→ Design for the Web
→ Digital Animation

as the new academic year is about to begin - I would just like to promote the 2 courses I run at TowerHamletsCollege (London, Poplar) - enrolment will start the first week of september so if you’re interested - be quick and get in touch :)

if webdesign or animation are not your thing - you should have a look at Zak’s website and the courses he runs: 2d3d Visualisation and Digital Aided Fine Art

All our courses are 1 year access courses and for adults, ie you will need to be over 19 years old to be able to apply. The courses are part time - held 2 days a week. Please feel free to get in touch with us directly if you have any questions about the course content and entry requirements.

→ get in touch with me about the webdesign and animation courses.
→ get in touch with Zak about the 2d3d Visualisation and Digital Aided Fine Art courses

For college information and other enrolment related information - please contact Tower Hamlets College via the advice line on 020 7510 7510 or email advice (at) tower.ac.uk.

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty - 15/10/08

to quote the site:

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

For now I just want to support this action and I am planning to write a dedicated post for the day - come on, everyone - let’s show strength in numbers ;)

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

1. go to your server control panel and open the database via phpMyAdmin.
   You will see your database listed by its name on the left hand side - click its name to access the WordPress data. This is only necessary if you have more than one database listed here - in my case, as you can see on the screenshot here - there is only one database and all tables are listed.
   
2. you will see the different tables, by default preceeded with the ‘wp_‘ - look for the ‘wp_users‘ table and click the browse button as shown below.
   
3. to access the specific user details, ie the table data - click ‘browse’
   
4. once you can see the exisiting users’ details - you can edit the specific details for the admin user as shown below:
   
5. you will see all fields and values for the admin user and you can now type in your new password:
   
6. as the last step before saving our new password - choose ‘MD5′ from function drop down menu
   
7. click ‘go’ to confirm and save your new password - and you’re done :-)
   Returning to the previous screen - you will notice your password has changed, now encoded shown again as a string of letters, numbers and symbols.
8. NOTE: you might need to delete the cookie for the site in order for the changes to take effect !

To give credit where credit is due - this is the page that helped me getting this problem solved: WordPress@ T2

once again - the ALA team want our data. Though forms or surveys can be a pain - this one is a must for all of us being webgeeks :-)

to quote the site:

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

That was until a gorilla came along introducing a new alternative which looks very promising ;-)

When clearleft announced their SilverBack application some weeks ago - it sounded like a wonderful solution which would be able to make this process a lot easier and more affordable. With their beautiful application logo, a stunning webpage - they managed to get all of us webgeeks very excited and eagerly awaiting the launch. Today - that time had come and as expected - it was worth the wait :-)

With a lot of building work going on around me today I was utterly distracted from my scheduled work and had a good excuse to go ahead and download and test the trial version - and I have to say it’s absolutely lovely :) What a well thought through and beautifully designed application. The ease of use after watching Andy Budd’s video demo (shown below - as on the SilverBack site) was wonderful, very intuitive and completely discreet. With no usertesting organised I could only run a test on myself to see the final output. The quality of the video is excellent, the export options just right for most purposes and I know already that I will be using SilverBack in the near future.

An additional bonus for me was to see that a percentage of the profits will go towards saving the gorillas. At such an affordable price already - that now makes the purchase a must :)

A huge compliment to the guys from clearleft for all their work on this great new application. I am really looking forward to start using it and incorporating it into my project cycle.

Silverback screencast from Jeremy Keith on Vimeo.

as found on CollegeHumor

It was nice to see some familiar faces and see some of the good ideas and projects covered in the report. I doubt this will do much to change attitudes, opinions and ultimately working methods out there - but it is good to get a conversation going and get the information out there. I was particularly chuffed to see one of the projects from the INMD workshop featured. The ‘iBrow’ image browser was a fantastic idea and its team (George Ornbo, Lisa Haskel, Alex Beech) did a brilliant job in implementing it - I do hope it will be used in future in some shape or form.

I am embedding the original video here for viewing - the clip is featured with a brief article on the Channel 4 website.