quietube: YouTube without the distractions — It’s a bookmarklet to remove all comments and other visual elements from YouTube video. In short: display the video only.
§ Douglas Bowman’s Farewell Post
I like reading Douglas Bowman’s farewell post. He left Google after three years. Here’s a paragraph:
Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.
Other comment about this farewell post:
This is, I believe, why Google’s products (many of which are great and innovative–I remain a devoted Gmail fan, for example) will always fall short of achieving the emotional connection that people feel to an iPhone. There’s no one with real power there who has a good sense of what makes a product beautiful or when it feels “electric.” You can’t quantify that sort of thing through study or harness collective brainpower to coerce it–someone just has to know it when they see it. (source)
After enabling media file preview in Google Mail, I decided to enable another Google Labs feature. It’s Undo Send. This email feature will give us 5 seconds to decide whether we want to send the email or cancel it. I think this feature is very useful. In 5 seconds? I think it’s enough. Or, not?
§ vBulletin Database Backup
I’m maintaining a pretty big forum. It has a great amount of traffic, AND huge database size. Right now, it has a remote backup server. The optimization is always challenging. Anyway, vBulletin upgrade process was easy. The forum I maintain used vBulletin 3.6.x when it was firstly installed. Right now, it’s using the latest stable release.
The first thing I did before upgrading is to backup its database. Using web-based database management tool like phpMyAdmin is easy. We can export and store it in minutes. BUT, in some cases, it takes more time if we have a large database. So, I use the other method: using the backup script.
When we download vBulletin, there is a backup script included in the distribution. It’s under do_not_upload directory. The file is vb_backup.sh. The first thing we need to do is to edit this script, to locate the configuration file. After that, we only need to execute this command: ./vb_backup.sh backup
It will generate a backup file using this pattern: databasename-dd-mm-yy.sql.gz. Just keep the file into the safe place (outside public directory always recommended), and start upgrading. All done.
§ Media File Preview Inside Google Mail
Yesterday, I enabled some Google Mail features offered from its Labs section — I’ve enabled some before. Google Mail Labs is a place to test some new features in Gmail. There are many features/applications we can test.
Google Mail users or those who use Google Apps for domain can enjoy this feature. Go to top right navigation, and there is a small icon to visit the lab section.
I enabled YouTube, Picasa and Flickr preview in mail features. If we enable this feature, we can see multimedia files preview inside our Google Mail account. The pictures/videos will be derived from the link inside the mail content. If there is a link to YouTube video, we can watch the video inline. Useful!
SuperNews! Twouble with Twitters — A young man struggles against the pressure to Twitter his life away [video]
Internet Explorer 8 is available in 25 languages. It’s said that there are some improvements — faster, easier and safer — compared to the previous versions. Check the feature overview.
§ Zeldman on IE 6
IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.
Jeffrey Zeldman
Bring Down IE 6 campaign — A campaign to encourage using more modern browsers and bring Internet Explorer 6 down.
§ Google Chrome’s Incognito Mode
Google Chrome offers another type of window/browsing mode called “incognito mode”. When we’re using Google Chrome in incognito mode page information (website addresses, downloaded files will not be stored/logged in our browsing and download histories. And, when we close the “incognito window”, all new cookies will be deleted right away.
Read mode details about incognito mode at Google Chrome Help page.
In simple definition, it means we can use incognito for more private browsing. It’s about information on your side, not server’s. If the server logs your data (IP address, user agents, etc), your data will be recorded.
But, I don’t regularly — well, almost never — use it. My main reason is because I’m using Google Chrome — and other browsers — in a private computer. And, sometime browsing histories are useful. The download histories, too.
§ Web Browsers’ Homepage Designs
I only visit web browsers’ sites when I want to download — sometime, I don’t even have to go to their sites to get updates — or, only when someone/something refers me to an address in those sites. Those are some possibilities. Their websites have beautiful designs, and sometime can be a great inspiration. :)
So, here are some screenshots. I like their designs as inspirations. Not in a particular order:
Camino: http://caminobrowser.org/
§ links for 2009-03-14
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ranked by their objective and various other weighted measurements: FontShop sales figures, historical value/meaning, aesthetic qualities.
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Create your fake pictures, captions and fake magazines and other funny jokes
The Bighow Online Journalism Handbook
A free online resource for journalists, bloggers, citizen journalists and anyone else interested in publishing. The handbook covers the basics of online reporting, writing for the web and social web, citizen journalism, professional blogging, how to use Facebook and Twitter, how to deal with censorship, list of citizen journalism websites worldwide, list of free tools for journalism and much more
How a Blog Can Grow Your Business — a presentation by Chris Garrett. Slides and PDF are available.
§ Dear Google, where is Risu city?
I went to Google Trend site to check some statistics. When I choose Indonesia as the location search, Google Trend will give more spesific results based on subregions. I also saw: Risu, Indonesia (see picture).
OK, I’m probably not good in Geography subject. But, I never heard about a city named Risu. May be, it’s there, somewhere in Indonesia. But, I never heard of it. There is Riau.
I asked Google about Risu, Indonesia. Google does not know either and give me a suggestion: riau, indonesia.
Well, let’s see the keyboard, find where “A” and “S” are.
§ Facebook and Friendster in Indonesia
I feel that more people added me as their Facebook contact list these days. And, many of them already added me to other social network site: Friendster. I joined both sites, but I almost never use Friendster in the last few months. I found that Friendster is too boring. I know, it might because I only use some of its feature.
When I visited Friendster, I only checked the friend requests, approve (or simply ignore them). Other than that? Almost nothing.
Few days ago, I looked up Friendster’s Alexa statistics. The traffic goes down — compared to its competitor: Facebook. When I checked both service using Google Trend, I got the similar result.
According to Friendster’s press release in April 2008, Friendster has more than 8 million registered users and 4 million monthly unique visitors to Friendster.com as of February 2008. The press release also said that:
Friendster is the most popular online social network in Indonesia with over 3.9 million weekly unique users, according to analysis of Alexa data as of April 1, 2008. “This makes Friendster more than five times larger than Facebook which has no more than 700,000 unique users each week, and this makes Friendster seven times larger than MySpace which has no more than 530,000 in Indonesia,” said David Jones, vice president of global marketing at Friendster. “As the second largest Web site in Indonesia (second only to Yahoo!) and the No. 1 social network in Indonesia, launching support for Indonesian will help Friendster maintain and extend its leadership position in the country as well as with Indonesians around the world.
On the other hand, Facebook becomes more popular now. According to Facebook demographic statistics, there are already more than 1 million registered users from Indonesia as of February 2009. Let’s see what will happen in the next few months. Should be interesting.
§ Opera Turbo for faster browsing experience
Today, Opera Software released Opera Turbo. It’s a server-side optimization and compression technology that provides significant improvements in browsing speeds over limited-bandwidth connections by compressing network traffic.
I downloaded and installed it right away. When I installed it — on Windows platform, it’s identified as Opera/10.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; Edition Turbo; en) Presto/2.2.0. I already had Opera 9.64. I do not have to overide my current installation. So, there are two version of Opera browsers now.
Using this Opera Turbo, we can cut the cost of browsing when we are on a pay per usage plan. It will compress the website contents so we will download a smaller page size. It’s available for testing right now and will be available as part of Opera Desktop versions. Interested? You can download it right away.
§ Opera 10 Alpha Installation Wizard
I like this Opera 10 Alpha Installation Wizard. It’s identified as Opera/10.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; Edition Turbo; en) Presto/2.2.0.
14 Rules for Faster-Loading Web Sites — few things to be considered, with explanation and examples.
§ The Periodic Table of Typefaces
The Table of Typefaces groups by families and classes of typefaces: sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed.
Each cell of the table lists the typeface and a one or two character “symbol” (made up by me simply based on logic), the designer, year designed and a ranking of 1 through 100. (source)
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Dadio.TV is a videoblog I created with my friend. Most contents are about Indonesia.
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1,061 posts since Nov 2002