Out with 2007, in with 2008

Another year down and another year of some great blog posts and lots of useful information. Stay tuned for another exciting year.

Is the new Google Analytics code buggy?

Not sure if you heard that Google has released a new code to insert in your website so you can benefit from the new metrics Google has stated that Analyitics will provide. Well, it would seem that some users, myself included, have experienced major issues with the new code.

For me it started when the code causes a major glitch if you run it on an ASP page running through IIS (page will crash). Ok, this was pretty easy to fix but the next issue was not possible. The new code would not register any stats. That means for the 4 days I had the new code installed I registered 0 for everything. I fixed that problem by going back to the old code.

So be warned as the new code may not be ready for primetime yet.

See other discussing problems:
http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help-troubleshoot/topics

Excellent Analytics Tip #11: Measure Effectiveness Of Your Web Pages

A Five Step Program to Measure Effectiveness of Your Web Pages:

• 1: Don’t Obsess About Your Home Page.
• 2: Compute Your Cliff - Only Then Jump.
• 3: Bouncy, Bouncy, Bounce - Its Good For You.
• 4: Site Overlay - Something To Love.
• 5: Think Holistically - Multiple Metrics, Key Context.

Read the full story:
http://...analytics-tip-11-measure-effectiveness-of-your-web-pages

Netscape Browser is no more

AOL To Discontinue Netscape Browser Development: Wow. I remember going to the store and actually paying for it. Came in a box and everything.

I can cross that browser off my list of supported browsers when I develop a website.

Link:
http://.../aol-to-discontinue-netscape-browser-development/

Veign's WhatsItsColor makes it on LifeHacker

LifeHacker, a great tech blog, has done a post on my WhatsItsColor online tool. This is very cool and hopefully will bring some recognition to a pretty fun little color tool.

LifeHacker:
http://.../find-a-complementary-color-quick-with-whats-its-color

WhatsItsColor:
http://whatsitscolor.com/

(WhatsItsColor was developed last year for a New Apps for the New Year contest at DonationCoder.com)

Robot riding a bike

Kid Friendly Email with ZooBuh!

Your child can now have a safe email account, giving you complete peace of mind. Parents have the ability to control and monitor their children's activities from anywhere.

Options:

• superior spam filtering
• receive email from contact list only
• send email to contact list only
• receive email from siblings
• email a copy of outgoing messages to the parent
• email a copy of incoming messages to the parent
• remove inline images
• remove links in emails
• allow specific attachments such as: images, pictures, video, mp3s, zip, pdf, word, excel, power point, etc.
• customizable bad word filter
• delete individual attachments without deleting the the whole email
• adjustable threshold (control aggressiveness of spam filter)

This is perfect for getting kids into the internet slowly and without fear. Its so important to let kids get used to the internet and teach them about safely using the tools that are now available and necessary.


Link:
http://www.zoobuh.com/

Kids login here:
http://kids.zoobuh.com/

Is your unlisted address available to anyone?

If you think your unlisted number and address will help protect your privacy then you may be mistaken.

Read all about the exploit here:
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000347.html

Then go here:
http://digitallanding.com/

Use the Search for Offers on the right. Enter an unlisted number and see if it returns the proper address. It did in one of my tests.

Will the exploit be plugged like it says here:
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000348.html

It may, but others will popup or are already out there waiting to be discovered.

Learn to identify the night sky

Very smart way to learn the constellations in the night sky. It basically starts small and grows into a more complete night sky training your brain along the way to recognize the constellations.

Link:
http://www.quietbay.net/Science/astronomy/nightsky/

Gmail's old security flaw still may pose a problem

Read about what can happen:
http://www.davidairey.co.uk/google-gmail-security-hijack/

Then go and make sure you have no unwanted filters in your Gmail account:
Login -> Settings -> Filters

Merry Christmas and Happy Festivus

--Back to Regular Programming on Wednesday--

Disable error reporting in Windows

1. Go into the Control Panel
2. Click the System icon
3. On the Advanced tab, click Error Reporting
4. Click Disable error reporting

Automatically highlight image maps with mapper

mapper.js 1.0 allows you to add automatic area highlighting to image maps on your webpages. It works in all the major browsers - Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, Safari and IE6+. On older browsers, it can use "jsgraphics" from Walter Zorn (if installed), else it'll degrade and your visitors won't notice a thing.

The effect is very cool and can be useful in image maps with many hotspots, like country or state maps.

Link:
http://www.netzgesta.de/mapper/

The Ultimate Fate of Supplemental Results

Now we're coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we're now searching the whole index for every query.

Link:
http://.../ultimate-fate-of-supplemental-results.html

EmEditor 7 released

EmEditor has relased its next, and most comprehensive, version of its very popular text editor. EmEditor v7, after just 30min of use, is already proving itself to be a major release packed with amazing features and additions.

Version 7 can now record and play keystrokes and mouse operation against other applications, and includes new plug-ins including Projects and Word Complete, lots of new objects for macros, the Macros Toolbar, and portability options (such as USB drive setup), virtual space mode, wrap indent, smooth scroll, Theme feature for color settings, and crash auto-recovery.

EmEditor is by far the best text editor I have come across and I use it daily for web development and design work.

If you use a text editor this is a must to check out.

Features:
http://www.emeditor.com/modules/feature1/

And it only took 8 tries

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

Link:
http://.../internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx

Microsoft co-founder on 700 MHz bidders list, Verizon Wireless not

Thus far, the preliminary list of bidders in the US Federal Communications Commission's 700 MHz auction is a veritable cavalcade of small telecom companies, plus small and large companies alike looking to become telecom companies. Google Airwaves, Inc. is the least surprising, and perhaps most spotlighted member of the group thus far.

Link:
http://.../Microsoft_cofounder_on_700_MHz_bidders_list

The list of bidders:
http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/default.htm?job=auctions_home

Amazon enters Database ring with SimpleDB

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

Pricing:

• $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed
• $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
• $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=342335011

Firefox 3 gets one step closer

Over the next few days Mozilla will be making the official announcement that Firefox 3 Beta 2 is available.

Link:
http://.../firefox-3-beta-2-available-new-address-bar/

Selectoracle tells you what that a CSS selector means

Ever wondered what a particularly complex CSS selector really means? Here's your chance to find out! Simply enter one or more semi-colon separated selectors or rulesets into the following "Direct Input" area, or provide the URL of a stylesheet in the "URL Input" area. Best of all, the SelectORacle will flag potential errors and other problems, and it won't choke on any actual rules. You've always wanted to know what makes those line-noise posers tick-- now you can.

For instance if you have:

• body > ol > li p;

SelectORacle tells you it means:

• Selects any p element that is a descendant of a li element that is a child of an ol element that is a child of a body element.

Pretty handy tool to better comprehend someone else's CSS.

Link:
http://gallery.theopalgroup.com/selectoracle/

Javascript games programming library

Scott Porter made a popular library for creating Javascript Games, called the Javascript Gamelib. It provided relatively simple routines for animation, sprites, collision detection and control. It meant games programmers could concentrate on designing games for websites instead of spending time rewriting the basic building blocks.

Link:
http://.../javascript_gamelib/javascript_gamelib.shtm

3 stubborn PC problems you can fix

1.You keep getting a "your system is running low on virtual memory" message
2.Your windows slide off the desktop . . . and you can't grab them
3.Your taskbar has disappeared

Read about the fixes:
http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getstarted/pcproblems.mspx

Google Adsense ads offers ad scrolling

Seems like Adsense ads offer a new feature where you can scroll through ads in an ad block using provided arrows. This is something I have not heard about before and just noticed in one of my ads.

Basically, when you click one of the arrows the ads scroll away and new set of ads scroll in. Cool feature but not sure how many people will actually use it.

First look at the new Microsoft Download center

Use Microsoft's Silverlight technology and is painfully slow. Man I hate when websites add flash and cool effects over speed and usability. Just ruins the experience.

Link:
http://preview.microsoft.com/downloads/...

Online MD5 and SHA1 Hash cracker is learning from you

I read it here:
http://cybernetnews.com/.../caution-online-md5-cracker-tool/

Then went to the tool:
http://md5.rednoize.com/

I entered some hashes to common words to see what it will do. Of course common words were cracked without a problem. I then used HashCalc to make up some hashes to random letters and numbers and they failed like I expected them too. I then entered the characters and it supplied the hash, also like I expected. Go back to the site again with the hash to the random characters and the site will now be able to crack it. Basically learning by what you enter.

This site will grow and more and more hashed values will be stored in their large database and therefore your password may be exposed in the future. Even more reason to have a string password.

Grab a new strong password over at Make Password.

An Unofficial Guide to the URL File Format

Sample URL file:

[InternetShortcut]
URL=http://www.veign.com/
WorkingDirectory=C:\WINDOWS\
ShowCommand=7
IconIndex=1
IconFile=C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\url.dll
Modified=20F06BA06D07BD014D
HotKey=1601


Full URL file spec:
http://www.cyanwerks.com/file-format-url.html

New code for Google Analytics

The new Google Analytics tracking code (ga.js) has been launched and is now available for you to use when you set up a profile. Installing the lighter ga.js code snippet instead of the old tracking code (urchin.js, "legacy") lets you take advantage of upcoming advanced features and sophisticated reporting while keeping the reliable tracking capabilities of urchin.js. For these reasons, we recommend installing ga.js instead of urchin.js. For more information on the new ga.js code, including information on migrating over from "urchin.js,"

Link:
https://www.google.com/.../answer.py?answer=55488

Migration Guide:
http://www.google.com/analytics/GATCmigrationguide.pdf

Detailed change log of Vista SP1

This document describes many of the notable changes in Windows Vista SP1, with the exception of some updates to the Windows Genuine Advantage experience which we are still developing for our customers and will be released in a later build.

Overview:
http://.../vista-sp1-changelog/

Full 17-page document:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

CompUSA's Going-Out-Of Business Discount List not so great

Nothing so great if you ask me with the CompUSA's going out of business discounts.

Link:
http://.../leaks-compusas-going+out+of-business-discount-list

Microsoft Expression Web Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Microsoft Expression Web Service Pack 1 delivers important customer-requested stability and performance improvements, while incorporating further enhancements to user security. This service pack also includes all of the updates released for Expression Web prior to December of 2007. You can get a more complete description of SP1, including a list of issues that were fixed, in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 937163: Description of the Microsoft Expression Web Service Pack 1.

Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

Get DivX Pro for free

Back in June, DivX offered a free version of DivX Pro for Windows and Mac which would normally cost $20. They must be in the holiday mood because they’re once again offering it for free. All you need is a valid email address and you’ll be set to go.Remember, this is the Pro version which includes DivX Converter and DivX Pro Codec.

Link:
http://.../free-divx-pro-download-for-a-limited-time-only/

Direct Download:
http://www.divx.com/dff/

Photoshop Contest '07 winners

Some amazing images created in Photoshop:
http://...n/photoshop-contest-07-...winner-announcement-110.aspx

Video games that defined my childhood

These are the games I played to death with I was younger. In no particular order.


1) Conan: Hall of Volta (apple IIc)

2) Bards Tale (apple IIc)

3) Super Mario Brothers (nintendo)

4) Zork (apple IIc)

5) Breakout (atari)

6) Minestorm (vectrex)

7) Castle Wolfenstein 3D (PC)

8) Mortal Combat (sega genesis)

9) Mission Impossible (vic20)

10) Zookeeper (arcade)


There are more, but these are the ones I remembered playing the most. Share yours by leaving a comment.

How To Configure the CGI Script Timeout Value in IIS 5.0 and 6.0

One of the most common questions people seem to ask when attempting to run some form of CGI application or script (such as PHP or Perl) on an IIS 6.0 server is “How do I change the default CGI script timeout value ?“ Quite often this is because they are trying to execute a relatively long-running script in an application and they are seeing the following error message.

Link:
http://www.iisadmin.co.uk/?p=7

How does your antivirus stack-up?

The antivirus applications were tested against more than 25,000 viruses.

Applications tested:

• AntiVir PE Premium
• NOD32
• TrustPort
• BitDefender Pro
• Kasperksy
• Dr. Web
• AntiVirusKit
• Avast! Professiona
• Norton
• Microsoft OneCare
• McAfee
• Norman
• F-Prot
• AVG Anti-Malware
• F-Secure
• eScan
• FortiClient

Link:
http://cybernetnews.com/.../best-antivirus-retrospective-tests/

Simple charts with a Google API

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Veign|Hello

That's it. One line in an IMG tag and you get the above image. Now that's easy.

Link:
http://.../embed-charts-in-webpages-with-one-of.html

API Link:
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

20 Horrible Habits of Clients

A common list of issues designers have to deal with while working with clients on projects and how to avoid or solve those issues in a professional manner.

Link:
http://youthedesigner.com/.../20-horrible-habits-of-clients/

Matt Cutts on using ALT tags

Here Comes Another Bubble - The Richter Scales

Secret Maryo Chronicles

Secret Maryo Chronicles is an Open Source two-dimensional platform game with a style designed similar to classic sidescroller games.

If you like Super Mario Brothers then you will love this game. This game is amazingly well done and the game play is fun.

Link:
http://www.secretmaryo.org

(found on DonationCoder.com)

TripTouch: providing live city guides

TripTouch is a website for independent travelers who want the best from their trip. Everything at TripTouch is centered around your location and your personalized travel tastes. We'll bring you information, services and a lively community - all in one easy to use site. TripTouch is still in beta stage - so please be patient with us if you see any glitches... we're working hard to make it the best travel site for your trip

What I like:

• The design and interface is clean, friendly and well organized. (nice icons)
• The type or grouping of information seems logical to what I would want if I was traveling.
• Strong foundation for what could be a great travel website
• The information contained within the Travel Information group. Just wish it was extracted onto the main page so I didn't have to click to see it.
  

What can be done better:

• Some information should be much lower on the page. Like the currency converter. This is something that I really wouldn't want so high. IMO the highest things should be where to stay, what to do, and where to eat. Those are the three primary questions that most travelers to a new city ask.
• Information seems incorrect. When I view my city I see local news that is no where near me, events that are not representative to whats going on, and no listing of restaurant.

What I wish it could do:

• Create a voting system where users who visit an area can vote on things like restaurants so a person visiting for the first time knows whats good. This is what I find lacking online right now. I really want to be able to easily find the cool places to see and the great places to eat when I visit a new city. Creating a Digg like interface could allow these places to bubble up to the top and show on a users main travel page.
• Ability to customize the layout of the main page (like iGoogle).
  

Good start and looking forward to the next big release.

Link:
http://www.triptouch.com

HowTo: Change the default folder view in Windows explorer

With this tip you can change how all folder display by default in Windows Explorer. Personally I like the Detailed View on most folders. The exception is a desktop folder of shortcuts where I leave it in Icon view.

1. Open Window Explorer
2. Click on any folder and set the Display View you want (drop down on the toolbar)
3. Navigate to the menu item Tools -> Folder Options
4. Select the Folder tab
5. At the top of the tab is a button that says Apply to All Folders
6. Click it and all folders will now display the view type you previously selected

Its just that simple.

Navicat does what few applications do

And that is to switch me 100% away from an application I have used for years.

Navicat is a powerful MySQL database administration and development tool that is not only sophisticated enough for professional developers, but also easy to learn for new users.

I did a post a few weeks back about some top tools for managing a MySQL database. From that post Navicat contacted my and offered me a free license to fully take advantage of their software. Usually I am weary about this but wanted to give it a try since a top developer I know that is in charge of DonationCoder.com also uses it. Why not give it a chance and use it for week to see if I like it - basically stop using the MySQL provided tools.


So glad I did as Navicat is an awesome application that is very well designed from a UI standpoint and provides all the functionality that one could need from a MySQL manager. So much better having all the features in a single interface instead of spreading them across several tools like MySQL Tools does.

Quick Highlights:

• Ability to drag and drop tables detween databases
• Ability to copy field(s) in a table design view and paste the fields into another table table design view. Makes copying part of a table definition easy
• Import wizard is very well designed and logical in its use and flow.

Wishes:

• Query Editor. I like typing in queries and it would be nice if the Query Editor either provided intellisense as I typed a table/field name or let me drag and drop table/field names into the Query Editor without navigating back to the Query Builder window.
• Quick SQL selection: Basically allow me to select a table and press one button (or right-click menu selection) to generate an INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and other SQL statements. Provide options of how the SQL statement is constructed: SQL statement on a single line, Lines based on SQL commands, or Seperate lines for each item.

Link:
http://www.navicat.com/

Internet Explorer and Firefox Vulnerability Analysis Report

For most people, their web browser is central to their interaction with the Internet, connecting to global web sites and helping them consume online services providing everything from booking flights to banking services to online shopping. This reality makes browsers a key tool when evaluating the security experience of users as the browser interprets Web content and programs delivered from around the world.

Over the past few years, there has been much discussion of the need for improvements in browser security, but few hard data studies performed to support assertions concerning the security of available browsers.

This report documents the results of my analysis of Internet Explorer and Firefox vulnerabilities over the past few years since Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP2 became available and Mozilla launched Firefox.

Link:
http://.../download-internet-explorer-and-firefox-vulnerability-analysis