How To Be a Creative Thinker

2011-03-27T22:33:00.000+02:00

Whether you’re trying to solve a tough problem, start a business, get attention for that business or write an interesting article, creative thinking is crucial. The process boils down to changing your perspective and seeing things differently than you currently do.

Be a Creative Thinker

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Firefox 4

2011-03-27T22:27:00.001+02:00

Firefox 4 is released..
Enjoy..

Get Firefox

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Redmondmag.com

2010-07-12T09:08:00.002+03:00

Redmond magazine is The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community. It is relied upon by Windows Server, SQL Server, Security, and Exchange experts worldwide.

URL: http://redmondmag.com

Google Chrome

2008-09-03T23:48:00.000+02:00

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

I will not say any extra details right now as i'm analyzing it..

i admire the great V8, i think it's the best of Google Chrome..

Try it: Google Chrome

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Rammstein Albums

2008-07-10T13:47:00.002+03:00

Rosenrot [Rose Red]
2005

Reise, Reise [Journey, Journey]
2004

Mutter [Mother]
2001

Sehnsucht [Longing] or [Desire] or [Hunger]
1998

Herzeleid [Heartache]
1995

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I Love Rammstein

2008-07-09T15:30:00.000+03:00

I Love Rammstein

My very beloved song: Benzin

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10 Tips To A Better < Form >

2008-06-11T16:17:00.006+03:00

The most monotonous entities in the known universe, forms, are a staple of every web programmer’s balanced diet.

Whether we like them or not, forms are the gatekeepers to our site’s goodies and often their design alone determines whether a user will try what you’re selling or simply walk away.

Without pomp or circumstance, here are ten tips to transform your plain vanilla into double chocolate chunk with marshmallows.

10 Tips To A Better < Form >

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I Applied For Google

2008-06-06T04:15:00.003+03:00

I saw on GMail blog that Google is hiring..

After looking thoroughly in my experiences and my strengths && weaknesses, i think i should join this BIG giant to do something new, better, useful for the entire world..

I should join Google's world-class engineers to develop the next-generation technologies on their biggest computer infrastructure in the world..

I want to innovative the next big application that will change the world..

What:

I applied for Google..

When:

Today @ 4:00AM

Where:

Mountain View, CA
Zurich, Switzerland

Positions applied for:

Interaction Designer - Zurich
User Interface Software Engineer - Zurich
User Interface Software Engineer - Mountain View
Front End Software Engineer - Mountain View
Developer Programs Engineer - Mountain View
Rapid Prototyper - Mountain View

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GMail Is Hiring

2008-04-17T16:02:00.007+02:00

Great Google GMail is hiring developers..

They need developers in Mountain View, Zürich & Seattle/Kirkland Offices..

Click here to see for urself

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Khaled's Birthday

2008-04-16T17:40:00.004+02:00

Today was a great day..

We celebrated Khaled for his 23 birthday..

Me + Khaled work together in the new company which i joined 16 March 2008..

Didn't i mention that?!

See Khaled and the party photos here..

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Free Software: Is It Free Or Open Source?

2008-04-09T11:36:00.002+02:00

Open source usually refers to software that is released with source code under a license that ensures that derivative works will also be available as source code, protects certain rights of the original authors, and prohibits restrictions on how the software can be used or who can use it.

Q. Is It Free or Open Source?

A. The software is free
The source code is open for every1

It's Free && Open Source !

More info:

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Interesting ?!

2008-04-08T17:10:00.003+02:00

< Open Source Enthusiasts Only(); />

* Comparison of open source and closed source
* List of open source software packages

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GooglePlex

2008-04-03T14:15:00.004+02:00

An experience u won't regret!

Now, see GooglePlex from the sky using google Maps..

Go to GooglePlex

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Programming Style

2008-03-31T14:59:00.005+02:00

Programming style refers to a set of rules or guidelines used when writing the source code for a computer program. It is often claimed that following a particular programming style will help programmers quickly read and understand source code conforming to the style as well as helping to avoid introducing faults.

Programming Style [Wikipedia]

to be continued..

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The Internet Goes Down In Egypt

2008-01-31T00:46:00.000+02:00

The Internet goes down in Egypt..

The Fiber Optic cable in the mediterranean sea that provides the Internet service in Egypt is down for a hidden reason until now..

The entire country will NOT use the Internet until it's fixed..

* What's Fiber Optic Cable?
- Optical fiber, Wikipedia
- Fiber Optic Cables Tutorial
- How Fiber Optics Work?

* What's the Internet backbone?

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Bad Vista - 01

2008-01-20T01:39:00.000+02:00

No Comment

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Merry Christmas

2008-01-01T00:05:00.000+02:00

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year Every1

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Simple Rule

2007-12-28T21:48:00.000+02:00

The entire planet has access to the Internet..
The entire planet has access to your computer system..

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'Vista Capable' Suit Against Micro$oft

2007-12-24T23:50:00.000+02:00

The case, first filed in March by Washington state resident Diane Kelley, charged Micro$oft with deceptive practices in letting PC makers slap a "Vista Capable" sticker on PCs, when "a large number" of the machines would be able to run only Vista Home Basic, the simplest version of the operating system..

Capable is a statement that has an interpretation for many that, in the context of this program, a PC would be able to run any version of the Windows Vista operating system..
But it doesn't!

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Hitman The Movie

2007-12-23T09:57:00.000+02:00

I saw Hitman recently..
I liked it alot.. but NOT like my favorite ever [The Matrix]..
I recommend u to see it immediately with no delay..

I loved 4 things in that movie:

The scene when the Russian FSB was attacking Hitman in the hotel after identifying him as the Belicoff assassin..
He escaped to the room below his room in the hotel..
He broke the window and found 2 scared little girls looking at him..
They were playing Hitman the game..
Awesome scene..
Olga Kurylenko [as Nika Boronina - 28]..
She was HOTTTT ;)
The style Hitman walks [exactly as the game]..
I thought this is not applicable to apply a game character walking style to humans!
The soundtrack @ the end of the movie..
Can any1 send it to me, or give me any URL?

Checkout:

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AJAX Memory Leaks

2007-12-22T11:32:00.000+02:00

Memory Leaks == Memory that is allocated but never freed..

After thousands of operations with a minor leak, a significant amount of memory can be lost, resulting in slowdowns and crashes. This is the sort of thing that you usually don't have to worry about with JavaScript, but if you're writing something complex—like a video game, or a GMail—it becomes a concern.

Is it a leak caused by browsers bad design or a leak caused by the bad design of our AJAX applications?

JavaScript VM comes with a garbage collector and aside from some edge cases you might encounter, it does a pretty good job. Once you close a page a lot of work is done behind the scene to clear unreferenced objects.

Well… AJAX can mess this up. The page is not closed any more.

The problem is not AJAX in itself as a programming paradigm but in what it can do for the application. With AJAX you can retrieve data from the server without closing the page and rebuilding it. And that data is placed inside the same page and manipulated by JavaScript programs. New DOM objects are created over and over, new JavaScript objects are created based on those data, new events are attached to all this objects. Few programmers destroy those object and unattach the events.

AJAX is still young and most of the people that have done some AJAX implementation for their site are just pulling some HTML parts from the server and using innerHTML to replace the content of a div element. No harm done. As the applications are becoming more and more complex the use case changes. XML or JSON is pulled from the server and DOM objects are created based on them. It is very easy to forget something.

Unfortunately most JavaScript programmers were taught to be that way by the old browsing habits. There was no need to clean after you. When the page needed some more information, it was regenerated on the server and rendered again by the browser. A clean sheet to work on. Everything that was persistent were the cookies on the browser.

Taking care of your things in JavaScript is harder than you think. Very good programmers missed this. I was using an AJAX application from a well known company (not here to throw the stone) and after heavy usage for about two days without closing my browser, it reached the respected 500 MB in my laptop’s memory.

Solution:
There are no examples,
only good practices.

More info:
* DHTML Leaks Like a Sieve
* Javascript Memory Leaks

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Happy Eid Al Adha

2007-12-19T13:02:00.000+02:00

Happy Eid Al Adha 4 Every1

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The Best Browser

2007-12-17T16:14:00.000+02:00

What is the best browser to make it ur home?

A very interesting discussion about 5 different browsers to help u decide..

5 Things I Love/Hate About 5 Different Browsers

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Windows Vista Source Code Revealed

2007-12-16T19:28:00.000+02:00

Micro$oft is hiding its source code from the world..
But the world has the right to know!

Voila..

Here's a small part of Windows Vista source code..

Have fun!

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Micro$oft Office vs. Google Apps

2007-12-15T01:52:00.000+02:00

It's a new day, it's a new office..

Eliminate hassle & cost..

Micro$oft is now threatened..

Don't BUY anything anymore..

Don't slow ur system with expensive software..

Share ur work anywhere, anytime all over the world..

Don't need to install ANY software in order to view ur important documents on any computer..

Google Apps is the first step towards Google Operating System..

[$399 : $679 Office 2007] or [FREE G. Apps]?

Try Google Apps now: http://www.google.com/a
[CHECK ONLY]
Micro$oft Office 2007: http://www.office2007.com

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Google Tricks

2007-12-14T23:37:00.000+02:00

Cool tricks using Google < I'm Feeling Lucky > button!

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Google Toolbar 5 Released

2007-12-13T22:53:00.000+02:00

Google released the 5th major version of Google Toolbar with several new and improved features.

Learn about the latest version of Toolbar from the team that built it. Google Toolbar Product Managers, Avni Shah and Aseem Sood, point out the original features and highlight new tools developed to make browsing the web even more useful and efficient.

Download now: http://toolbar.google.com/t5

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Web Mashups

2007-11-26T14:38:00.000+02:00

A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Combine many feeds into one [Mashup], then share it anywhere in the universe..

Examples:
* Microsoft Popfly
* Yahoo! Pipes
* Netvibes

This article is not yet completed..
i'm digging further right now..

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GMail 2.0

2007-11-19T09:19:00.000+02:00

Gmail's New Version Is Now Available..

Faster
Stronger
Smarter
Different

Read more

Try GMail 2.0

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AJAXLoad.info

2007-11-07T09:50:00.000+02:00

If u need [loading] indicators for ur AJAX-based Web 2.0 site, then this is the place..

Select ur loading indicator type and background, click Generate..

and here's ur loading indicator as u want..

http://ajaxload.info/

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AJAX Windows

2007-11-06T11:00:00.000+02:00

A whole new experience..

An operating system running on the web..

Try it

It's FREE & COOL..

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Firefox Add-ons: Search Engines

2007-10-20T10:15:00.000+02:00

Mozilla put a few popular search sites in the Search Bar in the upper-right corner of Firefox. If you'd like to add more, there are alot to choose from.

Go to Firefox Add-ons: Search Engines

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My Facebook

2007-10-03T10:37:00.000+02:00

Check me out on Facebook now..

Don't forget: Write on my wall..

Checkout my profile

NB: u have to login in order to see my profile..

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Working with SQL Server Date/Time Variables

2007-09-27T11:17:00.000+02:00

My boss gave me a task to build a module that searches a SQL Server 2005 database using PHP!
i got stuck working with SQL Server 2005 dates..
After searching the web with my favorite Google, i found a very rich article solved all of my problems..
Thanx to Gregory A. Larsen [gregalarsen@msn.com]

Article address [4 Parts]:
- Working with SQL Server Date/Time Variables
- Displaying Dates and Times in Different Formats
- Searching for Particular Date Values and Ranges
- Date Math and Universal Time

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Gmail: A Behind the Scenes Video

2007-09-26T11:58:00.000+02:00

Google asked the world to help them imagine how an email message travels around the world. All it took was a video camera, the Gmail M-velope ( ), and some creativity — and, wow, did you get creative!

http://mail.google.com/mvideo

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Ten CSS tricks you may not know

2007-09-24T14:22:00.000+02:00

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/css-tricks.shtml

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Web Developer Firefox Extension

2007-08-04T16:00:00.000+03:00

The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

What are Add-ons?

Add-ons are small pieces of software that can add new features or tiny tweaks to your Firefox. They can add new search engines or dictionaries in other languages, change the look of Firefox with a new theme, or much more. Take a look around and see what add-ons can do for you.

Ofcouse IE doesn't have such advanced features!! ;)

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Firefox Network Error Messages

2007-08-04T15:30:00.000+03:00

Good article from Mozilla about Firefox Network Error Messages:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:1.5_Network_Error_Messages

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GMail Drive

2007-03-10T11:09:00.000+02:00

We all know GMail from Google..
GMail on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail

What if u can put GMail as a partition in [My Computer]?
Upload ur files in GMail using drag'n'drop?
C:\
D:\
GMail Drive:\

GMail Drive on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive

GMail Drive official site:
http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Download GMail Drive now [Softpedia]

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Micro$oft M$DN is down!

2007-02-14T12:56:00.000+02:00

I wonder why Micro$oft M$DN website gives that error msg:

Server is too busy

Any1 have an answer?!?!?!

Check out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/

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Happy Valentine's Day

2007-02-14T12:41:00.000+02:00

Happy Valentine's day to all..

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So Busy!

2007-02-01T16:42:00.000+02:00

Hi all blog visitors..

i'm so sorry for NOT posting anything new these days..
i'm extremely busy developing the internal web-based management system for my company..

and other stuff for some clients..

will b back soon..

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Merry Christmas

2007-01-01T00:00:00.000+02:00

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year Every1

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Micro$oft.com in the new look

2006-12-20T10:09:00.000+02:00

In an earlier post i said Micro$oft will be redesigned..
well.. they made it finally.. Check here..

They say: "On December 14 we introduced a new home page for Microsoft.com. The new page incorporates months of research, testing, customer feedback, and refinements. We hope the new page makes it easier to find what you’re looking for on Microsoft.com, and that you find new items of interest along the way."

Read here!

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Global Security

2006-12-19T00:11:00.000+02:00

The entire planet has access to the internet..
That means the entire planet has access to your computer system..

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Computers Computers Computers

2006-12-12T13:13:00.000+02:00

*A refund for defective software might be nice, except it would bankrupt the entire software industry in the first year..

*Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done..

*The computer allows you to make mistakes faster than any other invention..

*Computers are useless. They can only give you answers..

*The only thing more powerful than the system, is the man that will overthrow it..

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Fedora Core 6 [Zod] Is Released

2006-11-18T10:36:00.000+02:00

This is the announcement of Zod. Zod permits you to call him "Fedora Core 6".

Tremble, Earthlings, for Zod is released from the confines of testing. Zod intends to hammer the servers of the world ... For those who chose the world-domination-acceptance package in your last installation, you need do nothing -- Zod is beaming itself to your computers already. If your keyboard begins to get hot, back away ... very ... slowly ...

For the rest of you minions who failed to do Zod's bidding previously, this is your ONE AND ONLY CHANCE to redeem yourself. Go quickly! Download the torrent NOW. Obtain the ISO immediately. Zod's minions know to back up their /home directory and to begin immediate installation of the GREATEST version of Fedora Core EVER.

Zod accepts that the Fedora Project continues to provide software and security updates for Bordeaux [FC5], as per the policy of Zod's minions. Zod chooses to permit this action to continue.

Those who would understand Zod must begin here:

Massive downloading of Zod is known to melt servers worldwide. Hurry!

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Back To Work

2006-10-29T10:07:00.000+02:00

Eid el Fitr has ended.. plus an extra day as vacation.. i return back to work today..

With a new start after the vacation, i hope i evolve more..

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Happy Eid el Fitr For All Of Us

2006-10-24T23:08:00.000+02:00

I congratulate my entire Islamic nation with Eid el Fitr el Mobarak..

happy eating Kahk all of us.. but don't eat much ;)..

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Firefox 2 to Launch Tomorrow's Afternoon

2006-10-23T11:29:00.000+02:00

Are you ready? We're working on the final details now, and will be finalizing the Web site updates over the weekend. Special thanks to everyone from the SFX community who has helped out with testing, marketing and outreach programs.

Source: Spread Firefox

Sneak a peek at the next generation Firefox browser:

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The Matrix: The Future Will Not Be User Friendly

2006-10-19T14:18:00.000+02:00

The Matrix, my favorite movie ever.. is [#34] of the IMBD Top 250 movies as voted by users..
The movie has a rating of [8.5] from votes of [189,223] users..

The Matrix is produced on (1999) with a budget of $63,000,000 and earned $631,000,000..

The film:
A computer hacker Thomas Anderson has lived a relatively ordinary life--in what he thinks is the year 1999--until he is contacted by the enigmatic Morpheus who leads him into the real world. In reality, it is 200 years later, and the world has been laid waste and taken over by advanced artificial intelligence machines. The computers have created a false version of 20th-century life--the "Matrix"--to keep the human slaves satisfied, while the AI machines draw power from the humans. Anderson, pursued constantly by "Agents" (computers who take on human form and infiltrate the Matrix), is hailed as "The One" who will lead the humans to overthrow the machines and reclaim the Earth..

Awards: The Matrix won 4 Oscars.. another 28 wins & 35 nominations..

Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself..

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Half Of Domain-Name Servers Are Open To Attack

2006-10-18T22:23:00.000+02:00

Half of the web's domain name servers are wrongly configured, leaving companies and large sections of the internet infrastructure open to attack. Infoblox, a developer of security appliances, and The Measurement Factory, a performance testing company, have just released their "2006 DNS Report Card". DNS servers map domain names into IP addresses, directing users’ internet inquiries to the appropriate location.

Should an organization’s DNS systems fail, all internet functions, including e-mail, web access, e-commerce and extranets become unavailable. The DNS survey was based on a scanned sample of systems consisting of almost 80 million DNS devices, or 5% of the main IP version 4-based devices being used on the internet. The survey found that 50% of DNS servers allow recursive name services – a form of name resolution that often requires a name server to relay requests to other name servers.

This leaves many networks vulnerable to pharming attacks and enables their servers to be used in DNS amplification attacks that can take down important DNS infrastructure, said the two companies.

In addition, more than 29% of DNS servers surveyed allow zone transfers to arbitrary queries, enabling duplication of an entire segment of an organization’s DNS data from one DNS server to another, and leaving them easy targets for denial of service attacks.

Source: ComputerWeekly

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Upgrading My Blogger To Blogger Beta

2006-10-17T11:39:00.000+02:00

I'm upgrading my existing Blogger to the new Beta Blogger..

They have extremely fascenating features..

It worth the update folks..

U may encounter some features to malfunction during the upgrade.. but soon, the blog will be fully functional with the new cool tools..

Try Blogger Beta for urslef..

Check out the new version of Blogger (in beta)
Migrate from old blogger to new blogger
http://www.blogger.com/migrate-login.g

Beta Tour
http://beta.blogger.com/tour_start.g
http://www.blogger.com/beta-tour.g

Create a blog on Blogger Beta
http://beta.blogger.com/signup.g

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Micro$oft.com Redesigned

2006-10-14T16:00:00.000+02:00

In early November Micro$oft plans to release the new design of the Micro$oft.com home page to the general public.

They must be hiding some AJAX scripting to make it so discreet.

I guess we’ll all know in early November when it launches.

http://www.microsoft.com/about/mspreview/default.mspx

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Micro$oft updates their website favicon

2006-10-13T15:37:00.000+02:00

Micro$oft has updated their website in the most subtle ways possible, by adding a new favicon..

The new favicon portrays the letter "M" negatively imposed on a blue background, thought to be similar to the blue color from the website header..

The favicon is only limited to 256 colors, it is unknown why Micro$oft did not generate a full color icon instead of the 256 colors icon which cannot accurately recreate the blue used on the rest of the website..

Source: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061012/microsoft-favicon/

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Problem Solving Techniques

2006-10-12T13:25:00.000+02:00

Every programmer learns something new everyday..
Here's what we r going to learn today:

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12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards

2006-10-02T09:00:00.000+02:00

The cries of frustration I hear from other developers about CSS are only an echo of the ones I made for years. As a result I like to think that I can relate, and I’m writing to convey the most important lessons I’ve learned so far.

Lessons:
1. Everything you know is wrong.. sort of..
2. It’s not going to look exactly the same everywhere unless you’re willing to face some grief..
3. You will be forced to choose between the ideal and the practicable..
4. Perfection is not when there’s nothing to add, but when there’s nothing to take away..
5. Some sites are steaming heaps of edge cases..
6. Longer lead times are inevitable..
7. Coherent and sensible source order is the best of Good Things..
8. Descendant selectors are the beginning and end of genuinely powerful CSS rules..
9. In the real world, stylesheet hacks will get your project across the finish line..
10. Working around rendering bugs is like playing Whack-a-Mole..
11. When you’re drowning in CSS layout problems, make sure of the width and height of the water, float without putting up a struggle, and get clear of the problems..
12. Background images will make the difference between the plain and the tastefully embellished..

Source: A List Apart

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Don't Make Me Think

2006-10-01T11:49:00.000+02:00

Never been in a meeting like that. The solution to this problem, by the way, is usability testing. Imagine that: making decisions based on actual data instead of never ending, last man standing filibuster style religious debates. Revolutionary!

Source: Coding Horror

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Happy Birthday Google

2006-09-27T13:05:00.000+02:00

Google's 8th birthday..
September 7, 2006..
After 20 days the cake appears..

Happy Birthday Google..
Enjoy a future of achievments..
Enjoy conquering ur competitors..

Google now is:
- One of the 5 most popular sites on the Internet and is used around the world by millions of people..
- Have 380 million global unique users per month..
- Number of employees worldwide: 7,942 full-time employees as of June 30, 2006..

Google headquarters:
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Telephone: +1.650.253.0000
Fax: +1.650.253.0001
www.google.com

Know more about Google history..
Check the company overview..

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Participate In Google User Experience Research

2006-09-26T11:58:00.000+02:00

Now u can share Google its success..

Sign up to participate in a Google user experience research study..
and YES, you would get paid! [$75/hr]

The more information you give Google in the form, the easier it is for them to match you to a suitable study, and the

More likely it is that you'll be invited to participate.

Then take a 5-steps form to identify ur strengths..
and wait for their call..

u can participate using one of the following methods [when Google calls u]:
- At a Google office..
- Remote usability study: from ur computer..
- Field study: Google researcher comes to u..
- Online survey: answer questions on the web or email..

Participate Now
FAQ

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Ramadan Kareem

2006-09-24T10:21:00.000+02:00

Ramadan is the name of the ninth month in the Hijri calendar. The religious observances of Ramadan occur throughout the entire Islamic calendar month. The calendar month Ramadan, 2006 (1427 AH), according to Saudi Authorities began on September 23 and will end on October 23. Other nations started a day later..

The Qur'an started sent down to the earth during this month. The entire month is spent fasting from dawn to dusk. Fasting during this month is often thought to figuratively burn away all sins. Furthermore, the Prophet Muhammad told his followers that the gates of Heaven would be open all the month and the gates of Hell would be closed. The first day of the after Ramadan is spent in great celebrations and rejoicings and is observed as the 'Festival of Breaking Fast' or 'Eid ul-Fitr'..

I've provided some useful links to know more about Ramadan and the great gifts that we can have for free from God..
Allah [God], Qur'an, Islam, Arabic, Hijri, Mosque, Muslim, Ramadan, Fajr, Maghrib, Fanoos [Ramadan Lantern], Fasting, Sawm, Salat [Prayer], Prophet Muhammad, Aqidah [Basic Muslim Beliefs], Laylat al-Qadr, Tarawih, Suhoor, Eid ul-Fitr..

Also check this good blog: Ramadan Kareem..

Happy Ramadan Everyone..
Ramadan Kareem..

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Computer Science Is No More About Computers Than Astronomy Is About Telescopes

2006-09-19T12:57:00.000+03:00

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

- E. W. Dijkstra

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Ten Products Google Should Develop

2006-09-14T15:13:00.000+03:00

From Mark Otuteye @ Google Watch,
Check the Ten Products Google Should Develop @:
http://www.markotuteye.com/google.htm

+ Info about Real Google Products..
+ Recent Acquisitions..
+ Google Business Stuff..
+ More Google links..

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World Firefox Day

2006-09-09T09:20:00.000+03:00

World Firefox Day gives everyone who uses and loves Firefox the chance to introduce Firefox to one other person they care about. If your friend starts using Firefox on or before September 15, 2006, both of you will be recognized on the Firefox Friends Wall, and in Firefox 2.

What exactly is the Firefox Friends Wall?
The Firefox Friends Wall is a digital wall that will display the names of everyone who participates in Firefox Day.

Just visit http://www.worldfirefoxday.com and fill out the nomination form. Once we confirm your email address, you’ll be able to send a message to your friend inviting them to download Firefox.

If both you and your friend opt-in to have your names included, they’ll add your names to an interactive Firefox friends display that will be accessible from within Firefox 2.

When will Firefox 2 be available?
Mozilla is currently planning to ship Firefox 2 in the fall of 2006.

http://www.worldfirefoxday.com/
http://www.worldfirefoxday.com/en/faq.php

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Hit By A Car

2006-09-07T09:12:00.000+03:00

It's a very strange feeling..

Yesterday after i got out of my work.. i stuck in the transportations.. there was alot of suffer going home.. and since i don't know the area yet, i stuck more and more..

After alot of time waste and annoyance, i met a kind man who guides me to locate my way correctly..

When he was guiding me, and when i was walking beside him in the very corner of the platform.. suddenly i felt like a very solid hard thing pushing me forward.. and the kind man shouted very loud.. and i felt myself fly forward in the air.. and i felt my body take a very strange shape while flying.. my head was behind me and my legs were skewed back..

Fortunately, thanx God, i dropped down standing on my legs.. standing without any feelings of any kind..
i looked behind [thinking what pushed me is a man] and surprised that it was a CAR..
i found myself away from it by 2 or 3 meters.. oh God.. did i really fly all this distance??!

I was confused and disbelieving.. i always believed that these things happen to others only..
but this was very close..

I was shocked, the kind man stayed with me sometime until i returned back to the real DAMN world..

Now i'm writing to u after a few hours and i feel a little pain in my back bones from the hit.. but i think everything is ok..

It was a very very strange experience.. i tremble when i think that right now i may not be here writing this post to u.. instead i may be broken in the hospital or died!.. thanx God, thanx God, thanx God..

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In The New Job

2006-09-02T14:42:00.000+03:00

After alot of searching, filtration and 100s of interviews during the last few months..

Finally, I'm proud to say: Today is my first day in the new job..

i feel stable and comfort in my 1st day which is a good sign to me, because i didn't feel such feelings from the 1st day in my previous jobs..

i hope it to be an opportunity to proove and evolve my computing ever-hunger desire..

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Lorem Ipsum

2006-08-30T23:52:00.000+03:00

From Tarek Amr blog:

What is Lorem Ipsum?
Why do we use it?
Where does it come from?
and more @
http://gr33ndata.blogspot.com/2006/08/lorem-ipsum.html

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First and Second Arabic Wikipedia Days

2006-08-28T23:41:00.000+03:00

- First Arabic Wikipedia day happened on Saturday August 26, 2006

- Second Arabic Wikipedia day is proposed on Saturday September 30, 2006

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Arabic Wikipedia Day

2006-08-26T02:12:00.000+03:00

Share your knowledge today August 26, 2006..

The Idea:
* A full-day job [24 hours] where interested volunteers gather together to contribute to the writing of the Arabic Wikipedia..

* Put up a list of articles to be created or updated or corrected and the volunteer work on the essays or articles of particular importance to him..

* Each volunteer can be involved from home, but all together are virtually gathered in one chat room
( IRC #wikipedia-ar@irc.freenode.org )

Why?
Arabic Wikipedia probably suffer from a severe shortage of content compared to lesser known languages, and spoken by a limited number of people. A large proportion of the pages of Arabic Wikipedia probably be imperfect and incomplete, and may not contain more than a few words. Therefore, we aim of this idea is to encourage people to participate in the Arabic Wikipedia and dissemination of the idea as much as possible..

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Be Smarter Than U R

2006-08-15T10:30:00.000+03:00

While searching the Web for PHP code snippets, i found this interesting one:

if( you == smart ) {
languages += "php";
}

sure thing this snippet is:
- a piece of art
- extremely fast
- secure
- cross-platform
- cross-browser
- easy to learn
- cheaper to host
- can be compiled using Zend Accelerator for more extra speed
[most developers know NOTHING about this point]

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Important Programming Truths

2006-08-11T12:51:00.000+03:00

This page contains a number of important programming truths that every programmer should know about. These truths are self-evident, and need no explanations.

If it compiles, it works.

If it compiles, it's correct.

If it runs, it doesn't have any bugs.

If it doesn't have any immediately obvious bugs, it's perfect.

If a bug doesn't show, it doesn't exist.

If it seems to work, it works.

Doing something right is easy. Avoiding errors only takes a bit of concentration.

The shorter the source code, the faster the program.

It's obvious how to optimize a program.

Prorammers don't make mistakes.

Run-time errors don't occur.

Users don't make mistakes.

I don't make mistakes.

Errors of any kind are rare.

Error handling can be done in version 2.

It's OK to crash on bad input.

It's OK to give incorrect output on bad input.

Portability isn't useful.

All the world's a VAX. Or, these days, an MS-DOS box.

The length of the feature list is important.

Speed is good, features are better.

Slowness can be fixed in hardware.

The bigger a program is, the better it is.

Random changes to a program fix bugs.

Testing takes only a short while.

Finding bugs is easy. Fixing bugs is trivial.

Bug-fixes don't need to be tested.

Trivial changes of any kind don't need to be tested.

The first approach, idea, or version is always the best.

A 1% crash rate is actually pretty damn good.

Code is self-evident. Comments aren't needed.

Comments are meant for people other than the original author of the code.

Undocumented features are fun and useful.

It can always be fixed in the next version.

Surprised users are happy users.

Demonstrating for clients is the best debugging method.

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Extremely Busy

2006-07-15T05:41:00.000+03:00

I'm very very busy these days..

I even don't have any time for blogging anymore..

But i'll try to post some articles when possible..
In fact, i'm preparing right now 2 interesting articles about:
- [Internet Censorship]
- [Insecurity of the Internet's Communications Routing (Infrastructure-Systems)]

Well, what keeps me busy alot is that i'm beginning a massive upgrade in my mind knowledge-base.. i'm reading 4 books for now and preparing for the 5th..

1. Pragmatic Ajax - A Web 2.0 Primer
2. Wrox - Beginning PHP, Apache, MySQL Web Development
3. Wrox - Professional PHP Programming
4. Yacoubian Building

5. The Da Vinci Code
[(for 4 & 5) can anyone provide me with the movies, or at least a web link to download them?]

Sure thing not all of them r code.. or i'd kill myself.. there should be some fun, some art..

Alot of freelance work will begin soon.. i won the bidding on a new and BIG 2 projects.. i'll start coding them next Saturday July 22, 2006.. 1000s of lines of self-learning code will be written..

So, reading-coding, coding-reading.. this is what i'll be seen doing the next period.. God help me..

See u soon! :'(

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GahooYoogle

2006-07-04T23:00:00.000+03:00

Like Google? Like Yahoo?
No problem
Try the power of Yahoo & Google combined in one place..

Why to use GahooYoogle?
Save your time, get more results in less time.
Your search will be faster and more reliable.

How to remember the name and spelling of GahooYoogle?
A little "poem", you will never forget GahooYoogle:
Write Yahoo then Google
Make the Y and G Toggle
Never forget GahooYoogle

http://www.gahooyoogle.com/

Enjoy Using GahooYoogle Experience!

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Google Machine Translation System

2006-06-19T03:05:00.000+03:00

Google gave journalists a glimpse of its next generation machine translation system at a May 19th Google Factory Tour. The system has been trained using the United Nations Documents as a corpus. This corpus is some 200 billion words worth of content. It uses existing source and target language translations (done by human translators at the U.N.) to find patterns it then uses to build rules for translating between those languages. Apparently it was successful where the current version had failed in translating certain phrases. If anyone were capable of making a serious go of MT, that would have to be Google..

Google has improved the algorithms for its MT program by feeding its computers the equivalent of 1 million books of text, using sources such as parallel translations of United Nations documents..

The results were very impressive, not the stupid machine translation you see on the Internet, which isn't really good..

Today, nearly every translation service offered on the Web - AOL, Alta Vista, Babblefish, even Google's - is powered by translation technology developed by Systran. The company, based in San Diego and Paris, has been involved in MT for more than 30 years. Each day, it translates more than 25 million Web pages..

The question is: what will they do with the new Google translator – where will they integrate it – and what side-effects would it have? If via Google we get our universal language, would that resolve many global problems by fostering cross-cultural understanding? Here is a speculative list of translation applications Google might implement; the key is auto-translation:
The Google Translation Service
The Google Browser
The Google Instant Messenger GIM
The Google Babelfish

-- Read More Here..
-- The machines do the translating [Google Blog]..
-- NIST 2005 Machine Translation Evaluation Official Results..
-- What is Machine Translation (MT)? [SYSTRAN Website]..

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Google Translate Arabic

2006-06-18T06:51:00.000+03:00

Now Google Translate is available in [Arabic/English] and [English/Arabic]..

Give it a try!

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Defeated By A PDA

2006-06-07T06:45:00.000+03:00

A friend of mine has a PDA..

He asked me to connect it to my laptop and put some stuff on it..

I tried to connect the PDA to my laptop using USB, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.. but, i couldn't connect it.. i stuck with the configuration.. the PDA is not recognized by my laptop at all.. What a shame!..

I was in a very bad situation from 2 point of views:
1. My friend: i'm ignorant and know nothing about computers and new technologies..
2. Me: i'm defeated by a PDA, i don't deserve my laptop, even sitting on a computer at all..

Anyone has a solution to this very embarrassing problem plz contact me immediately @ ms.amin[AT]gmail[DOT]com

Hurry Hurry Hurry...

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The Interview Is Done

2006-06-06T06:58:00.000+03:00

Yesterday June 04, 2006 i did my interview as a real estate agent..

I left an excellent first impresstion on my interviewer..

I was confident, wearing an elegant suite, a talented english speaker, capable of diplomatic sentences & smiles that should be said in such situations..

I think i did what's required from me, the rest is in God's will..

Now i should wait for a call from them to tell me am i in or not..

I hate this part so much, because most of the jobs -which i applied for- stops here..
----------
There was one thing that disturbed me ALOT in the interview..
The interviewer asked me his first question: Why r u switching this HUGE, POWERFUL computer programming experience with the REAL ESTATE field?

When i heared this question, i thought to leave immediately..
Really, there's nothing on earth can force me to SWITCH! but it's a Priority ReOrganize matter.. i just wanna live well and eat well in this miserable country, this Anti-Progress country..
I can't work as a web developer, ok, but it will NEVER leave my head!

I wonder that u r asking urselves now: How did i answered him?
Well, i said: I DON'T LIKE OFFICE/DESK WORK.. I CAN'T SET IN A CLOSED PLACE 9HRs A DAY TO WORK!

I enjoyed the experience alot.. it's very possible that i won't join the company.. but i learned something new..

NB for my very close friends: DON'T WORRY FOLKS, I WON'T LEAVE PROGRAMMING..

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Tomorrow I'm Going To An Interview

2006-06-04T06:50:00.000+03:00

Tomorrow i'm going to an interview [as Real Estate Broker]..

i hear u asking: How can a programmer turn into a real estate broker?

well,
i used to be a banker for a while..
also i used to be a computer programmer for another while more longer than the banking while.. ;)..
now i'm going to dig thru a very new path for me.. the real estate brokerage..

i love programming alot.. i'm extremely smart in it..
why do i leave programming?..
thanx alot to my BELOVED country TPYGE<..
she's the main reason for that..

i'm not happy with the new field.. but freelance work is not enough to live..
i'm an internet technology researcher too, but technology research is something we should DENY here in TPYGE<, we should think in dust, shadows, annoying each other, deny ourselves and work forever to serve the big guys who steal the country at the end..

TPYGE< Error: The job cannot be displayed, it's perminantly unavailable..

God help me don't lose my mind..

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The Fight For Freedom Begins

2006-06-04T06:14:00.000+03:00

I was tracking the political changes [upside-downs] in Egypt the last month..

Egypt now is on fire, really..

Bloggers and Activists are beginning a war against the corrupt System[Government] in Egypt..Protesting is everywhere..

The System is trying to preserve itself by squeezing and detaining activists using inhuman ways to shut them up..

The System is torturing the activists in prisons without any trials and making fake cases against them and the innocent people without any awareness of what it's doing, it is moving very random with alot of fatal errors..

But the obvious thing here is that the System failed to do what he wanted to shut down the sounds of freedom..

The opposition is very heavy and spreading as hell.. the worldwide community knows everything with text, videos and pictures.. and people worldwide are participating also in the protesting in France, Germany, England, USA, etc..... without being detained ofcourse because they are NOT in Egypt..

The end of the corrupt System is coming very very fast..

I'll try to provide links to these subjects soon..
You can begin with:
- http://www.manalaa.net/
- http://misrdigital.blogspirit.com/

I just light up the idea in ur brain, u can dig more harder than me and find more sites by urself..

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My DSL Is Down

2006-06-04T05:30:00.000+03:00

I couldn't blog in May because of a very annoying problem..

My DSL connection was terrible and having 200% problems..

I couldn't connect to the web, read or send my emails, read my feeds or even blogging..

After alot of investigations, i discovered that the DSL Provider company and the Router MisConfiguration is the key elements behind this problem..

The problem is still current, but will be solved in the very near future..

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The Dark Internet

2006-05-17T06:34:00.000+03:00

The terms dark internet or dark address refer to any or all of the unreachable network hosts on the internet.

The global reach of the internet is one of its greatest charms. Some parts of the internet — which is a physical collection of computers and other hardware — are difficult or impossible to access either by accident or design.

A study of these lost sites by US researchers has investigated the extent of the "dark internet" and just what causes a net address to fall off the map.

The study found that up to 5% of the internet - potentially 100 million hosts - is completely unreachable.

The internet works because all the computers on it have an individual address.

Routers, devices that shuffle data around the internet, know where to send information because they maintain lists of these addresses.

But occasionally some of these addresses disappear and researchers at Arbor Networks have spent three years finding out why.

Results of a three-year study on internet 'reachability' have confirmed that the web is partitioned and littered with pockets of 'dark web space' which are home to some of the internet's nasties.

But more worryingly, the study found that this dark space is often used as a launch pad for fleeting internet attacks or as a spamming platform.

The most common cause of dark address space is router misconfiguration. Some military sites on the archaic MILNET address blocks also frequently fall into dark addresses. It is also speculated that hackers utilize malicious techniques to hijack private routers to either divert traffic or mask illegal activity.

Arbor found that these short-lived routing activities, like spamming, indicated a misuse of the routing infrastructure.hackers may increasingly be targeting routing infrastructures as a platform for denial of service attacks.

If a router can stake a claim on a block of address space, the rest of the net's infrastructure will simply accept it and route all traffic for that block.

Because routers aren't set up to log such incidents, these dark corners of the web represent pockets of malicious or sinister activity and "intentional misuse and co-option of the internet routing infrastructure"

Arbor also found a large number of SMTP servers, including over 40,000 unique mail sources, a number of which were associated closely with known spamming incidents. These internet nasties work by exploiting inherent weaknesses in the web's routing infrastructure.

The study reveals that all parts of the internet are not equally connected to every other part. By contrast, some networks inadvertently act as gatekeepers for sections of the internet that lie beyond them.

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The Internet != The Web

2006-05-01T06:54:00.000+03:00

The Internet <does not equal> The Web..

The Internet and the Web are not synonymous..

The Web is a term that's often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself.. but here's the distinction between them:

-The Internet:
The Internet, or simply the Net, is the publicly accessible worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using a standardized Internet Protocol (IP). It is made up of thousands of smaller commercial, academic, domestic, and government networks. It carries various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web..

The Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, microwave links etc..

-The Web:
The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information space which people can read-from and write-to via a large number of different Internet-connected devices. For example, computers, Personal Digital Assistants(PDA), cellular phones, telephone kiosks, etc. The World Wide Web is also available (sometimes only partially) through digital television services, exposing content onto television screens..

The Web is actually a service that operates over the Internet, just like e-mail..

WWW is the complete set of documents residing on all Internet servers that use the HTTP protocol, accessible to users via a simple point-and-click system..

The Web is a collection of interconnected documents, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, and is accessible using the Internet..

On other words we can say:
The Internet is the hardware..
The Web is the software..

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My Website is online

2006-04-27T05:55:00.000+02:00

My Website is online now after a few days of offline state..

All errors had been fixed..

The site URL is: http://adjuster.somee.com

Enjoy the experience..

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I'm a meebo contributor!

2006-04-21T03:35:00.000+02:00

Woohoo, i'm a contributor now in meebo Arabic translation..

Congratulate me folks..

Due to the worldwide huge recognition, meebo has expanded its interface to a very long list of languages..

They depend on users feedback to add new services, so, they used this point to enable users to contribute in meebo localization.. they 100% succeeded in that..

Now i'm officially a meebo contributor!

Check out:
- meebo official website
- meebo contributors
i'm #4 after Adel, Yassine and Ali..

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My Website is offline

2006-04-16T08:11:00.000+02:00

My Website is offline for a few days due to some problems with my host..

Also users have reported for some errors in the site forbidding some features from correctly rendering in some browsers..
so errors are being checked to be fixed..

The site will be online again after a few days with:
-- Whole new interface..
-- Bugs fixed..
-- Cool AJAX services enabled..

All of these new features will be introduced on a new host..
Keep spotting the Website icon at the top corner of the sidebar to the right.. it's now disabled, very soon it will be enabled..

Sorry for the inconvenience..

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AJAX Sample Code

2006-04-16T05:26:00.000+02:00

This tutorial covers subjects which require some degree of familiarity with Javascript and PHP. Beginners may therefore find it a little hard going, but hopefully should still be able to grasp the principles and uses of Ajax, if not the details.

The standard and well-known method for user interaction with web-based applications involves the user entering information (e.g. filling out a form), submitting that information to the server, and awaiting a page refresh or redirect to return the response from the server.

This is at times frustrating for the user, besides being rather different to the 'desktop' style of user interface with which he may be more familiar.

Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) is a technique (or, more correctly, a combination of techniques) for submitting server requests 'in the background' and returning information from the server to the user without the necessity of waiting for a page load.

There are a few, relatively simple, steps to coding an Ajax application. The description below is an attempt to describe the main points without bogging down the new user in too many of the technicalities.

First, we need to know how to create an XMLHTTPRequest object. The process differs slightly depending on whether you are using Internet Explorer (5+) with ActiveX enabled, or a standards-compliant browser such as Mozilla Firefox.

Second, we need to write an event handler which will be called via some event on our user's page, and will handle sending our request for data to our server.

The event handler will use various methods of our XMLHTTPRequest object to:
-- Make the request to the server..
-- Check when the server says that it has completed the request..
-- Deal with the information returned by the server..

We can make our request of the server by using a GET method to an appropriate server-side script. Here's an example event handler called sendRequest which assumes that we have created our XMLHTTPRequest object and called it http:

Note that the function listens to the onreadystatechange property of the XMLHTTPRequest object and, each time this parameter changes, calls a further function handleResponse..

Third, then, we need to write a function handleResponse which will establish when the server has completed our request, and do something useful with the data it has returned:

Note here that our function checks for a readyState value of 4 - there are various numbered states describing the progress of such a request, but we are only interested in the value of 4, which indicates that the request is complete and we can use the returned data.

Also we check that a successful server response was received.. that's 200..

In this case, we have received our information as simple text via the responseText property of our XMLHTTPRequest object. Information can, however, be returned as XML or as properties of a predefined javascript object, though this is perhaps beyond the scope of this tutorial.

This creates a request object along with a send request and handle response function. So to actually use it, you could include the previous JavaScript functions in your page. Then to make one of these backend requests you would tie it to something. Like an onclick event or a straight href like this:

That means that when someone clicks on that link what actually happens is that a backend request to
( somepage.php?id=getserverdata ) will be sent.

Now, let's get to the server-side part "somepage.php", you might have something like this:

Now, look at handleResponse. It assigns the string returned by the server "Hello AJAX World" to the ID named someID using DOM..
That means if you have a DIV tag like this in your page:

Once you click on that link, that will dynamically be changed to:

That's all there is to it. Everything else is just building on top of this. Replacing the simple response "Hello AJAX World" syntax with a richer XML format and making the request much more complicated as well. Before you blindly install large "AJAX" libraries, have a go at rolling your own functionality so you know exactly how it works and you only make it as complicated as you need. Often you don't need much more than what is shown here.

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Where To Use AJAX

2006-04-14T05:45:00.000+02:00

It's been well over a year now since GMail changed the way everyone thought about web applications.
Here are places Ajax should now be required in a web application:

Form driven interaction
Forms are slow. Very slow. Editing a tag on a del.icio.us bookmark? Click on the edit link to load the edit bookmark form page, then edit the field and hit submit to wait for the submission to go through, then return to the previous page and scroll down to find the bookmark to see if the tags look right..

But with Ajax? Click on the edit link to instantly start changing tags, click on the submit button to asynchronously send off changes to the tags and quickly see in place what changed, no reloading the entire page..

Deep hierarchical tree navigation
First of all, applications with deep hierarchical tree navigation are generally a nightmare. Simple flat topologies and search/tagging works very well in most circumstances. But if an application really calls for it, use Javascript to manage the topology UI, and Ajax to lessen the burden on the server by lazy loading deep hierarchy data. For example: it's way too time consuming to read discussion threads by clicking through and loading completely new pages to see a one line response..

Rapid user-to-user communication
In a message posting application that creates immediate discussions between people, what really sucks is forcing the user to refresh the page over and over to see a reply. Replies should be instant, users shouldn't have to obsessively refresh. Even GMail, which improves on the old hotmail/yahoo mail 'refresh inbox, refresh inbox' symptom, doesn't really push Ajax far enough yet in terms of notifying new mail instantly..

Voting, Yes/No boxes, Ratings submissions
It's really too bad there are no consistent UI cues for Ajax submission, because submitting a vote or a yes/no response is so much less painful when the submission is handled through Ajax. By reducing the time and impact of clicking on things, Ajax applications become a lot more interactive - if it takes a 40 seconds to register a vote, most people would probably pass unless they really care. If it takes 1 second to vote, a much larger percentage of people are likely to vote. (Sample:Movie ratings are 2008 on Netflix versus 210 ratings on IMDb.com)..

Filtering and involved data manipulation
Applying a filter, sorting by date, sorting by date and name, toggling on and off filters, etc. Any highly interactive data manipulation should really be done in Javascript instead of through a series of server requests. Finding and manipulating a lot of data is hard enough without waiting 30 seconds between each change in views, Ajax can really speed this up..

Commonly entered text hints/autocompletion
Entering the same text phrases or predictable text phrases is something software/javascript can be good at helping out with. It's very useful in del.icio.us and GMail, for quickly adding tags/email addresses..

--------------------------------------------------------------

Where you shouldn't use AJAX:

Simple forms
Even though forms are the single biggest beneficiary of Ajaxification, a simple comment form, or submit order form, or other one-off rarely used form does not benefit from Ajax driven submission. Generally, if a form is not used much, or it's critical to work properly, Ajax is not that helpful..

Search
LiveSearch on blogs is more annoying than useful. There's a reason that Google Suggest is staying in beta and not going on the front page of Google. Searching on Start.com Live.com doesn't allow use of the back button to see a previous search, or previous pages. Maybe it's possible that no one has gotten this right yet, but getting this right is hard enough that it's generally not a good idea, or more trouble that it's worth..

Basic navigation
In general, driving basic site/application navigation using Ajax is an awful idea. Why would anyone want to spend time writing code to emulate the browser behavior when they could spend time making their application better? For basic navigating between documents, Javascript doesn't help..

Replacing a large amount of text
Ajax saves a complete refresh of the page, so small pieces of the page can be more dynamically updated. But if nearly everything on a page is changing, why not just request a new page from the server?

Display manipulation
Even though it seems that Ajax is purely a UI technology, it's not. It's actually a data synchronization, manipulation and transfer technology. For maintainable and clean web applications, it's a good idea not to have Ajax/Javascript manipulate the interface directly at all. Javascript can stay separate and simply manipulate the XHTML/HTML DOM, with CSS rules dictating how the UI displays that data..

Useless widgets
Sliders, drag and drops, bouncies, mouse gestures, whatever. Mostly these widgets can be replaced with more intuitive controls, or eliminated altogether in favor of simplicity. In picking colors, maybe a slider widget is useful to pick the exact shade. But in picking a price point in a store, a slider to pick the price to the cent is just overkill..

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AJAX Mistakes

2006-04-12T02:25:00.000+02:00

Ajax is an awesome technology that is driving a new generation of web apps. But Ajax is also a dangerous technology for web developers, its power introduces a huge amount of UI problems as well as server side state problems and server load problems.

This's a list of the many mistakes developers using Ajax often make:

Using Ajax for the sake of Ajax
Sure Ajax is cool, and developers love to play with cool technology, but Ajax is a tool not a toy. A lot of the new Ajax applications are really just little toys, not developed for any real purpose, just experiments in what Ajax can do or trying to fit Ajax somewhere where it isn’t needed. Toys might be fun for a little while, but toys are not useful applications..

Breaking the back button
The back button is a great feature of the standard web site user interface. Unfortunately, the back button doesn’t mesh very well with Javascript..

Not giving immediate visual cues for clicking widgets
If something I’m clicking on is triggering Ajax actions, you have to give me a visual cue that something is going on. An example of this is GMail. Whenever I do something in GMail, a little red box in the top right indicates that the page is loading..

Leaving offline people behind
With this new breed of Ajax applications, people who have spotty internet connections or people who just don’t want to switch to the web need to be accomodated as well. Just because technology ‘advances’ doesn’t mean that people are ready and willing to go with it. Web application design should at least consider offline access. With GMail it’s POP, Backpackit has SMS integration. In the Enterprise, it’s web-services..

Sending sensitive information in the clear
The security of AJAX applications is subject to the same rules as any web application, except that once you can talk asynchronously to the server, you may tend to write code that is a very chatty in a potentially insecure way. All traffic must be vetted to make sure security is not compromised..

Assuming AJAX development is single platform development
Ajax development is multi-platform development. Ajax code will run on IE’s javascript engine, Spidermonkey (Mozilla’s js engine), Rhino (a Java js implementation, also from Mozilla), or other minor engines that may grow into major engines. So it’s not enough just to code to JavaScript standards, there needs to be real-world thorough testing as well..

Too much code makes the browser slow
Ajax introduces a way to make much more interesting javascript applications, unfortunately interesting often means more code running. More code running means more work for the browser, which means that for some javascript intensive websites, especially inefficiently coded ones, you need to have a powerful CPU to keep the functionality zippy..

Not having a plan for those who do not enable or have JavaScript
According to the W3 schools browser usage statistics, which if anything are skewed towards advanced browsers, 11% of all visitors don’t have JavaScript. So if your web application is wholly dependent on JavaScript, it would seem that you have potentially cut near 10% of your audience..

Not using links I can pass to friends or bookmark
Another great feature of websites is that I can pass URLs to other people and they can see the same thing that I’m seeing. I can also bookmark an index into my site navigation and come back to it later. Javascript, and thus Ajax applications, can cause huge problems for this model of use. Since the Javascript is dynamically generating the page instead of the server, the URL is cut out of the loop and can no longer be used as an index into navigation. This is a very unfortunate feature to lose, many Ajax webapps thoughtfully include specially constructed permalinks for this exact reason..

Inventing new UI conventions
Using complex logic in the page design such as ‘click on this non obvious thing to drive this other non obvious result’ will increase the time and difficulty of learning the aplication, which is a major negative for any application..

Blocking Spidering
Ajax applications that load large amounts of text without a reload can cause a big problem for search engines. This goes back to the URL problem. If users can come in through search engines, the text of the application needs to be somewhat static so that the spiders can read it..

Character Sets
One big problem with using AJAX is the lack of support for character sets. You should always set the content character set on the server-side as well as encoding any data sent by Javascript. Use ISO-8859-1 if you use plain english, or UTF-8 if you use special characters, like æ, ø and å (danish special characters) Note: it is usually a good idea to go with utf-8 nowadays as it supports many languages)..

Changing state with links (GET requests)
The majority of Ajax applications tend to just use the GET method when working with AJAX. However, the W3C standards state that GET should only be used for retrieving data, and POST should only be used for setting data. Although there might be no noticable difference to the end user, these standards should still be followed to avoid problems with robots or programs such as Google Web Accelerator..

Problem reporting
In a traditional server-side application, you have visibility into every exception, you can log all interesting events and benchmarks, and you can even record and view (if you wish) the actual HTML that the browser is rendering. With client-side applications, you may have no idea that something has gone wrong if you don’t know how to code correctly and log exceptions from the remotely called pages to your database..

Return on Investment
Sometimes AJAX can impressibly improve the usability of an application (a great example is the star-rating feedback on Netflix), but more often you see examples of expensive rich-client applications that were no better than the plain HTML versions..

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What Is AJAX?

2006-04-02T21:30:00.000+02:00

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is not a technology in itself, but is a technique for creating interactive web applications. When using AJAX, Web applications are able to make quick, incremental updates to the user interface without reloading the entire browser page. This makes the application faster and more responsive to user actions. This is meant to increase the Web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.

Ajax is a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together:
XHTML (or HTML), CSS, DOM, JavaScript, XML, XMLHttpRequest object.

- XHTML (or HTML), CSS, for marking up and styling information.
- The DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, like JavaScript or JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.
- The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server.
- XML is commonly used as the format for transferring data back from the server.

The classic web application model works like this: Most user actions in the interface trigger an HTTP request back to a web server. The server does some processing (retrieving data, crunching numbers, talking to various legacy systems) and then returns an HTML page to the client. It’s a model adapted from the Web’s original use as a hypertext medium.

This approach makes a lot of technical sense, but it doesn’t make for a great user experience. While the server is doing its thing, what’s the user doing? That’s right, waiting. And at every step in a task, the user waits some more.

Obviously, if the Web is designed from scratch for applications, users will not wait around. Once an interface is loaded, why should the user interaction come to a halt every time the application needs something from the server? In fact, why should the user see the application go to the server at all?

An Ajax application eliminates the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction on the Web by introducing an intermediary (an Ajax engine) between the user and the server.

Instead of loading a webpage, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine, this engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user’s behalf. So the user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something.

Every user action that normally would generate an HTTP request takes the form of a JavaScript call to the Ajax engine instead. Any response to a user action that doesn’t require a trip back to the server (such as simple data validation, editing data in memory, and even some navigation) the engine handles on its own. If the engine needs something from the server in order to respond (submitting data for processing, loading additional interface code, or retrieving new data) the engine makes those requests asynchronously, usually using XML.

Who’s Using Ajax:
All of the major products Google has introduced over the last year [Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach].
Flickr, A9, Netvibes, del.icio.us, meebo, Remember The Milk..
and alot more of Web 2.0 sites..

These projects demonstrate that Ajax is not only technically sound, but also practical for real-world applications. This isn’t another technology that only works in a laboratory. And Ajax applications can be any size, from the very simple, single-function [Google Suggest] to the very complex and sophisticated [Google Maps].

The biggest challenges in creating Ajax applications are not technical. The core Ajax technologies are mature, stable, and well understood. Instead, the challenges are for the designers of these applications: to forget what we think we know about the limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a wider, richer range of possibilities.

It’s going to be fun.

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Netvibes is the best Web 2.0 Start Page

2006-03-29T03:41:00.000+02:00

The aim of it is to provide a place on the internet where you can set just the content you like, a super easy way of building your personalized homepage, available anywhere, anytime. No registration is needed, however if you want to access your page from another computer you'll be able to do it by registering with your email address and a password..

Netvibes is a web-app based on the idea of personalized homepages..
it is powered by some nicely developed Ajax..

Netvibes can be considered as a personal news aggregator with RSS and Atom support. Comes with a set of predefined news feeds..

Netvibes is developed by a french team who are excited about what the web can be..

Netvibes is fully localized, available for now in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese..

Netvibes was launched on the 8th September 2005..

The project itself looks pretty good: modules are intuitive and the page interaction’s easy to catch up on with just a few seconds. There are a few other things on the slate too, apparently, like modules for Flickr, feed searching, bookmarks, etc..

All in all, while it is another solution for a problem that many people are tackling, Netvibes looks like a pretty good Ajax-based homepage, so you should definitely check it out and take your conclusions..

U can read alot of newly added features to Netvibes on their blog @
http://blog.netvibes.com/

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Windows Vista Delayed Again

2006-03-28T05:14:00.000+02:00

The new version of Microsoft Windows, called Vista, is now delayed..
it was originally going to ship in 2003. Then 2005. Then 2006. Now in early 2007 [January]. I'm not surprised!

Micro$oft says the delay is for the need to make more security and usuability tweaks..

Office 2007 launch delayed too to meet Vista!!

A quote from retiring Windows co-president Jim Allchin:
"We won't compromise on product quality, and we needed just a few more weeks."

The few more weeks changed to few more months!
After the delay i prefer to think Vista this way..
Windows Vista: Too Much Marketing, Not Enough Coding..

So what's new in this Vista?
Windows Vista will include whole new stuff such as:
1. Anti-spyware tools.
2. Internet Explorer 7.
3. Better home networking.
4. Windows Media Player 11.
5. Windows Calendar [a new systemwide tool designed to do for datebook information what Outlook Express does for e-mail in Windows XP].
6. Broad IPv6 support.
7. Improved client-side caching of data stored on a server.
8. Volume encryption.
9. Revamped synchronization engine.
10. Lots of new laptop features. with an auxiliary display.
11. Automatic hard drive optimization.
12. Security enhancements.
13. New searching mechanism.
14. Secure boot-up process that helps prevent someone from gaining access to your data if your PC is lost or stolen.
15. Parental controls.
16. There will also be visual changes.
and more..

How much will it cost?
Pricing has not been announced.

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Is Skype Secure?

2006-03-22T17:25:00.000+02:00

We all know the advantages of Skype, but what about the disadvantages that we all don't know?

Is Skype secure? Is the program safe to use? Is Skype more secure than a telephone call made with an analog or ISDN telephone? How does the security of Skype compare with other VoIP-based systems?

Skype binds to three ports on the user's computer and directly manipulates Windows XP's built-in firewall to accommodate these network bindings..

Skype's file transfer function does not contain any built-in anti-virus protection that scans programs as they are downloaded..

Skype accesses the hard disk several times per minute..
Although those accesses are small, extremely fast and safe in the short term, they can be harmful in the long term..

Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of Skype, has admitted that the current security model would not open-source:
Would he make Skype open-source? No, that would make its strong 1024 bit encryption and security vulnerable: "We could do it but only if we re-engineered the way it works and we don't have the time right now."

In cryptography and computer security, security through obscurity (sometimes security by obscurity) is a controversial principle in security engineering, which attempts to use secrecy (of design, implementation, etc.) to ensure security. A system relying on security through obscurity may have theoretical or actual security vulnerabilities, but its owners or designers believe that the flaws are not known, and that attackers are unlikely to find them..

A few people will give up a "normal" phone for a PC-linked Skype connection. New products, such as standard phone handsets with USB connectors, help blur the line separating Skype from the rest of the telephone world, but that line remains..

Is Skype's completely proprietary nature. Open source fans don't appreciate Skype's rejection of open source values and standards. Large companies don't appreciate Skype's way of worming through corporate firewalls..

Skype do not follow standards, two major computer-based phone products that do follow standards, SIPphone and FreeWorldDialup, have tiny market share compared to Skype but have the weight of internet standards on their side. Their limited market share will not threaten to overwhelm Skype but may grow large enough to push Skype to involvement with the standards community. That probably won't happen until at least 2008, and will likely depend on how Microsoft implements Voice over IP support in Windows Vista..

The integrity of the data, i.e. data modified while traveling though peers, even if encrypted, is unknown and undocumented..

Skype provides an uncontrolled registration system for users: registration requires no proof of the identity of the user at all. This works two ways: you can use the system without revealing your identity to other users of the system, but on the other hand you have no guarantees that the person you communicate with is the one they say they are..

Skype is a proprietary software program using undocumented protocols, and laws prohibit reverse-engineering it..

Skype implements some kind of "peer-to-peer" network over client machines, with clients on fast connections becoming major exchange points; since research centers typically have very high speed connections, machines running Skype in those centers may generate very high traffic; some networks were reportedly nearly saturated by Skype traffic..

The information flow implemented by Skype is unknown; though encryption is used, it is unknown where traffic goes..

Skype claims that its system uses the RSA encryption algorithm for key exchange and 256-bit AES as its bulk encryption algorithm. However, Skype does not publish its key exchange algorithm or its over-the-wire protocol and, despite repeated requests, refused to explain the underlying design of its certificates, is authentication system, or its encryption implementation. Therefore it is impossible to validate the company's claims regarding encryption. It is entirely possible that the data is both encrypted and not secure..

Skype could also be an infection vector for spyware. Although the program's creators promise that their program does not come with spyware or adware, it is possible that they are not being truthful or that their policy will change in the future. Skype could have security vulnerabilities that a third-party could exploit..

Finally, it must be remembered that the security of the Skype system also depends entirely on the good will of Skype’s programmers and the organization running Skype’s back-end servers. It is possible that there are back doors in the system allowing the Skype organization or others to record Skype conversations, turn on a computer's microphone and record the room's noise..

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Skype! Free Internet Calls

2006-03-19T02:41:00.000+02:00

Skype lets you make free calls over the internet to anyone else who also has Skype. It's free and easy to download and use, and it works with most computers. Skype offers free global telephony and unlimited voice calls with its next-generation peer-to-peer software.
Users may call landlines and cellphones for a fee; users may call each other for free.
Skype makes your computer (or PocketPC) works as your phone.

Skype users now are near to 272 million people worldwide..

Skype works on a decentralized model, meaning there are no big phone switches and controlling computers in regional data centers, such as those that power Vonage and other broadband phone service providers. The only centralized Skype services at the beginning were the login servers, which also show which other Skype users are online. The switches that followed control SkypeOut calls to traditional telephone networks around the world. Adding Skype Voicemail and SkypeIn requires more centralized resources, and Skype data centers are growing as you read this. But Skype's low infrastructure cost per number of subscribers creates jealousy among every other broadband phone service provider.

Other internet telephony services, such as Vonage, Verizon, Packet8, ATT CallVantage, and others, spend hundreds of dollars of marketing and advertising money to find each new customer. Skype spends nothing [$0] except for the server support to keep its download files available.. Users worldwide join Skype by a word of mouth..

Skype transmits the full frequency range of human hearing (20Hz to 20KHz). Compare this with the standard phone frequency of 300Hz to 3.4KHz and you can see why Skype calls sound so wonderful.

The hassle could be your computer must be turned on to use Skype, and people you call must have Skype running on their system in order to receive your call.

PROs:
-- Every Skype connection uses 256-bit encryption
-- Call quality astounds people
-- Talking free to other Skype users
-- Conference call with up to 5 total Skype users
-- File transfers
-- Chat (instant messaging)
-- SkypeOut [The ability to call regular phones]
-- SkypeIn [The ability of regular phones to call you on Skype]
-- Skype Voicemail
-- Skype Video Calling

Skype may not take over the world. However, Skype makes the world's highest-quality phone connections available for the world's lowest price: free.

The main difference between Skype and other VoIP clients is that it operates on a peer-to-peer model rather than the more traditional server-client model. The Skype user directory is entirely decentralised and distributed among the nodes in the network, which means the network can scale very easily to large sizes (currently just over 70 million users) without a complex and costly centralised infrastructure.

Try Skype now!

For now, Skype looks so wonderful, but to me and other developers, it still needs alot of criticism for security.. specially in large scale use like researches and large companies..

Security in Skype has alot of red marks which will be discussed in the next part..

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The Million Dollar Homepage

2006-03-15T03:22:00.000+02:00

The idea is to sell 1 pixel on the screen for 1$..
You can buy 1 box minimum for $100 (100 pixels = 10x10 pixels), and the maximum purchase is whatever is left..
And it's doing the job very well : about 450000 pixels sold in just 2 months..

The idea started 26th August 2005 and now is sold out!

The owner is Alex Tew, 21 years old, the UK student behind the site.. He sells pixels on a web page to fund his way through university..

The site and homepage will be online for at least 5 years.. at least until 26th August 2010..

He says to buyers "You will have a piece of internet history!"

So why should people buy Alex pixels?
Because every buyer will have an image and a link to his site on the homepage of a site that could potentially be seen by millions of people over the coming years. The site will be online for at least 5 years, that's guaranteed, but the idea is to keep it online forever..

All you need to make money on the Internet is one really good idea.

Site: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

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Google Mars is here

2006-03-14T05:06:00.000+02:00

Google is now showing you maps of the Mars. This feels just like Google Maps for earth. You can switch between three different map types; elevation, visible, and infrared. A list of "links of interest" (like where spacecrafts landed), as well as named mountains, canyons, dunes and craters is also available.

Google in their Mars FAQ says they're working on a version of this Mars data to be used in Google Earth (desktop) clients.

Links:
Google Mars
http://www.google.com/mars/

About Google Mars
http://www.google.com/mars/about.html

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Switching to Gmail

2006-03-08T04:05:00.000+02:00

Switching to a new email address can be a pain, but it doesn't have to be. To get personalized help on how to switch to Gmail, enter the
domain for the email address you no longer want to use, and click "Help Me Switch". Or view general instructions on switching from any
email address. Change is good. It can be easy too.

While I was doing some work this weekend I came what appears to be a new "guide" from Google that's designed to assist users of other
email services in a switch to Gmail. Yes, more good marketing from Mountain View.

The "Switching to Gmail" guide is a set of pages where, after the user enters their current, non-Gmail address (note that they use Yahoo
Mail and Hotmail in an example), they receive a customized guide (based on the current service) to switch to the still beta, Gmail.

Switch to GMail from other email services - Just enter the domain for the email address you no longer want to use, and click "Help Me
Switch". Contains detailed information on migrating to GMail from Yahoo, Hotmail, SBCGlobal, Comcast and .EDU addresses.

Switch from any email provider:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=switchguide.html&switch=1

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Google Page Creator

2006-02-27T02:00:00.000+02:00

Want to create an online photo tour of your vacation to Bali? An overview of the South American precipitation cycle for your science class? A shrine to your pet ferret?

Now's your chance. We're testing a new product that makes creating your own web pages as easy as creating a document in a word processor. Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There's no software to download and no web designer to hire. The pages you create are hosted on Google servers and are available at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com for the world to see.

http://pages.google.com
A new web address u will remember for good..

Links
About Google Page Creator
http://pages.google.com/-/about.html

Sign up for Page Creator updates mailing list
http://pages.google.com/-/updates.html

Page Creator Help
http://www.google.com/support/pages

Page Creator Google Group [484 members and counting]
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Page-Creator

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RSS On My Blog = Correct

2006-02-20T08:14:00.000+02:00

Some folks ask me alot if i have RSS feed for my blog..
and i say:
"Yes, sure i have.."

To subscribe to my feed just click the orange radar icon on the sidebar, u'll be redirected to my FeedBurner feed page,
there u can subscribe using 2 different ways:

** Desktop Client:

As u see, there's alot of programs to use it to subscribe, but i recommend FeedDemon, it's good and easy..
just select the reader program u like from the menu, and it will open automatically and add my feed to ur list of feeds..
[the reader u select should be installed on ur computer first ofcourse]

------------------------------------------------------
** Online Service:

Here once an icon has been clicked, u'll be redirected to an online reader service, u should register[create account] or login there..
then u'll add my feed to ur collection..
u have a group of options to select from, feel free to make a choice..

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RSS: Web Syndication Part 2

2006-02-18T07:21:00.000+02:00

You may want to read Part 1 first

What is Atom?
Atom is a format quite similar to RSS. It was created by people who felt that RSS could be improved upon, and some that disagreed with some of the politics regarding RSS. Some people are heavily involved in the (quite unimportant, in my opinion) argument as to which format is better. The Atom format is in development. The basic difference is that while Atom is somewhat more complex, it is also able to carry more complex information, and it is consistent across the syndication, storage, and editing of information. Just about everything on this page which discusses RSS applies equally well to Atom. You can learn more about Atom at the official website, AtomEnabled.org.

What is OPML?
OPML is an XML format for outlines. You can read more about it on the OPML website. An OPML file can be made that lists all the RSS feeds you subscribe to, and this can be very useful. Many RSS aggregators can produce (export) OPML files, and many can read (import from) them. This is a very useful feature. Suppose that you are using aggregator ABC to read 50 RSS feeds. Your friend tells you that aggregator XYZ is so much better than ABC, so you want to try it out. Rather than re-subscribing to all 50 feeds from XYZ, you can export an OPML file from ABC, and import that file into XYZ, assuming that both aggregators have these features. Many people put their OPML files online, which would allow you to instantly to subscribe to all the feeds that they read. Share Your OPML is one website that makes use of information from many people’s OPML files.

How do I read RSS Feeds?
If you want to collect and browse feeds you have many choices, but there are two primary categories of feed reading applications:
** Desktop Programs
** Online Services

**There are many desktop applications for Windows and Mac OS system users, but the most popular two are:
-- FeedDemon (Windows)
-- NetNewsWire (Mac OS X)

Both are top for ease of use.
For a reader of your choice; a search for "RSS Reader" at popular search sites will yield many results.

**If you would prefer to use an online service to track your feeds, you have the advantage of being able to access your feed updates anywhere you use a web browser. Also, any upgrades or new features are added automatically.

The trade-off comes in different, fewer features and slightly slower performance versus desktop programs.

There are many web-based feed reading services, but the most popular two are:
-- NewsGator.com
-- Bloglines.com

Glossary
-- RSS = Really Simple Syndication = Rich Site Summary = RDF Site Summary = who cares?
-- RSS file = RSS feed = RSS channel = feed = channel
- Atom = a format similar to RSS; like RSS the files may also be called feeds or channels
-- XML = eXtensible Markup Language = the format RSS is written in = important only because RSS may be labeled as XML
-- RDF = Resource Discovery Framework = the format of RSS version 1.0 = important only because RSS may be labeled as RDF
-- OPML = Outline Processor Markup Language = an XML format for outlines, which may be used as a way of listing many RSS feeds
-- My website is syndicated = My website produces an RSS feed
-- Scraping = When Joe makes an RSS feed for Bob’s website without telling Bob; the feed is called a scraped feed
-- blog = weblog = log on the web = a journal-type website, many of which produce RSS feeds
-- RSS reader = news reader = RSS aggregator = a program that can read RSS files
---------------------------------------------------

Must read links:
- RSS Tutorials
http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/
http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml

- OPML Info
http://www.opml.org/

- RSS 2.0 founder Dave Winer
http://www.userland.com/

- RSS Workshop: Publish and Syndicate Your News to the Web
http://www.rssgov.com/rssworkshop.html

- RSS 2.0 Specification at Harvard
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss

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RSS: Web Syndication Part 1

2006-02-16T06:45:00.000+02:00

RSS: The Web's Next Big Thing..
Hang on to your hats boys and girls, because your experience of the World Wide Web is about to change!

What is RSS?
"RSS" stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.
RSS means to get latest updates on sites, blogs or news headlines as they released without going to the site and check it.

Think about all of the information that you access on the Web on a day-to-day basis; news headlines, search results, what’s new, job vacancies, and so forth. A large amount of this content can be thought of as a list.

Most people need to track a number of these lists, but it becomes difficult once there are more than a handful of sources. This is because they have to go to each page, load it, remember how it’s formatted, and find where they last left off in the list.

RSS is an XML-based format that allows the syndication of lists of hyperlinks, along with other information, or metadata, that helps viewers decide whether they want to follow the link.

To enable this, a Web site will make a feed, or channel, available, just like any other file or resource on the server. Once a feed is available, computers can regularly fetch the file to get the most recent items on the list. Most often, people will do this with an aggregator, a program that manages a number of lists and presents them in a single interface.

Feeds can also be used for other kinds of list-oriented information, such as syndicating the content itself (often weblogs) along with the links.

Web pages are getting smarter than they used to be. More of your favorite sites are making content summaries and updates available for syndication, just like the syndicated advice columns in your newspaper. Only this kind of syndication is free and "really simple." It is called "RSS" for "really simple syndication."

That means you can download a free or low-cost news feed reader[aggregator] and "subscribe" to a number of your favorite Web sites. You might have seen odd little orange "XML" rectangles on some sites. The URL when you click on the rectangle is the address of the news feed.

What is RSS News Aggregator?
A news aggregator is a software application or remotely hosted service that collects syndicated content from disparate sources and provides a single consolidated view. These applications can also be commonly referred to as a feed reader, feed aggregator or simply just an aggregator.

Why Use an RSS Aggregator?
For anyone that reads a half dozen or more pages that have RSS feeds, an aggregator is a necessity. RSS aggregators are set up to periodically check for new items in the feeds you are subscibed to, commonly once every hour. In other words, the news comes to you, rather than you having to go to the news. This saves a tremendous amount of time. Or conversely, you can read many more feeds in the same amount of time. Many people read several hundred feeds. That just wouldn't be feasible without an RSS aggregator. Additionally, you avoid all the non-new information on a web page, including the ads, menus, etc.

to be continued in part 2..

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