Thomas Le

MASSIVE Savings on CS5.5 Student and Teacher Edition!

Thomas Le — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:50:09 +0000

Until March 2, 2012 Adobe is offering their CS 5.5 packages at an ADDITIONAL 80% off. Normally retail priced CS5.5 Master Suite Collection is $2599. Student and Teacher $899. I just bought it for $179.80.

Terms and Conditions

Adobe Store

Enter SAVE80EDU at checkout.

Acrobat X Pro Student and Teacher Edition $23.80 (Retail $449, Student/Teacher $119)
Photoshop CS5 Extended Student and Teacher Edition $39.80 (Retail $999, Student/Teacher $119)
Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard Student and Teacher Edition $59.80 (Retail $1299, Student/Teacher $299)
Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium Student and Teacher Edition $89.80 (Retail $1899, Student/Teacher $449)
Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium Student and Teacher Edition $89.80 (Retail $1699, Student/Teacher $449)
Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium Student and Teacher Edition $89.80 (Retail $1799, Student/Teacher $449)
Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection Student and Teacher Edition $179.80 (Retail $2599, Student/Teacher $899)

Check out their site for more information. These are great deals for a limited time. Get them while it’s available! Ends March 2, 2012

ALL of these suites are perpetual licenses and CAN be used for commercial purposes.

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/000/25f26dd.html#main_education_discount

Keyboard Shortcuts for Manipulating and Navigating Text

Thomas Le — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:57:25 +0000

There are various keyboard shortcuts that one can use to navigate and manipulate text very quickly and easily using only your keyboard. Some of these shortcuts include Copying, Cutting and Pasting. These are fundamental shortcuts that everyone should know because they are virtually universal in all text programs as well as in your operating system and will make your life easier.

For copying simply select the text you want to copy and press CTRL and C at the same time. Then move to the place you want to paste it and press control V. If you want to remove the text from the original spot you can Cut it by pressing CTRL and X and then paste it using CTRL and C.

You can navigate text quickly by using CTRL. Simply hold down the CTRL button and use the arrow keys and you will move by a single word. A word is defined by being separated by a space. Sometimes if there are hyphens this method will go to the hyphen, but in general it will move by the word separated by a space.

To select the text as you move simply hold SHIFT and use the arrow keys and you will move by a single character. If you want to select by a whole word you can hold SHIFT and CTRL and press the arrow keys and you will move by an entire word.

Getting quickly from the top to the bottom of the document you can use CTRL and HOME or CTRL and END, respectively.

All of these and a few others are illustrated in a video I recorded recently that you can see below.

Thank you for reading and give me a thumbs up and subscribe if you like my tutorial. More will come shortly.

What is Binary?

Thomas Le — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:53:38 +0000

“There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

Do you get it? If not, then this article is for you! Binary is the basic ‘language’ of computers. Common analogies are on and off switches. In binary, on and off are represented with 1 and 0 respectively.

Computers use bytes to store data. A byte is represented by 8 bits. A bit is a single 0 or 1. The highest number value a byte can go up to is 255. Technically it’s 256 values because 0 is a value which is a power of 2.

For example 0000 0010 is 2. To figure out a value in binary one must multiply each number from right to left by the power of two. This illustration will give a better picture of what I mean.

This is just a basic introduction to what binary is. I hope this helped you in understanding what people mean when they talk about binary. Please leave comments below if you have specific questions about binary you would like me to address.

Ludum Dare 22! Post Mortem

Thomas Le — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:09:53 +0000

So a couple weeks ago I met a group of 5 other people at Panera Bread in Mira Mesa, CA and we discussed working as a team for this Ludum Dare competition. Ludum Dare is a competition that is held 3 times a year and does not have a cash prize at all. The object of the competition is to create a game in 72 hours as a group or if you enter individually 48 hours. This time at Ludum Dare 22 there were 891 entries combined with the Jam(group) and Compo(single). Only 174 were Jam entries.

We discussed the types of games we liked to play and our skills we could bring to the group and it turns out we had 3 programmers and 3 artists. The competition took place over a weekend at 6pm PST Friday evening until 6pm that Monday evening. We decided to go with a top down game and we used Unity 3d as the engine for the game using c# as the language. Our artists used Maya and 3ds Max for the art assets.

Keep in mind I had only met this group a week prior and then spent just about 60-72 straight hours with them in the same vicinity. We, of course, took sleeping breaks and ate because there’s only so long you can go without sleep before you are useless at anything you might try to do.

By Monday afternoon we had turned out something pretty nifty, in my opinion.

Was it polished? No.

Was it finished? No.

Was it working and playable? Definitely.

But it was something we did in 3 days with very little sleep and with almost complete strangers, and that says a lot.

You can check out the version we submitted here. We are going to polish it up and put another version out here in a couple of weeks. We all have day jobs and simply cannot dedicate all our free time to fixing this project.

The point of Ludum Dare is to be creative and to create something. We collaborated an idea, worked together and produced a working game. That is a tremendous accomplishment.

Throughout the competition we kept a blog on the Ludum Dare site check it out here.

All in all I had an absolutely awesome experience. I met new people, proved to myself I had what it takes to be a valuable part of a team and best of all I created a game!

Please leave comments below on what you think about this game. I will post an update when we get the more polished version of the game done in a couple weeks. Also, keep a look out for a preview of another game I am working on using Unity3d!

Prevent Spam With Mailinator

Thomas Le — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 05:24:35 +0000

Have you ever wanted to sign up for something that is ‘free’ but didn’t want to be subjected to the spam that might accompany that membership? There is this service called mailinator which let’s you use any randomly made up email and then check that email instantly, for free and without a password.

For example if I want to sign up for a free service of some kind, say a newsletter or something to see if you really will like it but don’t want to give away your real email. You simply signup with an email like dontspamme@mailinator.com (you can literally use that email address, but it might be a commonly used one too). When you sign up and it says that they sent you an email simply go to http://www.mailinator.com and type in dontspamme in the username box and it will check that email.

Keep in mind that anyone that knows the username can check that mailbox. There is no password required. You could use a random sequence of letters like ertyuiop@mailinator.com and just check it right away not having to worry about remembering it later.

Computer Terms You Should Know

Thomas Le — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 06:44:58 +0000

A little over 17 years ago I started working with computers. Like most people when they first start with computers I was clueless with all these terms and acronyms accompanied with using computers. If you are a newbie or maybe even low-intermediate user I hope to enlighten you of at least one new term covered in this article.

OS: Operating System. The essential piece of software to use any type of computer. Whether it be a graphing calculator to the computer you used to get this article there is an OS instructing the computer how to turn the information it receives into something you understand..

Tech Fact: Microsoft DID NOT steal the idea of a GUI (Graphical User Interface) from Apple, in fact, they both got the idea from Xerox who developed the GUI and the mouse. Microsoft just released their product a little before the Macintosh was released and a lot of people hate them for that.

Install/Setup: These terms are used almost interchangeably. They are used when a new piece of software is put on the computer. Most of the time a program will have a ‘setup.exe’ program which when executed will ‘install’ all the files on your computer.

Download: This term is used when you are getting a file FROM a Web site. DOWN means FROM server.

Upload: Web masters should know this term more than an every day user. This means YOU are sending files TO a Web server. UP means TO server.

Hard Drive: This is the physical piece of hardware that holds all the information. Information is stored using binary. This is the only thing that a computer can understand. Binary is a system that only has 2 states, on or off, 1 or 0. This is also referred to as a base 2 system. Our decimal number system is a base 10. Another popular number system in the computer world is called Hexadecimal, this is a base 16 system where the values are expressed as 0-9 and A-F, A being 10 and so on.

Byte: A byte is made up of 8 bits which is a 1 or a 0 in the binary system. A single byte with a value of 0 would look like this 0000 0000 (the space is added for readability, to see the numbers in blocks of 4). To count in binary you must know the powers of 2. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. Using these values and switching on and off numbers in the byte can produce a number from 0 to 255, or 256 values (including the 0).

I explain more about binary in it’s own article.

Kilobyte (KB): Because data storage is measured in bytes which is a base 2 system a kilobyte is made up of 1024 bytes. Most of the time it is rounded down to 1000 for simplicity. 1024 is 2¹⁰

Megabyte (MB): Megabyte.

Central Processing Unit: This is the ‘brain’ of the computer that determines the speed of the computer.

Megahertz (MHz): 1,000,000 (one million) hertz. This measures the amount of cycles or lines of code the CPU can execute per second. 800 MHz has 800,000,000 cycles per second.

Gigahertz (GHz): Gigahertz. 1,000,000,000 (one billion) hertz.

This is just skimming the surface of all the techie computer terms that are out there. If there are terms that you think should be on this list please leave a comment below. If you heard a term and would like to know what it means, please leave a comment and I will add it.

Back Up Your Data with Mozy

Thomas Le — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 02:48:20 +0000

Backing up your data is an extremely important part of using your computer. With the threat of computer viruses, spyware, and other things that can go wrong with your computer it is a very devastating event when your computer crashes and you lose all your data. This is remedied by having a current backup of your data. You can be sure that your precious pictures or that important report for work or school is safe if you use a backup system.

I personally use Mozy. Mozy is a piece of software that backups your data in the background without you having to think about it. You get 2GB for free and the prices start at $3.95/mo + $0.50/GB so it scales with how much data you actually use.

Backing-Up Your WordPress Database!

Thomas Le — Fri, 27 May 2011 05:33:39 +0000

I logged in today and saw that WordPress is updated. This brings up the issue of backing up your database. It is good practice ANYWAY, even if you are not upgrading the script, to make backups of your precious data. I learned the hard way when my server crashed back in April and I lost my WordPress database completely. I found a link to a site that gives you information on how to backup your database using a cronjob. Basically, a cronjob is a scheduled task that can run at given intervals. This can be setup via a control panel or via an SSH terminal.

http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/cron/

I ran into the problem on my VPS. I didn’t have mutt installed by default and because of this I thought about modifying the script to allow for daily backups to be made and the previous one to be deleted. If you are interested in this script contact me and I’ll be happy to give it to you.

Get Up Close And Personal With Your SAVE Button

Thomas Le — Thu, 19 May 2011 07:12:53 +0000

How many times have you gotten half way down the page typing and something has happened that made you lose the whole thing? It has happened to me many times (unfortunately). If you are using Microsoft Word it does have a back up and recovery feature, but it isn’t foolproof, you still can lose a lot of work.

There are many other programs that may be used on a daily basis that don’t have this recovery feature. One rule of thumb is to save right away and then save every 5 or so minutes. I suggest every time you are done with another paragraph or a big change click that save button or press CTRL + S.

Get to know your keyboard shortcuts and use them. It saves a lot more time pressing two keys, the CTRL + S keys (for you Mac people Command + S), with your fingers already near them then to raise your hand up, put it on the mouse and move it to the save button. It’s painless and easy.

A lot of programs, like Microsoft Word, have fail-safes. In Word’s case it’s an auto save so if something was to happen and the computer restarted usually some of the lost data will be recovered. Other programs, like TextPad, don’t have an auto save.

Don’t be upset again with losing valuable data. Use your save button often.

Frequently Used Emoticons

Thomas Le — Thu, 19 May 2011 06:35:42 +0000

Emoticons are very useful and commonly used. They are simple, easy to remember, ways to express certain feelings in an email with text.

A : or = are usually used for the eyes and variations of ( and ) make a lot of the emotions. I will just display the = as the face, but just keep in mind it can be switched out for the colon :.

=D – Very Happy
=) – Smile
=( – Sad
=0 – Surprised
=P – Razz/Sticking out your tongue
=`( – Cry
>=) – Evil Grin
– Wink
=S – Worried

In the past several years (I originally wrote this in 2002) several of the chat programs that are most popular actually convert these emoticons to actual images to further display emotion in the text. I am personally partial to the equal sign as the face and the ( and ) as the mouth.

Certain programs, such as Skype and Yahoo Messenger don’t even require you to remember how they are typed out. They give you a list of all the emoticons you could ever want (and several you probably will never use.)