Malaysia Internet Interruption

It's 26th November again and Taiwan was shaking. Despite the fact that the life lost is small compared to last year tsunami, I'm going to mark this date on my yearly calendar as the "Earth Shaking Day". The earth quake scalled at 7.1 ricther were causing disruption to the Asia Pacific Cable Network (APCN2) underwater cables. Aparently ISPs in the South East Asia region shares the same cable to link all the communication network to the US and to the rest of the world.

What did I do that day? I reboot the server once (old habit), ping and tracert to Google,Yahoo and Utusan (I didn't aware of the quake until I read The Star later that day). With no Google and Yahoo means no internet social life for me (Gmail, Blogger, YM, Meebo, TechCrunch) at least for the rest of the week. So I thought of looking for locally host content and sevices provider. All the local news press site are available Utusan, The Star, The News Starit Time, Berita Harian and of course the local tourism portal VirtualMalaysia.com still up and that was it. Without Google I didn't have a single clue what to do next. So logged to the long lost local search engines cari.com and catcha.com. Both were working but still most of the results will pointed out to abroad.

Well I guess there is no such alternate routes or perhaps no alternates routes could survive the 7.1 richter scale shake. I wonder if there is no internet ever created, what will happen to us all?

Keyboard Hack - How to Display Odd Characters Using Keyboard.

I was searching for a shorcut to display symbol so that I can easily type it while I chat or to be insert in comment box etc. Well I found a bunch of it.

Alt Key + Calculator Number = Symbol

Hold the ALT key & type the number next to the symbol you want on the CALCULATOR part of the keyboard, then release Alt Key. Symbol will appear. And here is the full list.

Alt + 0169 = ©
Alt + 0174 = ®
Alt + 15 = ¤
Alt + 20 = ¶
Alt + 21 = §
Alt + 128 = Ç
Alt + 129 = ü
Alt + 130 = é
Alt + 131 = â
Alt + 132 = ä
Alt + 133 = à
Alt + 134 = å
Alt + 135 = ç
Alt + 136 = ê
Alt + 137 = ë
Alt + 138 = è
Alt + 139 = ï
Alt + 140 = î
Alt + 141 = ì
Alt + 142 = Ä
Alt + 143 = Å
Alt + 144 = É
Alt + 145 = æ
Alt + 146 = Æ
Alt + 147 = ô
Alt + 148 = ö
Alt + 149 = ò
Alt + 150 = û
Alt + 151 = ù
Alt + 152 = ÿ
Alt + 153 = Ö
Alt + 154 = Ü
Alt + 155 = ¢
Alt + 156 = £
Alt + 157 = ¥
Alt + 159 = ƒ
Alt + 160 = á
Alt + 161 = í
Alt + 162 = ó
Alt + 163 = ú
Alt + 164 = ñ
Alt + 165 = Ñ
Alt + 166 = ª
Alt + 167 = º
Alt + 168 = ¿
Alt + 170 = ¬
Alt + 171 = ½
Alt + 172 = ¼
Alt + 173 = ¡
Alt + 174 = «
Alt + 175 = »
Alt + 225 = ß
Alt + 230 = µ
Alt + 241 = ±
Alt + 246 = ÷
Alt + 249 = •
Alt + 250 = ·
Alt + 253 = ²
Alt + 350 = ^
Alt + 352 = `
Alt + 382 = ~

Update
Alt + 0128 = € - Thanks A1 Web Solutions

Some might find this useful while others might thought this is just another geek stuff. As for me, most probably I just want to use "²" for my Malay language chat like "layang²" or "macam²".

Slide Show Presentation Goes Online

There is time when I open up emails from my friends I'm hopping that there is no PowerPoint (with .ppt extension) stuff attached. I hate the idea of opening other application while you're browsing through email. Why? well it's simply annoying and those kind of attachment are prone to be a virus. Similarly, I used to get video attachments through emails but thank to YouTube such attachment is rarely invade my inbox. However this situation has change when SlideShare, an online slide show sharing come to the rescue our needs.

At a glance, SlideShow website look just like YouTube. Even the process flow and services look alike. You PowerPoint presentations can be imported and embedded on your website or blog with a snippet of code - a process now familiar to every blog and web owner. There is the ability to click forward, back, visit the original location of the file on SlideShare and even add tags so others looking for similar topic will find you.



When I first saw it, I realised that the same feeling struck again. Of course the first one was when I use YouTube. However there are still limitation in SlideShare;
- No fancy transition can be transferred, only forward and backward navigation.
- I detect spams in some presentation comments
- Full online editing is not there.

But give them some time to evolve and I'm sure this web 2.0 site is going to be a hit.

Microsoft's New Home Page

If you haven't notice yet or perhaps you are not one of the Microsoft products fans, they have change their corporate website design. The new navigation is aimed at helping their client to quickly find the most sought-after content on Microsoft.com. They start working on it last year and had gather a bunch of beta tester to give feedback on the new design and navigation system since early 2006.

The way I see it, the most significant changes made are on the floating navigation panel and the main content presentation display. If you click on the product menu on the right, the rest of the page will dimmed and can't be click. They must be really want you to concentrate on their products then.

Investigating inside the codes reveals no table layout exist. All layout are controlled by the CSS. Despite the prominent use of Ajax,the site adapts gracefully by replacing the Ajax panel with plain-looking menus on separate pages. However there is no sign of any RSS feeds either button nor the automated "link href=".

Now you might be wondering, does any of the above really matter? Well, the site looks and works great for the most of users. Beside, no matter how good your designs, you still can't satisfy everyone.

Heads Up - Two in three retail PCs are notebooks

Based on current analysis by Best Buy, Radio Shack, Circuit City, CompUSA and Staples in US: Notebook shipments rose 57.7 percent during the first three weeks of the holiday shopping season as compared with the same period last year. These is no surprise, reviewing Dell catalog for December 2006 issue in my hand, the cheapest new notebook with wide display, AMD Sempron 3500+, 512MB DDR-2 SDRAM, 60GB SATA HDD and ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 is for RM2,249.00 it's less than USD1k.

Again despite issues like performance and capacity, technology lag, reliability, expandability, configurability and upgradeability shadowing the usage of notebooks for years, it is clearly demonstrate that price will is always win the users heart.

As if I could only have one computer, though, it would be a notebook, but only because client support is my primary task and I've gotten comfortable doing it in the client site rather than in my office.

Face Recognition Technology by Polar Rose

The way I see it, the web is increasingly becoming visually oriented, progressing from text to photos and other rich media such as video and podcast. Polar Rose claims that close to 10 million new photos are uploaded on a daily basis, a number which is doubling every eight to ten months. We should thanks to the digital camera innovation and internet for the exponential growth. Perhaps a picture does tell a thousand words.

Even so, most of the photo are unreachable due to lack of algorithm that could surface them like the way text search does. Since the day of Altavista, Inktomi, and Google we haven't seen any new revolutionary of photo search technology without the "human" intervention.

To overcome this issue, Polar Rose technology makes photos searchable by analyzing their content and recognizing the people in them. Yeah it's another face recognition technology just like Riya that I've discovered earlier. The Polar Rose's face recognition technology used was originally developed by CTO Jan Erik Solem during his M.Sc and Ph.D. stints at the universities of Lund and Malmö in southern Sweden. It's unique in that they are able to extract 3D information from regular 2D images.

However "human" users are still needed as to help to train the application recognize each individual in the photo. Polar Rose offers a plugin to be installed into your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser. The plug-in detects people in online photos and places their signature rose approximately where the pinhole of their shirt would be. A click on the rose will bring up a tooltip with relevant information, including name and other photos found of the same person. You can apply to become a beta tester but the plugin will be released only during the first quarter of 2007.

Face recognition is cool but like I said earlier in my previous post, if this technology going to be a public tools it does raise some privacy issues. To avoid this, perhaps it can be tune by identify object or item instead.

Riya - A Visual Search Tool

I came across to a similar technology when I interviewed a candidate for my previous company. She develop a colour recognition application by calculating percentage of colours in a photo for her thesis project. But my interest dies as I can't imagine how to monetize the idea. That is before I discovered Riya.

Riya is a facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface. Face recognition technology isn't new. You can find it in cameras, cellphones and biometric devices but for the sake of web application, this is really great.

I decided to try out Riya's functionality. The process starts with registration and choosing a privacy setting on your pictures. You then download a client application (around 40MB) that uploads photos you choose to include in Riya. The actual uploading takes a while - about 4 hours for each GB of photos. Instead of waiting around, Riya will email you when the process is complete.

That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 60 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are. And then click the "Run Rec" button, it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy.

I could also allow friends to tag and search my photo and let it all searchable in public search. On this extend I realize that Riya might have some privacy issues in the future. Imagine if Riya get so much data on people that I could take a picture of a crowd, upload it to Riya, and instantly have the names of every single person in the crowd. It almost like FBI's backup suspect database.

But if Riya choose client/partner wisely it might benefits us all. Just look at like.com. You can identify a similar accessories or item detected in any photo. You can even select your favorite celebrities photos and copy their style. Paris Hilton wannabe, this is your day.

Ruby - The gems of programming language

I've heard about Ruby for quite sometime. Ruby is a reflective, object-oriented programming language. It combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like object-oriented features, and also shares some features with Python, Lisp, Dylan and CLU. Yeah like C wasn't enough.

The language was created by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto way back in 1993. Matz stresses that systems design needs to emphasize human, rather than computer, needs.

"They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves." - Matz

One important part about Ruby is that it is distributed under an open-source license. It is a cross platform. So if you have15 minutes to spare try this web based hands on tutorial to get some ideas.

Malaysia Broadband ISP

How do you browse, if I may ask? Did you subscribe a broadband service from your local ISP? Nowadays you barely can surf with 56kb dial up connection, considering if you are one of the YouTube, P2P services junkie.

Currently I'm using an ASDL from my office and dial up from my home. I'm seriously considering to upgrade my internet service for my home usage, so I dig around. Here is some information about ISP in Malaysia with broadband services:

1. TMnet Streamyx - Wired
   
2. Jaring Broadband Wired/Wireless - Wired/Wireless
   
3. Time Broadband - Various
   
4. Airzed WiMax - Wireless
   
5. DiGi Mobile Broadband - Wireless
   
6. Nasion 1 Wireless Broadband - Wireless
   
7. Maxis Wireless Broadband - Wireless
   
8. Maxis 3G - 3G
   
9. Celcom 3G - 3G
   
10. Smart Ku-Band - Satellite
    
11. Smart C-Band - Satellite
    
12. EB Technologies MyWave24 - Wireless/Wired
    
13. PenangFon - Wired
    
14. AtlasOne - Wireless
    
15. MyKris - Wireless
    
16. ZapZone - Wireless
    
17. GoLightSpeed - Wireless

Wow that much? Currently TMNet taking the most share on the Malaysia broadband pie. The problem with TMNet ADSL broadband services is that you wont get the speed that you subscribed. Look carefully to their terms, TMNet's broadband speed is based on best effort and factors such as; Quality of the copper cable (Yup we still use copper), distance from the supporting TM exchange, weather, electromagnetic effects, PC performance, Internet traffic during the period, and the website that you visit. Recently TMNet caught the copper line thieves which is turn to be their own supplier. Sigh... Coincident?

All and all I just hope the Malaysia's broadband service and penetration should be improved by widening the service using microwave (WiMax) or using Power Line Communication (PLC) technology in near future.

The Best Places to Waste Time on the Web

Inspired by PC World's article on The 15 Best Places to Waste Time on the Web, I realize that I also have a list of places to waste on the web.

Ok they got 15, but mine has been group to 5 type of web sites. I eliminate some other stuff like email, searching tool and forum board as it will make my list never ends. Here goes:

1. Digg
   Watching this ever popular social bookmark in action can really waste my day. Try out Digg's Swarm or Stack, you can visually see each entry marked as Digg or popular in real time (I think). A similar site would be Slashdot, Delicious, Reddit, furl.
   
   
2. YouTube / MetaCafe
   This hot services which I don't have to introduce is really addictive. Watching 'Mat Rempit' in action in YouTube is just so amusing or watch other user experimenting stuff that you wouldn't dare, nutts. It's really huge interm of collection of public videos. I can do this the whole day.
   
   
3. Flickr
   As an avid photographer, this is a must. Reading all the exif data from good photos consume lots of time plus lots of cool groups to check on.
   
   
4. Blogs / News, lot of them
   Friends blog - as seen on my blog sidebar, including friend's friend blog.
   Tech blog - Techcrunch, Engadget, Gizmodo
   News - Yahoo News, ZDNet, The Star, Utusan Malaysia, Malaya Mail, Berita Harian, Harian Metro
   Newsletter - SitePoint, Site Pro News
   
   
5. Blogging
   I'm not sure if this should fall under wasting my time or filling my free time. I blog so that I remembered any information that I discovered from the Interenet cloud. I guess this is how contribute back to the net sphere.
   
   

You also might have your own version, it's all personal preferences and needs. Perhaps you want to share with us here.

Digg - Swarming the thought

Did you ever wish to read minds of other people? And ever want to know how its feel like? Well Digg Lab shows some interesting applications that resemble the feeling of reading other people thought, well sort of.

If you are new to this, Digg is free an online social bookmark service. What it does is allowing any user to submit a story complete with the URL link, title and short description and save it into their server. Other Digg member (Digger) would cast a vote for any story that they like and they call it Dig It, and if they don't like it they just Burry It.

In Digg Swarm, any new story will keep pouring into the screen and shows who Digg the story in every second. Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as they're dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and make them grow. Brightly colored (yellow) stories indicates more diggs.


If you feel that you can't keep up with the info, you can turn to Digg Stack which much organize like a stack of story. Digg Stack shows diggs occuring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. Diggers fall from above and stack up on popular stories. It also allows user to pause the stack movement and a lever to control the stack size.

The project are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. Once matured they will published the API to allow outside developers access to this data.

I like the fact of not knowing what’s going on in someones’ head. If I knew life would be boring, it’s the hoping, the wondering, the guessing that makes life interesting. It keeps me on my toes.

Blogger Beta Hack - Label Cloud

I really wanted to re-arrange the Blogger Beta label into a better visual presentation, like above. Today I got some free time to play around with it. So I searched through and Phydeaux hack matched my criteria. Read on his blog entry for more details.

Color Wheel Pro - Create colour schemes for your website

Creating a website template never been an easy job for me. It consumes lot of man hours just to meet the client expectations. Luckily Color Wheel Pro is here to help you with the visual and I can spend more time with programming.

Some hightlight feature

• shows colour schemes on real examples.
• includes numerous presets for every type of colour scheme.
• exports the palette in ACO, ACT and GIF formats.
• You can create colour schemes based on the traditional red-yellow-blue (mixing) colour wheel and on the visual red-green-blue colour wheel.
• Comprehensive documentation on colour theory.

Plus, you not only use it for designing a colour scheme for a website, you can also apply the scheme to your business card, product box etc. My wife use it to set a colour scheme for our living room. Neat.

Free Trial Version available for you to try it out.

Firebug - A web developer companion

I couldn't thank more for having a Firefox as a free, reliable & web developer friendly browser. And now Firebug teaming up with Firefox, that's really huge for me. Firebug currently is a on Beta 1.0 version, giving you access to development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. How cool is that? Here are some features of Firebug:

• You can undock Firebug into its own window—multi-monitor users rejoice!
• The DOM inspector now offers full in-place editing of your document structure, not just attribute values.
• The DOM inspector’s CSS tab reveals all applicable CSS rules for elements, including properties inherited from ancestor elements, and lets you toggle on/off and edit individual style declarations.
• The DOM inspector’s Layout tab pops up guides, rulers, and shaded boxes in the main browser view to illustrate the CSS box model as it applies to each element that you hover your mouse over.
• The Net tab graphs the request times for all files that make up a page, meaning I can just about throw away the Tamper Data extension, which I previously used for this.
• The new JavaScript profiler reports on the execution times of your JavaScript functions, so you can pin down performance bottlenecks in serious JavaScript applications.

Even though this is an extension for Firefox, for Internet Explorer, Opera & Safari lovers, check out the Firebox lite. However the best aspect of this new extension is that (based on this blog entry), it is FREE. Thanks to the creator of Firebug, Joe Hewitt.

Random Thought: How to create Technorati

Woke up this morning and suddenly this question pop in my mind "How Technorati works?" Yup I'm a late dreamer. Anyway I dig a little bit and found some clues from David Sifry, the creator of Technorati himself. He describes the process flow as following:

1. We spider blogs, and match up their links to your blog - to anywhere on your blog
2. In the inbound blog list, we use the outbound links from the blog homepage, not from the archives
3. We do process RSS feeds an other metadata, but that doesn't affect your inbound blog stats.
4. Nightly, we go through the database and re-calculate the number of inbound blogs and links, which helps us double-check our work and also allows us to create the interesting newcomers list, the interesting recent blogs list, etc.

So my next question would be, "How to create a blog spider?" Well I figure that a blog spider must be like a webcrawler or something. It traverses the Internet gathering, filtering, and potentially aggregating information for a user. Well said, but it's now sounded more like How to create a Google bot kind of stuff.

I saw some the spider were written in Ruby, Phyton and Perl. Take a look to this article, "A web crawler in Perl", maybe this is a good lead.

FeedBurner: Your Optimized RSS Distributor

We have CD Burner, DVD burner and now we have the RSS/Atom feed burner. Imagine this, as a webmaster or blogger, don't you ever wanted to know how many RSS feed subscribers currently you have, where they're coming from and what they like best? Maybe you don't bother, but I do.


With FeedBurner services, it shows how to accommpolish 4 goals using just your own RSS feeds:

1. Publicize your content and make it easy for people to subscribe.
2. Optimize distribution so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and can be consumed by subscribers wherever they are.
3. Analyze your traffic to learn how many subscribers you have, where they're coming from and what they like best.
4. Make Moneyitize by participating in the FeedBurner Ad Network. Why not reward yourself for your effort?

I really like the distribution optimization made by FeedBurner. There so many RSS reader out there and do you think is that your job to find it all so that you can share your feed? I don't think so. So now I've converted links of my feed to a single FeedBurner link.

I also went through all the functionality and I must say I'm impressed. Kudos FeedBurner team.

Google's Page Rank Unleashed

While searching some good reading material to kill my never ending boredom, I found this formula

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed. Phil Craven has published an article on "Google's PageRank Explained and how to make the most of it".

Based on his article I would say it will took ages to raise my blog's page PR. Knock yourself out.

Snap: Take A Peek Before Visiting Any Links

Snap Preview Anywhere displays a preview of ANY site that is linked to from your page. Your site visitors can now visually decide whether a site is worth visiting before actually clicking the link to go there.


Feature Highlights

• High Quality Preview Images
• Instant Feedback and Response
• Largest Library of Site Previews
• Simple Sign-up Process
• No Maintenance Required
• Snap Search Box
• It's FREE
  

If you're trying to plug the javascript generated by Snap into the Blogger Beta (v3.0), you might having difficulty to save it. Just omit the "defer" from the code "javascript defer id=" and save it.

Blogger Beta Hack : Peek-A-Boo Navbar

Originally posted in Bloggeratto, this piece of code will make your blogger Navbar remain hidden but when you move the cursor on it it will slide down but this is only fully supported on Firefox, Iceweasel(linux),Flock, MZS6,Netscape, Safari & camino(linux).

Just add this 2 lines code in the CSS right before the "body {"

#navbar-iframe{opacity:0.0;filter:alpha(Opacity=0)}
#navbar-iframe:hover{opacity:1.0;filter:alpha(Opacity=100, FinishedOpacity=100)}

There are many other hacks available out there and on my mind that I would like to try out but I'm not in a hurry here.

ASCII Art - Generator

I believe any BBS user or perhaps you might even received email from your friends sending out this ASCII picture once awhile. Nowadays there are many ASCII converter available on the internet with so much of variation. Text to ASCII image, jpeg image to ASCII image and so on.

But the most amazing ASCII image I ever saw was a portrait created by Guruprasad Vanalkar. He creates an amazingly accurate, life-sized, colored portrait of Dean Cain on a typewriter for "Believe it or not" TV shows.

Anyway, here are a few ASCII sample of converter.

- Text-Image.com (Web Based)
- ASCII Generator Software v 0.6.8
- ASCII Art Generator (Web Based)

Heck I can give 700k ++ list, well you know where to find more.

Pluging out the Pluck

Pluck is pulling out their RSS feed reader from their product line. Too bad I was just about to use it. Here is some of the announcement.


Pluck RSS Reader Shut Down Notice

Consumer RSS reader services will be discontinued January 5, 2007.

All versions of Pluck's RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck's web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of end users well for several years, but with Pluck's focus in other business areas, the venerable RSS readers are set to be retired from our product line.

Over the next two months, you will have the opportunity to export your RSS feed subscriptions to other RSS readers of your choosing.

Please see the instructions on this page for details on how to export your subscriptions and bookmarks (Windows only) for use in other readers.

Read the full announcement.

JsCalendar - Déjà vu

When I first saw it, I thought I've seen this before. Well I did but in this version, the JavaScript Calendar add some extra punch including time and keyboard functionality.

Supported browsers

» Internet Explorer 5.0+ for Windows
» Mozilla, Netscape 7.x, Mozilla FireFox (any platform)
» Other Gecko-based browsers (any platform)
» Konqueror 3.2+ for Linux and Apple Safari for Macintosh
» Opera 7+ (any platform)

Features

» The look is customizable through external CSS
» High quality color themes
» Keyboard navigation
» Can show days from adjacent months
» Can show week numbers
» Translated into many languages
» Any day can be “the first day of week”
» The default “first day of week” can be configured in the language file
» One can easily jump back or forward with 24 years
» Provides help hints (also configurable)
» Includes an optional time selector with 1 minute resolution
» Special days (configurable list of days that are displayed differently)
» Allows multiple days selection
» Fast and very easy to setup

Take a look at the demo page. Enjoy

Relay - file and directory management

I love small apps. Most of the time it is just a straight forward function with minimum effort. While searching for the AJAX version of file and directory management, I found Relay. Develop by Chris Iufer, this is a free distribution piece of software.

We are freely distributing the software open-source. So we hope it comes in handy to all those readers of yours who were begging to get their hands on a copy of it. The project is launching as a public Beta, and we hope that the community will really help us make this thing stellar. Were positioning it as a better way to manage your site files for things like blogs or personal homepages, and to transfer files between artists and their clients.

Features

• drag-n-drop files and folders
• dynamic loading file structure
• upload progress bar
• thumbnail view, including pdf
• multiple users & accounts with basic administration
  

And here is the scripts for your own pleasure. Enjoy