Give your name a ruggedly rusty look in Photoshop.
We always get a kick out of tweaking a logo or creating a cool text image in Photoshop. On tonight's "Screen Savers" I'll show you another fun project that'll make your friend's name look like it just came out of the junkyard.

Create your concrete

1. Start a new file. Click Edit, Fill, Contents, 50% Gray to fill it with 50% gray.
   
   
2. Create a concrete slab in the layer by applying the Texturizer filter.
   
   1. Click Filter, Texture, and Texturizer.
   2. Use Sandstone for the texture.
   3. Push the Scaling and Relief sliders up a bit to make the texture rough and strong.
   
   
   
3. Create a new layer.
   
   
4. Pick the Paintbrush tool and choose a dark-gray foreground.
   
   
5. Specify your brush.
   
   1. Go into the Brushes palette by clicking Windows and Brushes.
   2. Click the Shape Dynamics section.
   3. In the Brush Tip Shape section of the palette, choose the third brush available, called "5."
   4. Push the Size Jitter to 100%.
   5. Push the Angle Jitter to about 40%.
   6. Set the Roundness Jitter to 100%.
   
   
   
6. Back in the image, draw some shaky lines to represent cracks in the concrete slab. Change the size of the brush to a smaller setting and add additional cracks emanating from the large ones.
   
   
7. Adjust the Layer Style.
   
   1. Click Layer, Layer Style, and Bevel and Emboss.
   2. Push the Depth all the way over to 1,000%.
   3. Bring the Size down to about 3.
   4. In the Shading section of the style, turn off Global lighting and set the angle from the bottom (-90).
   5. Push the Opacity for both the Highlight and Shadow modes to 100%.

Makin' metal

1. Choose the Text tool and choose a deep brown for the Foreground.
   
   
2. Type in the text for your logo. This layer doesn't have to be type. It can be some logo design you've created.
   
   
3. Resize the text to fit the shape you want by clicking Edit, Transform, and Scale.

Text tweakers

1. Click Layer, Rasterize, and Type to rasterize the text.
   
   
2. Apply the same Texturizer filter as before, but use less Scale and Relief.
   
   
3. Go into the Layer Style for the layer with the text by double-clicking the layer in the Layers palette.
   
   1. Give the text a Drop Shadow.
   2. Increase Opacity.
   3. Adjust Distance to make the drop shadow more prominent.
   4. Make sure the light source is from above.
   5. Choose Bevel and Emboss.
   6. Choose Chisel Hard for the Technique.
   7. Push the Depth up to increase the intensity of the lights and darks.
   8. Adjust the Soften slider to make the edges of the bevel slightly smoother.
   9. Choose the Satin layer style.
   10. Choose the Ring Double Contour under the Contour box. (Click the small arrow.)
   11. Play with the Distance and Size until you get some deep patterns within the letters. Your results are your own choosing.
   12. Click OK to get out of the Layer Style dialog box.
   
   
   
4. Using the Burn tool and a fairly large brush, add some touches here and there to the letters to intensify the color and add randomness.
   
   
5. To make the letters look rough, make the type a selection by Command or Control-clicking the layer in the Layer palette.
   
   
6. Create a completely black Layer Mask by clicking Layer, Add Layer Mask, and Hide All.
   
   
7. Since the letters are a selection in the layer mask, fill that selection with white.
   
   
8. Deselect.
   
   
9. Choose the Spatter filter by clicking Filter, Brush Strokes, and Spatter.
   
   
10. Push the Smoothness all the way up to 15.
    
    
11. Play with the Spray Radius until you have a desirable effect.
    
    
12. Click OK.

From TechTV

Data WareHousing

What is data warehousing?

page 1 of 6

Systems that contain operational data -- the data that runs the daily transactions of a business -- contain information that business analysts can use to better understand how the business is operating. For example, they can see which products were sold in which regions at which time of year. This helps identify anomalies or to project future sales.

However, there are several problems if analysts access operational data directly:

• They might not have the expertise to query the operational database. For example, querying IMS databases requires an application program that uses a specialized type of data-manipulation language. In general, the programmers who have the expertise to query the operational database have a full-time job in maintaining the database and its applications.

• Performance is critical for many operational databases, such as databases for a bank. The system cannot handle users making ad-hoc queries on operational data stores. Imagine that you are doing your banking on the Internet and paying bills. When you hit the OK button, it usually takes only a few seconds to process a payment. Now, consider a bank analyst trying to figure out how to make more money from an existing customer base. The analyst runs a query which is so complex that your transaction now takes about 30 seconds to complete. Obviously that performance time is not acceptable (and neither are the new charges that the analyst is dreaming up). For this reason, operational data stores and reporting data stores (including OLAP databases) are generally separated.

  However, over the last few years, reporting data stores have tended to become pseudo-operational and current. Such stores are called operation data stores (ODSs). Consider the telecommunications industry, for example. ODSs are popular with these companies, as they try to identify fraudulent charges as soon as possible. DB2 is one of the few databases that is well suited for both operational and reporting workloads.

• Operational data is not generally in the best format for use by business analysts. For example, sales data that is summarized by product, region, and season is much more useful to analysts than raw data.

Data warehousing solves these problems. In data warehousing, you create stores of informational data -- data that is extracted from operational data and then transformed and cleansed for end-user decision making. For example, a data warehousing tool might copy all the sales data from the operational database, perform calculations to summarize the data, and write the summarized data to a database that is separate from the operational data. End users can query the separate database (the warehouse) without affecting the operational databases.

By IBM