The Mathematics of Healthy Weight

Okay Big Boys (and Girls): Who's been spending too much time on the Computer ?

There is a very easy way to tell.

We simply do it mathematically by calculating how fat we are.

This involves calculating our "Body Mass Index" or "BMI".

My son and I both put ourselves to the BMI test, and found like most nerds, that we are definitely overweight. (From doing too much computing!)

But all is not lost. There is another mathematical equation that can tell us just how fast we need to get our heart beating; in order to burn away those big body bits we need to get rid of. This is called our "Target Heart Rate" and is discussed later on in this Blog post.

Body Mass Index (BMI)

Body mass index (BMI) is used to estimate our total amount of body fat. It is calculated by dividing our weight in kilograms by our height in metres squared (m2). Or we can use Pounds and Feet if we are in the USA.

Differences in BMI between people of the same age and sex are usually due to body fat.

BMI and Children Under 21

The healthy weight range for adults of a BMI of 20 to 25 is not a suitable measure for children.

For adults who have stopped growing, an increase in BMI is usually caused by an increase in body fat. But as children grow, their amount of body fat changes and so will their BMI.

For this reason a BMI calculation for a child or an adolescent must be compared against age and gender percentile charts.

There is a special BMI Calculator for persons aged 2 to 20 years old at this web page:

http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcsite.nsf/pages/bmi4child


BMI Calculation

We can use either of the charts below to work out where our BMI is.
We find our height on one axis, and then trace across until it matches up with our weight.

For Big Passy that is 185cm matching up with 97kg, which puts him as being definitely Overweight.

A couple of years ago at the peak of his Pizza eating and Computing addictions, Big Passy was actually 185cm lining up with a whopping 125kg = Very Obese.


Source: http://www.vertex42.com


Source: http://www.dost-dongnai.gov.vn

There are also Online Calculators for BMI at these websites:

http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/bmi-m.htm

This calculator also tells us the percentiles of Americans:
http://www.halls.md/body-mass-index/bmi.htm

This calculator is for Children and Adolescents under 21 years of age:
http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcsite.nsf/pages/bmi4child


Interpreting BMI Values

Once you have measured your BMI, you can determine your healthy weight range.

If you have a BMI of:

• Under 18 – you are very underweight and possibly malnourished.

• Under 20 – you are underweight and could afford to gain a little weight.

• 20 to 25 – you have a healthy weight range for young and middle-aged adults.

• 26 to 30 – you are overweight.

• Over 30 – you are obese.

Risks of Being Overweight

(by playing too much computer games and being physically inactive):

If you are overweight (BMI over 25) and physically inactive, you may develop:

• Cardiovascular (heart and blood circulation) disease

• Gall bladder disease

• High blood pressure (hypertension)

• Diabetes

• Osteoarthritis

• Certain types of cancer, such as colon and breast cancer.

Risks of being Underweight

If you are underweight (BMI less than 20), you may be malnourished and develop:

• Compromised immune function

• Respiratory disease

• Digestive disease

• Cancer

• Osteoporosis

• Increased risk of falls and fractures.

Body Fat Distribution and Health Risks

A person’s waist size is thought to be a better predictor of health risk than BMI.
Having fat around the abdomen or a ‘pot belly’, regardless of your body size, means you are more likely to develop certain obesity-related health conditions.

• Least risk – slim (no pot belly)

• Moderate risk – overweight with no pot belly

• Moderate to high risk – slim with pot belly

• High risk – overweight with pot belly.

Waist Size and Health Risks

Waist measurement can be used to indicate health risk.

For men:

• 94cm or more – increased risk

• 102cm or more – substantially increased risk.

For women:

• 80cm or more – increased risk

• 88cm or more – substantially increased risk.

Genetic factors:
The tendency to deposit fat around the middle is influenced by a person’s genes. However, you can take this genetic tendency into account and do something about it.

Being physically active, avoiding smoking, reducing computer gaming, and eating unsaturated fat instead of saturated fat have been shown to decrease the risk of developing obesity.

BMI Information Source for all of the above: http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au


Training Heart Rate


Source: http://img.brothersoft.com

Yes obviously we are going to have to get off the computer, quit the junk food, and do some serious exercise.

We need to start off slow though, and then work up to productive exercise where our lungs are burning, and our heart is beating out of our skin.

Anyone over the age of 35, as well as younger people who are overweight should check with their doctor or personal trainer before beginning any type of exercise programme.

There is actually a certain speed we are supposed to get our heart up to, for exercise to be beneficial.

This heart rate is often called our "Training Heart Rate", or "Target Heart Rate".

Our "Resting Heart Rate" is our normal heart beat when we first awake, or while we are sitting down relaxing before doing our daily exercise.

To determine our Heart Rate in beats per minute, we can:

• Take our pulse for 15 seconds, and multiply this answer by 4 or

• Take our pulse for 30 seconds, and multiply this answer by 2

The heart rate we need to aim for during exercise, depends on our age, and is shown in the following graph:


Source: http://www.healthgoods.com

There is also a great target heart rate calculator here:

http://www.healthnetwork.com.au/weight-loss/target-heart-rate.asp

The basic mathematics behind this is that your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) is 220 minus your age. You then need to workout below this rate at a "Target Heart Rate" of about 80% of your MHR.

There is a great web page that explains all of the maths and percentage rates about ideal Heart Rate here:

http://www.concept2.com.au/training/trainingguides/heartrate.aspx


Remember to always use "The Talk Test"

You should be able to carry on a conversation while exercising. This doesn't mean you shouldn't breathe hard, but if you can't speak and can't catch your breath, that's too much exertion, so slow down!


Well that's it folks. Walk away from the Computer right now, and start your New Year's health kick!

But just before you do:
DON'T FORGET TO DO OUR ONE CLICK SURVEY AT THE TOP RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THIS WEB PAGE. JUST CLICK ONE OPTION IN, AND THEN CLICK THE "VOTE" BUTTON.

Enjoy,
Big (Overweight) Passy Wasabi

Make a Homepage in Dreamweaver

In a previous Blog post, we made a design for a website Homepage using Adobe CS3 Fireworks. This design is shown in the picture above.

We have also created a Background Image for our Homepage in Fireworks that looks like this:



If you do not have Adobe Fireworks, you could easily make this same type of background image in Adobe Photoshop, or any of several other image processing programs.

The next step is to make our design into a functional webpage using Adobe CS3 Dreamweaver.

We want to be able to mouse over each of the images.

Each image will have an alternate Rollover Image (that is pink in color).

When we click a rolled over active image, it will take us to one of these sub pages: Home, Contact Us, Our Pictures, Games, Music, Our Blog, About Us.

To create rollover images, we first need to have made a set of images to serve as links. These images could be pictures, clipart, or button images. We can make these ourselves, or use Google Images** to find images on the net we can use.

(**If we were making a commerical site, we would probably not be able to use images from Google found randomly on the net, because it would violate copyright laws. However, since we are using some internet images only for our own educational purposes in this exercise, we are probably unlikely to get besieged by copyright lawyers in most countries.)

For each of the images we find, we need to resize them down to be around 90pixels by 90pixels in size to fit neatly within our homepage. We also need to create a separate rollover version of each image that is somehow different
to the original image; eg. different color, or text added to it, or blurred, or a different picture, etc.

For our homepage we created the following set of images:



We need to start off in Dreamweaver by setting up for the display of our 1024x768 Background image called "PWHomepage1.jpg".

This can be done by setting up the following code in the Homepage HTML:



We can get some starting HTML to put the above code into by doing
"Create New > HTML" from the front start panel in Dreamweaver.

But if we have Adobe Fireworks, then we can use the Export HTML and Images function to have Fireworks create this initial starting HTML for us.

Once we have the background image setup, we then have to add all of the Rollover link images onto our page.

Placing the Image onto our Homepage, and then converting it to a Rollover link image is a fairly simple three step process in Dreamweaver.

• First we insert a “Div” container onto the page that is the exact same size as the rollover Image.

• We then move this Div box to the required position using the mouse.

• We then insert the Image into its Div box, and set it up to be a Rollover link.

Because we have not built our other web pages yet, we will make all of our Rollover images link to an “Under Construction” page that we built using Fireworks.

Here is our finished Home Page :

http://www.passyworld.com/

The following PDF document provides step by step instructions on how to build a Homepage using Dreamweaver CS3.

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the “How to do a Homepage” PDF

Throughout this month we will be building the sub pages for our revamped
"Passy World" website.

We will feature some blog posts about how to do this.


DON'T FORGET TO DO OUR ONE CLICK SURVEY AT THE TOP RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THIS WEB PAGE. JUST CLICK ONE OPTION IN, AND THEN CLICK THE "VOTE" BUTTON.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Design a Homepage in Fireworks

The above is the homepage of our original "Passy World" website.
It was built from a template design that came with Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.
These days it is looking a bit old and tired. It's definitely time for a makeover.

We have decided to create a Homepage that is completely visual with very little text. It will merely contain some rollover links to take visitors to the subpages.

Adobe Fireworks is great for working with images and designing web pages. Using Fireworks we can then export our design out into some executable HTML. We can then see how our page will display in various browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari).

Note that although this Blog post is about using Fireworks to Design a Homepage, we could easily do the same thing using Adobe Photoshop, or any other of several image processing applications.

Here is the completed new design for our "Passy World" Homepage:



The following PDF document explains step by step how to design a Homepage using Adobe CS3 Fireworks.

If you would like to have your own full size copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the full size PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the “Make a Webpage” PDF

"Passy World" is an entirely separate website to "Passy's World of ICT".

These days we do all our work on PW of ICT, and only use the old "Passy World" site as an online storage bin for all of our PDF documents, Powerpoints, Flash SWFs, etc. We then link to these PW files when we do blog posts on PW of ICT.

However, we have decided to do some work on the old "Passy World" site, to make it a proper site where we can feature our favorite pictures, music, and flash games.

The next step is to take the background image of our newly designed homepage in Fireworks, export it to HTML, and then use Adobe Dreamweaver to create a fully functional webpage. This will be covered in an upcoming blog post.


DON'T FORGET TO DO OUR ONE CLICK SURVEY AT THE TOP RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THIS WEB PAGE. JUST CLICK ONE OPTION IN, AND THEN CLICK THE "VOTE" BUTTON.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Friday Funny at Hogwarts

Image Source: http://news.ninemsn.com.au

"Hey Dude, I think they're laughing at you!"

Time to whip out the wand and poke a bit of Friday Fun at Harry Potter.

Here at Passy World we have scoured the net, like a giant scarey spider, to find you the very best of Harry Potter hilarity. So let's wave the wand and get into it.

You may, or may not be, be one of the 16 million people who have seen this unique Harry Potter Puppets Video:



We know you want more, so how about another one:
(74 million views and rising on You Tube)



And now a classic Runescape spinoff from the previous clip.




Anyway, back to Hogwarts. Here is a really bizarre quiz
that is a must-do for all you diehard Harry Potter fans:

Now I don't think these next dudes will be laughing too much at anything:


Image Source: http://images.paraorkut.com

But let's see if any of these jokes can raise a giggle.

Harry Potter Jokes

What did Harry Potter do when he found the three-headed dog?
- He ran away ... wouldn't you?

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Olive Olive who?
Olive Harry Potter!

How many wizards does it take to change a lightbulb?
- None. Wizards don’t use electricity!

How many Beaters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
- Two: one to hit the bulb with his bat, the other to see what's going on, hit the first with his bat, and then change the lightbulb.

How many Keepers does it take to change a lightbulb?
- None. They'll just suffer through in the darkness and angst about it.

How many normal Seekers does it take to change a lightbulb?
- One, but he gets a hundred and fifty points for it.

How many Potters does it take to change a lightbulb?
- One: he holds it and the world revolves around him.


Why did the Weasel cross the road?
- Somebody tossed a knut.

Why did Potter cross the road.
- No reason, but someone will write a book about it.

Why did Crabbe and Goyle cross the road?
- Draco did.

Why did the Dark Lord cross the road?
- Because Potter couldn't stop him.

Why did Death Eaters cross the road?
- The Dark Lord ordered it.

Why did Trevor cross the road?
- To get away from Longbottom.

Why did Dumbledore cross the road?
- He was following the poisoned lemon drops.

Why did Professor Snape stand in the road?
- So no one could tell what side he was on.

Why do Slytherins cross the road twice?
- Because they are doublecrossers.




The Top Six Mistakes made in Harry Potter Movies

Harry is never once shown with owl poop on his shoulder.

What sort of wizard eats his cereal with a fork?

Harry makes things disappear by chucking them out the window.

No hint that young Harry will grow up to be an evil Sith lord.

Murderous fire-breathing dragons look suspiciously like goggle-eyed Muppets.

Annoying little dork is depicted as a witch, rather than a Trekkie.


The next Harry Potter Book ?

"Harry Potter and the Jobcentre Plus" - where Harry, having finally graduated from Hogwarts, realises that he's totally messed up his chances of ever getting a decent job, and must now join the ranks of the unemployed! He may have a damn good broomstick, but he can't even get a job sweeping the streets with it.

DON'T FORGET TO DO OUR ONE CLICK SURVEY AT THE TOP RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THIS WEB PAGE. JUST CLICK ONE OPTION IN, AND THEN CLICK THE "VOTE" BUTTON.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Study in USA, UK, Canada Universities

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Game Programming in Python

Image Source: http://farm2.static.flickr.com

Python is a modern language that makes programming reasonably easy. At the same time, Python is a serious language that is used by companies and organizations such as Google, NASA, Industrial Light and Magic, and many others.

There is a fantastic free eBook by Al Sweigart that teaches how to use Python in a fun way. "Invent with Python" is not a book for making professional video games (which require teams of artists and programmers), but rather a book to teach computer programming to non-programmers by making simple fun games.

Al Sweigart is a legend for writing this book and sharing his world with us.

To get started with Python, all we need to do is go to his web page here:

http://inventwithpython.com/

It has links for downloading Python installer for multiple operating systems. It also has Al's free ebook "Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python" as a 4.27MB download in PDF format.

The book shows us fun games and then explains how they are put together in the Python Language. The companion website also has full sets of program code that we can download for each finished game.

(Note that the Appendix sections of the Book are on the website version of the book, but not in the PDF version of the book).

Here is a list of the chapters that are in the book:




In the first chapter Al tells us how to install Python 3.1.
So we downloaded and installed it.
The book said that we needed to install the older version 2 of Python to be able to make .exe files. So on the main web page we also selected to download and installed Python 2.6.4.

(Note that we did not experience any subsequaent technical problems having both versions installed at once).

To make a program in Python, we start up the Python "IDLE".
IDLE stands for "Interactive DeveLopment Environment". The development environment is software that lets us write Python programs. We use IDLE to type in our programs, and then press the F5 key to run them.

The window that appears when we first run Python IDLE is called the "interactive shell". We actually then do File > New to open a fresh window to program in.

A "shell" is a program that lets us type instructions into the computer. The Python shell lets us type Python instructions, and the shell sends these instructions to software called the Python interpreter to perform. We can type Python instructions into the shell and, because the shell is interactive, the computer will read our instructions and execute them when we press F5.

This is shown in the following screen capture:




There are several other fun games we can make using Al's book, such as a simple version of the classic "Hangman" game.




Making an .EXE Version of our Game

Appendix C in the online web version of the book covers in detail about how we can make an .EXE version of our game that we can run off our USB, or zip up and email to our friends.

Eg. Step by Step instructions can be found here:
http://inventwithpython.com/appendixc.html

We followed the steps, but had some minor difficulties along the way.

Downloading and installing py2exe was ok.
However, when we run it we must ensure we are using the Python 2.6.4 IDLE, and we are not in Python 3.1 which will not find py2exe.

When we ran the Appendix 3 confirmation test we received:
"DeprecationWarning: the sets module is deprecated"

A friend of mine who does Python told me this about "Deprecation":
There are MAJOR changes happening in the python language between 2.X and 3.X and those marked as deprecated in 2.X won't work in 3.X.

So the warning is an alert to programmers who plan to upgrade their code to the new version of python not to use the old 2.X methods, variables, and so on.

Next we made the setup.py script, which will build an .EXE for the "Hangman.py" Hangman Game.

Running the Windows command line proved problematic.
We had to change directory cd so that we were in c:\Python26
Then we had to copy our setup.py and Hangman.py files into c:\Python26
Then we had to alter the command to not contain the .py suffix in it:

Eg. type the command line in Windows XP command editor as:

python.exe setup py2exe

and not as python.exe setup.py py2exe

We then received a not found error on module "Hangman.py".
So we went back and edited our setup.py to contain "Hangman" instead of "Hangman.py".

This got the module compiling, but a failure with syntax error in Line 70 of our Hangman program. We suspect this is due to a Python 3.1 versus Python 2.6 language difference. We did not pursue this any further.

However the online book does contain an Appendix which discusses differences between Python 2.6 and Python 3.1 .

We decided to go for something simpler, and try to compile our simple "Hello" program into an .exe .

This worked fine and put out lots of text messages, and then created a "dist" folder as c:\Python26\dist
This dist folder contains our .exe and associated files. This folder is what we need to distribute to friends, or put onto our USB.

However, when we ran the "Hello.exe" it worked ok, but closed the runtime window so fast that we were unable to see the program result on the screen. The original Hello.py program possibly needs us to enhance it with a time delay coded into the end of it to keep the results on the screen for a few seconds.


Additional Python Resources:

http://www.pygame.org/
http://www.pyglet.org/
http://docs.python.org/3.1/tutorial/

Special thanks to Donna Benjamin from Creative Contingencies: http://cc.com.au who helped out with material for this post.

Python programming is ok, but personally I much prefer Flash Actionscript, because we can put our final products so easily onto web pages to share with the world immediately.

To sum up:
There is nothing to be scared of playing around with Python,
just as long as you work out who's the boss!


Image Source: http://gobalnerdy.com

DON'T FORGET TO DO OUR ONE CLICK SURVEY AT THE TOP RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THIS WEB PAGE. JUST CLICK ONE OPTION IN, AND THEN CLICK THE "VOTE" BUTTON.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

Wondershare Photo Gallery

It may take a couple of minutes for all 27 photos to load into the cylinder.
To view a photo, click on it to zoom in. Then click on the photo again to zoom back out again. Hold down the mouse and drag to rotate the cylinder around. We can also use the top right hand corner player buttons to advance through the pictures.

The above super cool 3D photo gallery was made using a $50 US application called "Wondershare Flash Gallery Factory Deluxe".

A full overview of this product can be found at:
http://www.flash-gallery-software.com/flash-gallery.html#10113

The cylindical slideshow maker can be found at this web page:

http://www.ourpix.com/tutorial/3d-flash-photo-gallery.html#10113

It does a slideshow of our photos, and we can add background music as well.

Note that on our PWofICT Blog page we are limited to a 550 pixels wide display of the cylinder. However because it runs as a Flash.SWF file, it is fully scalable, and looks even better as a larger sized cylinder on a single web page.

Eg. Click on the following link to view a larger version of the cylinder gallery:

http://www.passyworld.com/passyHTMLs/WondershareGalleryCyl.html

Everyone should try this Wondershare software to see how easy it is to use.
The first step is to download and install the trial software from the above web page. When we start the application, we click "order later" and this will give us access to use the software for 30 days free of charge.

(However, as shown in the example at the end of this blog post, your photos will have the "Evaluation Copy" message placed on top of them).

There is a full set of instructions on how to use the software, at the following web page. The software is very quick and easy to use.

http://www.ourpix.com/tutorial/3d-flash-photo-gallery.html#10113

Basically it is a simple three step process:

• Browse to find your photos on your hard drive, and double click on each one to add it to the gallery maker.

• Choose a template (such as the 27 pics cylinder one)

• Publish an output SWF or HTML or EXE etc file.

Note that our published .SWF file of 27 photos ended up around 3 MB in size.

When we installed the software, we obtained some sample pictures in a folder at: C:\Program Files\Wondershare\Flash Gallery Factory\res\Samples

In this folder, the photos are all .jpgs that are 800x600 in size.

We therefore took our own selection of photos, and made them all 800x600 .JPG files using Adobe CS3 Photoshop. While we were in Photoshop, we also played around with filters and effects on a number of our pictures. This created some very nice "arty" results.

Wondershare Gallery has several types of different gallery layouts such as spheres, cubes, circles, and many others. This one below is called a "Wall" layout. (Because we did not have a set of 36 photos for the wall, some of our 27 photos are repeated on the wall.

There are two versions of Flash Gallery Factory: Standard and Deluxe.
Here at Passy World we are using the Deluxe version.
To see the differences go to this page:
http://www.flash-gallery-software.com/comparison.html

If you like what you have seen here, then you will definitely want to purchase your own copy of "Wondershare Flash Gallery Factory Deluxe" by clicking the following link:
http://www.flash-gallery-software.com/purchase-flash-gallery.html


Here at Passy World we plan to use the WS Gallery software to create interesting visual displays of items for you throughout our blog posts in 2010.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi