The rules of the game are that one must seek out a colored ticket (there are three colors – red, blue and green) hidden on the Yahoo! Youreka! website; register online and receive a confirmation e-mail that can be exchanged for a Tag to redeem a prize.

You may choose to claim your prize immediately or if you are lucky, exchange your eDM for a purple tag that will give you the chance to take part in the YOUREKA! Finale Event organized by Yahoo! Malaysia, at Capsquare, Kuala Lumpur, on November 25. The best prizes to be won at this stage are such as a customized one-of-a-kind iPOD Touch and Macbook Air!

Last weekend, the first YOUREKA! pit-stop was held at the Adidas flagship store in The Gardens, Midvalley where red tag holders received 10% off Adidas products and free Adidas premiums.

For those of you who are dying to participate, this is how you enter:
Log on to and start looking for YOUREKA! Tickets. Yahoo! users can start hunting right away, while new users need to register.

*Take note that only one colored Tag can be redeemed with a confirmation eDM colored Ticket for each redemption period. Redemption items are non-exchangeable and strictly while stocks last.

First up are two very useful scripts for Greasemonkey that are called FB Purity and Facebook Fixer. FB Purity takes aim at annoying quizzes and blasts them out of Facebook alltogether. Well, technically they are just hidden from you using clever manipulation of CSS scripts, but at least you will enjoy a cleaner looking and less obnoxious home page. Next is Facebook Fixer, which does a whole lot of behind-the-scenes changes so that the new Facebook resembles the older style. More importantly, it adds a really useful feature whereby when you mouse over any images, it will automatically pop up the full resolution picture at the side. Very useful when browsing galleries.

A word of warning though, these scripts need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, and may cause instabilities if and when Facebook updates their website, which may happen often. So far I only had problems once, and the fix is simply to disable all scripts until an update comes along for it. These two have helped me the most in cleaning up and making Facebook more user friendly and they are thus highly recommended.

Next up is a Firefox extension called Archive Facebook, which does exactly that. After installing, navigate over to Facebook and a link should show, allowing you to backup all your pictures, messages, activity stream, etc. Everything related to your account will have a copy recreated on your hard drive, which is very useful for downloading all your profile pictures.

Finally, TweetDeck is the app of choice when it comes to integrating Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into a single application. The tool is currently the second most popular Twitter application (behind Twitter’s own website) and offers features such as sending and replying tweets, status updates to Facebook and creating groups to monitor selected conversations, as well as previewing thumbnails and un-shortening shorturls so that you can see which websites are going to. It’s wrapped up in a shiny Adobe AIR interface and performs well. I have already replaced Digsby with TweetDeck on my computer.

With these tools, Facebook and Twitter will hopefully work even better for you. Any other tools you can share which improves your experience on these two web services?

Photosketch is an elegant concept: you sketch a scene of, say, a dog chasing after a robber using your mouse. Then the next step is to label your sketch, eg ‘Dog’ and ‘Robber’. With this information input into Photosketch, the output will be a photo of what you drew, except all you did was do a crude sketch while the output is a beautiful picture. See the demo video here.

For professionals, this is the art of image editing, or also known as photoshopping. However instead of having to hold a degree in design, all you need is this tool and a little imagination; the rest is automatic.

Photosketch works by pulling images from the internet (Google Images, Bing Image Search, etc). From this vast library of photos, it determines what you need. After it has gotten the sample pictures, it is then composited together. It is clever enough to stitch individual elements into a single coherent figure, even adding shadows to make it more realistic. It also uses fancy statistical algorithms to filter out incorrect or undesirable images leaving only the best images to work with.

The appeal lies in its simplicity. No doubt big companies like Google or Microsoft will be quick to investigate and perhaps invest into the technology, by which time it will be available to the public. For now, Photosketch remains a research in progress, with more work to follow.

One thing which remains to be seen is how far the program is from final release. Some people at Slashdot have commented that the tool is not as ’smart’ as it’s thought, requiring tweaks to its configuration files to set the number of ‘objects’ and also relying on a library of  potential matched images into a directory for the tool to access and analyze; this is a far cry from the ‘able to search the whole Internet’ claim. Nonetheless, it works, and with the floodgates open, more development is sure to follow.

HD Quality Games

The problem is mainly due to the claim that OnLive is able to deliver ‘HD quality’ games in real time over the Internet. Many write this off as impossible due to the size of the video stream that has to be pushed though the Internet. It is a complex problem because traditionally, video streaming sites build up a ‘buffer’ of video before they start playing them, so that any hiccups on the Internet such as lost or dropped packets can be smoothed over with the buffer. With video games, no such buffer exists as everything on screen is a result of the user interaction.

Video Compression

The first method to try and tackle this problem is using video compression, which essentially squeezes the information so that it can transfer faster. The problem with this approach is that video games is one of the types of content to compress due to the fast-changing camera angles, explosions and other effects which makes it difficult to compress very well. Common techniques that work well for film, such as analyzing the differences between frames then only sending the information of changes between the frames cannot be adapted for video games.

Latency

The second problem is latency, or lag. Interestingly, even if you have the fastest connection on the planet, there are still some inescapable physical limitations which will increase the lag of the signals (the game video stream, the time between when you click on the mouse and that information reaching the server, etc). First is of course distance; the further you are from the server, the longer the information has to travel and the higher the lag. Furthermore, the signal processing inside the modem is finite and measurable. Then there is lag from having to compress and decompress the video, and finally, as the information travel from the server to you and visa versa, it will be routed through switches which also introduce some lag.

Chaotic Internet

Another problem is the inherent nature of a chaotic internet. Packets of information arrive to your computer in a disorderly manner, sometimes later than another, sometimes out of order and this disorganization mean that there can be a time when the game absolutely needs the information in order to display the next frame, which simply isn’t available. The way OnLive plans to solve the problem is to provide an adaptive compressive technology which changes the compression algorithm depending on network conditions. The technology provides some great streams that look great in motion, but might not look as nice when paused. However, some people would want to pause their games, for instances like taking a picture of a great achievement or reviewing sometimes. Therefore, when the server compresses the video stream, it is actually doing two different types of compression, one is the adaptive compression and the other does a high quality compression for each frame which is then simultaneously recorded if you need to recall it.

The technology is great because it allows you to play great new games without having to own very powerful gaming PCs, as all you need is an OnLive microconsole. With the trend of computers getting smaller and less powerful like netbooks, OnLive is a great service.

XP Mode is Windows 7’s new way of integrating a virtualization experience directly into the operating system. In the past, it was cumbersome to set up a virtual computer and required some special knowledge that most users are not bothered to learn. As a result, Vista which broke certain applications that only worked on XP earned the wrath of many a consumer. It might be a case of too little too late, but XP Mode for Win 7 attempts to make using virtual computers a seamless environment for legacy applications.

Virtualization Technology

One caveat to XP Mode is that your processor needs to support Virtualization Technology, and most AMD processors have this support enabled as a default so it will not be a problem for you. Unfortunately for Intel processors, only certain models have VT, and most of them are disabled by default in the computer BIOS. If you are running Intel, it is highly advised that you Google your processor’s compatibility with VT. Intel had a quirky way of working out which class of their processors support VT, and you may find it surprising that some of their high end quad core models DO NOT have VT.

Nevertheless, once you have enabled VT support from the BIOS, it is a simple matter of downloading and installing Virtual PC and XP Mode from this torrent.

The new XP mode supports the following features:

• USB device support
• Seamless application publishing and launching
• Support for multi-threads
• Clipboard sharing
• Printer redirection
• Smart card redirection
• Drive sharing
• Integration with Windows Explorer
• Known folder integration between host and guest
• Support for higher resolution
• Requires AMD-V or Intel-VT CPU features
• Integration with XP Mode

It’s definitely a virtual computer system done right, as the seamless integration means you won’t notice that the application is running within a virtual computer. It will just pop up and behave more or less exactly like it is running natively on your Windows 7.  However, note that XP Mode is only available for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate.

Why XP Mode?

Why run XP Mode? Besides offering you a way to run applications that wouldn’t run using Windows 7 XP Compatibility Mode, you can also use this to run 32-bit versions of applications from a 64-bit computer. An example of this would be engineering software like CATIA, which refuses to run on a 64-bit system unless you purchase the proper version of it.

Happy downloading and good luck with Windows 7.

First off, your old blog will probably be abandoned. At most, you may insert a new link to point visitors to your new blog. But all the search engines that have linked to your old blogs will continue to link to them and not to your updated blog, and that may be a problem because you will need to rebuild all your ‘reputation’ all over again. In particular, all those Google-generated visitor traffic won’t be able to reach your new blog, which means you’re basically starting over from scratch all over again. AdSense revenue will tank as a result.

Secondly, your RSS feed will die, and readers who have been following your feed will most probably just delete the non-responsive feed and move on. Don’t underestimate the amount of people who use RSS as a way to keep track of their favorite web spaces.

However, fear not as there is a way for your to migrate from Blogger to your own self-hosted WordPress server in 6 simple steps that avoid all the pitfalls described earlier. Digital Inspiration’s Amit Agarwal compiled these useful step-by-step instructions:

Step 1: In case you haven’t done this already – register a new web domain, buy server space from some web hosting company that offers PHP/MySQL hosting and and install WordPress software on your new domain.

Step 2: Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard > Tools > Import and select the Blogger option. Authorize WordPress to access your Google Account and within minutes, all your old blog posts and comments will be available on the new WordPress site.

Step 3: Copy this file into your WordPress themes directory. This is what you should copy over: blogger.php.txt

Step 4. Open your WordPress Dashboard and go to Pages -> Add New Page. Keep the title and URL of that page as blogger and select “blogger” from the Template drop-down. Save. There’s no need to add any content to this page.

Step 5. Open the template generator, type the full address of your new WordPress blog (including http:// and the trailing slash) and this tool will create a new classic template for your blogspot blog that will look something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="<$BlogLanguageDirection$>">

<head>

<title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>

<script type="text/javascript">

<MainOrArchivePage>window.location.href='xxx'</MainOrArchivePage>

<Blogger><ItemPage>window.location.href='xxxblogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>'</ItemPage></Blogger>

</script></head><body>

<div style="border:#ccc 1px solid; background:#eee; padding:20px; margin:80px;">

<p>This page has moved to a new address.</p>

<h1>

<MainOrArchivePage><a href="xxx"><$BlogTitle$></a></MainOrArchivePage>

<Blogger>

<ItemPage><a href="xxxblogger/?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogItemTitle$></a></ItemPage>

</Blogger>

</h1>

</div>

</body></html>

<!-- replace xxx with your WordPress site URL --->

Step 6. Open your Blogger Dashboard -> Layout -> Edit HTML and choose “Revert to Classic Blog”. Copy-paste the template generated in Step 5 in the “Edit Template” area and click “Save Template Changes”.

Your are done. Open any page on your old Blogger blog and it should redirect you to the corresponding WordPress page. On the WordPress side, since we are using a permanent 301 redirect with the redirection URLs, all the Google Juice will probably pass to your new WordPress pages with time.

Update your RSS Feed: When you move from Blogger to WordPress, the address of your RSS feed will change as well. Go to Blogger -> Settings -> Site Feed, type the address of your new WordPress RSS feed here and Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. will automatically move to your new feed.

There you go, a complete and pain-free (for the most part) process that allows you to continue blogging without diminishing the user traffic that you have so painstakingly built over the years. Happy blogging!

My attempts at looking for a way around this problem yielded a way of switching on developer mode for Chrome and then using a Userscript to do the same thing.

Unfortunately, the whole process is rather clunky and did not really work. Happily, I stumbled upon something called Privoxy, and it’s an absolute godsend which I will now heartily recommend to anybody who’s on the Internet often. Even if you have adblock software installed on Firefox, you should check out Privoxy all the same because it’s a whole new concept of Internet filtering.

First let’s introduce Privoxy and what it is capable of. It is an advanced non-caching web proxy with filtering capabilities allowing you to directly modify HTTP headers and controlling access. The advanced features are quite powerful and allows you to filter out certain keywords, setting up actions and filter rules and so on. However for most of us, Privoxy is used to block ads and banners, get rid of ‘web-bugs’ or invisible cookies and generally remove most of the nasty stuff that the Internet likes to throw at you.

Although the settings sound scary, installing and configuring Privoxy can be done in two steps and gives you 80% of the benefits from the tool. Only a small percentage of very advanced people would actually use the remaining 20% of Privoxy’s power for other purposes. Simply head on over to their website and grab a copy to install in your machine.

After you’re done, its time to set your browser to use Privoxy as a proxy. In the case of Google Chrome, we simply head on to the Options > Under the Hood page and hunt down the Proxy configuration. In the new dialog menu, go to LAN Settings, then Advanced and finally under HTTP and Secure, set the Proxy address as localhost and the port as 8118. This are the port that Privoxy uses. Set the same settings for your other browsers if you want to use Privoxy to filter out the data.

Once that’s done you’re all set to go. Remember to allow Privoxy to start each time your computer does (just drag a shortcut to Privoxy and put it inside your Startup folder in the Start Menu). Otherwise, your browser will be hunting for a Proxy which hasn’t started yet.

That’s all you need to do. Now whenever you visit any website, Privoxy will be the bouncer in line to strip search the content and filter out all the junk from the Internet before passing the remaining clean data over to your browser, to use an analogy. The built in filtering algorithm and rules are pretty sturdy right out of the box, but remember to update your Privoxy installation every now and again to get newer filtering rules. It’s a very fast and efficient way to set up ad blocking on your computer, and if you follow the above method for Chrome, Internet Explorer will also be configured for Privoxy.

Zune HD marks a significant step forward for portable media players, combining powerful hardware components such as an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) multitouch screen, an NVIDIA Tegra HD processor and HD Radio capabilities with software advancements such as the new Quickplay menu, a well-featured Web browser, and engaging music and video playback features to deliver a new portable listening and viewing experience. The device is also capable of output of 720p high-def content to a HDTV.

Zune Marketplacer

The Zune HD also features an FM tuner, which is also present in the iPod Nano but not the Touch. But its the NVIDIA processor that is most exciting, as the 3D capabilities offered surpasses what could be done on most consumer electronics device out there currently, including the ageing PSP. Microsoft has already stated their commitment towards bringing exciting 3D titles such as Project Gotham Racing and Audiosurf later in the year though the Zune Marketplace, an online service similar to the iTunes Store. However no titles will be available at launch.

OLED Screen

Another huge selling point of the Zune HD is the incredibly gorgeous screen, using not the old LCD technology used in almost all modern devices today but the more advanced, thinner, more detailed OLED screens offering a stunning experience especially when watching movies on them.

With the launch of Zune HD, Microsoft faces an uphill battle to populate its Marketplace with good apps whilst the Apple App Store boasts millions of applications with tons of games that can be downloaded and played right now. It is expected that Microsoft will take anywhere from 6 months to a year before people will take the Marketplace seriously.

Secondly, the pricing of the cheapest 16GB Zune HD is at $220, which is a tad higher than the cheapest 8GB iPod Touch 2G at $199. If you spend your time watching lots of video and listen to songs and have a use for the FM tuner, the Zune is the better device. But if the sole reason for owning a media player is to have a multipurpose portable entertainment device, the iPod will still remain the device to beat.

Although Microsoft has been trying again and again since 2006 with the original Zune to take on the iPod, it seems like the Zune HD is not the answer… yet. But it does provide a refreshing alternative to the be-all-end-all iPod Touch. Maybe the Zune HD 2 will meet the bar that Apple has set… assuming it hasn’t been moved higher by then. Before committing your money on either device, I highly recommend you go to a store and check out the Zune HD in action, especially the screen quality. It might be just the thing to sway your opinion.

Purposely put the wide-screen HP LCD side by side with my old Dell LCD monitor, for comparison. I didn’t have a spare display card on the computer and was too lazy to hook up the Dell monitor to my notebook, so it’s off.

Setting up was a breeze, just plug and play. The screen comes with an informative manual that could guide even the most electronically-unsavvy people. Cables can be kept well out of sight by routing it through a hole in the base. Obviously the designers placed some priority on the aesthetic value of the product, which is great, since I’m a neat freak!

Ok, so we know it’s pretty, but can it get down to business? It sure did. Images on the monitor were crisp and crystal clear. And I especially loved its wide screen which is perfect for watching wide-format DVD movies, doing design work and viewing documents side-by side. It’s also a great companion to my laptop. I just plug it in and voila! I have two screens to work with.

Sound-wise, I was pretty much blown away too. Its built-in speakers were excellent, perfect for a higher level of experience when playing 3D games. Well, guess that makes me one satisfied user.

For those of you who are interested, here are the specs:

• 1600 x 900 factory-set resolution
• Supports DVI-D and VGA video input connectors
• Supports High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) to prevent transmission of non-encrypted high definition content
• Plug and Play capability, if supported by your computer system
• On-screen display (OSD) adjustments for ease of setup and screen optimization
  Energy Star compliant

When Malaysia set up the Multimedia Super Corridor, Tun Dr Mahathir guarantees that there will be no censorship whatsoever of the Internet. He has the foresight to understand that technology companies overseas such as Microsoft, Cisco and other Silicon Valley heavyweights are very sensitive about operating environments and wanted to remove as much barriers as possible in order to encourage foreign investments to flow into the country. Now it appears that under the leadership of Prime Minister Najib, all that will be undone.

The Internet Filtering system proposed by Malaysia will be at the gateway level. That means that Internet providers such as TM, P1 and Jaring will be forced to comply with the new legislation and implement the filters on their hardware. This is contrasted with China’s Green Dam, which aims to put filtering software on every computer and has so far been a failure. Unfortunately, this means Malaysia’s filtering system will be much easier to implement and enforce. Minister of Information, Communications and Culture, Rais Yatim, have also stated that his ministry will take over the content and monitoring division of such an initiative, giving the government direct access to what to block.

New media vs Old media

Critics say that the new filtering system will no doubt be used to filter out internet content that is critical of the ruling government. The Barisan Nasional has been in control of the country’s politics for 51 years and have faced great pressure during the last General Elections from the Opposition which have successfully used the ‘new media’ such as Blogs and Twitter to spread their message to people around the country, managing to deny the ruling BN a 2/3rd majority in 2008. Ever since, persistent attacks from the opposition have reduced the government to executing a series of very unpopular moves such as arresting and detaining bloggers and charging them in court for sedition. The war between the government and opposition seems to be heading towards another stalemate as the ‘old media’ have traditionally denied publishing opposition views and it seems soon the ‘new media’ will follow the same trend.

PM Najib rose quickly to shoot down allegations that the filtering will be used to censor the opposition, saying that the government still has no changes in policy and no censorship will be done. He added “however, we are still discussing the matter”.  There are already 4 proposals submitted to the government on the filtering system. A decision is expected to made in December regarding which system is to be used, in time for the High Speed Broadband rollout next year.