

Every episode of this show brings something interesting, and this is perhaps the show’s biggest draw. Whether it’s a cheating girlfriend or a bar fight, you’ll always be amused with the entertaining antics of the show’s main characters.

I don’t want to ruin things for you if you’re planning on seeing the episodes, so you’d be best off not reading the rest of this article if that’s the case. If you’ve seen the episodes or simply don’t care about knowing what happens, the following list will recap some of the show’s highlights through this point.

Two housemates, Sammy and Ronnie, have ended up falling in love with each other. This was very unexpected, as in the first episode, Ronnie had claimed that the last thing anyone should do at the Jersey Shore is fall in love. The two of them seem to be head over heels for one another.

In one of the show’s most recent episodes, Vinny ends up kissing a girl while they’re out at night, before he learns later that this was the girlfriend of the man whose house they’re living in. Vinny believes that he’ll be kicked out of the house, but this doesn’t turn out to be the case.

Lastly, the fighting is a fixture on this show. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an episode that doesn’t involve some kind of a physical altercation. Not only do the men on the show find themselves in fights, but the women go at it too. This makes for some very wild television.

Millions of viewers are looking forward to the final episodes of this series as it winds down. You can be sure that another season will follow.

This author additionally regularly blogs about the down throw blanket and Little Giraffe baby blanket.

We run training courses on Adobe Dreamweaver, the industry-standard web development software. And we are increasingly finding that the profile of the person wanting to learn Dreamweaver is becoming distinctly, well, frankly, unpredictable! It seems that just about anyone nowadays can find themselves needing to build a website or to create web content in some shape or form.

In the same way that graphical interfaces have changed computing, making it more user-friendly, the use of Adobe Dreamweaver makes people with limited understanding of web site creation capable of putting together a reasonable site. It is also a greate platform for learning how web sites should be put together. For example, when you create each new web page, Dreamweaver lets you choose from its built-in standard layouts based on Cascading Style Sheets technology, the current recommendation for creating web pages. The code produced by Dreamweaver has lot of useful comments explaining how each page layout functions.

Many small organisations have already learned to rely on Adobe Dreamweaver to build and manage their own website, creating and modifying pages and then uploading them via FTP to make them live and available to the public. Those organisations with a more urgent need to establish a web presence may still turn to professional web development companies to get them started and then use Adobe Dreamweaver when changes need to be made, often saving themselves a small fortune.

Another way that organisations can save money is by hiring web designers to create Dreamweaver templates and then basing their website on these templates in-house. This also has the benefit of giving organizations control of their site right from the outset.

Although Dreamweaver is pretty easy to use, it is not likely that many users can simple load it onto their machine and start using it like a pro. Most people will benefit from having some form of Dreamweaver training. This will allow them to learn the essential aspects of the program and the process of creating basic sites and making them live. An effective Dreamweaver training course will also give users an insight into the underlying web technologies and the code which Dreamweaver generates as the users create their pages using visual techniques.

One of the best ways to make a site useful for visitors is making it interactive, allowing users to search for the specific content that they want. By attending an advanced Dreamweaver training course, staff within an organization can learn to add database-driven content to their website using technologies such as ASP, PHP or ColdFusion. And, here again, Dreamweaver does the lion’s share of the work, allowing users to create sophisticated search and results pages using the same simply point-and-click and drag-and-drop techniques used to create basic content.

The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver training courses at their central London training centre.

Microsoft Word offers a number of features for zooming in and out of your work and also the moving from one part of your document to another. Let’s begin by looking at zooming. In the bottom right of your screen on the taskbar, you will find severl controls for zooming which offer several different functions. Firstly, you can click on the “Zoom Out” and “Zoom In” buttons and you’ll notice that the zoom level increases or decreases in steps of 10%.

An alternative to the “Zoom Out” and “Zoom In” buttons is to drag the “Zoom” slider left to zoom in or right to zoom out. Another way of moving the slider is simply to click anywhere on the zoom scale. The slider will then jump to that exact point and you page will be displayed at that exact zoom level.

It is also possible to click on the percentage displayed next to the slider to display the zoom dialog box. Here, you can either choose a preset zoom level or you can type any percentage between 10 and 500. You can also choose to display the entire width of the page or simply the entire width of the text ignoring any margins. Similarly, you can display the entire page or several pages at once.

The View tab of the Word Ribbon also has a zoom section. On the left, the zoom button offers another way of displaying the zoom dialog box. On the right, there is the option to display one page, two pages or the page width. Finally, clicking on the button marked 100% returns the view to actual size.

Yet another way of zooming in and out is to use a combination of the mouse and the keyboard. If you hold down the Control key, you can use the scroll button on your mouse to zoom out or zoom in.

While on the subject of the scroll button, let’s now look at techniques for navigation. If the Control key is not held down, the scroll button naturally allows you to scroll up and down. You can also use the scroll bar: click on the scroll arrows to scroll up or down one line at a time or drag the scroll box. When you do so, you’ll notice that the current page number is displayed as you drag.

Below the scroll bar, are the Browse Controls which, by default, allow you to move one page forward or back. However, the behaviour of these arrows can be customised by clicking on the Select Browse Object button between the two arrows. This displays a pop-up menu where you can choose between several different objects within Word such as headings or images. Whichever object is selected will determine how Word jumps through the document when the controls are clicked. As well as using these controls, you can use the keyboard equivalents: Control-Page-down or Control-Page-up to move up and down according to the currently selected browse object.

Author’s company runs web design training courses in London and throughout the UK.

This article offers a description two features which are very useful when printing worksheets in Microsoft Excel: Print Titles and Set Print Area.

Print Titles

Each time you print a worksheet, Excel normally prints all the data that it contains. However, there are times when you only want to print a selection of your data. Although you can achieve this by hiding rows and columns, Excel offers a simpler solution.

For example, let’s say you have a worksheet with only five average-sized columns but several hundred rows, although the header and footer appear on every page, only page 1 will have column headings. This means that it becomes difficult to know what the figures on the other pages relate to. We can make use of Excel’s Print Titles feature to print the column headings on every page. Print Titles are in the Page Setup section of the Page Layout tab; simply click on the button and Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box with the Sheet tab activated. In our five column worksheet example, we would only need to specify the number of rows that we want to repeat at the top of every page. In our example, it would be only the first row. Having clicked to specify row one, we can click Print Preview to see the result and we would see that the headings are repeated at the top of each page.

Only one print area can be specified at a time. The Clear Print Area command will restore normal behaviour; so that, when you print, the entire worksheet will be printed.

When you print a worksheet, Excel normally prints all the data that it contains. However, there are times when you only want to print a selection of your data. Although you can achieve this by hiding rows and columns, Excel offers a simpler solution.

In the Page Layout tab of the Excel 2007 ribbon, you will find the Set Print Area drop-down menu. When you click on it, it offers two options: Set Print Area and Clear Print Area. The Set Print Area command allows you to highlight a range of data and specify that this is the only part of the worksheet that will be printed whenever you use the print command. Having chosen the Set Print Area command, Excel will now display a dotted lined border around the area that has been set, in much the same way as it normally displays the page boundaries after the print command has been used.

Only one print area can be specified at a time. The Clear Print Area command can be used to restore normal behaviour; so that, when you print, the entire worksheet will be printed.

Author is a developer and trainer with On-SiteTrainingCourses.Com, a UK IT training company offering XML and XSLT Classes in London and throughout the UK.

Most computer users in the United States have heard of the leading American antivirus vendors. Manufacturers such as Symantec, McAfee, Computer Associates, and Trend Micro. These companies have a market leading presence in the United States. Microsoft, too, has aspirations to become a key player in this enormous growth market.

In fact, Microsoft bought intellectual property and technology rights from GeCad software in 2003, a company situated in Bucharest, Romania. They also acquired Pelican Software, which had a behaviour orientated security product, as well as the Giant Company Software for spyware and Sybari Software, which controlled virus, spam, and phishing filtering.

A great deal of discussion centered on whether Microsoft would end up in a domineering place in the antivirus market by simply bundling its recently acquired software technologies up with its Windows operating systems at no charge. This is a comparable technique that has been applied in other markets such as word processing and Internet browsers. In fact, this is precisely what did take place. Microsoft has come out with a free product called Microsoft Security Essentials.

It is too soon for me to advise whether MS Security Essentials is a world-class antivirus product, but it is not free to everyone. Microsoft has been battling Windows piracy for a while now with its Windows Genuine Advantage sneaky download and sure enough, this new product from Microsoft will only work on Windows systems and even then, only with operating systems that pass the Windows Genuine Advantage test. (Please click the link at the bottom the page to find out more).

There is nothing wrong with that per se, but it does mean that hardly anyone in the Third World will be able to make use of it, because a pirated operating system comes bundled with every computer that I have ever seen in Asia and probably elsewhere too. People save for years in order to afford a computer and the last thing they worry about when they plug it in is whether the operating system is genuine or not.

Of course there is a number of other antivirus manufacturers prominent in this market. There are many companies with great market presence in other countries that are beginning to become more widely recognized. These vendors include GriSoft from the Czech Republic, Sophos from the United Kingdom, Panda Software from Spain, Kaspersky from Russia, SoftWin from Romania, F-Secure from Finland, Norman from Norway, Arcabit from Poland, VirusBuster from Hungary, Nod from Thailand and AhnLab from South Korea.

It is not yet clear where the industry is heading and everyone in this market faces a rapidly changing scenario. The amount of effort required to find and deliver fixes for new viruses is quite staggering. Malicious programs are becoming more and more complex and the quantity of them is escalating.

Many companies may find themselves without the capital to equal the efforts of those truly bent on creating havoc. The antivirus companies are receiving hundreds of new samples of viruses a day! What is more, the new viruses are getting “smarter” in that they propagate themselves quickly and they often hide themselves too. Some are even smart enough to move around in a system by renaming themselves in an effort to make it difficult to remove them.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the Microsoft antivirus software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software