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