Jamtraxx Web Solutions

The wait is finally over. For months we were only looking at leaked footage of how Windows 8 was supposed to work with it's new GUI. Cause really, the first few images we have seen about Windows 8 looked more like a tablet GUI design… and that, doesnt work quite well with a desktop PC on a mouse.

Finally we can test Windows 8 right on our own PCs now. I am very much eager to test this OS. From the articles that I have been reading so far, it seems it's using the cloud more than any other OS – well, I guess not as much as Google's Chromium and the rest of the flavours from that build. But yet again, I still have to test it out for a ride! 

Anyway, you can get yourself a copy of the ISO from MSDN and install it on either a physical machine or a virtual machine. But I would never suggest installing it as your main OS for now.

At a conference held in Nevada, a Project Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agancy otherwise known as DARPA asked hackers to to help block cyber threats in the United States.

Peiter Zatko announced the start of a fund-the-hackers program, called Cyber Fast Track, in a keynote talk at the Black Hat conference which is aimed at hackers and IT Sec experts.

"One of the ways I see fixing it is bridging the gap between the government and the hacker community," said Zatko, who goes by the handle "Mudge."

By "hacker," he doesn't mean criminal. He's referring to people who try to break computer systems with the goal of making them more secure. These people are sometimes referred to in the security industry as "white hats," as opposed to nefarious "black hats."

"We have all sorts of other criminals, be it in politics or finance, and those elements may be bigger than the criminal element in the hacker community," he said.

This would be the type of action I am hoping the Philippine Government would actually do. The past few months have been a rollercoaster ride for our ITSec Experts. Friday before President Aquino's State of the Nation Address, a government website was hacked and left a note. And few days before the said attack, a number of defaced government website have also been popping out. We are lucky that the crackers/hackers here in the Philippines are more of the White Hats. If they really wanted to do damage, they could have. 

I am guessing most or some of the System Administrators of the said government agencies have since been sacked or yelled at. Well, RootCon is due in a few days. These Systems Admins should attend conferences such as RootCon which discusses security issues and could actually help their networks.

We have opened our doors to graduating students who wish to learn and do their OJTs with Jamtraxx Web Solutions. ACLC Tacloban sent us a letter sending three of their students to our doors applying for apprenticeship. Jamtraxx Web Solutions accepted the offer in order to help these soon IT Ninjas.

Just in time as well since Jamtraxx Web Solutions won a government contract for some web application developments. This would be a great time for us to teach these soon to be IT professionals on our web development process.

It has been always a problem in the technology driven world we are now living in that all the stuff we need and access are on the cloud. Years ago, sending mails (snail mail for that matter), checking your bank account and even shopping needs the person to be physically there. This technology from the birth of the web, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook and what not sure did give us humans a better 'life' however, the same technology caused significant problems to us as well.

Let's face it, there would always

 be flaws in the web, from hackers getting into other people's databases, identity theft and what not and the only barrier protecting our data on the web, is our passwords. A lot of people uses the same password on all the websites that we are a member of. Not to mention, most people still uses dictionary passwords(or passwords that can be found on a dictionary -.-), some people uses birthdays and a combination of the two.

This is really problimatic as this can be easily bruteforced(the process of guessing passwords). The problem that people usually have though is memorizing passwords that is of Industry Staandards is it is hard to memorize them- Yes, I know how that feels, I myself have more than 30 sites I go to and have different passwords on them all. We have stumbled upon a website that advocates itself to having a much better password. 

Passwordcard.org is a nice service to help people generate a new secure passwords for all different sites. 

Jamtraxx Web Solutions believes the joy that Easter comes with and we would like to share this belief with you. We will be giving away a 20 percent(%) discount on all orders for webhosting starting today, upto Easter monday. To be able to avail the 20% discount, please use the cupon code EASTER2011 upon checkout and you will be given the discount on your payment.

Please note that only annual and bienial order terms will be given the discount for us to be able to leviate the cost of the free domain on these terms. If you have any other questions, please send us a ticket.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. It's really been a cram these past few days with project after project and likewise deadlines after deadlines. The main reason really was I had to finish 2 systems to be presented for ACLC College Tacloban's "ACLC Days" which was on the 21^st to the 24^th. Luckily though, I had a few projects to show but needed some security checks and all that good stuff.

The event was fun. Though the lack of support from the management was obvious. We had to setup our systems on a Sunday and would have probably been a Monday if I havn't approached the school directress for help because we did not have power cables and network access on our machines. But all-in-all, it was a good show.

Anyway, since I am not able to type in anything usefull, I'll just show some images here.

Did you ever had a situation where you need to resize lots of images to the same size but always felt lazy due to the fact that your computer is not one of those NASA Super Computers? Well, someone just asked me to do it for her since she had a 2GB website. No, I am not exaggerating things. It was a 2GB website and it was only a few pages(HTML fails). But yeah. The reason was each of those images was taken using a DSLR Camera with more than 3,000 pixels. Each file was about 3MB. Now if you are hosting that on a local machine, you can never see the problem. However, if you try to have it hosted somewhere on an enterprise server, not only would it cost a lot to host a 2GB website. The bandwith it would eat would be HUGE! On top of that, your visitors would leave the page annoyed that it takes forever to view the page. It's not really about the "Unlimited" space and bandwith cause still, you would end up being kicked off any server since you would be crippling the server.

Anyway, there's actually an easy way to resize your images using Photoshop. This should make the jobs of would-be-webmasters much easier. I've been there. I had a few experiences of my own where clients sends hundreds of high resolution images for their websites. This is good though so you can still play around the images. Besides, you can always make a high resolution image to a small one but not the other way around.

So without straying out the topic any further, lets dive into batch resizing images in Photoshop.

First you need to open Photoshop. I use a 64bit Photoshop CS4. You may have a different version but it should still work as the features we would be using is pretty much common for all versions.

Now you need to create another copy of all your images since we are resizing them down(Not unless you want to have the smaller files instead of the high-res ones for backup). On the backup files, you need to separate your images from the Landscape and Portrait. This makes sure that all images will have the same resolution. So just create a folder that's called Landspace and Portrait and paste the files inside those folders respectively.

Open the Actions tab by clicking on the play icon if you are using CS3 or CS4. If you don't have this tab visible, you can open the Actions tab by going to the Windows on the menu, and clicking Actions. or ALT+F9

When you have it open, click on the "Create New Action" button as shown in the mashup image below.

There will be a popup and give your action a name. In my case, I called it "Width 800px" and click Record.

It is important to note here that all your actions is being recorded by Photoshop. You would need to follow the instructions very carefully.

Now, Open a file. Again, Open a file, do not create one.

Next, Click on the Image Menu and select Image Size.

Since we are making an action to automate 800px width, type 800 and select pixels on the width and make sure Constrain Proportions is checked.

Click OK and save and close the file. 

Now it's done. Click the stop button on the Actions Tab.

Now comes the fun part. Automating it so we can just leave our computer while it does a batch process of resizing our images.

In Photoshop, click on file and select Automate >> Batch.

Under Actions, Select the recording we just created, Width 800px.

Under Source, Select Folder and browse to the folder where you want to resize the images to a width of 800px.

Click on Override Action Open Commands.

Now since we have a backup copy of the images we are resizing already, you can just select Save and Close under Destination.

That's it. When you click OK, Photoshop will go open each file on the folder, resize them to 800px width and save the file. Now you can leave your computer while you watch TV while Photoshop does it's magic. You can now convert your thousands of images without actually being in front of your computer. This will automate the process for you.

Of course, you need to resize the height of the portrait images as well. All you need to do is change one of the process stated above and edit the height instead of the width to 800px.

Well, that's it. You can leave a comment if you think this is helpful and share it to people.

 

We have been asked a few times before on why some of our hostees have been having problems with bandwith consumption. There was actually a blog that had a few gigs of bandwith consumption and it was not even half way through the month. Bandwith costs money that's for sure. Most people hosted on sites not offering unlimited bandwith would tend to have problems down the road with their hosting provider. Some hosting provider sells a gig of extra bandwith for a wapping $3 per month. Now, if you calculate that to say 2 gigs extra bandwith a month, that's $30 per year.

There's actually a quick fix for this that can save you a lot of bandwith. By a lot, I mean more than half. Our website saves up to 70% bandwith. Not only are you saving bandwith, your websites would load much faster when using it. Best of all, it's just 2 clicks away on your Cpanel. Most webmasters new to Cpanel tend to miss this very useful feature although the benefits are huge.

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Hello,

On the 25th of December, we have launched our Christmas event where we were giving away free domains. We have closed all possible entries yesterday and we have chosen our winners. We are giving away 2 domains this year… or wait, maybe we would do this again sometime.

Winners are Jamie or jamie-lee.org and Ewoishe or ewoishe.com. Please send us an email to support@jamtraxxsolutions.com with the domain you wish registered or renewed. If the domain is not registered with us, we need that domain transfered to us so we can renew it. 

We thank everyone for joining this event. Keep an eye on our facebook page for updates and events.