I just don’t have the time to continue development.

Members system is implemented as well. I’m sure there are a lot of things someone with some time could do with this.

Domain:
Created: 2009-02-16
Expires: 2011-02-16

The domain is hosted at godaddy.

Any affiliate links (the free ebook and currency converter) on there are through this place, https://www.forex-affiliate.com

It has not made any money, I haven’t pimped it out at all. I did have one person email me about it though heh.

Heres a couple PDFs with stats from September 2009, October 2009, November 2009, December 2009, and January 2010 http://freeforexsms.com/stats.zip

I’ll send all files (the php isn’t encrypted) with the mysql database (with a few users in there), and push the domain to your godaddy account no problem.

I am including hosting with Made2Own for 6 months. I am not affiliate with them in anyway. This is from their site (you can also find them on twitter here: http://twitter.com/made2own )

Some of the features include:

• UNLIMITED Disk Space
• UNLIMITED Monthly Bandwidth
• 1 Hosted Domain
• 5 Email, FTP Accounts, SQL DBs and Subdomains
• Setup Fee Waived

And as with all of our hosting accounts, these features are included:

General: Money Back Guarantee, 24/7 Support, 99.7% Uptime, Free & Instant Setup.

Control Panel: cPanel, Fantastico, Instant Backup/Restore, Online File Manager, Preconfigured PHP/CGI Scripts, B/W Monitoring, Directory Passwords, Analog Stats, Webalizer Stats, Custom Error Pages, IP Blocking, Hotlink Protection.

Email Features: Spam Assassin, Email Virus Protection, Webmail, Email Forwarders, Mailing Lists, Auto-Responders, SMTP Access, IMAP Access, POP3 Access.

Server Support: PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, JavaScript, CGI-bin, Zend PHP Optimizer, Cronjobs, Self-Signed SSl, GD Support, ImageMagick.

The hosting is paid up until August 2, 2010

• Contact Form 7 – This gives you a great looking contact form. Highly customizable with an option for adding a captcha.
• Akismet – Stop spam. This comes with every WordPress install. You need a key for it, register at wordpress.com. It’s free!
• Google XML Sitemap – Add a good XML sitemap for your site.
• WordPress Auto Upgrade – This makes upgrading the most easy thing. No excuse to not keep your site safe and up to date.
• WP Super Cache – I use this on the sites that get a lot of traffic. There is very much a noticeable difference when you use this. It really speeds your site up.
• Twitter Tools – Best Twitter plugin for WordPress. Use this to tweet your blog posts.
• Lightbox 2 – Makes your images show up in a lightbox. Extremely handy.
• Chili Code Highlighter – Best plugin to syntax highlight code. You can see examples of it on my site here, Write on images with PHP
• WPrecaptcha – Akismet and this plugin will stop all spam. Must have.
• WPaudio – This is great if you want to share some mp3s on your site. I use this here on my site, My New Ringtone

What plugins do you use? Leave me a comment!

This short tutorial shows you how to take the background out of a photo. Something that comes in very handy.

WARNING: I’m going to use a picture of me for an example. It is very lolsy and may distract you.

1. Open your image in Photoshop. I am using CS2, so the exact steps might not be the same, but they should be very close to whatever version of Photoshop you’re using.

Once you have the image in Photoshop, double click the background layer in your layers. This turns it into a layer.

2. We use the Extract feature for this in Photoshop. It should be under the Filter->Extract menu (ALT+CTRL+X). If it isn’t check the help for your version of Photoshop.

3. Use the marker tool to trace around the image, keeping half of it on the image and half of it on the background.

4. Once you have traced around the image, use the bucket tool to fill the area you want to keep.

5. You can click ok to process the image. The background is now removed.

6. The image might not look too great around the edges, however, you can easily fix this up. To do this, we’re going to use the History brush. Click the box next to the step you did just before the extract.

7. Select the History brush and go around your image and fix up where it needs it. Use the eraser in conjunction with the brush to make it look good.

All done! This is very easy to do in Photoshop and your technique will only improve in both speed and quality the more you do it. Go have fun!

First is a product called iDrive from http://www.idrive.com

iDrive gives free users 2gb of storage. For me this is plenty to backup some important documents. Their little program you download is quite nice. It is easy to use and explore, allowing you to see right away what files you are backing up and how much space you are using.

The three main buttons in their program are Backup Now, Schedule Backup, and Enable Continuous Backup. It has a default scheduled backup time of 5:00AM every day, but that is easily changeable.

The restore feature is nice as well. It will show the files you have stored with them and allow you to choose which ones you whish to restore to your computer.

There is integration with your OS, but under Windows XP I was prompted to install the plugin for it, it didn’t install along with the program. They do have support for Windows, Mac, and Linux. As well as some mobile applications.

Overall, this was a good option to use if you like something with a bit more options and like to tinker with settings to have full control over things, but it seemed like it was just more work than I wanted to do. I give this application a 4/5 stars.

The second application I used was Dropbox from http://www.getdropbox.com

Just from the website alone you can tell Dropbox is more slim and condensed.

They also offer a free 2gb account, which is plenty for me.

I downloaded their application and was pleasantly surprised. Their application is all integrated into Windows. When I want to backup a file, I just drag it into a folder called My Drop Box which they put in My Documents.

They also have a system of synching. You can run it on multiple computers or phones, and when you save files, it can synch to all devices. Pretty handy feature.

Folder sharing is also very easy and makes it great for letting other people have access. For me, this will come in handy when I’m working with people on projects. They have a Public Folder as well that allows anyone to see the files which you put in there.

Dropbox also have some 30 day undo history. Might come in handy if I make mistakes. They also offer an unlimited undo feature called “Pack-rat”.

The online interface for Dropbox is amazing. So simple and great looking. You can upload a folder of images and it’ll generate a photo album. Pretty slick.

I give Dropbox a 5/5 stars and recommend it for sure!

Here’s my project page I will be keeping updates on: http://www.riscit.info/wopr/

It does:

- password metrics (tells you if its a strong password or not)

- submit lockout (user won’t be able to submit form until everything is good)

- minimum strength requirements (user needs to have a password of X strength)

Here is a demo of the script: http://www.thecreativeoutfit.com/freebies/passroids

You can view the options and download it here: http://www.thecreativeoutfit.com/index.php?view=jQuery-Password-Plugin

htaccess will only work on Apache webservers, if in doubt consult your webhost. To use these, you will need to create a text file and call it htaccess. Input code from below into it to suit your needs, and upload to your site via ftp. You will then need to rename the file to .htaccess

There are a couple different codes that are returned to the browser on redirects.

301 – Permanent Redirect. Good for moving files forever. This tells the search engine and clients that it has moved permanently and should use the new URI.

302 – Temporary Redirect. It tells the search engine and client that it’s redirecting and should continue to use the requested URI.

Here are some sample redirect usages:

301 Moving a single page

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

301 Move entire site

Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/

To do 302 redirects, just replace 301 with 302.

My main linux distribution of choice is Slackware Linux. I recently installed it on my Thinpad 600X. I have a classic Orinoco wireless card that is pretty cool, of course, it doesn’t compare to the Senao cards. Anywho, I wanted to run kismet on this laptop, but Slack uses the orinoco 0.13d drivers. These drivers do not support monitor mode (also called promiscuous mode) which allows for scanning passively. Thus, I had to update the drivers. I have yet to find a site that has complete directions on how to do this, though the shmoo group developed the driver, their directions are not simple for *nix n00bs.

Below you will find how to easily install the patches to enable monitor mode for Orinoco cards so that you can use kismet, tcpdump, etc

Step 1. What we’re going to do is patch the original driver. To do this we need the original driver. You can obtain it from orinoco driver homepage. You will want to get version 13e. Alternatively, you can grab it from my site here

Step 2. Now that we’ve got the driver, we need the monitor mode patch. This is just a *.diff file from the shmoo group. The patch (orinoco-0.13e-patch.diff) can be obtained from their site here http://airsnort.shmoo.com/orinocoinfo.html or alternatively, from my site here.

Step 3. Now you can go ahead and grab the patch to improve channel changing. This patch is from the kismet wireless homepage. This is the orinoco-0.13e-dragorn3.diff patch. I’ve got a local copy of it as well located here.

Step 4. We can now begin the installation of the driver and patches. First you will untar the orinoco driver using

$ tar zxpvf orinoco-0.13e.tar.gz

Step 5. You can begin patching the code now. Change into the directory just created

$ cd orinoco-0.13e

Step 6. And now apply the patch

$ patch -p1 < ../orinoco-0.13e-patch.diff

Step 7. Now apply the performance patch

$ patch -p1 < ../orinoco-0.13e-dragorn3.diff

Step 8. After everything is patched, you need to compiled the driver using

$ make

Step 9. When it is done compiling, you will need to be root to install it

$ su

Step 10. You can now install the driver

$ make install

Step 11. If you haven’t received any errors (which you shouldn’t have), everything has worked fine. You can now plug in your wireless card to see if it worked with the iwpriv command.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques. It makes really cool looking photos.

Here’s how I did it using HDRsoft’s Photomatix.

Take three pictures using a tripod. I took one picture at EV (exposure value) +2, one at EV 0, and a third at EV -2. If you don’t know how to change your EV, look for the +/- symbol.  Here is an example picture of the EV button.

Once you have your three pictures, open up Photomatix. Click Generate HDR. Click Browse and select the three photos you just took.

Use these options:

If you have moving water in your shot, change the option to Background movements otherwise leave Moving objects/people selected.

Click OK, wait for it to generate the HDR image. It will normally be too dark, now click Tone Mapping. Then play with the settings to get whatever effect you want.

Once you have found the effects and like what you have done, click Process. Then File -> Save As to save as a JPG. All done!

Here is a photo I did with my cheap point and shoot:

Images from http://abduzeedo.com

For this example I’m gonna use this image:

In order to write on images, you’re gonna need the GD library installed in your server. Most of the time this is already done if you’re using shared hosting or if you’ve already got a working webserver.

Save and upload that image into a dir on your server, and we’ll begin working.

We want to be able to input any string of text so we’re going to make a form for submission. Create a form using:

<form action="img.php" method="get">
<input type="text" name="line1" />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Do it!" />
</form>

As you can see, it’s not fancy, but it works.

Lets start off with the “Hello World” example. Save this as img.php

<?php
$string = $_GET['line1']; // lets get the text from the form
// define what image we want to write on
$im = imagecreatefromjpeg("sign.jpg");
// define the text color, red, green, blue
$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($im, 61, 61, 61);
$font = imageloadfont('Brigitte.gdf'); // tells it what font to use
imagestring($im, $font, 175, 395, $string, $textcolor); // line o'text
// header to tell the browser it's an image
header("Content-type: image/jpeg");
imagejpeg($im); // creates the image with text
imagedestroy($im); // destroys the image in the memory
?>

Let’s take a look at whats going on here. From the comments you can tell whats going on for the most part, but I can expand.

Line 1 of the code is using the GET method from the form we created to store the text in a variable called $string.

imagecreatefromjpeg() PHP function tells PHP that we want to use a JPEG image. PHP has functions for GIF, PNG and strings, BMP, XBM, XPM, and from GD itself.

We then allocate the colors we want to use for the text. imagecolorallocate() uses RGB values to do this.

imageloadfont() loads our font for writing. It can be a bit tricky to find a font suitable for writing on images and I’ve included a few in the download at the end of this article with the rest of the code. There is, however, a great program that allows you to take any Windows font and turn it into a GD font. You can get this program from here: http://www.wedwick.com/wftopf.exe

The fifth line of code is where PHP does the writing. It takes the image, font, X and Y coordinates, the string (your text), and finally the text color and writes on the image.

The header() is basic PHP to tell the browser what kind of content it is viewing, in this case an image.

PHP then creates the image, and destroys the temp image in memory. You should now have something like this:

Afterthoughts: You can create a form that does POST instead of GET for a bit more “security” through obsecurity.

You could use one page for all the code, but I used two to help newbies.

Download archive with project files here: php-gd.rar

Here is the script in action: http://riscit.info/dynamic_image/input.html