Internet - Software

How Zone Alarm works, the free firewall for windows

Zone Alarm, the best freewall for Windows, you can download it from the download page

What is Zone Alarm?

As I explained in the previous article the systems of our machines don't defend us from connecting to internet without the user's knowledge. Zone Alarm protects us such connections and works for Windows.

What is a firewall and how does it work

State of the current firewalls (October 2009)

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the firewalls that come with Windows and Apple platforms leave much to be desired, both the first and the second does not defend us from applications that connect to the Internet without the user's knowledge, whether Trojan or commercial applications such as Adobe CS4 that connects to the Internet to verify the serial number of the suite.

I don't know the effectiveness of the firewall of Windows 7, because I have not had a chance to try, also don't know of existing firewalls in Linux, but something tells me that Linux is more effective.

In any case, there are firewalls very good, a good firewall, like Zone Alarm (see article) for Windows or Little Snitch for Apple, which I shall devote a later article, they prevent both incoming and outgoing connections.

Methods to access your computer over the Internet,
incoming and outgoing connections

There are two basic methods to access our computer, incoming connections and outgoing connections.

The first method would be through the open ports on our router or our computer, anyone through a scanner IP addresses can access your computer through these ports and take advantage of system vulnerabilities that exist for both Windows and Apple, it is important to keep these ports closed in both our router and computer. To better understand what these ports are you can read this article . How to do it escapes the scope of this article I have chosen to focus on Firewalls.

This method could be considered as incoming connection, the hacker from home via the Internet enters into our computer.

The second method is usually through a Trojan, named for the myth of the Trojan horse, who wrote Homer in the Odyssey and you know too well. You download an application from the Internet, which at first seems harmless, but once installed or run, with or without our consent, it connects to the Internet, reports that it is installed and ready to send confidential information of our activities or any wrongdoing.

This method can be considered as outgoing connection, this trojan sends a signal to the hacker from your machine. That is, the signal goes from your machine to the Internet.

A good firewall

So a good firewall then has to protect both the incoming and outgoing connections, the firewall that comes with the Apple Mac OS X system protects against incoming but not against outbound, and the Windows alike. Hence they are needed as Little Snitch software for the first or Zone Alarm for the second.

Little Snitch is very easy to use and Zone Alarm depends on how you installed is harder or easier. When installing it asks us our level depending on this computer and acts accordingly.

AVG Free antivirus 9 available,
how to setup

AVG Free antivirus 9 is available, you can download it from here

Differences between a CMS and a custom built Website

Both a CMS as a custom built Website share one thing in common, both systems have an administration, a rear part where an administrator modifies the content displayed on the front. In this administration also edit content, the administrator can delete, modify or duplicate items. These systems are called self-managed websites because a user without much knowledge can manage the content of a website.

To build a self-manageable web there are two possibilities, with a CMS or custom built.

CMS are pre-built systems that are valid for any general purpose site. Being a general purpose site, the administrator level has to be a little high to edit the content. CMS can be valid for a site like a newspaper or for an online store, the structure and content should be different as the work of the administrator.

The custom built website focuses management for the data structure that depends on the content, ie, the administration will be different depending on whether the site is a newspaper or a shop. For example, adding a product to store the system will ask the price of the product, in an article in a newspaper the system will ask for the name of the author. So, in the custom built website, the system asks with a form, all the particular data, and the level of the administrator can be low. He just need to full forms.

El mejor antivirus gratuíto
AVG Free antivirus (sorry, no translation yet)

AVG Free antivirus, es, hasta la fecha de hoy, el mejor antivirus que he probado para PC, lo mejor; es gratis, puedes descargar la versión gratuíta (para Windows) de aquí

En esta web me dedico a comentar varios antivirus, porque, desgraciadamente, están muy extendidos. Siempre hay que distinguir entre virus y gusanos/troyanos, para detectar y eliminar gusanos/troyanos recomiendo el RemoveIT.

En estas páginas también he recomendado el Avira Antivir, pero al poco tiempo salió el AVG y por mi experiencia puedo decir que AVG me ha detectado más virus que el Avira.

How Apple Automator works

Automator, Apple's robot, powerful and underutilized

Apple has a tool called Automator that is present in the system from the Tiger version (Mac OS X 10.4) but I do not know anyone who uses it. So this article aims to introduce a simple example of its use so that anyone who reads it is encouraged to use it.

Easy video trimming

Avidemux does its job well and easy. Is OpenSource and is available for all platforms. You can download it here .

Working with video I found that there is not a simple and effective way for small operations in video files. I still have not found simple software that works on Mac or PC (if there is, let me know, please) that can cut, copy and paste video. The closest tool I've found is the Quicktime Player in the mac platform, with registered version.

Grandperspective helps to locate free space on the mac hard disk

Grandperspective is a small but useful tool to graphically view the space occupied by files on our Mac, is free and can be downloaded here (only for Mac OS X)

Many times an unknown number of files are filling your hard disk. When the cleaning hour has come, is very helpful to know which of these files take up more space and to assess whether it is worthwhile to keep them.

What is a port?
What means closing or opening the ports?

If we imagine that the Internet is like a lawn sprinkler through which passes a large volume of data ports holes would be like a water sprinkler. Internet runs a data flow (water), in that great stream of mixed data travels all services (such as our e-mail, our chat messenger, or whatever we're going down, internet is the great flow and services travel in that stream.

When we connect to our internet provider assigns us a number of ip, this number is unique on the Internet for the duration of our connection among all computers connected to internet in the world, our number is unique. And it's something like 198.123.434.234, that is, four numbers, grouped into three digits.

When we have a router working, it is responsible for filtering each service and refer to your software. For example if you open your email program while we're down some Internet router is responsible for filtering email on port 110 and what we're going down the port 21.

Easy Video Editing

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Mpeg Streamclip es una pequeña pero útil herramienta para editar video, es gratuíto y puedes descargarlo de aquí (para Mac OS X o para Windows)

Otra vez otro artículo para ayudar un poco a los que se inician en este mundo del video. Una de las cosas que da más quebraderos de cabeza a la hora de trabajar con video es la variedad de codecs y formatos de archivo que hay.

Este artículo está destinado a montajes de video sencillos (tipo copia y pega), pues para montajes más complicados ya existen aplicaciones más completas y por ende más complejas, como el Final Cut para Apple o el Adobe Premiere.

Free games with Gametap

GameTap provides some very interesting games for free, you can visit the website by clicking here

Ideal for any Sunday afternoon. GameTap is a small application that lets you select from a variety of games to download to your computer. There is a version for Apple Mac but do not have many games than the one for the Wintel platform.

Once downloaded and installed the program you can navigate between different categories of games. One of these categories is free games, which provides a great selection.

Cheat sheets for Illustrator to download

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Adobe Illustrator un buen programa de diseño pero un poco complicado

Adobe Illustrator es muy buen programa para diseño gráfico. En España durante muchos años los diseñadores gráficos trabajamos con Freehand, de la empresa Macromedia. Pero desde que Adobe compró Macromedia y decidió potenciar el uso del Illustrator en detrimento del Freehand, el cual acabará muriendo, nos hemos ido pasando al Illustrator.

Adobe Fireworks también es muy buen programa para grafismo pero su gran inconveniente es que no trabaja en cuatricomía, si fuera así, no haría demasiada falta usar el Illustrator, que a mi parecer, tiene demasiadas opciones, muchas de ellas que no tocaremos jamás.

Para que esta transición no sea tan difícil os dejo para descargar unas fichas de referencia que estoy seguro os resultarán útiles para manejar el programa.

Creating patterns in Adobe Illustrator

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Con Adobe Illustrator podemos crear rellenos complejos pero hay que tener en cuenta una serie de puntos

Para crear rellenos complejos que formen un patrón en Illustrator creamos un relleno partiendo de un dibujo. Tenemos que diseñar este dibujo teniendo en cuenta que se repetirá siguiendo un rectángulo o "encuadre".

Dependiendo del encuadre que utilizamos nos creará una teselación o patrón diferentes.

The best plug-ins for Firefox

Firefox, Our nice browser.

One of the advantages that Firefox has over other search engines is the possibility to add new characteristics or upgrades, thanks to available plug-ins and other compliments. They can be activated or deactivated from the tools/plug-ins menu. They can be easily installed by visiting https://addons.mozilla.org/.

Here I will outline what I think is most worthwhile.

Internet Explorer is no longer only available
to Legal Windows Users

Explorer 7, both loved and hated can be downloaded here.

A few months ago Internet Explorer 7 for Windows hit the market, but it was only available for systems operating with legally installed Windows. Recently this changed and computers working on pirate versions of Windows have now gained access. Why?

Well, it seems that Microsoft didn't want to let go of its piece of the Internet pie. It turns out that the majority of Window users are on pirate installations and Microsoft decided that they would rather have all those pirate Windows users navigating their way throught cyberspace on Internet Explorer as opposed to other browers.

Microsoft has some common sense.

Making slideshows for iDVD;
Photopresenter

PhotoPresenter, software for creating slideshows, you can download it from here.

I have a friend who travels a lot, and when traveling he makes many photographs. Prior to the existence of digital cameras and memory cards of 2Gb, we used to do as much as 64 photographs per trip. But now we can do hundreds of them.

The iPhoto or the iDVD applications will do, I thought, but although I knew the iPhoto could make slideshows, it can not export to iDVD.

I found a PC software that did exactly what I wanted, in theory, but in practice it did not, it failed with the music. The music was muted on the DVD. 

There are alternatives to using Microsoft Office;
OpenOffice and NeoOffice.

OpenOffice, is an alternative to Microsoft Office in the Windows environment, you can download it from here.

NeoOffice, the new suite for Mac OS X can be downloaded from here.

RemoveIT is a FREE up-to-date antivirus

RemoveIT is a free software program that does a great job. It removes trojans and worms. You can download it (for Windows) from here.

Many PC users are tired of continually dealing with the bombardment of viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, etc, etc. Many have decided they would rather switch then fight and have moved to Apple. Although the Apple platform is better against viruses, the virus developers primary focus is to develop viruses designed to attack common computers, with the Wintel PC being the most popular.

If someday Apple computers are more common than PC's, I think they will be the next objective of viruses. But today, viruses are exclusively for PCs.

Converting video easily with FFmpeg or Handbrake

FFmpeg is also a good tool for converting video, but it has so many options that using it is more complicated, you can download it from here (for Mac OS X).

Due to the number of devices that exist for playing video and audio, there are also different file formats. There are the .MPEG file (DVD), the .MOV (quicktime file), and the .AVI (video windows) and the new MP4 (for mobile or iPods). There are many more, but these are the common ones. What happens when we convert a DVD to play on an iPod? Well, we have to convert the file in the DVD (MPEG) format to anything that the iPod can read.

This process in a computer was a complicated process, we had to extract the MPEG DVD with some software (usually a commercial one) convert it to another format considering the number of frames per second, the size of frame and other concepts not too much interesting when the only thing we want is to watch the DVD in our iPod.

Executing Classic (Mac OS 9) on an Intel Mac

SheepShaver the Classic emulator for Mar or Windows, you can download it here