I guess maybe Google slowly rolling out SearchWiki feature to some random user or continent.

I remember Matt Cutt talking about this ages ago but I didn’t have the opportunity to test it out at that time.

This is something I have been waiting for a long time. I always hate some website that manipulate search engine weakness to be on the result page. I don’t want spam site appear on my search result page. Their website really give nothing to me other than junk and full of advertisement.

Now they are gone FOREVER (at least for me).

The result that you modified will be only seen by you – it doesn’t effect other user search result (I guess this the most dreamed feature by spammer LOL). And that is perfectly fine, I don’t really care what other people see anyway but I do believe Google care.

Here is some screenshot from my search

And you can even leave comment on each result in Google SearchWiki

I am curious how long have you guys already have this feature? Am I the last people who get this feature?

Curious with it then I decided to run Gmail on 3 different browsers on my machine. So here is the result.

 
Gmail themes on Internet Explorer 8 Beta 64bit

Gmail themes on Google Chrome

Gmail themes on Minefield 64bit

As you can see Chrome and Minefield display themes as it supposed to be seen but on IE it really suck.

See the pencil, coffee stain and the flowers picture cut off. And there is no darker background to make the top menu stand out.

I don’t understand this, why can’t just Microsoft people create a standard browser as others do. I believe it is not they are not capable of doing so, or maybe it is just another marketing tactic even though I don’t know what it is.

On the latest IE 8 still didn’t show much improvement. Why did they care to make incognito function (called InPrivate Browsing in IE) and some other stilly function that only a small percentage of user will use while they can’t even render standard CSS properly.

Gmail got themes!!

Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven’t been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we’re launching today, there’s a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There’s even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers — it’s not exactly practical, but it’s great for testing out your geek cred. We’ve also done a minor facelift to Gmail’s default look to make it crisper and cleaner — you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

At the moment you can choose from 30 fabulous themes.

Here is what my Gmail looks like at the moment.

If you still haven’t notice this change, you can check in your Gmail setting. There should be new tab there named “themes”.

The first 15 themes only just color play while the other 15 themes really unique themes. Must be a lot of effort have been put into this. I think all of them really beautiful and I can’t decide which one to use.

REMARK:
If the tab still not appear in your settings maybe you have to wait for a few days. As always Google will roll out the new feature slowly in-case somebody will spot some nasty bug :p

Another big feature is Multiple Points of Presence (MPOP) which is basically means you can login to Windows Live Messenger from different location/computer without logging out another instance of Windows Live Messenger on the other computer. Previously, whenever you login your account on different computer with the same account still logged in on the other computer, the instance on the other computer will be forced to logout.

Some of the other new features:

• Signature sounds - I’m still not sure how this will looks like.
• Per contact sounds - Choose different sounds for different contact.
• Animated Avatar - Now you can use GIF format images for your avatar/display picture.
• URL Status Message – URL now clickable.

From what I can see about these new features is Windows Live Messenger will be even more bloated. I already stopped using Windows Live Messenger a few years back (it still known as MSN Messenger at that time) mainly because it consumed too much resource. Every new version will become less responsive and use too much memory and only featuring feature which is not so crucial for normal IM use.

Via: infoworld

People are often curious about which applications and technology I use, and if there are features in the new version of Office that have changed the way I work. Without a doubt, the 2007 Microsoft Office system enables me to get my work done more easily and quickly than before.

If you visit my office, you will probably notice right away that I have three large flat screen displays that sit together and are synchronized so they work like a single very wide display. The large display area enables me to work very efficiently. I keep my Outlook 2007 Inbox open on the screen to the left so I can see new messages as they come in. I usually have the message or document that I’m currently reading or writing in the center screen. The screen on the right is where I have room to open up a browser or look at a document that someone has sent me in e-mail.

I spend the majority of my time communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners. As a result, Outlook is the application that I use the most. I receive about 100 e-mail messages per day from Microsoft employees, and many more from customers and partners.

It’s very important that I hear what people think about our products and our company. Yet I need to balance that against the very real risk of information overload from all the e-mail that I receive. The advances we made in Outlook 2007 for filtering, rules, and search folders have made it much easier to manage my e-mail than before, especially because so much happens automatically once I’ve set everything up.

A great thing is that all my voice mail, faxes, and even instant messages are sent to my Outlook Inbox using our unified communications technology. Another important feature of unified communications that we have integrated into Office applications is presence and identity. That means I can always tell at a glance whether the person I need to get in touch with is available or not.

One change to Outlook that I appreciate is tasks are now integrated with how I view my calendar. Before the 2007 Office release, I never used the Outlook task feature, but now that tasks are automatically added to my calendar, it makes it much easier to stay on top of the important things I need to do.

Source: Office Hours

As for me generally I really love this latest Microsoft Office 2007, how they try to make each of their software can communicate with each other. Such as, you can send you email from Outlook 2007 to OneNote 2007, ability to synchronize task between Outlook and OneNote and also ability to blog from OneNote.

My only problem and the only one is this latest 2007 suite not memory friendly. I know to put also those nice feature need a lot of resource, but I think the cause is the .NET framework. As you can see, all latest Microsoft products was written in .NET and .NET is not resource friendly not to mention slower performance compared to native language based applications.

Currently my PC setup is P4 1.6GHz and 1GB RAM, launching multiple office applications is a nightmare. Maybe all Microsoft’s engineer got high-end machine so they didn’t notice this drawback, but IMHO they should think not all people have the latest hardware setup to fulfill Office Suite recommendation.

Then my love affair with Firefox started to end. Firefox 1.5 (and the earlier versions, I started at 0.7) never skipped a beat, and unlike IE it had tabs, which were a god send to me as it was to many others. Mozilla launched Firefox 2.0, and suddenly my internet experience started to sour. I’m a heavy tab user, so it’s not unusual for me to have 15, 20 and even more tabs open, it’s how I read my feeds in the morning, opening up the stories that interest me for later reading. Firefox had what has been called by others “memory leaks,” which in laymen’s terms meant that it tripped out your memory on a PC, froze up and crashed…and far too regularly. I became a Mac user this year, and the first thing I did when I started up OS X for the first time was to download Firefox, hoping that perhaps it was a PC problem. It wasn’t. Same memory problems, same crashes. Mac fanboys told me that it was my fault for using plugins, so I deleted Firefox and started again without the plugins. Same problems, constant freezing (even with 4gb on a MacPro) and crashes. I switched to Safari for a time, and as much as it was a decent browser, it doesn’t play nice with all sites, in particular with the WYSIWIG backend on Wordpress blogs. Then came Flock 1.0. I’d never been a Flock fan before, always believing it to be nothing more than Firefox with plugins (Flock is based on the Firefox engine). Having watched the demo at TechCrunch 40 I downloaded the beta of Flock 1.0 and surfed away without incident. Some how the folks at Flock had tweaked the underlying Firefox engine to stop the memory issues.

Firefox 3 Beta 1: The Memory Use Says It All

I also once, a Firefox fan until I found Maxthon. The main reason I switch browser is memory consuming. At that time I only have 512MB of RAM and I am heavy multi-tasking guy and heavy tab user. Usually my PC will on 24/7 so it is normal for me to have 30+ tabs with Maxthon, this something that I can call impossible with Firefox.

To give you some idea how different their memory consuming, I got screenshot for you.

As you can see from the screenshot above Firefox using nearly 50MB of memory and I just start it, with only one default tab opened while for Maxthon I have around 10 tabs opened.

If you know some dirty trick for freeing some memory by minimizing the application, Firefox just have no effect with that trick. I don’t know how the developer code Firefox but I think 99% of Windows applications will clear their memory when minimized.

Actually I got a lot more to talk about this matter, but I don’t have enough time currently so, maybe I will continue my humble opinions later.

Creating New Show Desktop Icon from Scratch

1. Open a new instance of Windows Notepad. Start –> All programs –> Accessories –> Notepad or type Notepad from run box.
2. Copy and paste code below into your Notepad

   [Shell]
   Command=2
   IconFile=explorer.exe,3
   [Taskbar]
   Command=ToggleDesktop 

3. From Notepad file menu, select save and give Show Desktop.scf as the filename.
4. You can choose wherever you want to save but I recommended you to safe on desktop so it is easier for you to execute next step.
5. Drag and drop your newly created Show Desktop.scf icon into the Quick Launch bar or alternatively you can copy and paste into it.

Done! You just recover your deleted Show Desktop icon.

Another Method of Creating Show Desktop Icon

This method that I am going to show you is much simpler than the previous one and will produce exactly the result. Let’s get started.

1. Click on start button and click Run
2. Type regsvr32 /n /i:U shell32.dll and hit Enter.
3. Wait until message box shown below appear and click ok.
4. We are done here! Congratulation!

Alternatively, you do the step above from windows command line utility; CMD. Just type the code, hit enter and wait for the confirmation box.

That’s all, we have successfully learn two method of restoring deleted Show Desktop icon. I hope someone learn something from this

If you own a web server or have been working with it, you must have been using some kind of FTP client to make your jobs done and your life easier. While full featured FTP client very useful for managing your FTP server and files, it is RightLoad come in handy when the situation is you just want to upload a small quantity of documents or images.

What is RightLoad?

RightLoad is a small program that allows you to quickly upload files directly from a Windows folder to your server. Instead of using a complicated FTP client just to upload a few pictures, you just right-click on the files, select the server and target folder and RightLoad will do the rest for you. When all files have been uploaded, RightLoad will automatically generate a list of different links to the files, ready to be copied into your post or website. [source: official RightLoad website]

How RightLoad work

Right is a context based application, that’s mean the best way of using it is by accessing to trough context menu (or mostly known as right click), but you still can run it the normal way by double clicking its icon and do drag and drop to start transfer.

As you can see from the screenshot above, this is how we access RightLoad most of the time. You can select one file, multiple files, or even folder to upload.

When you first launch RightLoad, you will be prompted to fill a FTP account that will be used as default account. You can setup as many servers as you want and for each server you can also setup as many folders as you want under that specific server (like my screenshot above).

What make it different from normal FTP client?

The feature I love the most is it will format from FTP format to HTTP format. For example, let say you upload a file name logo.jpg to folder temporary, when uploaded you will get FTP format URL such as ftp://user:password@ftp.kuntau.net/public_html/temporary/logo.jpg then if you want to share whatever you uploaded with others you have to reformat the URL to http://kuntau.net/temporary/logo.jpg format, so they can view the document properly and for you not to reveal your login also!

What RightLoad do for you is, it will automatically do the formatting for you and pre-highlighted it on upload complete so what only left for you is pressing ctrl + c to copy the URL.

As you can see from screenshot above also, it come predefined with several common tags for forum and website use such as [URL] tag, [IMG] tag, <a> and <img>. When you click any of this tag, the links on the left side will be converted to corresponding tag.

Another handy feature included is it will automatically detect if you are uploading image and it will offer you to create thumbnail for easy posting on website or forum. You can also specify default thumbnail size in the options menu.

That is what I can review about this marvelous tiny but useful freeware. If you are interested visit its download page and experience it yourself, it is free; nothing to lose on your side.

Show hidden files on Windows Vista

1. Click on the start button ( the rounded Windows logo)
2. Click on Control Panel, then click on Appearance and Personalization, finally click on Folder Options
3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
4. Under Advanced Settings click on Show hidden files and folders radio button to select.
5. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
6. Click OK to accept and apply those changes

Show hidden files on Windows XP

1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
2. Under Tools menu bar, click on Folder Options.
3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
4. Check Display the content of system folder checkbox.
5. Click on Show hidden files and folders radio button.
6. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
7. Click OK to accept and apply changes

Show hidden files on Windows Server 2003

1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
2. Under Tools menu bar, click on Folder Options.
3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
4. Check Display the content of system folder checkbox.
5. Click on Show hidden files and folders radio button.
6. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
7. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows 2000

1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
2. Under Tools menu bar, click on Folder Options.
3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
4. Click on Show hidden files and folders radio button.
5. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
6. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows ME

1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
2. Under Tools menu bar, click on Folder Options.
3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
4. Click on Show hidden files and folders radio button.
5. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
6. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows NT

1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
2. Under View menu click on Options.
3. In Options window, click on View tab.
4. Scroll down a bit, look for Show all files radio button.
5. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows 98

1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
2. Under View menu click on Folder Options.
3. In Options window, click on View tab.
4. Scroll down a bit, look for Show all files radio button.
5. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows 95

1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
2. Under View menu click on Options.
3. In Options window, click on View tab.
4. Scroll down a bit, look for Show all files radio button.
5. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Reminder

Under Windows XP and above, showing protected operating system files can be very dangerous since it show you all the files critically needed by the operating system. Any single wrong move can bring you disaster and nightmare, and potentially you have to re-format your hard disk drive.

On the other hand, malicious software always using this technique to hide itself from you since this kind of files + hidden flag can’t be found by normal search and delete command. System file status can be achieved by applying flag s to the file.

I hope someone can find this list useful.

I just tried to en-queue a total of 45 videos in the list and I got no complain from this system, so I jump to conclusion that this new Multi-Video can upload unlimited or very large number of videos simultaneously.

 
The coolest thing about this new YouTube multi-video upload system is, it use AJAX technology extensively. When you add a new video to the list, the new video will be automatically added to bottom of the list and the list itself will stretch accordingly; no more page whole page load, that just very convenient. The same goes when you want to add video title, description or keyword just click on the text as image above and it will turn into editbox!

The edit options link above used if you want to add more video options such as video category, broadcast options, date and map options and sharing options.

Aside from the cool thing there is also downside IMHO, for me I would prefer stand alone win32 program rather than web base application because a lot of thing can happen with browser; browser crash or hang and all your hard work just gone like that. Different with stand alone application which you have more control over the situation, not to mention a lot of better feature can be implement surpass the limitation of web application.

Anyway, if you decide to use the multi-video upload feature, just go to the installer webpage to install the plugin.

Halloween

Holiday observed on October 31, the eve of All Saints’ Day.
Its pagan origins can be traced to the Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated in ancient England and Ireland to mark the beginning of the Celtic new year. The souls of the dead were supposed to revisit their homes on Samhain eve, and witches, goblins, black cats, and ghosts were said to roam abroad. The night was also thought to be the most favorable time for divinations concerning marriage, luck, health, and death. The pagan observances influenced the Christian festival of All Hallows’ Eve, celebrated on the same date. The holiday was gradually secularized and was introduced into the U.S. by the late 19th century. Still associated with evil spirits and the supernatural, it is celebrated by children in costume who gather candy by ringing doorbells and calling out “trick or treat,” “trick” referring to the pranks and vandalism that are also part of the Halloween tradition.

You can also check out previous Google Holiday Logos and Events.

Happy Halloween all !

I’m not sure when they got this verification, but I think last time I download there is no such thing there.

I tried with all browser I had, Internet Explorer, Maxthon and Firefox but still failed. In Maxthon and Internet Explorer, I got a couple of JavaScript error notification such as this:

Line:45
Char:1
Code:0
Error:’s’ is undefined
URL:http://gallery.live.com/search.aspx?q=acronym

and this…

Line:193
Char:67
Code:0
Error:Expected ‘;’
URL:http://gallery.live.com/search.aspx?q=acronym

Digging a little bit in the source code (I tried to find the download link actually) showing me this

<button class="default"
onclick="DownloadItem(this,'908829d1-f935-4084-bbe4-5e84afa784dc',14,1,'
wictorwilen','dc606024-0dd6-4761-9af8-1bf25f5e5b1a',0,0,8,
'httpx3ax2fx2fdownload.gallery.start.comx2fd.dll
x2f2x7e14x7e954x7e2273x2fAcronymsWLWPluginSetup.msi');
return false;" id="btnDownload" type="button"><div>Download
</div></button>

I don’t know if this is advanced technique or what but the URL look weird. Not resembling valid URL format, maybe they try to decode, encode, track or whatever.

//s.linkLeaveQueryString=true
s.trackDownloadLinks=true
s.trackExternalLinks=true
s.linkDownloadFileTypes="exe,zip,msi,gadget,cab,btn"
var PageName = 'LC_liveitemdetail';
var m_iMasterLiveItemTypeId ='';;
var m_bDoOmnitureTracking = true;

Did they track every click?

Back to topic, anyone else experience this or only me? I don’t think this is my fault because I can download from anywhere else just fine…

According to YouTube’s Blog they will make a number of large changes for the site over the next few months. For the time being they give sneak preview of the new YouTube’s video browsing page.

Some of their improvements:

• Categories will now be found under the "Videos" tab.
• Dropdown menus make for a smoother transition when clicking through popular pages, ie. "Most Viewed," "Top Favorites," "Recently Featured," etc.
• Tabs and video browsing pages have a new overall look and feel.

This latest change will greatly improve video browsing experience with easy to access frequent used links.

While a lot of other blogger complained the too bright red color, I just love them, it really make the page stand out. Maybe this also to match YouTube logo color?

Good news by Firefox advanced configurations

As probably guess, ALL this secret functions nowhere to find in the normal options dialog, it is in hidden advanced configurations. Follow me.

1. Click on the address bar (shortcut, CTRL + L), to change focus to address bar.
2. Type about:config and press enter. A new page will open with bunch of things.
3. Lets get rid of whatever we don’t need by typing search in the filter bar.
4. Still a lot of things there but we are only interested with browser.search.openintab line.
5. Double click that line and you will see the value changed to true (the default value is false, that’s mean search result will always open in current page)
6. You will noticed the line will be bolded to give visual help that the default value has been changed.

Now we are done, the effect will be activate immediately. Try type something in the search bar and you will see Firefox open the search result in a new tab.

Another case closed

Fixed security issues:

• URIs with invalid %-encoding mishandled by Windows
• XPCNativeWrapper pollution using Script object
• Possible file stealing through sftp protocol
• XUL pages can hide the window titlebar
• File input focus stealing vulnerability
• Browser digest authentication request splitting
• onUnload Tailgating
• Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.1.8)

As always, you can download latest Mozilla Firefox at official site or read version Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8 full release notes.

Here is the major changes:

• Tracking site search activity - You can find out what people search for on your site and where these searches lead.
• Event Tracking capability - New report option designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your page view metrics.
• Outbound Link Tracking - This feature will report on links visitors clicked on your site that direct them to another site.
• Urchin Software - Urchin software from Google limited beta is a software product that you can run on your own servers. It got similar interface with previous Google Analytics interface.

By the way, one tracking site search feature will be available to public, the other two are limited beta test that you have to contact their Authorized Consultant to participate.

Official release: Joost Beta 1.0.2. Release date: October 17, 2007
Filename: JoostSetup-Beta-1.0.2.exe, Filesize: 10.1 MB.

This version still in beta 1.0 version and will also carry the old release notes.

This can be done by enabling network http pipelining. Follow this step.

• Open up Firefox advanced config, type on address bar about:config
• In the filter box, type pipelining so it will only show options in our interest.
• Double click on network.http.pipelining to enable it, see the value on the value column change to true.
• Change network.http.pipelining.maxrequests value to something higher than the default (4). For this setting you really need to change to suit your connection, higher speed connection will benefit with higher value and vice versa, play with it a bit until you get your golden value.

If you want to enable pipelining on proxy, you can change that setting there also. This setting will take effect immediately, you don’t have to restart your browser (this is some of the thing I like about Firefox)

Enjoy your faster browsing

The Worst Thing about Macs

Jason Cross at ExtremeTech has made an interesting post about The Worst Thing About Macs. Here is some excerpt.

“Microsoft Just Copies Everyone and Buys Everything.” This common belief held by Mac users is not only factually incorrect, it turns a blind eye to the many ways in which Apple fails to, ahem, “Think Different.” The way Dashboard in OS X rips off Konfabulator and other widget engines predating it, Spaces knocks off many prior Virtual Desktop features, or how that fancy CoverFlow stuff was purchased from third-party developer Steel Skies. Many popular Apple ads are knock-offs. The “Hello” iPhone ad blatantly rips off Christian Marclay’s film short “Telephones.” Lugs actually issued a cease and desist order to get Apple to stop the iPod ad that was nearly identical to their Eminem ad. Their ad boasting the new Intel chips clones the music video for “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service.

The Ugliest Products in Tech History

The Ugliest Products in Tech History according to MSN Tech & Gadgets. Guess what, there were 2 Microsoft’s products in their list.. LOL

Microsoft Windows 1.0

The first Macintosh operating system popularized the concept of graphical user interfaces when it was launched in 1984, and a year later Microsoft responded with the first version of Windows–and no GUI has been as blocky or garish since. To be fair, the first Windows wasn’t so much an operating system as an add-on to MS-DOS, which meant living with design groaners like ALL-CAPITAL file names and the still-very-DOS-like graphics standard. Though more than a few people would contend that Microsoft has been playing catch-up with Apple’s design sense ever since, the ugly duckling did eventually turn into a swan with Windows Vista. And, as we understand it, Windows has done kind of OK in the marketplace.

One again, HAPPY AIDIL FITRI.

p/s: I am currently writing an article about a bit like hacking, it is actually exploiting webmaster/author weakness to get something free. I just need some times to this article better to read and understand.