What is Hotlinking?

Hotlinking (also known as inline linking, piggybacking, leeching and bandwidth theft) refers to when one site links directly to an object on a second site. Typically, the object is a picture that can then be displayed on the linking site without the owner having to copy the actual file from the second site.

How Hotlinking can Affect your Wordpress Blog

Hotlinking not only allows another site to use your content without permission but also uses your bandwidth to do it. Every time a user surfs to the page of the offending site, the actual image shown is downloaded from your server to the user’s browser, even though the user is not on one of your web pages. This can degrade performance on your site or even cause your site to run over the bandwidth limit allotted by your web host - typically resulting in additional charges or even a suspension of service.
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Simplicity is key when presenting statistics to management or customers. Data analysts are often tempted to put as many details as possible on the standard “one sheet” template; however, too many numbers on a page can cause confusion about where to initially focus. When reducing the number of statistics on a page is not an option and summary stats are not appropriate, traffic-lighting is a quick and effective method to highlight trends or draw attention to information that need to be addressed.
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When performing data analysis on a cohort population, it is often desirable to categorize characteristics can have many values. Age, income level and credit card score are examples of population attributes that can be placed into “buckets” and easily analyzed based on broad categories (without having resort to linear or logistic regression). While variables can be quickly encoded using IF statements, SAS’s Format procedure provides a more elegant and portable solution.
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Imagine you are given a list of major Canadian political donators and wish to load it into SAS for further analysis. The list is in a text file with fields delimited by tab characters. SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) offers wizards to automatically import a variety of file formats, but using these GUI’s preempts the chance for automation or additional processing during import. Using code to load data offers several advantages:

• Ability to redirect data to multiple data sets
• Ability to clean and modify data during load time
• Ability to delete unwanted data
• Portability and reusability

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Phishing, in practical terms, is an attack used by hackers to gain access to private information such as credit card numbers, social insurance numbers and user passwords. Rather than breaking down a physical or technological barrier, phishing is a social engineering attack where targets are typically duped into providing this information directly to false versions of legitimate websites run by the hackers. Personal information can then be used for fraudulent purchases, resale to third parties and even identity theft. While there are no universal statistics on the number or nature of phishing scams, most security websites agree on the following –

-Financial Services is the most targeted industry sector overall
-Paypal, Ebay, Amazon and the major banks are the most targeted companies
-North America is both the primary target audience and the region were the largest number of phishing sites are hosted
-Websites are by far the most popular portals through which to gather information, although an increasing number of phishing scams instruct targets to call a telephone number

Below are screenshots from a phishing email I recently received. Have a look at the warning signs –
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What is Digg?

Generally referred to as a social news site, Digg is technically a user-driven news aggregator. Registered Digg users can “digg” (i.e. bookmark and submit) an article on a web page by submitting a URL, along with a brief description. URL submissions are placed on display for other Digg users (registered or not) to read, comment on, rate, and bookmark for themselves.

How Digg can benefit your blog

Two words: heavy traffic. A popular Digg article can easily send thousands of new visitors to a website in a single day. A website does not need an explicit link to Digg in order to receive the benefits of Digg exposure; however, adding a link at the end of every post will give regular and special interest visitors the opportunity to promote an article to a large news-oriented audience. The larger form of the Digg button also specifies the number of times an article has been bookmarked, which can be used as an indicator of its popularity among targeted visitors.

How to add a Digg button to Wordpress Posts

Digg support can be added directly to a Wordpress blog via editing the PHP code for certain files within the blog’s theme. The main challenge is finding the correct files to edit, since Wordpress themes can have different file structures. As such, this tutorial will be more of a strategy for altering a theme to add Digg support. To address most of the common issues users will encounter, a more complicated theme will be altered.

Prerequisites:

• A Wordpress installation with the ability to edit theme files (generally speaking, online services that do not allow you to upload your own themes also won’t let you edit existing theme files)
• An account with administrator privileges (required for editing theme files)

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What is an IP address?

An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique address within a network used by devices to communicate with other devices within the network. Computers, printers, routers, and network hard drives are examples of devices that could have an IP address within a network.

IP addresses are generally assigned according to country and internet provider. There are also some specially reserved IP addresses or IP ranges that are universally understood:

• Local Machine IP – The IP address 127.0.0.1 (localhost) is always synonymous with the local machine. This IP address is valid only within the local machine environment, as every computer is its own “localhost”.
• Private Network IP’s – The IP ranges 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.254, 10.0.0.0–10.255.255.255 and 172.16.0.0–172.31.255.255 are reserved for private internal networks, such as a home networks or corporate intranets. These IP addresses are only valid within the local network and cannot be used if, for instance, a user wanted to connect to another user over the internet. Thus, it is typical for a computer to have an IP address for the local network (e.g. 10.1.2.1) and an IP address visible to the Internet (e.g. 65.34.24.24), which is itself one large network.

For the purpose of this tutorial, private network IP’s will be referred to as internal IP’s while internet-accessible IP’s will be referred to as external IP’s.

Why would I need to know my IP address?

1. Network gaming [internal or external]
2. Running a private server (e.g. FTP, HTTP) [internal or external]
3. Windows file sharing within an home network [internal]
4. … and any time another computer or service needs to identify your machine for commication or software deployment

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Note: This tutorial may seem simplistic to some but I’ve been answering these questions for several years and still wince while watching casual PC users take nearly half a minute to find Windows Explorer in the start menu. Some “advanced” users fare little better, so please be patient.

What is Windows Explorer?

Windows Explorer is a file management system for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. The most common uses of Windows Explorer include:

• Copying, moving and deleting files between directories
• Accessing information on USB keys, CD-ROM’s and DVD-ROMs
• Changing file attributes (eg setting files to read-only)
• Performing context-sensitive operations on files (e.g. file compression, opening media files with Windows Media Player)

What is the Difference Between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer?

Internet Explorer is a web browser and allows users to surf the World Wide Web (or locally-stored web pages). Windows Explorer is a file management system that allows users to “surf” their hard drives, optical media drives and network drives. Continue »

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Please use the comment section of this page for the following -

1. Requests for new tutorials
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The web hosting service review had one user complaining about how there aren’t any tutorials on how to set up a web page on the dotster hosting site. Services from lunarpages only need tutorial requests and they’ll send you the desired information about how to web host. When you search for hostgator, you will find it is on the first page because a search engine optimization company has reserved its spot there.

The Challenge

You’ve completed your latest movie masterpiece and now it’s time to put on the finishing touches. One problem – your Non-Linear Editor (NLE) cannot do exactly what you need. Perhaps you would like to render the final project using a proprietary codec unavailable in your NLE of choice. Perhaps you would like to render an MPEG-2 file using CinemaCraft Encoder or other software that produces better output than your NLE’s internal algorithm. Maybe you are not done applying filters to the final video, but those last few filters reside in a different software package.

In the past, the primary solution was to render the project to an intermediate file and then load that file into other software packages for post-processing. While this approach may be adequate for smaller projects, several problems arise when working with longer video segments or with High Definition content:

1. Quality Loss. Rendering a project to a lossy intermediate format (e.g. DivX, Neo HD) results in loss of visual quality. Further processing and rendering causes more quality loss, which may result in unusable video output
2. Disk Space. The problem of quality loss can be avoided by rending the project to a lossless intermediate format (e.g. Lagarith, Huffy). However, the resulting file size may be prohibitively large due to the much lower compression ratios of lossless formats.
3. Time. Rendering any intermediate format takes time and then more time must be spent re-rendering the file after further processing.

The Solution: Frame-Serving
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