I’ve had this book for a while but haven’t had a chance to review it for this site.

Access Denied is a review of different methods of filtering Internet content across 40 countries including North Korea, Myanmar, and quite a few others.

It’s broken up alphabetically by country. Each country’s section is devoted to explaining how that country’s government blocks, doesn’t block, or otherwise restricts access to the Internet at large.

Most people are only familiar with China’s “Great Firewall” but other countries institute similar methods of controlling their populace.

For example, the section on North Korea states that, as a whole, North Korea is a “virtual black hole in cyberspace” but that an intranet exists in the capital of Pyongyang of just over 30 websites.

The section goes on to state “key indicators” of life expectancy, literacy rate, and several other factors. North Korea has a life expectancy of 64 years, and a literacy rate of 99%. Each country summary ends with several pages of bibliographic information for further reading.

Other sections are just as informative and state the type of content each country prohibits and why, which countries have state run ISPs, and other fun facts about where the country is. You can use the data to find out how one country fares against its neighbors.

Access Denied (the book)

Stylemac is all about open source graphic design programs. And, of course, the main one of them all is Blender. From Big Buck Bunny to Project Orange and everything in between, Blender is a very versatile imaging program.

Of course, this doesn’t mean it’s easy to use, the old adage of “easy to play, difficult to master” comes to mind.

I’ve been using Blender for a couple years now and thought I knew a bit of everything Blender had to offer, but I was wrong. I picked up this book by Allan Brito figuring it’d be a refresher in things I already knew, but I was wrong.

Not only does it show a few things I already knew, but a bit more on things I didn’t know. Even my mother, who has used Blender far longer than I have, was able to learn a great deal from this book.

The primary focus of the book is on creating building interiors and lighting effects, but the lessons learned can be put to different uses within Blender.

In all, I’d say this is a great book for new Blender users and veterans alike.

Link to Packt page for the book.

The Ruby on Rails web application framework continues to catch more and more interest. Many improvements and added features in the recently-released Ruby on Rails 1.0 gave the community another boost.

Now Apple released an article which explains how to develop Ruby on Rais applications under Mac OS X. The even concentrates on using Textmate:

It should come as no surprise that Mac OS X is a favored platform for Rails development. Rails and its supporting cast of web servers and databases thrive on the rich Mac OS X environment. The premier text editor favored by legions of Rails programmers everywhere is TextMate, a Cocoa application. And all members of the Rails core development team work with Macs.

I’ve read several Rails tutorials (and even completed some of them), and this one has much in common with the other ones available: it concentrates on creating a simple application, it tries to explain the basic ideas behind RoR. One good thing is that this article also introduces methods like ‘belongs to’, ‘has many’ or business logic, which are things not all Ruby on Rails beginner tutorials try to explain.

Developer.Apple.com: Ruby on Rails

Adobe Illustrator is one of those Applications many people use, but hardly really use. People often just use it to do basic vector editing, and some aren’t even capable of doing just that – as Illustrator is quite different compared to Photoshop but the partly similar Interface suggests otherwise

Veerle wrote/recorded a tutorial which explains how to use the pen tool in illustrator and how bezier curves work.

Illustration, from sketch to finish

Community MX, which specialises on Macromedia application tutorials, is offering free tutorials during the final week of 2005. Over 1400 articles and tutorials will be free to read. You still need to be a member to download support files and use the forums.

Flash, Fireworks, ColdFusion, Freehand and tutorials for Dreamweaver MX