;nyquist plug-in
;version 3
;type generate
;name "Frequency Sweep"
;action "Producing frequency sweep..."
;info "by Adam Pope"

;control startf "Start Frequency (Hz)" real "" 1 0 20000
;control endf "End Frequency (Hz)" real "" 10000 0 30000
;control duration "Duration (secs)" real "" 20 1 300
;control type "Sweep scale [1=Linear, 2=Exponential]" int "" 1 1 2
;control other "I dont know what this does" real "" 5 0 100


(if (= type 2)
(fmosc startf (pwe duration endf other))
(fmosc startf (pwl duration endf other)) )


Copy this code into a frequencysweep.ny file and place it in your Audacity plug-ins directory.  You’ll need to restart audactity for it to register the new plug-in.  Once you’re back in, click on ‘Generate’ on the menu bar and select ‘Frequency Sweep’ from the list of options.  You will then be presented with a dialog containing sliders to play with the parameters of your sweep.  If any of the limits are too restricitve for you, simply change the values in the plug-in file!

If anybody can explain what the 3rd parameter of pwe and pwl does, I’d love to know!

No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h', needed by `Makefile'.

..then salvation is at hand.

Mac OS X Leopard Perl

The problem (in most cases) is that files are missing from the 5.8.8 Perl installation and are present in the older 5.8.6 version.  To correct the error you simply need to copy the files from the 5.8.6 directory to the 5.8.8 dir.  Execute the following command as root or using sudo:

cp /System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/*
/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/

You should then be able to install Perl modules happily.

If you are already a Firefox user, please go and update yourself

If you have never tried Firefox *shock* please give it a go! We promise you’ll love it.

You can pledge your support at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/ and they will let you know as SOON as you can download and help make a record.

Good luck to the Mozilla Firefox team from all of us at iZone!

Sorting by a Hash Key

The answer is really quite simple and very elegant. Let’s build up an example.

my @data;
push @data, {name => "Item A", price => 9.99 };
push @data, { name => "Item B", price => 4.99 };
push @data, { name => "Item C", price => 7.5};

We now have an array with 3 hashes in. Suppose we want to sort by price, how do we do it?

my @sorted =  sort { $a->{price} <=> $b->{price} } @data;

Perl’s build in sort function allows us to specify a custom sort order. Within the curly braces Perl gives us 2 variables, $a and $b, which reference 2 items to compare. In our case, these are hash references so we can access the elements of the hash and sort by any key we want. A description of the <=> operator can be found on Perlfect. Suppose we want to sort in reverse order?

my @sorted =  sort { $b->{price} <=> $a->{price} } @data;

Simple. You can test this by adding the following line to the bottom of the script.

print join "\n", map {$_->{name}." - ".$_->{price}} @sorted;

Which gives us:

Item B - 4.99
Item C - 7.5
Item A - 9.99

Whilst the phish gains no extra credibility by being hosted on the Home Office’s website, it does raise serious questions about how it got there in the first place and the security of the government’s websites. This is the department that knows everything there is to know about UK citizens after all and hackers have obviously found a back door somewhere!

“This is very embarrassing for the Home Office, having the Crime Reduction website hacked by cybercriminals is a bit like having a mugger hiding in the local police station nicking people’s wallets when they come in,” said Jacques Erasmus, head of malware research at Prevx.

May we suggest the web developers working for Her Maj’s government take time to read up on SQL prepared statements and how to properly escape SQL queries to prevent such attacks in the future.

Update: The Home Office removed the phishy content from the site early on Monday morning.

Update 2: The Government IT bods have been caught with their pants around their ankles again, this time with an editable interface left open to the public.

We named the Netcraft Toolbar as one of our Top Web Browsing Extensions and are delighted to be able to continue using it with the lastest version of our favourite web browser.

Thank you Netcraft

This is a delightfully ironic story on the back of news that Paypal is planning to block ‘unsafe’ browsers that do not implement a variety of security features to help prevent phishing. Perhaps they should try looking a little close to home first!

Potential for Phishing

The vulnerability allows a malicious attacker to construct an entirely new page which will appear to be on the paypal.com domain name. This fraudulent page could mimic the PayPal login and harvest account details.

And with a little more imagination you can do funny things like putting the WikiPedia XSS page onto PayPal:

The vulnerability has been reported to PayPal, lets hope they close the hole before people fall victim to this.

Digg, the quintessential Web 2.0 social news site has released an update to its comment system. This is a much needed update to a crumbling system. The previous incarnation use to kill my browser if their were more than a couple of hundred comments, the new system is faultless - even on the announcement of this news, which had almost 2,000 comments.

Overview of Changes

The new system is fairly comprehensive and leaves little untouched. The changes can be broken down into 4 key areas:

Presentation

The new comment system pages the comments in blocks of 50 and only shows the first level of conversation by default.

“The display of each page of comments is now managed by a processing queue, which allows the pages to load quickly without hammering your browser with all of the discussions and replies at once”

The new system also hides comments by un-important users, highlighting the interesting comments and “you can now click the Digg count to see the total number of Diggs and buries for each comment”.

Sorting

The Digg team have added an fascinating new sort order. Controversy.

“Controversial sort … highlights comments with the most divergent ratings from Digg users”

It’s also possible to filter comments made by you or your friends - very handy for finding the opinion of people you know among a sea of dross.

Posting

Posting is now easier than before. A bigger, expanding text area and larger font size make posting a comment more accessible and a 5 minute edit window lets you tweak your opinion.

And for the indecisive among you, you can also now change your up/down vote for any comment as much as you like.

Preferences

Logged in users can customise the default comment display to their hearts content.

“you can now choose how many discussions to initially load as well as whether discussions should be collapsed or expanded by default”

Congratulations to the Digg team for listening to the community and delivering a much needed improvement! Digg might not quite be dead. Yet.

Horizontal tabbed navigation created with standards compliant CSS and XHTML is becoming a very popular choice among web designers and developers. Our Tab Creator guides you through a range of options before delivering W3C standards compliant, semantic XHTML and CSS.

Stylish CSS based Horizontal Tabbed Menu

The iZone Tab Creator splits the tab creation process into 4 easy steps. You can then see an instant preview of your new menu before downloading the code and images. This step-by-step tutorial will walk you through the process of creating your menu:

Step 1: Select Your Tab Style

The iZone Tab Creator lets you create menus with a range of tab styles. In the initial release there are 6 styles to pick from. Simply click on your preferred style to select it and move on to step 2.

If you’ve got any suggestions for styles, leave us a note in the comments.

Step 2: Select Your Tab Color Scheme

Step 2 allows you to blend your menu into the look and feel of your site. Select the text and background color for the active and inactive tabs. A Photoshop style color picker is provided to help you explore ideas and a single tab preview lets you see how it will look. We have also provided 8 presets to get you started.

If you’ve already got hex values, you can simply copy and paste them into the text boxes.

Step 3: Add Tabs To Your Menu

Your menu needs to link to the pages on your site, right? Step 3 lets you add tabs to your menu, up to a maximum of 10. For each tab you can specify the text to display and the URL that the tab links to.

You can remove a tab by clicking on the cross on the left side. Tabs can be re-ordered by dragging and dropping the rows.

Step 4: Customise Your Menu’s Look and Feel

In the initial beta launch the options area looks a little bare, we’re working on adding cool new features all the time! Currently you have 3 options:

• The spacing between each of your tabs
• The width of the bottom border
• Whether your menu is aligned to the left or right.

If you have any ideas for options you’d like to see, please let us know in the comments!

Step 5: Preview Your New Menu

Step 5 provides an instant preview of the menu you have created. It isn’t 100% accurate to the code that gets generated, but gives you a good idea of the appearance. The main differences are:

• The preview only shows the first 3 tabs
• Each tab is fixed width, the real menu is fluid and expands to contain the text entered

Step 6: Download The Code

When you click the ‘Download’ button we generate the code and images needed for your menu, package it all up in one nice ZIP file and let you download it. Inside your Zip file you will find:

• tab_on.gif - The active tab background
• tab_off.gif - The inactive tab background
• tabs.html - HTML file containing code to navigation and related CSS

To use the menu on your site:

• Copy the HTML onto your page. You’ll need the <div> tag and its contents:

  <div id=“nav”>
  
  …
  
  </div>

• Copy the CSS. You can either place it in a <style> tag in the <head> of your page, or put it into an external style sheet (the preferred method).
• Upload your pages and the 2 images to your server

Future Development

We are still working on the Tab Creator and hope to add more cool features soon. If you have any ideas or you find any bugs in the tool, please let us know in the comments.

Credits

Thanks to Isocra for their ultra cool drag-n-drop script and Mark Kahn for his awesome color picker.

Using these tools, we will turn an otherwise dull image into something far more beautiful.

Although they are examples of ‘destructive’ Photoshoping, when dealing with small areas of images, especially photos, it is far easier and more effective to ‘paint in’ these effects rather than using masks to create similar results.

STEP 1

Select a photo that you want to touch up. I have picked an image i took on Brownsea Island in. It isn’t a bad photo but the colours aren’t as vivid as i remember them in real life.

STEP 2 - Dodge

The dodge tool is the first of a pallet of three that we will be exploring in this tutorial. It is located here..

The dodge tool works by lightening darkened areas under the brush. Its primary function is to bring back detail that you may have otherwise thought lost to the black.

I am using Brush Size 70 with 0 Hardness, and will be lightening the Midtones with an Exposure of 18.

In my experience, you wont often need to change from Midtones, but for extra tweaking feel free to change the mode and experiment.

In my image i want to being some of the detail lost in the sand back to life.

After a light brushing in the areas I want to save i have achieved the effect i want. Be careful you don’t overdo the dodging. It can lead to creation of noise.

STEP 3 - Burn

The Burn Tool as you may expect does the reverse of the dodge tool. It darkens objects. You may wonder about its uses, but it is fantastic at adding definition into photos. My favorite use is to revive distant, Grey horizon hills or mountains.

In my image, I want to restore that horizon and make some of the clouds look a little more ominous.

Ive got my Burn Tool set to a very soft brush (0 Hardness), varying the size as i need with the burn settings on Midtones and a very low exposure of 10.

STEP 4 - Sponge

Now for a little touch of Photoshop CS3 magic. The sponge tool has the ability to saturate or desaturate an area in order to restore or take away vivid colour.

The beauty of using the sponge tool over a hue/saturate adjustment is that i can can apply different levels of saturation with my brush depending on the areas i want to effect. So in this case i want to bring out the colours in the amazing sky, and more so in the sunset oranges.

To do this I will be using a soft brush (0 Hardness), of varying size. Mode set to Saturate and Flow set to 20.

So simply brush more over the areas you want to effect the most. To give you an idea of how I’ve applied the sponge,I saturated the blues slightly less than the reds and oranges. The water had the least amount of saturation.

And the results are fairly fantastic..

STEP 5 - Crop, Frame and Sign

A few final touches. I have cropped the image and added a black border to focus the viewer. I have also added a Palce/Date to the finished artical.

I hope you have enjoyed seeing these simple yet effective tools in action. Please feel free to post your own revitalized images and comment below.

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