Web Flames

Barnes & Nobles Launches "Nook Study" for Students

2010-08-04T08:42:00.003+03:00

As you may know, the digital book war between Amazon and Barnes & Noble has been heating up. Last week, Barnes & Noble announced an important move it is making, adding Nook boutiques to its brick and mortar stores across the country.

Today, Barnes & Noble announced its next move, launching NookStudy, a software solution that gives students access to eTextbooks and other digital content and organizational tools for learning. The company also launched a textbook rental service. Barnes & Noble claims it is now the first and only major online retailer giving college students textbooks in new, used, rental, and digital formats.

"As leaders in the college bookselling arena, we aim to deliver college students the greatest choice, flexibility, savings and value when it comes to their textbook, reading and study needs," said Tracey Weber, Executive Vice President, Textbooks and Digital Education for Barnes & Noble.com. "With new, used, rental and digital textbooks, we offer students across the country the ability to choose the formats that are best for them – whether they prefer digital, physical, renting or owning."

"And we're thrilled to roll out our revolutionary NOOKstudy application to provide higher education students with unprecedented freedom to access their eTextbooks and other resources on their PC or Mac anytime and anywhere to make it easy to study smarter," added Weber.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/08/03/barnes-noble-launches-nookstudy-for-students

Which Payment Platform Will Dominate Mobile?

2010-03-31T14:47:00.001+03:00

A recent study found that consumers are getting more comfortable with mobile shopping, and you best believe that will only continue, as people continue to spend more of their web time on their phones. So as everybody reaches for their mobile devices to make payments, which platforms are they going to use?

PayPal hopes to stay in the drivers seat in this area. WebProNews interviewed Francesco Rovetta, director of business development for PayPal Mobile at SXSW a couple weeks ago, who talked a bit about PayPal's vision for mobile.
PayPal is certainly not the only player in this space though.

O'Reilly Media Founder Tim O'Reilly has posted a fascinating piece on the "State of the Internet Operating System," which explores in depth, just what the phrase operating system means in the age of the cloud, and the mobile web. While he talks about this with regards to search, media access, communications, identity, advertising, location, and a slew of other categories, one section of this lengthy article talks specifically about payments.

"Payment is another key subsystem of the Internet Operating System," he says. "Companies like Apple that have 150 million credit cards on file and a huge population of users accustomed to using their phones to buy songs, videos, applications, and now ebooks, are going to be in a prime position to turn today's phone into tomorrow's wallet. (And as anyone who reaches into a wallet not for payment but for ID knows, payment systems are also powerful, authenticated identity stores - a fact that won't always be lost on payment providers looking for their lock on a piece of the Internet future.)"

"PayPal obviously plays an important role as an internet payment subsystem that's already in wide use by developers," he continues. "It operates in 190 countries, in 19 different currencies (not counting in-game micro-currencies) and it has over 185 million accounts. What's fascinating is the rich developer ecosystem they've built around payment - their recent developer conference had over 2000 attendees. Their challenge is to make the transition from the web to mobile."

UPDATE: PayPal contacted me, pointing out errors in O'Reilly's numbers. "We now have 81 mil active registered accounts and 210 million accounts, in 190 markets and we support 24 currencies."

O'Reilly also mentions Google and Amazon as key players in the mobile payments space, with the Android Market giving Google Checkout a boost, and Amazon having only recently opened theirs up a bit to developers.

Adobe Goes Open Source With Two Media Tools

2010-02-22T15:45:00.002+02:00

Adobe has announced that is has taken another two of its products targeted specifically at the media and publishing industries and gone open source with them.

Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), which was originally launched as Strobe last April, gives developers the ability to easily assemble pluggable components to develop better media players at lower costs and quicker turnaround.

Text Layout Framework (TLF) gives developers and designers support for complex languages, bidirectional text and other advanced typographical features.

Adobe says its went open source with OSMF because open source will facilitate cheaper and less complex development histories for video players, while in the case of TLF it doesn’t appear to have said anything at all and gone open source just because…
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-development/adobe-goes-open-source-with-two-media-tools-005091.php

EU Calls For More Privacy On Social Networks

2010-02-10T10:18:00.001+02:00

The European Commission is reminding teenagers to "Think before you post!" on social networking sites as Europe marks Safer Internet Day.

The Commission said 50 percent of European teenagers give out personal information on the web, which can remain online forever and be seen by anybody.

At last year's Safer Internet Day, 20 companies signed the Safer Social Networking Principles, including YouTube and Facebook, but a report from the Commission says more measures need to be put in place to protect children's privacy online.

"If we want children to think before they post, social networking companies should post the right information using the right language. Last year the European Commission urged companies to act, and I am glad that many have heeded this call," said EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding.

"However I expect all companies to do more. Minors' profiles need to be set to private by default and questions or abuse reports have to receive quick and appropriate responses. The internet is now vital to our children, and it is the responsibility of all to make it safe."

Highlights from the report include:

* Only a third of social networking sites responded to user reports asking for help
* 40% of social networking sites assessed make minors' personal information visible only by their friends by default
* Only 11 out of 22 make it impossible for the private profiles of minors to be found through search engines

Washable Electronics from Seal Shield

2010-02-10T09:50:00.000+02:00

How would you like to wash your keyboard? Although it sounds a bit absurd, it is possible, thanks to Seal Shield. The company produces a line of dishwasher safe products consisting of keyboards, mice, and remote controls.

The company came from the medical industry and wanted to create a product line that would prevent the spread of bacteria and infections. According to Seal Shield, around 90,000 people die every year in the U.S. as a result of transmitted bacteria and infections.

With Seal Shield’s products, consumers are able to put the devices in the dishwasher, soapy water, and more to ensure that they are disinfected often. Most of the company’s products include its Silver Seal protection, which is an antimicrobial protection that helps prevent microbial growth and other bacteria.

With the one exception of the ability to be submerged in water, the keyboards, mice, and remote controls look and feel just like normal ones would. Incidentally, the company also revealed a Seal Cell waterproof cell phone at CES that is yet to be available.

Polaroid Brings Back Instant Film

2010-02-10T09:45:00.000+02:00

Many of you probably remember when Polaroid ended its line of Instant Film cameras back in 2008. Fortunately, the company has decided to bring back its legendary Polaroid OneStep camera but with a modern twist.

Jon Pollock, Polaroid’s Chief Marketing Officer, spoke with WebProNews at CES 2010 and explained how so many people expressed remorse for the Instant Film products. Specifically, artists and photographers reached out to Polaroid and asked them to bring it back.

In November, the company made its official announcement that it was bringing back its classic film. Polaroid will be offering a redesigned, modernized version of its OneStep camera that Pollock proudly showed off at CES. He said this camera “really represents Polaroid.”

The PIC 1000 will be available just in time for the holidays this year. Incidentally, Polaroid’s new Creative Director, Lady Gaga, pointed out in this WPN report that she was excited to help Polaroid take its Instant Film into the digital age.

http://videos.webpronews.com/2010/02/08/polaroid-brings-back-instant-film/

Applying a Tattoo : Photoshop Tutorial (HD)

2010-01-27T10:19:00.000+02:00

Make-up

2010-01-27T10:04:00.001+02:00

Google Increases Sitemaps Limit from 1,000 to 50,000

2010-01-25T14:30:00.000+02:00

Google has changed the number of Sitemaps you can reference in a Sitemap index file. The number use to be 1,000 sitemaps can be referenced in a Sitemap index file, now the number is 50,000 Sitemaps. This is a huge increase in capacity.

Still, each Sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs, so technically 50,000 multiplied by 50,000 is 2,500,000,000 or 2.5 billion URLs can be submitted to Google via Sitemaps.

Basic head animation in Flash

2010-01-18T13:19:00.001+02:00

Body Makeover

2010-01-07T14:07:00.001+02:00

The Bone Tool - Inverse Kinematics in Flash CS4

2010-01-04T15:48:00.001+02:00

Guidelines for webmasters

2010-01-04T14:15:00.003+02:00

From Google Master Central, Google underline a few guidelines a homeowner should follow to be find, indexed and ranked by Google:

"Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

1.Design and content guidelines
2.Technical guidelines
3.Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.

* Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

Design and content guidelines
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* Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

* Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

* Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

* Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

* Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

* Check for broken links and correct HTML.

* If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

* Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

* Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.

Technical guidelines
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* Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

* Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

* Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

* Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.

* If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.

* Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

* Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Quality guidelines
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These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

* Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

* Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

* Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

* Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

* Don't send automated queries to Google.

* Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.

* Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

* Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

* Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration. "

Wii Video Games Offer Real Exercise

2009-11-18T10:37:00.001+02:00

Active Wii sports video games and some Wii fit activities may increase adults' energy expenditure as much as moderately intense exercise, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions.

The study funded by Nintendo, found that about one-third of the virtual physical activities require an energy expenditure of 3.0 METs or above, considered moderate-intensity exercise. METs are metabolic equivalent values, a standard method of estimating energy expenditure, researchers said.
Wii-fit

"Energy expenditure is the most important information to measure the effect of video games," said Motohiko Miyachi, Ph.D., lead author of the study and head of a physical activity program at the National Institute of Health and Nutrition in Tokyo.

Researchers found:

* Nine activities had less than 2 METs.
* Twenty-three activities had 2-3 METs.
* Nine activities had 3-4 METs.
* Five activities had more than 4 METs.

"The range of energy expenditure in these active games is sufficient to prevent or to improve obesity and lifestyle-related disease, from heart disease and diabetes to metabolic diseases," Miyachi said.

Boxing was found to be the most effective Wii sports game with an energy expenditure of about 4.5 METs. Golf, bowling, tennis and baseball are 2.0, 2.6, 3.0 and 3.0 METs, respectively.

The most effective exercise on the Wii fit is the single arm stand, with 5.6 METs. Yoga and balance exercises were significantly lower than those of resistance and aerobic exercise, but these exercises work well in improving flexibility and fall prevention.

Americans and Japanese are increasingly overweight. About one-third of adults in the United States are overweight and almost one-third are obese, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

"Obesity and overweight is increasing in Japanese men," Miyachi said. "Twenty years ago, only 20 percent Japanese middle-aged men were obese and overweight, now it is more than 30 percent."

Miyachi, who also plays active video games, recommends these active games rather than sedentary video games.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/16/wii-video-games-offer-real-exercise

Monopoly City Streets to Launch on Google Maps

2009-09-09T09:58:00.005+03:00

September 9, a giant worldwide game of Monopoly will commence, using the real world. That is, the real world on Google Maps. Hasbro, the creators of the classic board game, are launching the game called, "Monopoly City Streets," in which players will fight for the largest empire in the world.

http://monopolycitystreets.com

The official site for the game offers the following description:

A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.

Own any street in the world. Build humble houses, crazy castles and stupendous skyscrapers to collect rent. Use MONOPOLY Chance Cards to sabotage your mates by building Hazards on their streets.

What I have not seen yet is a rulebook for the game. How does the game translate to such a large-scale project? How do you roll the dice and take turns? Is there a "Go to Jail...Do not pass go, do not collect $200" card? Are there even Community Chests?

There are a lot of questions, but they should be answered now, on 9. Daily Mail does have a few details. Players will start with $3 million. Pennsylvania Avenue (home of the White House) costs $2 million, and rent is automatically paid each day from $50,000 for a house to $100 million for a skyscraper.

Looking forward to play :)

Template- Getting a CSS Template

2009-09-08T15:22:00.000+03:00

Photoshop - All you want to know about smart objects

2009-09-03T14:48:00.000+03:00

Photoshop Tutorial - how to use Smart Objects- PixelPerfect

2009-09-03T12:18:00.002+03:00

This lesson will teach you how to master Smart Objects in Photoshop. Smart Objects protect your pixels when scaling images and are a key tool to help you create the best photos and art possible.

Optimize your crawling & indexing

2009-08-13T14:00:00.003+03:00

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dgk2ft62_18cvjx4nk4

In the slides u can see in the link above, you can see some examples of what not to do—real-life examples (though names have been changed to protect the innocent) of homegrown URL hacks and encodings, parameters masquerading as part of the URL path, infinite crawl spaces, and more. You'll also find some recommendations for straightening out that labyrinth of URLs and helping crawlers find more of your content faster, including:

* Remove user-specific details from URLs.
URL parameters that don't change the content of the page—like session IDs or sort order—can be removed from the URL and put into a cookie. By putting this information in a cookie and 301 redirecting to a "clean" URL, you retain the information and reduce the number of URLs pointing to that same content.
* Rein in infinite spaces.
Do you have a calendar that links to an infinite number of past or future dates (each with their own unique URL)? Do you have paginated data that returns a status code of 200 when you add &page=3563 to the URL, even if there aren't that many pages of data? If so, you have an infinite crawl space on your website, and crawlers could be wasting their (and your!) bandwidth trying to crawl it all. Consider these tips for reining in infinite spaces.
* Disallow actions Googlebot can't perform.
Using your robots.txt file, you can disallow crawling of login pages, contact forms, shopping carts, and other pages whose sole functionality is something that a crawler can't perform. (Crawlers are notoriously cheap and shy, so they don't usually "Add to cart" or "Contact us.") This lets crawlers spend more of their time crawling content that they can actually do something with.
* One man, one vote. One URL, one set of content.
In an ideal world, there's a one-to-one pairing between URL and content: each URL leads to a unique piece of content, and each piece of content can only be accessed via one URL. The closer you can get to this ideal, the more streamlined your site will be for crawling and indexing. If your CMS or current site setup makes this difficult, you can use the rel=canonical element to indicate the preferred URL for a particular piece of content.

How to Create a Surreal Scene of Flying Bombs on Fire

2009-08-11T09:13:00.000+03:00

YouTube Launches Site for Smartphones

2009-08-11T08:39:00.000+03:00

Smartphone users now have their own version of YouTube. The company says that smartphone users with "capable" browsers like the iPhone, G1, and Palm Pre can access the mobile site.

Dwipal Desai"As more and more people are using the browser on their smartphones for checking email, visiting websites, and even accessing YouTube, we want to make sure that we provide the best possible YouTube experience on your mobile browser," says YouTube Product Manager Dwipal Desai.

Users can log into their account, view their favorites, and find and share videos just like normal. "It's part of our mission to create the best possible YouTube experience for you, whether you use the site on your computer, in your living room, or on the go," says Desai.

To access the new mobile site, just go to YouTube.com from your mobile phone. From there you'll be taken to a new website designed specifically for your mobile device.

This version of YouTube is not available on all devices, keep in mind. According to some people commenting on YouTube's announcement, it doesn't work on the Blackberry Bold, or the Sony PSP, to name a couple.

It's gong to be wise for YouTube to be optimized for as many devices as possible, especially now that it has its own AdSense-type program. The site is also catering to new a lot more these days, which could increase demand for the site for users on the go.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/07/youtube-launches-site-for-smartphones

MEDICAL SENSING: Inexpensive handheld tool detects brain injuries in the field

2009-08-05T14:41:00.002+03:00

About two million Americans suffer concussions each year, and too often the result is severe neurological damage or death. “People often don’t realize when they’ve had a concussion, because there is no loss of consciousness,” says Liz Giordano, CEO of the Head Injury Association (Commack, NY). Failure to detect and treat intracranial hematoma (brain bleeding) within the first hour can have catastrophic effects and computed tomography (CT), the gold standard for diagnosing and pinpointing brain bleeding, is often unavailable in places like ski resorts or on the battlefield.

The Infrascanner system consists of a Windows Mobile PDA connected by a wireless Bluetooth link to a handheld sensor with disposable fiber optics cap. (Courtesy of InfraScan)
Click here to enlarge image

At about 1% of the cost of a CT scanner, a portable near-IR (NIR) device by InfraScan (Philadelphia, PA) is now awaiting FDA approval—though it’s already received Giordano’s approval. Carried by emergency medical technicians, the tool could enable diagnosis of head-injury patients much earlier and avert tragedies. InfraScan is a start-up company spearheaded by legendary laser-medicine pioneer and National Medal of Science winner Britton Chance—along with Claudia Robertson from the Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX) and an entrepreneurial team from Drexel University (Philadelphia, PA).
Differential light absorption

The Infrascanner takes just two minutes to scan a person’s head. “The system is used to measure all four major brain quadrants (frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital) on the left and the right sides of the head, for a total of eight measurements,” said Baruch Ben Dor, InfraScan president and CEO. The battery-operated unit evaluates the differential light absorption of the left versus right brain. Normally, light absorption is symmetrical. But when the brain suffers a hematoma, light absorption is increased while the reflected component is decreased in the affected area. The system presents its data to the operator through a graphic red/green display and a numerical value of the difference in optical density between the left and the right sides—which is proportional to the amount of bleeding.

The setup consists of two parts: a sensor system and a commercially available personal digital assistant (PDA) that runs dedicated software. The sensor includes a Class I 808-nm-emitting diode laser placed 1.5 in. away from a silicon light detector, which is covered by an NIR bandpass optical filter. The laser illuminates the tissue by way of an optical fiber, and the detector reads the signal through a second fiber. The separation between source and detector allows measurement of NIR absorbance in a volume of tissue about 3/5 in. wide by just over an inch deep. The system then digitizes the signal and transmits it wirelessly (via Bluetooth) to the PDA. Operators are trained to use the device, but software in the PDA also checks the signals and can alert the user if he or she makes a common mistake. And because the system is contained in a handheld device, it is possible to complete a scan when a fallen patient cannot be moved.

The Infrascanner received Europe’s CE mark this past fall, and recently completed multicenter clinical trials in the U.S. and abroad. Now it is awaiting FDA clearance.

In addition to its field application, the technology shows promise for repeated scanning of patients in intensive-care units to catch delayed hematomas. This application is attractive because CT scans are not only expensive, but also known to introduce high doses of radiation in patients. The technology could be used to monitor patients with strokes and other blood-flow disorders.

http://www.optoiq.com/articles/display/365406/s-articles/s-laser-focus-world/s-volume-45/s-issue-7/s-world-news/s-medical-sensing-inexpensive-handheld-tool-detects-brain-injuries-in-the-field/s-QP129867/s-cmpid=EnlImagingAugust42009.html

GoDaddy Makes Twitter Part Of Domain Registration Process

2009-07-08T09:04:00.000+03:00

Implies all site owners should have accounts

GoDaddy is sometimes hard to take seriously; its marketing department seems to be run by the same bunch of teenage boys in charge of Axe commercials. But GoDaddy is still the world's largest domain registrar, and it's poised to help Twitter with a new step in its registration process.

GoDaddy seems to have made the assumption that anyone wanting to create a website will also want to establish a presence on Twitter. Adam Ostrow reports that it's actually "integrated Twitter registration into its domain manager, allowing you to see if the Twitter username that matches your URL is available, and if so, register it."

This says a great deal about how important Twitter has become to the people at GoDaddy (and indeed, you can find GoDaddyDeals, GoDaddyJobs, and GoDaddyGuy Twitter accounts, with that last one being rather popular and putting out about ten tweets per day).

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/02/godaddy-makes-twitter-part-of-domain-registration-process

AVG Releases Free Real-Time Search Scanner

2009-04-22T15:02:00.000+03:00

Checks search links before you click

AVG has pretty good timing considering the recent success cybercrooks have had with manipulating search results to direct searchers to malicious websites. The security company released a free tool today that scans links before users click on them.
AVG Logo
AVG LinkScanner, available for free download, checks URLs ahead of clicking by scanning the webpage and alerting the user if the site contains malicious code. When used in conjunction with Google, Yahoo, or MSN, the tool shows green check marks beside safe results and red exes beside unsafe ones. The tool also works with links in email, IMs, and bookmarks.

The company says on any given day two million web pages are infected with malware, and every day 60 percent of threats move to a different webpage, including (and especially) those on trusted websites. Available for Windows XP and Vista users, AVG’s LinkScanner prevents users from downloading compromised webpages.

“It’s our belief that every computer user has the right to basic security protection, regardless of the ability to pay,” said J R Smith, AVG Technologies’ CEO. “These dangerous web pages threaten to disrupt the very fabric of the internet as well as how we view and use it; posing an even bigger threat to users than viruses.

The tool scans pages individually, so prevention and labels only apply to one page on a given website, not the entire site itself.

The free scanning tool comes at a good time as Google has been struggling with malicious pages making their way high up in the search results before the search engine can identify them as attack sites. The problem has gotten bad enough that Google says its ranking algorithm will be tweaked to make this less likely.

No word yet on whether the tool also works with URL shorteners, used on social networks and microblogging platforms like Facebook and Twitter to fit links into character limits. Recently hackers have been using URL shorteners to trick users into clicking out to malicious sites.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/04/20/avg-releases-free-real-time-search-scanner

Search Upload * Video File * Quick Capture Adobe Flash CS4 Tutorial- How To Use The Bone Tool

2009-03-31T15:00:00.000+03:00

Dreamweaver CS4 Tutorial Inserting A Picture

2009-03-31T14:44:00.001+03:00

Photoshop Tutorial: Face shaping.

2009-03-16T13:18:00.001+02:00

Convert Voice Messages to SMS With Skype

2009-03-05T11:02:00.001+02:00

Skype, together with SpinVox, has a new service out, albeit not a cheap one: your voice messages on Skype can now be converted to SMS messages, for 25 cents per message.

The fee doesn’t include the standard Skype message rate; furthermore, if your voice message is too long for one SMS, it’ll be spread up to as many as three messages, further increasing the cost. Finally, if your message is not converted properly, Skype and SpinVox will still charge you the fee.

If a message is partially converted, the words that weren’t understood by the software will be converted into question marks or spaces. As far as configuration options go, you can choose which of your Skype contacts will have voice messages converted. To save up on your bill some more, you’ll be able to set up a maximum number of voicemail conversions per day, but I guess this will only be good enough when voicemails aren’t exactly crucial for you.

The service will support four languages: English, German, Spanish and French, with plans to add support for Italian and Portuguese.

http://mashable.com/2009/03/03/voice-sms-skype/

Photoshop CS4: Content-Aware Scaling

2009-03-04T09:46:00.000+02:00

Photoshop CS4: Virtual Weight Loss (HD)

2009-03-04T09:40:00.000+02:00

Chatting from Your Google Homepage

2009-03-04T09:34:00.004+02:00

Gmail chat has come to iGoogle. This means users will be able to chat with their friends and associates without leaving the comfort of their Google homepage.

The feature is not a gadget like most of your iGoogle features. The chat feature comes in the form of a sidebar and resides below the left-hand navigation menu.

The chat feature is not on everyone's page yet. It is currently showing up for a large set of Google users, but those who do not have it yet can simply go here and opt-in to get it.

Users who already use Gmail chat will find that their same settings will apply here. The most important thing to note however, is that you will not be limited to chatting only with Gmail users. You can invite friends from other services to join your list.

Google acknowledges that there are still some bugs with the feature and requests the patience of users while they work them out. "Here at Google, it's common practice for us to involve our users as early possible so we can make sure we get it right," says Google Talk Engineer Rhett Robinson.

Of course users who do notice bugs can report them, and Google is always open to additional feedback as well. At this point the chat feature is rolling out in English for US users, but other languages and countries will soon follow.

Future tech News New Sony battery charges up on cola

2009-03-03T13:30:00.001+02:00

Sometimes it seems there are about as many ways to charge gadgets as there are products waiting to be plugged in, but how about a battery that runs on Coca Cola?

Sony's latest take on the Bio Battery we saw a couple of years ago was on display at the International Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Expo in Tokyo this week.

Glucose breakdown

It works on the principle of getting an enzyme to break down glucose, then manipulating electrons and hydrogen atoms. The waste product is simply ordinary water.

The new Bio Battery can generate 70mW of power from 28cc of cola, which is approximately twice the output density of the previous model.

Walkman roped in

As per usual in its demonstrations, Sony showed its new technology powering a Walkman (what else?) and a pair of speakers. Not bad for something powered by a squirt of fizzy pop

http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future-tech/new-sony-battery-charges-up-on-cola-556647

Live TV Coming To The iPhone (AAPL)

2009-02-18T15:21:00.002+02:00

Live television programming is on its way to Apple's (AAPL) iPhone. But the big questions are: Where? And is anyone going to pay for it?

Digital video company PacketVideo says it's done with its mobile video app for the iPhone, which it will offer to carriers to sell their own branded mobile TV services.

PacketVideo, a division of NextWave Wireless (WAVE), says to "expect to see a major mobile operator launch this application within 6-8 weeks." But a PacketVideo rep wouldn't disclose if it would be AT&T (T), the iPhone's exclusive U.S. carrier.

AT&T currently offers two other mobile TV services, but nothing for the iPhone. It sells MobiTV service for some phones, including a business TV service for the newish BlackBerry Bold, and Qualcomm's (QCOM) Flo TV for other phones. MobiTV doesn't have an iPhone app yet, and Flo TV requires a special chip to work in phones -- a chip that Apple hasn't built into the iPhone. So a PacketVideo-powered live TV app for the iPhone could potentially be a revenue maker for AT&T -- if the carrier can get content deals figured out, etc.

That is, if anyone signs up for it. Mobile TV is popular in some countries -- especially in Asia -- but hasn't taken off here. Just 2.1% of U.S. mobile subscribers watch programmed TV on their cellphones, according to comScore M:Metrics.

http://www.businessinsider.com/live-tv-coming-to-the-iphone-2009-2

Noca Targets Transaction Fees with New Online Payment System

2009-02-11T15:58:00.001+02:00

If you sell anything online, whether physical goods or services, you’re probably keenly aware of the 2-3% (plus $0.30) lost through transactional fees every time someone makes a purchase with their credit card. This fee rears its ugly head whether you use PayPal, Google Checkout, or Amazon Flexible Payment Service since those companies are largely just passing on the fees imposed on them by credit card companies.

Noca, a startup founded by ex-Visa employees, is attempting to virtually eliminate transaction fees by bypassing the credit card companies altogether with its own online payment service. Since $5 billion goes towards online transaction fees every year in the United States alone, and since online vendors have particularly slim profit margins, the company thinks that the near elimination of transaction fees would be a huge boon for online vendors. Concurrently, Noca seeks to provide consumers with a more rewarding and more secure purchasing experience, thereby making its service appealing to both actors involved in a transaction.

While Noca aims to eventually facilitate online payments for purchases of all sizes, it begins with a focus on micro-payments, and on micro-payments made through Facebook in particular. It has launched two Facebook applications to test its payments system out: OneClick Pay and HelpYourWorld.

The former provides a simple way to send money to friends. As you can see in the screenshot to the left, the idea is to send someone a digital check; you actually enter your routing and account numbers into the application instead of using a credit card. This poses a significant obstacle to adoption (who remembers these numbers or carries around a check in their pocket?). But the company insists that using checking information rather than credit card information increases security and reduces the chances of identity theft. Plus, Noca is working to provide functionality that would allow you to enter your online banking credentials in lieu of your checking information.

The latter Facebook application, HelpYourWorld, provides a good use case for Noca’s micro-payment system. Since the application solicits $1-at-a-time donations for a series of causes, it benefits greatly from Noca’s lack of transaction fees (especially the standard fixed one of $0.30). Noca hopes that many other Facebook applications with similar micro-payment needs will use its APIs to implement its payment service.

As for the benefits to the consumer, Noca promises to provide strong and flexible incentives through cash back schemes, frequent flier miles, and the ability to designate a part of your payment to a charity of choice. The company also insists that its service will be substantially easier to use than others like PayPal, and that consumers will gain access to a much more comprehensive transaction history than they would get elsewhere.

In the longer term, Noca will become much more like a credit card company itself, providing credit to users through direct partnerships with banks. In doing so, it will be able to provide users with the same benefits of buying things on credit without charging vendors standard transaction fees, which it considers mostly oligopolistic fat. To make money, Noca will also attempt to leverage its user data to target them with tailored advertising and product deals.

Is Noca The Next PayPal?

2009-02-11T15:52:00.002+02:00

Noca, an online payments start-up we wrote about last year, is officially launching its payment service today. Formed by ex-Visa employees, Noca originally offered a micro-payments system via two Facebook applications, OneClickPay and HelpYourWorld. The company is now offering payment services for unlimited amounts. Currently, Noca has two clients; digital content provider Klatcher.com and a local little league site. The advantage of Noca’s system is that it allows online merchants to bypass high transactional fees (usually 2-3 percent plus $0.30) imposed by credit card companies on consumer purchases.

Whether using Google Checkout, PayPal or Amazon Flexible Payment Service, merchants have been unable to avoid these fees, which can be pricey on expensive or luxury items. Until now. Noca’s online payment service only charges 0.25 percent on transactions and eliminated the fixed $0.30 fee all together. Once Noca’s system is enabled, the consumer’s issuing bank underwrites the risk so that the merchant receives payment within 1 to 2 business days.

On the consumer side, Noca assures security and prevention of identity theft because the transaction avoids credit cards and uses debit transactions instead, where the money goes directly from the buyer’s checking/savings account to the merchant. The user enters account and routing numbers into a virtual check, in a process which the company insists is secure. After entering routing and checking numbers, Noca will then send a text message with a code to the user’s cell phone, which needs to be inputed for the transaction to be completed.

With credit tight, consumers might feel more comfortable paying for items directly from a checking account. And it assures security for both merchants and consumers. Can Noca give PayPal a run for its money?

Gmail goes offline

2009-02-04T10:13:00.002+02:00

It’s easy to downplay Gmail as an enterprise email solution — it’s only available as webmail, and if the internet goes down, so does your email.

When Google Gears was launched, people began looking forward to the day when Gmail would become an offline application. Today it happened — Gmail can now be used outside the cloud if you wish.

I still can’t see the feature, but Google announced it today on the Google Enterprise blog. The feature is said to be available immediately in Google Apps, and will be rolling out gradually for all Gmail users.

To enable the new feature, should you have it, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to Gmail and click ‘Settings’.
2. Click the ‘Labs’ tab and select ‘Enable’ next to ‘Offline Gmail’.
3. Click ‘Save Changes.’
4. In the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username, there will be a new ‘Offline’ link.
5. Click this link to start the offline synchronization process.

What makes this possible is something called Google Gears. Gears is available on all modern browsers as an addon, with the exception of Chrome which has it built right in.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1243

Google Behind Tool to Detect ISP Blocking

2009-02-04T10:13:00.001+02:00

It's no secret that Google is an avid supporter of net neutrality legislation. Now, in an effort to further their cause, they've partnered with he New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers to create M-Lab (Measurement Lab).

M-Lab is designed to help detect whether an internet service provider (ISP) is blocking an internet application. This type of research has been attempted before, but Google says the lack of resources such as servers has held the research back.

That's where Google comes in. They'll be supplying 36 servers to 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. M-Lab will collect data on the blocking or interference by ISPs of user internet use, including BitTorrent.

Don't Get Too Attached To Editing Wikipedia

2009-02-02T11:25:00.001+02:00

At Least Without Flagged Revision

It's about to get harder to edit a Wikipedia entry. That is unless those who oppose the concept can come up with a better idea.

Who among us hasn't encountered some false information on the site at one time or another. The goal here is to make Wikipedia, which is one of the most popular sites on the web, a more reliable place for obtaining accurate information. That can't be a bad thing from the average user's perspective.

However, out of users, 60% want to see the tightening of controls, while 40% still don't. After all, Wikipedia was built on a philosophy that allows anyone to add information.
Jimmy Wales
Times change though. Sites evolve. Wikipedia gets ranked high on Google for many, many searches. People looking for information want accuracy. A lot of us know that we can't always trust everything we read on Wikipedia. But how often does this phase the common searcher? Is this a concept that runs through little Johnny's mind when he's researching U.S. Presidents for his social studies paper?

It's not like users can't still submit edits. It should just be a little less chaotic this way, and ideally more useful in the long run for the majority of the site's users.

The process is called Flagged revisions, and has already been in place at the German-Language version of the site according to ITWorld. That seems to be the way it's going to go, but those opposed can share their ideas with management. If they come up with something better, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will consider it.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/01/30/dont-get-too-attached-to-editing-wikipedia

Beginner's introduction to CS4 Dreamweaver tutorial

2009-01-22T12:34:00.001+02:00

How to make your teeth look white

2009-01-22T12:26:00.000+02:00

Google Lauches New SiteMap Generator Tool

2009-01-20T15:57:00.001+02:00

Google have launched a new tool from the Webmaster Central stable which uses different ways to identify site URL's and also creates Sitemap files.

Called the Google Sitemap Generator, it uses your webserver's traffic, its log files, or the files found on the server to quickly find the URLs on your site.

Google Webmaster Trend Analyst John Mueller explains that they have created "a different kind of Sitemap generator that uses several ways to find URLs on your website and then allows you to automatically create and maintain different kinds of Sitemap files."

Once the tool has collected all the URL's on your site, it can create the following Sitemap files for you:

* XML Sitemaps for Web Search according to the sitemaps.org standard

* Mobile Sitemaps for mobile-friendly websites

* Code Search Sitemaps for source code that you make available to users.

John explains that through the combined method "Google Sitemap Generator can be very fast in finding these URLs and calculating relevant metadata, thereby making your Sitemap files as effective as possible."

If you would like to learn more about the new tool then read John's article on the Webmaster Central Blog

Lycos Europe To Shutter Lycos Mail, Tripod On February 15

2009-01-20T10:29:00.000+02:00

Troubled Internet company Lycos Europe, which is owned by Telefónica, is shutting down its email service and website creation and hosting service Tripod, the company is saying via emails to users that begin with “We regret to inform you that our parent company has decided to discontinue all unprofitable activities.” Both services will be discontinued as of February 15 2009.

Below is the email sent to Lycos mail users. The company says it is working on “finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider,” but don’t hold your breath. After February 15, all data is history. Paid Content has the Tripod news.

Dear User,

We regret to inform you that our parent company has decided to discontinue all unprofitable activities.

One of the activities that will be discontinued is our E-mail business division. For this reason, we are hereby terminating your account as of 15 February 2009. Currently, we are still working on finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider. If we should succeed to do so, we will inform you within the next 4 weeks. But as this is currently doubtful, we would like to ask you to assume the end of the service.

Prior to this date, you may continue to log in to your e-mail account and receive and send mail as usual. After this date, however, we will close your account and delete all content and access authorizations stored with Lycos in relation to your e-mail account, in accordance with legal requirements.

You will then no longer be able to receive or send e-mail under your e-mail address. The contents of your mailbox will also no longer be accessible. For this reason, we ask that you back up all important data from your Lycos e-mail account in the next few days and switch to another e-mail provider.

Should you still be entitled to services for any additional paid options, we will of course reimburse the balance to the bank account you provided.

We regret this measure and would like to thank you for the trust you have placed in us.

Kind regards,

Your LYCOS Mail Team

Mobile is the new online

2009-01-07T10:41:00.001+02:00

"mobile is the new online"

The early adopters are doing it (I can hear them all screaming "old news" already), the consumers are soaking it up, and most of you all know it, but probably on a sub conscious level rather than conscious level.

Our cell phones (or mobile phones, depending where in the world you live) are now our pint sized PCs, camera, organizer, entertainment unit and so on. They have been for years, but the levels of engagement are at record highs.

All through last year, we heard the rumblings of a marketing wave that's rapidly gathering momentum. The rumblings came in various, often disguised forms. Think iPhone and Google Android launches, Yahoo and Google deals with handset and telephone companies, a myriad of new localized search services... all these things point to the revolution that's happening.

While I was contemplating what this means for 2009, I stumbled on this new study by Pew Internet & American Life Project. The report, titled The Future of the Internet Part III, raised the following relevant findings:

* The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.

* Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

* The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

Now I debate whether the predictions/forecasts will take the 10 or so years suggested by the report, given the rapid adoption already in place. But it does confirm the need for smart small business operators to starting rethinking their ideas of online.

I'm sure many of you are thinking "hang on, I've only just started my search marketing Campaigns". Its okay - the shift in internet consumption isn't going to be an overnight phenomenon. But it is inevitable.

While the possibilities of mobile extend widely, even for those of you just seeking out local marketing opportunities - mobile is definitely a consideration that needs to see itself on your plans for 2009.

At the very least, start embracing the mobile friendly marketing opportunities that already exist such as Google Advertising and Google Local services.

http://www.ineedhits.com/free-tools/blog/2009/01/future-casting-mobile-is-new-online.aspx

Spectrophotometry improves detection of colon cancer

2009-01-07T10:04:00.001+02:00

Medical device company SpectraScience (San Diego, CA) announced that the significant rate of missed cancers during colonoscopies may be greatly improved by the use of its spectrophotometric WavSTAT Optical Biopsy System. A recent Canadian study shows the limitations of colonoscopies in detecting cancer, and reports that the procedure may detect polyps and early cancerous tissue only 60-70% of the time.

The Canadian study in the Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine found that traditional colonoscopy, while widely recommended, was much less accurate than anyone expected. Scientists at SpectraScience pointed out that using a safe low power laser to illuminate tissue in the colon, the WavSTAT system, when combined with a physician's visual assessment can tell within seconds if the tissue is "normal" or "suspect" with 96% sensitivity.

Using the principle of laser-induced fluorescence (LIF), diseased or cancerous tissue fluoresces differently compared to normal healthy tissue. Diseased tissue has reduced fluorophors which when analyzed by a specialized detector can indicate with high sensitivity that the cells are becoming dysplastic, a precursor to cancer.

During colonoscopy, a small fiber-optic probe is directed by the clinician to touch the suspicious tissue. Depressing a foot switch directs low powered, safe laser light into the tissue. The laser shuts off and the tissue fluorescence light is directed back up the same fiber optic probe to a specialized detector. The system's computer analyses the detectors output and within seconds displays a RED or GREEN light on a screen. A GREEN light means the tissue is "normal" with 96% sensitivity. Where a flat polyp is suspect, multiple uses of the optical fiber and the RED light may assist the clinician in determining the margin of the "suspect" tissue and remove all of it in the same procedure.

SpectraScience holds approximately 60 patents worldwide that have been issued or are pending on its WavSTAT Optical Biopsy System and LUMA Cervical Imaging Systems. These devices are used to assess tissue quickly to help determine if it is normal, pre-cancerous, or cancerous. The WavSTAT and LUMA Systems are currently approved by the FDA for detecting pre-cancerous and cancerous tissue in the colon and cervix, respectively. An evaluation of the WavSTAT for detection of pre-cancers in the throat is being tested.

For more information, go to www.spectrascience.com.

AJAX remains a top RIA platform, preferred for stability

2008-12-30T14:27:00.001+02:00

Rich Internet applications today range from the merely cool to the truly valuable, such as an intranet portal that lets U.S. fighter pilots deployed on missions around the globe keep in touch with their loved ones. When Chicago-based developer Roundarch was building that application, it picked AJAX as the project’s underpinning.

Dave Meeker, user experience strategy lead for Roundarch, said AJAX was the clear choice for the task. Its generic HTML and CSS base, along with a compelling GUI, make AJAX a prime platform for government projects.

“AJAX is sort of our standard way to solve a problem unless we have the option to move [away from it],” Meeker said. “We’re limited a lot of times by where we have to deploy an application.”

Meeker’s company has maintained the Air Force portal for the past seven years, creating RIAs that keep U.S. airmen connected, as well as tools used for Webmail, logistics, planning and data services. The portal offers a “secured instant messenger,” with planned video chatting capabilities, which can be an airman’s only form of communication with his or her family when deployed overseas. Meeker estimated the portal has 850,000 registered users and called it the “main hub” of all software tools used by the Air Force.

Developers said AJAX remains a viable and flourishing RIA development method, even with Adobe Flex, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX jockeying for attention. AJAX lets developers leverage their familiarity with CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Many developers have said AJAX is easy to use and is a good choice when it comes to creating simple dynamic Web applications. Also, AJAX can run on any browser, whereas Flex and Silverlight might create a problem when trying to upload applications in countries that might not have the same bandwidth and speed as the United States or Europe.

“When you start looking at applications that have to run outside of the U.S. and Europe, and talk about things being deployed in Africa and southeast Asia, you just don’t have computers that are as fast,” said Meeker, whose company has also done RIA projects for Hershey’s, The History Channel and Motorola. “Running the Flash player with 96[MB] of memory is really a bad experience. You can get away with building AJAX applications that perform better on poor hardware.”

Peter Mezzina, a technical lead for EMC’s Powerlink development group, said AJAX is a suitable and accessible choice for a group of developers working on a collaborative project. Powerlink provides EMC customers with online technical support and resources. Mezzina’s group develops EMC’s customer support website and has created a portal where customers enter trouble tickets. The portal also provides search capabilities and other business functions.

When deciding on its RIA platform, the Powerlink group evaluated 12 products, including Flex, and considered familiarity with the programming model and performance, Mezzina said. The group decided on AJAX because it had done some work with the Dojo Toolkit, and that experience gave it “an easy entry point” into AJAX, he said.

The Dojo Toolkit is a JavaScript library that tries to make creating AJAX-based applications easier with prepackaged widgets and a packaging system to facilitate modular development. “We didn’t think we had to hire a lot of people and thought we could train people and get them up to speed quickly,” said Mezzina.

The group chose Backbase’s Enterprise AJAX framework because it puts AJAX in a Java wrapper. That gave Mezzina and the other developers a familiar model, since the product presents itself as a Java library. Mezzina said his team used tools for managing and developing Java code. He said the tools do not always apply directly to JavaScript, and as a result, the team is less productive with JavaScript than it is with Java. “We were using the Dojo Toolkit, and that allows you to touch the JavaScript, but we found that was taking people out of their comfort zone,” he said. “The results and time it took to develop was hard to predict.”

Heavy lifting required
In comparing AJAX with Flex, Silverlight and other RIA platforms, Mezzina said AJAX is more stable and thus presents fewer problems for clients. “That’s the thing with any of these technologies," he said. "It’s not so much that you have servers going down or things of that sort. It’s about the customer trying to access the site and finding something weird on their PC. We’ve had cases like that [with applications built with AJAX], but for the most part, they’ve been easy to fix.”

An AJAX developer has to do more “heavy lifting” of code to build applications that feel as rich as Flex apps, Meeker said. The reason for this is that Adobe has spent much time putting application patterns into the Flex component framework.

Meeker estimated a developer could populate a data grid in Flex in seven to 10 minutes, whereas the task might take a couple of days with AJAX. This is because Flex applications run inside the Flash player on the player's own runtime, as opposed to an AJAX application running in the browser and using the browser’s memory process.

Though AJAX applications are lighter than Flex apps, the latter can offer more powerful performance, Meeker said. “If I’m building an application with a dashboard where I need to be able to move data around and drill in and out, I like the idea of a Flex application. [But] I think AJAX suits itself perfectly for extending the Web as we know it and making it more like desktop software.”

While AJAX has been around significantly longer than Silverlight and other platforms, some developers say AJAX has taken a long time to mature because there hasn’t been one single body pushing it as there is for the Adobe and Microsoft platforms. Open-source projects and organizations such as the OpenAjax Alliance have advanced the technology, but it is still missing a singular entity to shape it in a consistent manner. According to Meeker, that lack of consistency has hindered enterprise adoption of AJAX.

“For enterprise clients, for us to go in and recommend an AJAX library or framework, sometimes it becomes worrisome. If something like [JavaScript library] script.aculo.us disappears in two years, then what does the team do?” Meeker said. “That may not seem like a big issue, but stockholders may get a little weary in terms of things that may not be supported in a couple of years.”

Mezzina pointed out that some companies have sought to simplify the code writing required for AJAX applications by packaging data transfer, so that data can move between the client and server after a Web page is pulled up. He called packaged data transfer a “bit of shorthand” that can make coding less complex.

Meeker said that while AJAX might not be ideal for creating complex Web applications, he sees a potential solution to that with Google’s Chrome Web browser for Windows, which was released in September.

One issue that Roundarch has seen with AJAX is where a user needs to be able to load up 5,000 rows of data for an application they want built. In some cases, Roundarch has had to ditch AJAX because it couldn’t handle the amount of data that was required, but a platform like Flex can do it really well. However, Mezzina said Chrome’s handling of JavaScript applications allows the creation of much more robust JavaScript applications by isolating the applications in the memory process.

“If [the browser] freaks out and breaks, then I can close it and it doesn’t affect anything else,” Meeker said. “AJAX is more exciting now because it’s more robust than it has been. I’m hoping the other browsers follow suit with how Google has approached handling of JavaScript processes.”

By Jeff Feinman
http://sdtimes.com/link/33135

PDF Converter

2008-12-22T17:37:00.002+02:00

Add PDF Creation Feature to Your Blogs and Websites

FreePDFConvert.com offers free service which allows visitors of your websites to save useful content to PDF file by single mouse click.

http://www.freepdfconvert.com/convert_web_page_to_pdf.asp

Microsoft releases its first iPhone app

2008-12-15T20:40:00.002+02:00

Is it possible some at Microsoft find the iPhone a more attractive platform than the software giant's own Windows Mobile?

Microsoft's Seadragon on Apple's iPhone.

Engineers in the company's Live Labs have released the company's first application for Apple's popular smartphone--even before making it available on Microsoft's own mobile platform. Seadragon Mobile, which was added to Apple's App Store on Saturday, is a free image-browsing app that allows users to quickly "deep zoom" images while online and is intended to demonstrate what is possible with a mobile platform.

Seadragon is the backbone for Microsoft's Photosynth, which allows users to take a grouping of photographs and stitch them together into a faux 3D environment.

Other iPhone apps are reportedly in development in Redmond; Microsoft's Tellme unit was expected to release the company's first iPhone app in the form of a voice-activated search for a variety of phones, including iPhone and BlackBerry. A Microsoft representative told my colleague Ina Fried in September that a public version of that program would likely be released in a few months.

So where's the Windows Mobile version of Seadragon?

"The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit)," Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, told TechFlash. "Most phones out today don't have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10122751-37.html

Gmail & Google Docs Removes The Need for Adobe Reader

2008-12-14T18:59:00.002+02:00

Gmail now supports the reading of PDF files. Good!!!

Now, what can be done?

1. Being sent a PDF file by email

If someone now sends me a PDF file by email, all I have to do is click the “view” button in Gmail. This then sends the file to my Google Docs account for viewing (you may have to log into Google Docs first)

After logging into Google Docs, their lightweight PDF viewer immediately opens your file. As you can see below, the viewer gives you the ability to download the file and print the file.

Plus, just like Adobe Reader, you have the strip down the side which allows you to see thumbnails of all the pages so you can jump straight to a particular page.

Once you’ve finished looking at your file, just close Google Docs. Easy. No need to use Adobe Reader or FoxIt or any other installed software.

2. Reading a PDF file on your computer

But what if the PDF file is not in your email? What if the PDF file is on your computer? Well then you can either upload it to Google Docs or to Gmail for reading in Google Docs.

To upload to Gmail, you can use a tool called Backup to email which integrates into your Explorer right-click menu. Then when you have uploaded the PDF file to Gmail, repeat stage one to view your file in Google Docs. You can also use Gmail as a nice little storage facility for your PDF files long term.

To upload your file from your computer to Google Docs (cutting out Gmail), Docs provides a variety of ways to get your file there. The easiest route is to go to Google Docs and use their file uploading tool. The only snag with uploading it to the Google Docs server is that there is a 10MB file size limit.

If you do a bit of online searching, you can also find things such as a desktop tool to quickly upload documents.

Then again, once your PDF file is in Docs, just use their lightweight viewer to open it. When you have finished and you don’t want to keep the file online, just delete it. You will still have the original file on your computer.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/gmail-google-docs-removes-the-need-for-adobe-reader-2/

Chrome Comes Out of Beta with 10 Million Users

2008-12-12T14:19:00.004+02:00

As was reported, Google’s browser Chrome is coming out of beta — a mere 100 days after it was introduced. When I commented to Sundar Pichai, Product VP, that this had to be one of the fastest exits from beta for Google in recent memory he explained that “Google has a very traditional approach to our client software products,” meaning it accelerates the process of getting them to a general release.

There were suggestions on the TechCrunch blog that third parties were potentially exerting pressure on or encouraging Google to hurry up the general release of Chrome. I asked Pichai about this idea and he said that the product was “very far along” when they initially released it in September. He added that the bugs and feature requests have been addressed; so it was time to come out of beta.

What bugs and feature requests?

Pichai said that there had been some issues with audio and video that were now fixed. He added that the browser is now more stable and even faster — indeed speed is one of its chief selling points. Among the feature requests, there are now better privacy controls (in one place), better bookmark management and various security upgrades and improvements. On the nagging question of a Mac version, Pichai said there was a good deal of internal pressure to get one done but it was a “non-trival matter.” He said that one would likely be out by the “end of the first half” of 2009.

One of the great features of Chrome is the new tab page (pictured above). Somewhat like Opera’s “speed dial,” it offers a grid display of most commonly visited sites for easy access. Another feature I would like to see Google add is one like Firefox’s “save and quit” option, which remembers tabs and sites and reopens them upon launching the browser during a subsequent session.

There are a host of coming improvements such as better RSS support and support for extensions, among a range of other things. Pichai also said that the browser has an impressive 10 million users after three months. That’s a very big number but to put it in the context of the larger browser market, here’s the marketshare breakdown:

I asked Google about location in the browser. Google Gears and its Geolocation API are built into Chrome. What that means is that Google’s WiFi and cell tower database triangulation will be able to pinpoint users with a high degree of accuracy (much like Google’s “MyLocation” does on mobile phones). It’s also similar to what Mozilla is doing with the next version of Firefox.

Pichai was not able to discuss these matters in great detail given that they were outside the scope of his responsibility. However he reminded me of the “double opt in” privacy policy tied to the Geolocation API. Google asks if you want to expose your location and third party developers or publishers trying to access that information must also request access from users.

There are lots of implications both for publishers and advertisers coming from this improved location awareness (Windows 7 will also have it). Here’s a previous post on some of the implications of location in the browser.

In the background, Microsoft has allegedly signed a deal with Dell Computer (a long time Google search partner) to pre-load the Live Search toolbar. If all that is true, an improved Chrome could be a carrot to retain the Dell relationship.

For the whole story go to http://searchengineland.com/chrome-comes-out-of-beta-with-10-million-users-15806.php

Yahoo Zimbra Desktop

2008-12-10T16:35:00.003+02:00

Yahoo has announced that its Zimbra Desktop can now be synchronized with Yahoo Contacts and Calendar.

To try out the calendar synchronization users need to be on the new Yahoo Calendar Beta.

The Yahoo Mail Blog explains. "After you have installed or updated your Zimbra software, go to the Account Setup link and then look for the link to Edit your account details."
Yahoo Zimbra Desktop Now Synching

"You should see a whole bunch of fun Synchronization Settings to select. Just like the first time you set up your Zimbra, it should take some time to populate. But once it finishes the first sync it should be much faster."

Yahoo says it has received frequent comments from users who wanted a way to synchronize their Yahoo Contacts and Calendar with Zimbra.

If users have problems they can visit the Zimbra Desktop forums to offer feedback or report issues.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/12/09/yahoo-zimbra-desktop-now-synching

Pulitzer Opens Up To Online-Only Publications

2008-12-10T16:03:00.000+02:00

Accepting text-based submissions

The Pulitzer Prize Board has announced it will now accept submissions from online-only news outlets for the first time in its history.
Pulitzer Opens Up To Online-Only Publications

Submissions are required to be text-based and come from online- only publications from the United Sates. The submissions should come from online news organizations that publish at least weekly. Entries comprised of entirely online content can be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories.

"This is an important step forward, reflecting our continued commitment to American newspapers as well as our willingness to adapt to the remarkable growth of online journalism," said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Prizes.

"The new rules enlarge the Pulitzer tent and recognize more fully the role of the Web, while underscoring the enduring value of words and of serious reporting."

Gissler said the Board will continue to follow the impact of the Internet.

Beginning in 2006, online content from newspaper Web sites was allowed in all Pulitzer journalism categories, but online- only newspapers were not permitted to submit entries. Entirely online entries were allowed in only two categories, breaking news coverage and breaking news photography.

In addition to text stories, the competition will continue to allow a full range of online content, such as interactive graphics and video in nearly all categories. Two photography categories will continue to restrict entries to still images.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/12/09/pulitzer-opens-up-to-online-only-publications

After Effects CS4 New Features: Photoshop 3D

2008-11-06T11:54:00.000+02:00

GPS Lingerie

2008-11-03T15:12:00.004+02:00

Brazilian lingerie maker Lucia Iorio says her GPS lingerie collection is more about fun and games, labeling the line “Find Me If You Can.”

Still, anyway... how can you keep such a big device on your waist?:) and all for the benefit of your lover?

Interesting idea though :D

Windows 7: Microsoft's secret weapon against Google

2008-10-30T16:12:00.002+02:00

With the first public alpha release of Windows 7 due today at the Microsoft PDC2008 conference, the outline of the new operating system is taking shape. What you won't see when that alpha comes out is the way that Microsoft will try to use Windows 7 as a Trojan horse in its war against Google.

Google's domination of the search market continues unabated, but Microsoft hasn't given up on it. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently said that his company is willing to lose "5% to 10% of total operating income for several years" to fund its ongoing attempt to make inroads into the search market. Much more than search is at stake. Google wants to replace Microsoft's desktop-based applications, such as Office, with its cloud-based applications, such as Google Docs.

So where does Windows 7 come in? What new features can Microsoft possibly introduce that will help it overtake Google in search and retain its domination of productivity software such as Office?

Microsoft's secret weapon in Windows 7 is not what features the operating system has, but instead what features it doesn't have. Microsoft is stripping Windows 7 of some of Windows' best built-in applications, and it's making them available only as downloads on its Windows Live site.

When Windows 7 comes out, it won't include Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker, which are some of Vista's most useful applications. Windows Movie Maker is a surprisingly sophisticated piece of software for creating videos and DVDs, and it's worthy of being sold as stand-alone software. Windows Photo Gallery is a well-done, elegant way to manage digital photos. And Windows Mail is the successor to Outlook Express, with a very big installed base. Expect users to howl in protest when they find those applications gone, particularly Windows Mail.

To get them, users will have to visit the Microsoft Windows Live site, where the software can be downloaded for free. And, of course, there will be plenty of other Windows Live software they can download, as well as other Windows Live services they can use. It's a variation on the classic "loss leader" in retail, where you lure folks in with freebies and then pounce with a hard sell.

Microsoft claims that it is stripping the applications out of Windows 7 because it makes for a "cleaner" operating system. But there are plenty of useless applications it could strip out of Windows to no ill effect. The backup program in Vista, for example, is close to useless. And as for People Near Me or Windows Meeting Space -- do you use either of those programs? Do you know anyone who does? Those could easily go to make for a cleaner operating system. And while Microsoft is at it, it could get rid of User Account Control. I don't know anyone who would cry real tears if that one bit the dust.
I expect that there will be plenty of other hooks in Windows 7 to get people to go to Windows Live. And I don't expect all of those hooks to be consumer-oriented like Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. Don't be surprised if there are enterprise-related hooks as well.

All this may be clever marketing, but it won't work. Microsoft may be able to push users to Windows Live, but if it doesn't build better search and better services than Google, people will stay with Google.

If Microsoft wants to eat into Google's share of the search market, there's only one thing it can do: Build better search. If it wants to make sure that Google doesn't threaten its near-monopoly of productivity suites, it will need to make some version of Office available over the Internet.

The key to battling Google is building better software and services. Stripping useful applications out of Windows isn't the way to win the war.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Operating+Systems&articleId=327354&taxonomyId=89&pageNumber=2

Flash CS4 3D Rotation Tool Tutorial

2008-10-25T14:27:00.000+03:00

Flash CS4 Bone Tool Tutorial

2008-10-25T14:10:00.000+03:00

FITC - Flash CS4 3D tool

2008-10-25T14:07:00.001+03:00

Photoshop CS4 New Features: Interface (lynda.com)

2008-10-25T14:04:00.000+03:00

Flash CS4 (Diesel) Tween Engine

2008-10-25T14:03:00.001+03:00

Resizing - CS4

2008-10-25T13:54:00.001+03:00

“Content Aware Image Resizing” - amaizing

2008-10-25T13:32:00.005+03:00

Presentation on some content aware image resizing software which has some truly jaw-dropping capabilities. Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan (of Adobe) have developed a way to resize images using something they call “seam carving” which lowers distortion in images.

Don’t Hold Your Breath For The Facebook Android App

2008-10-24T13:35:00.002+03:00

The bad blood between Facebook and Google may go deeper than anyone has really realized to date. The spat became public earlier this year when Facebook banned Google’s Friend Connect, theoretically over security issues (but really over competitive issues).

The source of the feud: Facebook chose Microsoft as their ad partner and investor a year ago; Google had already put their money behind MySpace. But beyond that, Google was also quick to compete with Facebook platform by launching Open Social with most of Facebook’s competitors, cementing the ill-will.

Now Facebook may be shooting itself in the foot to spite its face (or however the saying goes) by ignoring the new Android platform. From what we hear, Facebook has dedicated exactly zero resources to creating a version of the service for Android, and has no plans to launch anything at all. That’s despite the fact that the company has robust iPhone and RIM applications (the iPhone app was developed internally by Joe Hewitt, the RIM app was built by RIM with Facebook’s help). Meanwhile, MySpace has already released an Android version of their service.

So why no Andoid app? The official reason is that Facebook is looking to others to develop these applications. Joe Hewitt pushed the iPhone app internally, a spokesperson says, and RIM built the app themselves (but Facebook lent engineers). Google or third parties are free to use the Facebook API to build apps using Facebook services, the spokesperson said.

But the off record discussions I’m having with others at Facebook tell a different story. One source derisively called Android “vaporware” (it looks pretty real to me). Another source at Facebook says “Android sucks, it doesn’t matter.”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/dont-hold-your-breathe-for-the-facebook-android-app/

Toyota unveils Winglet personal

2008-10-24T10:03:00.004+03:00

Only a year after taking control of Sony's robotics business, Toyota has come up with a vertical, mechanized scooter (or personal transporter, in future-speak) intended to help people move about in public areas.

Called the Winglet because of its fleet nature, it is the first gadget to duplicate the celebrated, and often mocked, navigation system of Dean Kamen's Segway Transporter: self-balancing through gyroscopic sensors detecting the gentle directional tilts of a rider.

However, this personal scooter is probably not up to par to the Segway in speed or ruggedness. The newest Segway model can go up to 12.5 miles per hour (versus the Winglet's 3.7 MPH), and the slightness of the Winglet's frame probably wouldn't survive a Police chase.

Main_winglet

According to Toyota, they will begin testing three different models at a few Japanese airports later this year, as well as some popular malls. The feedback received from customers will help determine whether Toyota will mass-market the gadget for sales everywhere else.

Last year, Sony decided to sell off most of its robotics division in order to streamline its overflowing number of product departments (killing off the Aibo dog in the process), and Toyota stepped in to keep pushing the technology.

Check out the Winglet in action after the jump.

http://video.itworld.com/services/link/bcpid1578108607/bclid1588003312/bctid1704033485

Good VoIP Deployment Guidelines (Do Not Exist?)

2008-10-24T09:54:00.002+03:00

Knowledge on security issues is a two-edged sword. Knowing enough of security will empower you to make right choices. But knowing too much can make you paranoid. So what, if all VoIP systems can be broken into? Or can they? Or do you really want to know?

Some people argue that you should not care about VoIP issues unless they impact your own VoIP deployment. With this thinking, why would I care about Microsoft problems as a Mac user? The answer is simple: I am in the security business, so I should know about security issues in any platform. If you are in VoIP security business, your job is much easier as you only need to know about VoIP security issues in any architecture and platform. Knowledge about vulnerabilities in one specific domain will help you analyze similar flaws in another domain. No tool can do that for you. It is not only about knowledge of issues, but how you use that knowledge to find new issues.

Building a VoIP architecture does not start from security mechanisms, but user requirements and budget. Although people keep saying that security is not an add-on, it really often is. But it needs to be added at the right time. Not all VoIP architectures need any security (mechanisms). The right choice of products, protocols and network architectures can take you a long way before any VoIP security solutions need to be added (if ever).

So back to the original question(s): How do I build a cheap (free) but still secure (enough) VoIP deployment?

The most common method of deploying VoIP in an Enterprise environment is using softclients, VoIP terminals running on a PC. The VoIP server can be running any open source VoIP gateway such as Asterisk or SER. The cost? Zero. Sounds attractive?

The security threats in such a simple VoIP deployment are really quite easy to enumerate:

* VoIP client has a vulnerability(Probability 100%)
* VoIP server has a vulnerability(Probability 100%)
* The PC has a vulnerability(Probability 100%)

What? That is not a threat enumeration! You are right... Let's try it the other way around:

* VoIP client has a vulnerability, with an exploit in the wild(Probability 100%)
* VoIP server has a vulnerability, with an exploit in the wild(Probability 100%)
* The PC has a vulnerability, with an exploit in the wild(Probability 100%)

We are not getting anywhere with this, are we... ;) One final time:

* VoIP client has a vulnerability, which will be exploited by someone(Probability ?%)
* VoIP server has a vulnerability, which will be exploited by someone(Probability ??%)
* The PC has a vulnerability, which will be exploited by someone(Probability ???%)

There are quite many influencing aspects in this... How can we block the exploit if we do not know about it yet? We are not going to block access to VoIP, nor to the PC's, so the perimeter defense approach is out of the question. Nobody believes in IDS/IPS anymore, so that does not help. Can we learn something from other Enterprise applications? Let's list some of them and see what is in common with VoIP:

* Email is not really peer-to-peer as the email clients access the Enterprise server and do not have any direct connections between client implementations. Otherwise, we know that all email clients are broken also, and are really careful to enforce which email client can be used in the IT infrastructure.
* Web Browsers are equally broken, but at least there are couple of browsers that most people tend to trust. A Browser is a bit more problematic to secure as it has to be able to connect to anywhere anytime. You can proxy outgoing web traffic, therefore limiting the attack surface.
* Instant Messaging is almost peer-to-peer, and probably why it is also banned in most Enterprise networks. It is possible to implement Enterprise IM using centralized messaging servers, which enforce access control. At least you know who attacked you if that happened.

Can we learn something from these? Yes. Enterprise networks need to enforce authentication (check, done in VoIP). They also need to control the traffic flows from outside into the Enterprise (check, let's use IP-PBX as the only route in), and from the Enterprise to the outside world (check, a proxy is in place). The used software has to be accepted by the IT staff, and security policies need to be enforced (check, softclients are installed and administered by central IT).

That sounds too simple to be true? VoIP is just like any other Enterprise Software. You need a security policy for VoIP, and enforce it. The most challenging task is selecting the right piece of software for the task at hand. Unfortunately that is not the easiest task for VoIP currently. Want some recommendations? Let's see if I have some for the next post, here in ITworld...

by Ari Takanen
http://www.itworld.com/

Android Goes Open-Source

2008-10-23T16:02:00.001+03:00

When Google announced Android, its software platform for mobile devices, it released an SDK for developers to work with, but it also promised to eventually release the code under an open-source license. Today, Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance did exactly that. You can now download the code and help Google and its partners to develop it further. The source code has been released under the Apache 2.0 license and consists of the complete codebase of Android, including all the libraries, media codecs, and applications.

The timing of this announcement coincides with the release of the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, which will go on sale tomorrow.
Apache License

androids_logos.pngThe Apache License allows developers to distribute and modify the source code in any way they want, and developers are not required to distribute the new code under the same license. The new license does not even have to be an open-source license, which will give companies the option to develop their own, proprietary platforms on the basis of Android.
iPhone and Android Compete for Developers

It will be interesting to see where developers will take the Android platform now that they have full access to it. We have already seen the release of quite a few very interesting programs for Android in anticipation of the G1 launch.

This announcement also sets Google apart from Apple, which is trying to keep complete control over its iPhone platform. While most users probably don't care about the politics behind the scenes, the Android platform might siphon off quite a few developers from the iPhone - especially given Apple's erratic behavior around including applications in the iTunes store lately.

For original article see http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/android_goes_opensource.php

OWASP EU Summit 2008 Training

2008-10-20T19:36:00.001+03:00

There's some novel training going on at OWASP's EU Summit 08 in Portugal, in two weeks time. Peleus Uhley from Adobe Systems will be providing training on:

Flash Player Security

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_EU_Summit_2008_Training#Flash_Player_Security

Auditing Flash Applications

http://www.owasp.org/index.phpOWASP_EU_Summit_2008_Training#Auditing_Flash_Applications

Adobe gives devs access to binary audio data in Flash

2008-10-17T16:21:00.004+03:00

Flash Player 10, released today, brings improved audio and video playback, according to the company. The product’s sound APIs have been tweaked so developers can dynamically generate audio and create new audio applications like music sequencers and mixers. Developers can also do real-time audio processing.

Adobe executives explained that developers have access to the binary data of audio in Flash Player 10. They can also process it and add effects by taking the data out of a loaded MP3 file. Application level compositing of audio is also possible, so multiple files can be mixed together into a single output.

Developers can also access the sound buffer in Flash Player 10, which allows them to pass binary data into the sound buffer. “I saw a great example the other day with a stock chart, where you can listen to the chart and not just do it visually,” said Justin Everett-Church, a senior product manager with Adobe. “It had a slide whistle effect where as the stock went higher over time, the pitch went higher, and as the stock went down, the pitch started going down. This was something you couldn’t really do by just loading an audio file, you really need to produce this at runtime.”

When asked what benefits Flash Player 10 offers enterprise developers, Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager for Adobe's platform business unit, said, Enhancements to the drawing API in Flash Player 10 and use of the graphics card will significantly improve Flash Player’s already significant lead in RIA visual application performance." He also said a new text engine, along with an upcoming ActionScript library for improved text layout, will let developers create "print-quality" RIAs that can use all major languages.

Flash Player 10 offers new custom filters and effects, along with new native 3D transformation and animation. Barclay said the company has improved its drawing API, so there is less code to write and an improvement to 3D image rendering.

Users can create their own custom filters and effects and apply them to text, animation and video. To do this, the company uses a feature called Adobe Pixel Bender, the same technology behind Adobe After Effects CS4, which is used to create motion graphics. Developers can use Pixel Blender to blend modes and fills to animate effects or change an effect on rich media content.

“Adobe After Effects CS4 creates cinematic effects for Hollywood movies, and now you can use those same effects at runtime on Flash Player 10,” Barclay said.

A new text engine lets developers control text layout and add text components. The text engine was designed by the team that created InDesign, company executives said, and this enables “print quality publishing” on the Web with Flash Player.

Later this year, Adobe will release a set of ActionScript-based text components that offer the ability to do multi-column text flow and display different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and Japanese, Barclay said.

Article written by Jeff Feinman www.sdtimes.com/ADOBE_GIVES_DEVS_ACCESS_TO_BINARY_AUDIO_DATA_IN_FLASH/About_FLASH_and_ADOBE/32979

Twitter A Tool For Thieves?

2008-10-13T18:38:00.001+03:00

Some small alarms have been raised over the possibility that Twitter and social media like it could be used as information sources for those with nefarious purposes.

Picture this: You’re at Starbucks enjoying a half-and-half grande mocha, or whatever, and you thumb as much into your WiFi-connected PDA, updating Twitter of your current occupation. “At a global coffee chain, working on my novel, just so everybody can see that I’m working on my novel.” Bang. The bad guys know where you are and what you’re doing and rob your house. Or, bang. Your girlfriend’s husband shows up and clobbers you with your own MacBook Air.

If you’re creative enough, you can think of a thousand scenarios that turn out poorly. Of course this is the fault of Twitter, and not the guy broadcasting his exact whereabouts to all of his followers.

These concerns have been raised, as Mike Masnick notes, on the heels of a bank robbery involving Craigslist. The robber used Craigslist to promise jobs to people and told them to show up outside a bank in a specific uniform. He wore the same thing and robbed the bank, creating a fine sense of confusion. (Hey, maybe penalties for bank robberies should depend on how creative the dude was robbing it. The Craigslist guy gets off light cuz that was pretty brilliant.)

Masnick also mentions how answering machines were once also feared as a broadcast to whomever called that nobody was home. It’s not quite the same because, unless consciously creating a diversion via Twitter, it was obvious pretty quickly that an answering machine was a nice way of lying without saying a word.

For the original article please refer to http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/10/09/twitter-a-tool-for-thieves

Facebook Rolls Out New iPhone App

2008-10-01T15:14:00.003+03:00

Last night Facebook rolled out their highly anticipated new iPhone application and with it a whole slew of new features. Some of the new features includes:

* Access to a complete newsfeed duplicating the functionality currently available on the site. This includes feed item commenting which makes this a mobile competitor to FriendFeed,
* Access to all messages in your inbox,
* Full-access to notifications,
* Tabbed profile design with wall, info, and photos, and
* Search of other users outside of your friends with the ability to request new friendships.

These updates and others bring the majority of Facebook’s functionality to the iPhone. When it comes to mobile social networks, Facebook is proving that they are keeping on the edge with features galore to keep users happy. I for one might start using my iPhone again (instead of my Blackberry) with this new application.

Read the entire article here

YouTube Improves Video Upload Experience

2008-10-01T09:49:00.004+03:00

YouTube has unveiled a new and improved video uploader.

They decided to let everybody use it after they have been randomly tested the beta version with different users.

On the new version

* Upload multiple files at once, without downloading a plugin

* You can enter in your video's metadata (like title, description, tags) while the upload is processing.

* The file-size limit for the uploads has been fairly raised from 100MB to 1GB.

There is always room for improvement, and YouTube recognizes that fact.

They're calling on users to give feedback so they can make adjustments (the whole point of a beta release). You can let them know your thoughts on the new version with a comment on their announcement post, or in the Community Help Forums.

10 Smart Java Script Techniques to improve your UI

2008-09-30T15:15:00.008+03:00

Javascript can add a lot of special effects that can really improve the user's experience. Here are 10 simple and clever Javascript techniques that add an extra dose of usability to any webpage.

Javascript is typically used as an aesthetic language in web development. This means that web developers should almost always be using Javascript for one thing only: Improving the visitor's experience. There are many clever and useful ways to improve a site from the user interface perspective. A developer can find nearly any snippet of Javascript to achieve what he or she wants to accomplish.

Javascript is truly a powerful and easy language to learn. It can be used to perform simple, aesthetic functions like toggling an element. It can be used to power a dynamic email client, and even send data instantaneously. Javascript can be as simple or advanced as you want it to be.

Frameworks are a blessing to any developer or designer who wants to quickly add Javascript effects to their layouts, without having to make raw code. Many of the techniques that we use below will run on Javascript frameworks like JQuery or MooTools.
Simple Javascript Techniques that Make Happy Users

It's important to note that many of these features aren't big and obnoxious, but rather small and subtle. Too often developers get carried away when it comes to adding Javascript. These are small but very useful techniques that can be used by almost any developer. You'll also note that most of these features deal with cleverly hiding and showing important information in non-traditional ways.

1. jQuery Hover Sub Tag Cloud

2. Opacity Change

3. Image Upload and Auto Crop

4. Password Strength Meter

As hackers become smarter and larger in numbers, it's becoming more and more important for site users to pick strong, non-guessable passwords that contain a combination of letters (upper and lower case), numbers and special characters. However, this task is easier said than done. Users typically don't read directions if they can help it.

5. Magic Zoom

Magic Zoom is a highly-useful script for eCommerce sites, as well as other sites that have detailed images. Instead of having the user making an extra click to a much larger picture and use up bandwidth, Magic Zoom allows you to essentially look through a magnifying glass at each picture.

6. JQuery Autotab

7. Incredible Javascript Login Form

8. Context Highlighting Web Forms

9. Sliding Top Panel

10. Social History

Site promotion buttons and links can quickly clutter a site or blog's layout. It seems that if you want to promote your blog posts and other content on sites like Digg and Delicious, you have to add a long list of buttons to your template so that you don't exclude anyone's favorite social bookmarking or news site.

For entire article, please refer to http://nettuts.com/javascript-ajax/10-rare-but-clever-javascript-techniques/

Adobe Photoshop CS3 - The clone stamp tool

2008-09-30T09:20:00.000+03:00

Helping you find your way

2008-09-29T15:30:00.003+03:00

The Virtual Earth team has just released a major update that brings some great new features, as well as enhancements to existing features to Live Search Maps. Some of the highlights include:

* New imagery. Brings locations to life, with richer bird's eye and 3D imagery of more locations in cities across North America.
* Weather Integration. Features near-real time local weather and cloud formations within the 3D imagery.

* Localized maps. Provides maps in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish for customers in Western Europe. Localized maps are supported for both desktop and mobile applications.

* Near-matching capabilities. Uses near-matching capabilities to find locations with alternate and similar spellings, resulting in a more relevant search experience.

* Landmark-based routing. Enhances searching for customers in the U.S. and Canada by offering maps with familiar landmarks, such as gas stations and fast-food restaurants, called out by name.

* Rich imagery for mobile users. Shows new maps rendered specifically for mobile devices.
* One-click directions. Gives directions in one click, enabling you to choose from route options by shortest time, shortest distance, or traffic flow.

All of these improvements are made possible by the new Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2. If you are an application developer or a webmaster, you can take advantage of these new Virtual Earth offerings as well. For more details, see Announcing the Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2.

Article written by Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist

Clearing bottlenecks is the goal of Intel's XML Suite

2008-09-26T09:01:00.003+03:00

Intel updated today its XML Software Suite processing libraries to version 1.1, seeking to offset bottlenecks in enterprise workloads and providing a benchmark utility that the company says will establish a baseline to compare the performance of XML solutions.

With this release, Intel focused on delivering better XML parsing and schema validation, as well as making XML Software Suite easier to integrate with Java development software and middleware.

"Looking at traffic in enterprise workloads, we are seeing the rise of XML becoming a factor in what chews up a lot of CPU cycles in systems," said David Hinz, director of marketing and business development at Intel. "It is important enough for us to get after it and provide better processing libraries than there are today.”

To that end, XML Software Suite is optimized with instructions for Intel's next-generation Nehalem microarchitecture, he said, adding that it also enables developers to write parallelized code that scales with hardware.

Nehalem will be created using the company's hafnium-based 45nm high-k metal gate silicon technology. It will be the first Intel processor to use QuickPath, a technology for shared memory among processors.

XML Software Suite 1.2 will follow suit in November with an updatable DOM tree structure that is refreshed when necessary for increased performance, rather than being recreated, Hinz explained. API improvements and extended support for Web services are also slated for the release. Intel will also support the Streaming API for XML, JSR 173.

In version 1.1, Intel created a direct interface for Java for easier adoption into middleware and development environments such as Apache Tomcat and Eclipse. Compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was also added.

Intel is making its XML benchmark utility broadly available as a non-branded open-source binary. “We are attempting to put a stake in the ground for standard benchmarks,” Hinz noted.

XML Software Suite is available for US$199, and Intel is providing a 30-day evaluation copy free of charge. The company has announced a partnership with SOA software maker MuleSource to offer integration support for the Intel XML Software Suite with Mule Xpack. Xpack includes a 60-day license to XML Software Suite, according to Hinz.

As the article provided above from the www.sdtimes.com, XML SOFTWARE SUITE is available and we hope this better XML parsing and schema validation, is indeed what we have been expecting. It's a good thing that at least is easier to integrate with Java development software, making our job less time consuming.

Flash 9 AS3 Dynamic Buttons

2008-09-25T11:37:00.003+03:00

for the source files click here

Flash Actionscript: Character Movement and Jumpig

2008-09-25T11:36:00.002+03:00

Adobe ActionScript 3 - Functions

2008-09-25T11:35:00.002+03:00

drop down menus in flash -- inserting into dreamwaver

2008-09-25T11:32:00.000+03:00

Easy Macromedia Flash Color Fading Tutorial in 9 Easy Steps

2008-09-25T11:31:00.000+03:00

Gphone Is Here (Almost)

2008-09-24T14:22:00.003+03:00

Google Android “Gphone” is almost here.

Announcement come from Google itself.

T-Mobile has the first Google Android “Gphone,” the G1.

If you pre-order the phone for $179.99 (plus taxes and fees; two-year agreement required), it will be delivered to your door somewhere around 22 October 2008.

Phone's features?

* Touch screen
* Customizable home screen
* Phone flips open for a full QWERTY keyboard
* Three megapixel camera
* Google Maps Street View (You can pan in the Street View photos by just moving the phone in the direction you want the image to turn.)
* One-touch Google search

gphone g1 side viewgphone g1 qwerty keyboard
Full QWERTY keyboard

gphone t-mobile g1 3 megapixel camera
3 megapixel camera

The platform is open to developers. It seems that they’ve already run developer contests and have more than 1700 apps ready to go.

Business Week also reports that Qualcomm is working on a Gphone, as are four other companies which may include Samsung, LG, and Motorola.

All five Gphones are due out in the next six months.

Blog Word Expo 2008

2008-09-24T09:56:00.002+03:00

Bloggers from several industries have come together in Las Vegas for a few days to share ideas and trade secrets.

HTC Dream’s “Late October” release date

2008-09-18T14:55:00.007+03:00

HTC Dream release date will be October 20th, and it after all probabilities will be 3 different colors (those seem to be: black, white, and brown).

Too bad that in Romania, HTC works with CIRMA ELECTRONICS as SERVICE PROVIDER and CIRMA stinks, sucks and they are far beyond any worst imaginations when it cames to service.

So, as long as i live in Romania, I will never ever, ever... buy another HTC as long as CIRMA it ensures the service for HTC.

By the way, my HTC fucked after 4 months of(trust me) gentle and proper handling.

So, i don't know, i don't trust HTC anymore.

Bluenog 4.0 released for Web developers

2008-09-16T09:59:00.002+03:00

Three ex-BEA employees are hoping to make a dent in the enterprise portal market by bringing tasks together. Bluenog today released version 4.0 of its ICE platform, which includes content management, business intelligence software and a Web portal, all in one. The idea is to outpace the competition by providing three highly integrated solutions to common enterprise problems.

Scott Barnett, co-founder and COO of Bluenog, said that the biggest advantage for his users is the time they save on integrating all three of these solutions. Most companies with a CMS system find that they have to integrate third-party business intelligence software or drag an existing portal into an incompatible Web infrastructure, said Barnett. He said that his two-and-a-half year old company has leveraged open source to keep the product price low, to US$25,000 per year.

Barnett said that Bluenog saves time and effort for development teams by consolidating the resources needed to deploy internal Web-based or service-based applications. Such software can be not only be developed using Bluenog's workflows, it can also be tracked into deployment and a standardized approval process, then monitored and reported on with Bluenog's integrated business intelligence tools.

Those reports can be put out in a variety of forms, from Excel spreadsheets to more formal reports for management.

“The main differentiation is the fact that they're pre-integrated. There's a unified framework that consolidates security, administration and deployment of applications,” said Barnett. “There's one administrative console. As you're deploying applications, you do it all from one place. You can serve content natively in the portal. Reports can be stored seamlessly in the CMS. If you're buying best of breed, most organizations are building that type of infrastructure and capability as well.”

Despite that integrated approach, Bluenog does play well with others, said Barnett.

“If you're buying Bluenog, it's because you're looking to build some sort of Web interface with rich Internet applications. You also want to serve up content. Let's say for example you already have an existing content repository and you want to pull that content and service it in the portal. We have a customer that uses another [business intelligence] tool, but because they were already using this other [business intelligence] tool, they didn't want to rip all of that out. Our core message is, 'Do not rip out what you have. Just put in [ICE] for the parts you need,'” said Barnett.

Bluenog runs on Java virtual machines version 1.5 or higher. It has been tested on Linux (both Red Hat and SUSE), Mac OS, Solaris and Windows.

By Alex Handy. Read the original article here

Exchange Server 2007 Migration: Look Before You Leap Do the prep work to leverage platform’s functionality without getting mired in its complexity

2008-09-16T09:05:00.007+03:00

While Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 offers a range of benefits over previous versions, many organizations are intimidated by the complexities of setting up and managing the new platform.

Armed with a little knowledge of the added capabilities—and a lot of planning and design preparation enterprises can dramatically reduce the headaches associated with
configuring, integrating and managing an Exchange Server 2007 environment.

Organizations considering a move to Exchange Server 2007 are probably aware of its numerous improvements to security, reliability and scalability. But experts say
some of the very things that make Exchange Server 2007 more reliable and
easier to use also make it more difficult to set up and manage.

Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, cited PowerShell and Exchange Management Console as two new administrative tools that will ultimately simplify Exchange Server 2007 usage and management.

But because those tools differ markedly from anything administrators might have used
in the past, many IT teams are struggling to get used to them, Morimoto said.

Exchange Server 2007 also introduces a role-based setup architecture that offers
installation flexibility, letting administrators make better use of hardware by targeting roles without draining system resources.

Administrators can deploy the server roles individually on dedicated hardware or install multiple roles on the same physical server, with the roles administered as separate entities.

“With previous versions of Exchange,administrators were forced to install the entire Exchange product on a server, even though they only needed certain features,” said Jim Lucey, senior technical product manager of the Microsoft Exchange Server team.

“With Exchange Server 2007, administrators can install on a role-by-role basis—for example, mailbox, client access,hub transport, edge transport and Unified Messaging.

If administrators only need to deploy a hub transport server or a client access server, they can do so without the need to run additional roles. [But] because
Unified Messaging is a new role with Exchange Server 2007, it has a higher learning
curve for Exchange administrators.”

Another architectural change is that Exchange Server 2007 must be deployed on
64-bit hardware and will not support an inplace upgrade from any previous version of
Exchange. Administrators must use the swing upgrade method to move an existing messaging service to Exchange Server 2007.

According to Morimoto, many organizations have never worked with 64-bit Windows
before, so they don’t know how to size, configure or optimize it properly.

Unlike prior versions of the software, inplace upgrades are not available with
Exchange Server 2007, and companies with Exchange Server 2000 or 2003 will need to
run both their legacy Exchange Server platform and Exchange Server 2007 in coexistence mode during the migration process.

Exchange Server 5.5 users must first migrate to Exchange Server 2000/2003 before migrating to Exchange Server 2007.

Because Exchange Server 2007 only supports x64, many organizations require a server refresh.“Customers are concerned about data loss with continuous replication,” said Roger Frey, director of Microsoft solutions marketing at NetApp.

“In the event of a primary-node failure,the passive node will come online and query the hub transport for missing mail.

Should the entire site fail, that mail is lost.”Frey recommended host-based data replication products to replicate hub transport servers to a disaster recovery site.

READ THE DOCUMENTATION

To address issues related to Exchange Server 2007’s learning curve, Lucey advises users to review Microsoft’s extensive planning documentation during the essential
planning phase. “One of the most important things for any organization deploying
a mission-critical application is to get the planning and architecture right from the
start,” he said. “Like laying the foundation for a building, you want to make sure the design of your Exchange Server deployment is planned properly.”

Topics to consider in the planning phase, Lucey said, “include hardware,storage, site consolidation, server sizing,high-availability and disaster-recovery needs, Active Directory, security requirements,etc.

Whether this is a small, medium or large Exchange organization, we have provided in-depth planning references for Exchange administrators to properly deploy Exchange Server 2007.”

Daniel Schneiderman, director of IT services at InfinIT Consulting, agreed that
many of the problems administrators grapple with when setting up an Exchange Server 2007 environment can be avoided with due diligence. “Familiarize yourself with the new architecture and roles,” he advised.“Read the documentation for configuring an Exchange environment. Get familiar with where the new management tools are.”

Of course, not all of the challenges can be overcome by learning new tricks. E-mail migration across an enterprise can be one of the most daunting projects an IT organization undertakes. Administrators face disaster if intellectual-property or sales-contact information is lost during a migration.

Chaos can ensue if employees are denied access to their inboxes. NetApp’s Frey said the top pain points cited by customers who have set up Exchange Server 2007 servers are large mailboxes,sizing and testing. “Microsoft is recommending larger mailboxes—
2GB plus—which for most customers represent a ten-to twentyfold increase over existing sizes,” he said. “Managing and backing up such a large data set is difficult and, in the case of customers who run a streaming online backup, cannot be done in the common four-hour window.”

Sizing an Exchange Server 2007 environment has also become more complex, said Frey,
because users can no longer measure and size user workloads in I/O operations per second (IOPS) and then use that number to size other servers. “With Exchange 2007, the user IOPS will change depending on the number of users in a storage group, the
number of storage groups on a server and the amount of memory in the server,” he said.

Jason Fisher, Symantec’s director of product management for Backup Exec, warned that high availability and data recovery are points of particular concern for anyone setting up an Exchange environment. “As Exchange has evolved, Microsoft has stayed
focused on being able to send and receive e-mail,” he said.“But when it comes to high availability and recovery, it’s not their distinct competence. Anyone who relies
on Exchange needs to invest in a data recovery product.”

According to Fisher, using a backup and recovery solution eliminates the need for daily backups while allowing quick recovery of individual mailboxes,messages and folders.Whether an organization runs Exchange Server 2007 in a standard deployment,
a local continuous replication or a clustered continuous replication configuration, such a solution ensures that data is quickly recoverable and available.

ARCHIVE MESSAGING DATA

Many companies today have massive databases, which can create user experience problems. For that reason, experts said it is essential to evaluate the current
environment before migrating to Exchange Server 2007, since doing so can help an organization maintain compliance and minimize legal risk. One recommendation is to archive messaging data before migrating. In most cases, an Exchange Server 2007 migration involves a long project timeline and complex coexistence.

Archiving helps reduce the timeline, consolidate the infrastructure and protect
mission-critical data. Many migration issues could easily be avoided if administrators simply took the time to test—a necessary step for determining whether the environment will meet the customer requirements. Too many customers attempt to skip the testing phase, said NetApp’s Frey.

“With RAM being cheap,” said Morimoto of Convergent Computing,“organizations usually put too much or too little memory in their Exchange servers. Exchange has optimum operating conditions based on the size of the organization, and too much or too little [memory] causes performance problems. Doing proper on-paper performance calculations, along with testing Exchange Server 2007 in a lab environment on the hardware that is anticipated to be used in production, allows an organization to properly test its assumptions.”

NEW RULES FOR RECOVERY

Exchange Server 2007 changes how organizations address disaster recovery, database recovery and systems management. “Exchange 2007 has built-in database replication. That means an organization no longer needs SAN replication to protect Exchange,” said Morimoto. “But some organizations still try to configure Exchange 2007 to do
SAN replication...they really get into a mess when they try to use old methods of data recovery in a new Exchange 2007 environment that has much better built-in
tools.

Likewise for tape backup: Since you now have a second copy of the database replicated in Exchange 2007, back up the secondary copy so you don’t impact the performance of the primary copy of the mail.”

C2C Systems CEO Dave Hunt said the storage limitations in Exchange Server 2007 make it necessary for companies to shift some of their data to a lower-cost device, but many fail to determine at the outset which data they will and will not move. “If you’re migrating the data anyway, now is the time to implement a plan to manage it,” he said.

Schneiderman advises organizations that are not fully prepared for a complete setup or migration to take their time,since Exchange Server 2007 offers the flexibility to introduce server roles gradually and to support Exchange in a coexistence mode. The end-to-end process is designed to maintain messaging functionality and stability
through the transition period.

“It’s not necessary to overcomplicate things,” Schneiderman said. “You can move to 2007 and keep your current environment; just introduce the 2007 server and move your mailboxes over.”

Most migrations cannot be done over a single weekend; many take several weeks or months. During that time, it is critical that messaging functionality functionality
be up and running without interruption, even when some user accounts are housed in
Exchange Server 2007 and others remain in the source messaging platform. If administrators fail to establish coexistence between the messaging environments, users lose the ability to e-mail and schedule meetings with each other,
share global address lists, and view public folders. To establish coexistence, administrators must synchronize Active Directory and Exchange data so that changes
made in one environment will be replicated in the other.

When setting up and managing Exchange Server 2007, most organizations rely on third-party solutions to optimize Exchange Server performance. The caveat is that if administrators fail to use versions of those solutions that support Exchange Server 2007, their headaches may mount during and after setup.

Administrators thus should test the software’s functionality to ensure that it functions with the new platform and related software products.

article by BY MICHELLE SAVAGE http://www.sysmannews.com/

SQL Server 2008 Becomes Generally Available The ADO.NET framework and data warehousing capabilities are key features

2008-09-15T15:43:00.005+03:00

Source: System Management News

While many customers may be reluctant to upgrade from SQL Server 2005 at first, there are many compelling reasons to do so, according to Dan Jones, program manager on the SQL Server team. Jones cited the top 10 new features at a press conference:

1. Resource Governor, which simplifies management of concurrent workloads

2. Policy-based management, to ensure policy compliance consistently across the enterprise

3. Data compression and sparsecolumns, which reduce storage requirements and increase
query performance

4. Transparent Data Encryption and advanced auditing, which protect sensitive data
5. Performance system analysis, which simplifies troubleshooting,tuning and monitoring of SQL Server 2008 instances across the enterprise

6. SQL Server Analysis Services, which helps build high-performance analysis solutions with scalability, performance, data mining and user interface enhancements

7. SQL Server Reporting Services, for better performance, usability and visualization, and full interoperability with the 2007 Microsoft Office system

8. Report Builder, which lets information workers easily build reports, provides enhanced report layouts and new visualization options, and offers the ability to access reports directly from within Office Word

9. Support for spatial data, enabling compatibility with location-enabled pplications

10. Ease of installation and upgrade.Editions of SQL Server 2008 include the free SQL Server 2008 Express and SQL Server 2008 Compact. Others include standard, work group, developer,Web and enterprise versions.

by Michelle Savage http://www.sysmannews.com

Question is ...should we still wait or jump already into SQL Server 2008

As always in life you don't want to wait to long, but as well don't want to be the first who does it.

Record Video Directly with MySpace

2008-09-15T10:11:00.001+03:00

As MySpace continues to lag behind Facebook in terms of market-share, the social network has finally decided to let users record videos directly via a webcam. YouTube and Facebook have already offered such options, and it is a little surprising that it has taken MySpace so long to do the same.

The timing is actually appropriate, however as MySpace Music is set to launch very soon. Adam Ostrow at Mashable writes:

Although MySpace is a distant #2 to YouTube in terms of online video, the webcam feature could have unique appeal to the site’s audience, which is still a haven for musicians and entertainers. Giving those users the ability to send quick video bulletins to their fans makes a lot of sense, and could perhaps improve MySpace’s market-share, at least by a few decimal points.

Musicians of course aren't the only ones that can benefit from such a feature. “The MySpace community is a creative group of individuals who we expect will fully utilize the direct upload with creative shows, commentaries and vlogs,” said Jason Kirk, VP of MySpaceTV. “Whether you are a musician, videoblogger, budding actor or an everyday user just looking for a job and using this tool to post a video resume, MySpaceTV makes it easier than ever before to with ‘Direct Record and Upload’."

This could also serve as a great tool for businesses to integrate into their social media marketing campaigns, particularly those looking to get in on the upward online video advertising trend. Of course, businesses would have to be willing to adopt social media first.

To access the Direct Video Record & Upload function, log into your MySpace account and click the "upload a video" link, then click on the “Record a Video Now” button. Users will be able to share videos just like normal, and embed them on other sites.

By Chris Crum, staff writer for WebProNews

Microsoft CSS Vendor Extensions in IE8

2008-09-15T10:00:00.000+03:00

Source: IEblog

As you may know, all browsers have a set of CSS features that are either considered a vendor extension (e.g. -ms-interpolation-mode), are partial implementations of properties that are fully defined in the CSS specifications, or are implementation of properties that exist in the CSS specifications, but aren’t completely defined. According to the CSS 2.1 Specification, any of the properties that fall under the categories listed previously must have a vendor specific prefix, such as'-ms-' for Microsoft, '-moz-' for Mozilla, '-o-' for Opera, and so on.

As part of our plan to reach full CSS 2.1 compliance with Internet Explorer 8, we have decided to place all properties that fulfill one of the following conditions behind the '-ms-' prefix:

If the property is a Microsoft extension (not defined in a CSS specification/module)
If the property is part of a CSS specification or module that hasn’t received Candidate Recommendation status from the W3C
If the property is a partial implementation of a property that is defined in a CSS specification or module

This change applies to the following properties, and therefore they should all be prefixed with '-ms-' when writing pages for Internet Explorer 8 (please note that if Internet Explorer 8 users are viewing your site in Compatibility View, they will see your page exactly as it would have been rendered in Internet Explorer 7, and in that case the prefix is neither needed nor acknowledged by the parser):

Property
Type
W3C Status

-ms-accelerator
Extension

-ms-background-position-x
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-background-position-y
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-behavior
Extension

-ms-block-progression
CSS3
Editor's Draft

-ms-filter
Extension

-ms-ime-mode
Extension

-ms-layout-grid
CSS3
Editor's Draft

-ms-layout-grid-char
CSS3
Editor's Draft

-ms-layout-grid-line
CSS3
Editor's Draft

-ms-layout-grid-mode
CSS3
Editor's Draft

-ms-layout-grid-type
CSS3
Editor's Draft

-ms-line-break
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-line-grid-mode
CSS3
Editor's Draft

-ms-interpolation-mode
Extension

-ms-overflow-x
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-overflow-y
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-scrollbar-3dlight-color
Extension

-ms-scrollbar-arrow-color
Extension

-ms-scrollbar-base-color
Extension

-ms-scrollbar-darkshadow-color
Extension

-ms-scrollbar-face-color
Extension

-ms-scrollbar-highlight-color
Extension

-ms-scrollbar-shadow-color
Extension

-ms-scrollbar-track-color
Extension

-ms-text-align-last
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-text-autospace
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-text-justify
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-text-kashida-space
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-text-overflow
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-text-underline-position
Extension

-ms-word-break
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-word-wrap
CSS3
Working Draft

-ms-writing-mode
CSS3
Editor's Draft

-ms-zoom
Extension

We understand the work involved in going back to pages you have already written and adding properties with the '-ms-' prefix, but we highly encourage you to do so in order for your page to be written in as compliant a manner as possible. However, in order to ease the transition, the non-prefixed versions of properties that existed in Internet Explorer 7, though considered deprecated, will continue to function in Internet Explorer 8.

Changes in the filter property syntax

Unfortunately, the original filter syntax was not CSS 2.1 compliant. For example, the equals sign, the colon, and the commas (highlighted in red) are illegal in the following context:

filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80, FinishOpacity=70, Style=2);

Since our CSS parser has been re-designed to comply with standards, the old filter syntax will be ignored as it should according to the CSS Specification. Therefore, it is now required that the defined filter is fully quoted. The proper way of writing out the filter defined above (with changes needed highlighted ingreen) would be:

-ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80, FinishOpacity=70, Style=2)";

In order to guarantee that users of both Internet Explorer 7 and 8 experience the filter, you can include both syntaxes listed above. Due to a peculiarity in our parser, you need to include the updated syntax first before the older syntax in order for the filter to work properly in Compatibility View (This is a known bug and will be fixed upon final release of IE8). Here is a CSS stylesheet example:

#transparentDiv { -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50)"; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50); opacity: .5;}

Making terms of service clearer for Google Chrome

2008-09-12T10:59:00.001+03:00

Making terms of service clearer

Last week's launch of Google Chrome generated some discussion over the legal language in our new browser's terms of service (TOS). As we noted in a subsequent post on Google Chrome's terms of service:

"... Under copyright law, Google needs what's called a "license" to display or transmit content. So to show a blog, we ask the user to give us a license to the blog's content. (The same goes for any other service where users can create content.) But in all these cases, the license is limited to providing the service."

We've also seen some discussion on a few blogs about how our universal terms of service apply to other products, with some users worried that Google is trying to claim ownership of the content they generate. To be clear: our terms do not claim ownership of your content -- what you create is yours and remains yours. But in lawyer-speak, we need to ask for a 'license' (which basically means your permission) to display this content to the wider world when that's what you intend. This issue is not unique to Google; it applies to lots of other Internet companies that display and transmit user content. You can see some other terms of service here from Amazon, eBay, and Facebook.

In some of our products, such as Gmail and Google Docs, we have included additional terms to make it clear that we do not claim ownership of the content. But even without those additional clarifications, we still wouldn't be claiming ownership of your content -- just a license that gives us your permission to use the content to provide the service. The additional terms are there to reassure our users that they still own their own content, even after giving us the permission we need to help them share and collaborate with others, whether via Gmail, Blogger, YouTube, Google Docs, or other services.

Because, in the end, that's what's most important: making sure you're comfortable using our services to share, publish, and store your stuff. We'll continue to look at our terms of service to make them as clear and user-friendly as possible, because at the end of the day if you're not comfortable, our products won't succeed -- and we know it.

The original was posted by Mike Yang, Senior Product Counsel, on google blog

More Experiments Join Gmail Labs

2008-09-12T09:42:00.004+03:00

Customizable bits and easy-access labels

A little over four months have gone by since Google launched Gmail Labs, and the company is now revisiting its collection of 13 experiments. Or, to be more accurate, adding to it, with three new features.

This isn't quite the fast and furious pace at which we were led to believe experiments would be released; thanks to a process involving "[n]o design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing," it seemed that things should get tossed out much more often.
Gmail Label Colors
Custom Label Colors

Still, the new experiments are at least interesting. Look for artistic types and the MySpace crowd to take advantage of custom label colors, for example. This adds a palette option to the standard 24 choices. The ability to drag and drop parts of the navigation bar represents another degree of personalization.

Then, as explained by Keith Coleman on the Official Gmail Blog, users "[n]ever have to click on a label again. Instead, enable keyboard shortcuts and press 'g' then 'l' to display the 'Go to label' pop-up. Start typing, and your labels will be filtered as you go. You can use the arrow keys to select a label and hit 'Enter' to select one."

Gmail engineers are still looking for feedback, so feel free to provide it if any of these seem like extraordinary hits or misses to you. Maybe you'll see a response before Christmas.

By Doug Caverly - Wed, 09/10/2008 - 9:51am. For original article, click here

Google So Excited About Satellites, It's Launching 16 More

2008-09-11T16:04:00.001+03:00

by Henry Blodget

Google, cable titan John Malone, and HSBC have backed a company called O3b Networks to bring high-speed Internet access to the 3 billion folks in emerging markets and Africa that won't otherwise get it. The delivery vehicle? 16+ satellites.

But don't launch into the what's-with-Google-and-this-space-fetish-and-oh-my-God-what-CAPEX rant just yet. The company won't be paying for the entire $750 million project. In fact, the company's investment may be limited to a mere $20 million (about two days-worth of cash flow).

Google, Malone, and HSBC have each put $20 million into the venture, and Allen & Co has contributed another $5 million. The $65 million of "seed" equity will eventually be supplemented by another $150-$180 million of additional equity, mostly from third parties. The rest will then be funded with debt.

We'd be shocked if the project ended up costing only $750 million, but in Google's case, at least, there's plenty more where that $20 came from. O3b hopes to have the satellites up and running by 2010. And even if only a fraction of the "other 3 billion" people (O3b) click on Google search links, the company will make back that $20 million in no time.

What is Web 2.0 ?

2008-09-11T11:46:00.001+03:00

YouTube to Launch New 'HotSpots' Feature

2008-09-11T11:40:00.004+03:00

According to Abbey Klaassen of Advertising Age, YouTube plans to launch a new feature called HotSpots this week that will allow "video creators to monitor how viewings rise and fall within a video."

youtube_logo.jpg Klaassen writes, "HotSpots plays a video alongside a graph that maps whether the audience is lower or higher than average for a particular length of video. When the graph goes up, the video is 'hot,' and more viewers are watching -- because there's either less attrition or some viewers are fast-forwarding or rewinding to isolate a particular point in the video. When the graph goes down, the video is 'cold' because viewers are leaving the video or skipping to another part of the content."

Klaassen adds that YouTube plans to unveil another service, called Visible Measures, which measures audience engagement within a video.

I can't find any additional information about YouTube's HotSpots or Visible Measures, so it appears that Abbey has a scoop.

In her article, Klaassen also interviews Matt Williams, a senior at State University of New York-Brockport, who makes funny videos and with his friend Andrew Reynold under the YouTube channel name StanleyJenkins. Williams estimates that optimizing videos based on YouTube Insights data has doubled his traffic.

Williams also noted that most of his video traffic was referred from related videos.
Li Evans of KeyRelevance interviewed me following the Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) session about the importance of related videos -- and the benefits of reaching out to influential bloggers to ask them to embed videos in their blogs. Check out Li's interview below.

For original article please read

Nokia Opens Media Sharing to Facebook

2008-09-11T10:03:00.001+03:00

by Reuters

HELSINKI, Sept 9 (Reuters) - Top cellphone maker Nokia has opened up its media sharing site and games offering on Facebook and is looking to broaden ties with the fast-growing social networking site.

Niklas Savander, the head of Nokia's Internet services business, said the world's largest handset maker was talking to many large social networking firms, including Facebook, to ease access to their sites from Nokia phones.

Nokia's "Share on Ovi" media sharing service was opened as a Facebook application last month, and members of the network can also play Nokia's "Reset Generation", the world's most expensive mobile game to develop, which links cellphone and PC gamers allowing them to play against each other.

"We obviously talk with a mass of companies and Facebook is one of them. Facebook is big in the U.S., it's gaining traction in Europe, but it's small in Asia," Savander told Reuters in an interview.

Nokia, which made about 40 percent of all cellphones sold in the second quarter, is the first handset maker to move strongly into content provision, trying to bolster its margins by selling customers mobile music or applications like games.

Nokia is set to invest billions of euros in building up a strong presence on the Internet services market over the next few years as growth in the cellphones market cools.

It aims to establish its new Ovi portal as one access point for a variety of Web services, some offered by Nokia, some by other firms.

"The world is a mashup—we have to make sure we have the key things in the offering. Facebook is one of them," Savander said. (Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)

Google News Archive Adds Many Scanned Newspapers

2008-09-10T09:16:00.002+03:00

Google announced they’ve expanded their Google News Archive search to now show much more historical newspapers. For instance, when you search for walks on moon and restrict your results to free results from around 1969, you’ll get an article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from March 7, 1969, titled “Astronaut Walks in Space”.

Next to the news pages, Google presents a section they call related articles, as well as ads (“publishers will be able to generate incremental revenue from contextual advertising placed on News archive search pages”, Google says in their help). You can zoom and pan on pages, and a top link reading “Get this newspaper” links to a subscription option from the source site. The interface may remind you of Google Books, Google’s service which scans books.

The service is rather slow at the moment, but what’s nice is that the newspapers are made text-searchable but at the same time are preserved in their original layout – including ads and all. On the other hand, I’m not sure how to see a given paragraph’s plain text to copy it (next to typing it yourself if you want to quote from it). Already, Google had been offering e.g. (paid) New York Times articles, but they were shown in text format. As for the quantity, Google speaks of “millions of pages of news archives” in a partnership with publishers, indicating that over time they will “scan more articles”... and eventually also start to integrate those into their main search results.

How to enhance a reflection using a smudge tool

2008-09-09T11:55:00.001+03:00

Adobe Photoshop CS3 tutorial

2008-09-09T11:54:00.001+03:00

How Search Will Revolutionize Social Networking

2008-09-09T11:36:00.005+03:00

Social networking is on fire. eMarketer predicts that in the US the category will reach 44.3% of Internet users by year's end. According to Google Insights, related searches are up 3,000% over the last four years. It has a ways to go before it's truly mainstream on a global level. (More than half of adults in 17 countries don't know what social networking is, according to Synovate.) Still the phenomenon is a sure thing, even though the individual winners and losers will surely shift.

What has me most excited though about social networking is a capability that isn't really in place yet in a powerful way - and that's search.

Much like the early days of the web, social networks have yet to fully exploit search. Recall that before Google came along 10 years ago web search was woeful at best and also un-monetized. Eventually that all changed. Even though Facebook's search is weak, already it's one of the fastest growing search engines. That's remarkable.

Search will become a core feature of the social network experience, add in social elements, usher in easier monetization and in the process revolutionize advertising. Here's a look at some trends to watch...

TRUSTED SEARCH TRUMPS UNTRUSTED SEARCH - Do you trust Google? I do as does most everyone. Do you trust what's in Google? For me, that depends on what I am searching for and where it comes from. However, I do trust the 1,000 people I have added to my social network on Facebook. In fact, it's why I limit my connections there to people I have either met or corresponded with. I value what they talk about and share there.

However, there's a gaping hole in the Facebook experience. While I can search through my friends, find new friends and also groups, I can't search the content my network creates. In addition, I can't go a layer deeper to see what my friends' friends are sharing (as I can on Friendfeed). Look for search to get embedded deeper into the social networking experience and create a split between trusted and untrusted search. The impact on PR will be major here too.

Microsoft's forthcoming integration of Live Search into Facebook could be the first step toward trusted search. MySpace has already site-wide search and can tweak it to achieve the same. (MySpace and Microsoft are Edelman clients.)

CONTEXTUAL SEARCH ADS GET SOCIAL - Google and MySpace have an advertising agreement going back to 2006. Facebook and Microsoft have a similar arrangement that started last year. So the search engines clearly view the social networks as a monetization venue and vice versa.

Social network advertising to date, though, has been a mixed bag. Everyone is innovating. But the draw on social networks is your friends, which makes it harder to be distracted by ads. Enter search. Watch for contextual search advertising and programs like Facebook's social ads to mix. New models will emerge where contextual ads are surfaced based on the content created and recommended by your friends.

SOCIAL NETWORKS BECOME SEARCH ENGINES - If you went through my browser history, you would be bored. I spend most of my time in Google's universe of sites and on The New York Times site. Beyond that, you will find a bushel of social networks - Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Now, what if I could interact with any or all of my favorite sites all from a single social network and have my friends add value to that experience? It's coming. Today, for example, on Facebook I use Six Apart's BlogIt to Twitter. I also catch up with my favorite sports teams using Sportsline's Facebook application. These are simplistic though. Notice what's missing - I can't search the web yet from inside Facebook. However, on MySpace I can. But this is the beginning.

In the near future the search engines will all create applications or hooks into soc nets that let you search and annotate the web in conjunction with your friends, changing the web experience. The image above from the Shifted Librarian shows how she is able to search her local library direct from Facebook. Now imagine that same search application gets social and you can see that a major evolution in how we mine the web with friends is coming soon.

For original article click here

Google Chrome Gets Slapped Around in Germany

2008-09-08T09:06:00.001+03:00

News Show "Warns Against Browser"

It doesn’t get any more “official” than this here. Yesterday, Saturday at around 20:07, Germany’s oldest and perhaps biggest prime time news Tagesschau announced the following under the headline “Warning against internet browser"*:

"The Federal Office for Information Security warned internet users of the new browser Chrome. The application by the company Google should not be used for surfing the internet, as a spokesperson for the office told the Berliner Zeitung. It was said to be problematic that Chrome was distributed as an unfinished advance version. Furthermore it was said to be risky that user data is hoarded with a single vendor. With its search engine, email program and the new browser, Google now covers all important areas on the internet."

If the Berliner Zeitung is to be believed, then this kind of strong warning from an official source seems slightly curious, in particular in comparison with say Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 release. As I was not able to find any such warning on the federal office’s homepage yet, I asked the office for a clarification yesterday and will update should they reply with more information.

Previously, the Electronic Frontier Foundation also expressed their concern with Chrome over an address bar feature that sends information back to Google as you type, in order to provide suggestions. Google recently activated an auto-suggest feature for their Google.com homepage as well, sending back character strokes to Google even before you hit return (and when you turn off that feature, it will come back next time your cookies are cleared). Features like these may be important to Google – perhaps of special importance to them in Chrome to offer a feature that sets their browser apart – but it adds a new privacy discussion to the list.

Article ordered by By Philipp Lenssen
For original story click here

Facebook Redesign Days Away

2008-09-08T08:51:00.002+03:00

Switch not optional anymore

Facebook's discussed its plans, altered them according to developers' feedback, and given users an opportunity to step forward or hang back as they please. Now, whether folks are ready or not, Facebook will roll out its new profile design over the next week or so.

"We'll actively migrate all our users to the new profile," announced Josh Elman on the Facebook Developers Blog. "This will happen by default rather than on an opt-in basis. Shortly thereafter, the old Facebook profile will no longer be available to anyone."
Facebook Logo

It's possible that this move will result in some whining, but Facebook looks set to avoid any News Feed-style uproar. Even Beacon-level complaining seems out of the question, since two days ago, Chris Crum noted that more and more users have been trying out (and sticking with) the new profile design.

Also, Facebook has what's supposed to be a pleasant treat in store for everyone. "[W]e're working on one more interesting feature to help make your applications more easily accessible to your users," Elman wrote. "We'll provide more details as we finalize the design, but it won't require any changes on your end."

It'll be interesting to see how this one surprise works out for Facebook, anyway.
Article written by By Doug Caverly
the original article here

AsWing + FDT

2008-09-06T14:24:00.008+03:00

Create a new Flash Project by click on the File - > New - > New Flash Project.

Type in the name of your project and click Next.

Click on the Create Source Folder... button, type in “src” for the folder name and click

"on Finish"

Click on Finish to complete the initial setup. Next right click on the src folder and create a new class

Type in the class name and then click on Finish. In this example we will use Test.as.

Next we add the aswing source folder to our project. Right click on the ASWingTest

project and create a new linked library. Then click on the Add.. button and then click
on the New.. button.

Click on OK again. You can see that the path variable has been added.

Click on Finish to complete adding the library to our project.

Add the following code to the Test.as file.

import org.aswing. *;
class Test extends JWindow
{
private var myButton : JButton;
public function Test (Void)
{
super (_root, true);
myButton = new JButton ("Test");
getContentPane ().append (myButton, BorderLayout.NORTH);
}
public static function main (Void) : Void
{
var myWindow : Test = new Test ();
myWindow.setLocation (50, 50);
myWindow.setSize (300, 300);
myWindow.show ();
}
}

Next let us setup our run time environment. Click on Run → Run.. . Click on the

FDT - MTASC Support and click on the New button. Type in a name for the workspace.

In the Project section click on the Browse.. button , select the ASWingTest project and

click OK

In the Main Class section click on the Browse.. button , type in Test and select the Test.as

from the list and click on OK

Click on the MTASC Arguments and we can specify other MTASC options in there.

Click on Run to compile the project. Below is the sample examples screenshot.

find the original tutorial here