Ahad Bokhari

I’ve been working out for the past 15 years of my life.  Throughout that time i went from a lean and athletic body, to now a more bulky physique.  Before i started this web development business I used to be a personal trainer, and an amateur bodybuilder.  I feel i have essentially been through all the motions (especially in the last 6-8 years) .

I left serious bodybuilding about 4 years ago to pursue a more lucrative career, but am now starting to get back into the gym. It is a great feeling to release work tension, and see your body transform.  The main question is how to achieve you goals and benefit from your hard work day in and out.    Most of you have probably seen people in the gym with flawless exercise routines, but then after six months you see them, and you expect to see a transformation, but they look exactly the same as the did before.

I have been approached several times by men and women, who have asked me how to consistently make quality muscle gains.  On the women side they ask me how do i develop a more rounded buttox (squats silly!!) and the men are always complaining about wanting to bulk up just that little bit more (eat smart, eat big to get big)  Well it all depends on your goals - Are you trying to gain, or develop a leaner more ripped structure?  In my limited knowledge i would like to share some pointers on how to gain quality muscle in this article.

15 WAYS TO GAIN QUALITY MUSCLE MASS:

1. Eat, Eat Big, Eat Smart, Eat Healthy but flippin eat!!  Don’t be stupid and eat fatty foods that are high in cholesterol;  Instead have foods such as boiled vegetables and boiled poultry.  Chicken is great, but when it comes to red meat be careful of the saturated fats (Try and go for undercut meat) If you work out and think you are going to gain with a kick ass workout routine - Think again, no food equals no gains, and worst of all bad calories equals bad or ugly looking gains.
2. Develop a healthy carbohydrate intake.  Remember you have to give energy to you muscles for you workout, but remember too may carbohydrates will release huge amounts of insulin and turn your body into a fat storing machine.  For professional bodybuilders who store fat, that is ok because they know how to lose it as well.  (Believe you me losing fat is very difficult!!)   Eat more carbs before you workout to fuel your body, and make sure not to eat as many before you sleep..
3. Develop a healthy Protein intake.  Eat your proteins during the day and ESPECIALLY after your workout.  The more protein the better and if you ingest too much you are just going to shit it all out.  If you dont have enough protein and your muscles will look flat in the morning when you wake up.  Keep your pump by eating proteins….keep the pump baby!
4. Cut down on your fat intake.  That means no ice creams, soda or candy.  Yeah i know how boring is that, but if you want quality gains then try it out and see yourself in a couple of weeks.  I guarantee you a difference.
5. Let go of your “ego” when you go to the gym.  Leave that “ego” outside of the gym or for when you get into some nice clothes for a date or party.  Honestly its best not to have an “ego” at all, but its just human nature huh??  Yeah you are going to see peeps in the gym lifting alot of weight, but don’t worry, it’s not about how much you lift but your angle and how many consistent repetitions you do.  Find a mediumish weight, stick to it and slowly progress upwards.  Remember the “Pump” is what you are looking for.  You are not going to the gym to show peeps how much you can lift or how powerful you are!!  Btw….I know this from experience, and how wrong I was!!!!
6. Understand the “angle” of each workout and what angle is best for you.  Don’t do exercies with the wrong angle as you will hit parts of your body that you are not meant to(for that particular exercise).  For example if you do One Armed Rows with your knee up on a bench for support that would not hit the right “angle” of you back.  Light - medium weight, good form and angles = PROGRESSION to the next level, and a higher weight bracket!!
7. Try and emulate someone’s body that you like.  For example if you like Arny, buy his book and see what he says about training and dieting properly.  Watch Arny’s “Pumping Iron” and see how he slowly but steadily reached his targets.  If you do watch the movie you will understand that Arny, or any other serious bodybuilder(s) are not dumb.  Quite the contrary they are very very very smart and well educated on their subjects.  Just because they are big doesn’t necessarily mean they are dumb.  If you are big and people think you are dumb, thats great - USE IT TO YOUR ADVANTAGE!
8. Be patient.  You arent going to gain over night.  It’s like filling up a glass of water drop by drop, and each drop is just as important as the next.  Patience is the key to success in any industry.  When the iron is hot strike and strike hard!
   What i am trying to say is that don’t let the weight defeat you mentally, but  rather you defeat the weight…
9. Don’t be an Upper Body Builder (or muscle builder or fitness dude).  Train your legs, train your legs, train your legs and flippin train your legs.  If you want to spur your upper body to grow then this is the right move.  How many big dudes have you seen with small legs.  That can be a common syndrome many times.  I am from Pakistan and Pakistani people lack quality “leg” genes.  Americans and Europeans are prone to having naturally natural legs.  You will also see black men with thinner types of legs, but hey them boys can “jump” like its not even funny!!  The black gene is physically the strongest gene in the world, hands down!!
10. Get 8 hours of rest on your workout days.  You need to sleep in order for you body to grow properly!  6 hours won’t cut it and you will feel “burnt out”.
11. Set short and long term goals for yourself. Understand what you want before you start working out. Consult a trainer, books magazines or whatever you can get your hands on!!  The internet is a great start.
12. Don’t think you know it all.  Talk to people about their diets and training routines.  Learn from people who you think deserve to be listened to.
13. Discipline yourself.  Mentally and physically.  Without discipline and focus you will never achieve your goals.
14. Drink plenty of water.  The body is made up of 70% water.  Without water your muscles will look flat.  Remember keep the “pump”!!!
15. Go into the the gym and train for no more than 45-50 minutes.  Develop an intense workout with medium weights (at first) with minimal rest between exercises.  Intensity will help your muscles to grow the proper way and you will explode.  For example if you are working shoulders out do your exercises with high intensity and then say “TATA” to shoulders and walk outta of the gym.  The motto is intensity and “TATA to shoulders, bi’s, tri’s or whatever you are training!!!  “TA” flippin “TA”, not looking back to see what other peeps are doing.  In and out baby!

*  Never overtrain otherwise you will feel “burnt out” too, and not grow.  You must rest your body and muscles.  2 days on and 1 day off.  Try that for now.  Every other day is also good for making good gains, but it all depends on your individual metabolism and recovery.  If you don’t feel like training on a particular day, DON’T, but don’t lose sight of you short and long term goals.

A NOTE ON SUPPLEMENTS:

Use supplements to help aid your body nutrition.  You should use supplements at any level.  I mean eating 5 chicken breasts can be difficult, but dowing one protein shake with 40 grams of protein is pretty easy!  The basic supplements you need are:

• Whey Protein (On, Designer Whey Protein, APN, Weider, Nitro Tech)
• Creatine (Cell Tech, No Explode, regular white creatine)
• Amino Acids (APN, Prolab, etc etc)

Good luck!!!

With time Flash will be fully searchable by Google and Yahoo. This is just the beginning as Google reaches to find a solution to this common problem.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog

about the Searchable SWF integration.

You can read more about it at Accuracast or the original Google post.

Thanks to the Adobe Developer Library for the example:

Convolution Filter:Convolution filtering is typically a part of multiple visual effects in most, if not all, pixel-editing applications. This is not surprising because using the filter effectively requires at least a working knowledge of matrices. The transformation capabilities made possible by matrices calculate pixel color values by combining values from adjacent pixels to produce a wide variety of image effects. These effects include, but are not limited to, blurring, sharpening, embossing, edge detection, and
brightness.

The UEFA Euro Cup came and went, just like that.  With back to back games there was hardly any time for the players to rest up in between matches.  I would have loved to see a Russia - Germany or Spain - Turkey final but Turkey and Russia lost in the semi final stages.  Hats off to Spain for playing immaculately, and keeping their composure against Germany (A gargantuan team).  Well done Torres (man of the match and only goal scorer), you have indeed proved yourself a top class player once again.

Designing for different resolutions can be tricky if you are a novice flash user.  There are those who feel once they understand how to design a liquid stage in flash they have become masters, while others consider it just a milestone.  It’s a bit of both for me, but you should be able to design a Fluid width site which accommodates all screen resolutions.
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Take a look at the above example, download the file and embed it into your html page.  Change your screen resolution or maximise your window to see how the movie-clips adapt to different resolutions whilst positioning themselves through the onstage.Resize functions.  The code is well commented, however if you are a complete noob then you’ll have some tinkering to do!!

NOTES

-  No need to install tween libraries as the file uses native classes that ship with flash.
-  Aligns all elements to stage.
-  ActionScript 2 and saved in Flash CS 3 format.

Happy Flashing!!

Hey everyone!! I managed to do a little marketing today and signed up on Rozee.pk site. My intentions are pretty straightforward and am looking to work locally in market (apart from my other projects). If anyone would be interested in contracting my services or just dropped by to say “HI” you can always reach me through my blog or website. I do understand that Rozee is a marketplace for employment and though i might not be looking for a permanent job i wanted to introduce myself and build relationships with professional and caring companies.

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//GO BABY GO!!!!!
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One question i wanted to ask anyone out there was would you all be interested in participating in a User Group for Adobe Flash/Flex in Karachi? I would like to see people from all walks coming (Java Developers and C++ developers are welcome!!!) and participate by giving lectures and sharing their code with the community - Yes sharing is caring!!! We all seem to be ranting on about the Indians and how far they have gotten, but fail to help each other out or don’t make a conscious enough effort. Take it from me if you want to learn you will learn.
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I can tell you one thing. Flex is the buzz nowadays everywhere in the world. The problem is that there is more demand than supply for flex developers so those who have the skills can take advantage of the good salaries they pay. Even if you dont come from a programming background (I don’t) i am sure that with a little determination you would eventually understand and learn the key concepts in RIA DEVELOPMENT. In the near future i will be screen/podcasting (havent decided yet) some of my work in Flex Builder 2-3 so you can always come here and get up to speed with things.

Navigation plays a leading role in all applications. The more you study navigation techniques the more you will understand that navigation is at the core/heart of a any application - the better the navigational system the more unique the user experience.

Navigation in the flex environment is not too difficult and starts with Navigation containers. A subclass of Flex containers is represented by the Navigational container. The benefits of this type of container is that it allows you to navigate and move around the application. Different elements of the user interface are revealed according to the path that the user chooses.

These are some of the Navigator containers in Flex:

• ViewStack
• Accordian
• LinkBar
• MenuBar
• ButtonBar
• TabBar
• TabBarNavigator
• ToggleButtonNavigator

What important to understand is that the above listed containers allow you to control the interactions that the user makes in the application. Secondly and just as important is that you can program the components of the application in response to user interactions.

Continued with an example in flex…
Read the full article

Everything in Flex occurs based on an event. This means that simply clicking a button or key to moving the mouse or receiving a response from a web service provides developers with the ability to trigger a custom event in their Flex applications. That’s a lot of control, and since Flex is not based on the request/response model of a standard web app, the app contains the functionality to perform those custom events without ever leaving the web page. This is because events are client-based—in other words, separated from the request/response model of a web page and do not require the page to refresh with every user interaction.

Events enable an application to respond to an occurrence such as a certain variable value being achieved or the user clicking a certain button. They form an essential part of application development. Consider this straightforward example as the building blocks of Flex System and User Events combined in one small application.

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When an event is triggered, there are three phases that flex uses to determine whether there are event listeners.

• Capture phase: Flash Player checks every node from the root of the tree to the direct parent of the target node to see whether it has a listener registered to handle the event.
• Target phase: The event is dispatched to the target node.
• Bubbling phase: Flash Player carries out a check in a reverse manner with respect to that of the capturing phase (starting from the direct parent of the target node to the root of the tree).

Two types of events exist in Flex: System events are dispatched when the code is executed, and User events are dispatched when the user who is using the application interacts with the features of the application itself (for example, buttons, form elements, navigation controls).

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This is an example of a simple flex app that converts miles to kilometers and vice versa. Notable features are:

• Uses <mx:Script> instead of inline actionscript elements.
• Validation for invalid characters.

There are many ways to approach this sort of simple flex app, but but building the project from ground with packages in AS 3 would be the most efficient in this case.

/*
A new breed of i.t. professionals are brewing nowadays. They are called “devigners”…These individuals have learned to fuse both design and development to create Rich Internet Applications. With the market headed towards RIA’s wouldn’t you want to create a stateful client where significant changes to the view would not require to reload another page?
*/

Web Applications present data within web pages that appear within a browser. These web pages provide an easy way for users to interact with data.

Web Apps typically consist of a number of different layers

• The user interface layer: Provides the means for a user to interact with the data in the web application. It usually consists of web pages that include standard elements such as buttons, text inputs, drop-down lists, images, and hyperlinks.
• The data used to populate the user interface
• A third layer that allows the user interface to interact with the data layer.

These layers are often called n-tier or multi-tier architecture. In n-tier architecture, the user interface is referred to as the presentation tier or layr. In web applications, the presentation layer occurs withing hte web browser using XHTML or SWF objexts, and client - side scripting such as JavaScript or Actionscript.

The user interface displays data from databases, XML, and text documents, the file system, and data streams from web services and RSS feeds. Increasingly, web applications rely on XML structures to provide content. The XML content might just result from a request to a database or by receiving a response from a web service.

This layer is called the data tier in n-tier architecture. The layer is abstracted from the presentation tier and is located separately. A database server provides a good example of the data tier. It exists separately from the web browser and server.

To include data from the data tier within the presentation tier, there is a need for a middle layer between the two. In n-tier architecture, this layer is called the business logic, or application tier. This tier exist as an itermediary between the data source and the application interface. It also enforces business rules and other logic required within the web application.

The business logic tier exist within an application server and relies on server side languages, such as ColdFusion, ASP.NET, and PHP. This layer is responsible for requesting data from the data tier and providing it to the presentation tier in an appropriate format, often using an XML structure.

One implication of using n-tier architecture is that this approach separates the presentation layer form the data source. It’s not possible for the client software to communicate directly with a database. Instead, the communication between the two is handled with a server side language and an application or web server withing the business logic tier.

PART II (Coming) - How flex fits into an n-tier architectural style….