ajb{log} » Internet Explorer

FriendFeed IE8 Accelerator

aj — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:39:25 +0000

I just developed a FriendFeed IE8 Accelerator. It is currently under review but you can install it on your IE8 now over here

Hope it’s useful to IE8 users.

Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined

aj — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:47:30 +0000

Yes you are reading that right, Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined in terms of population. Facebook has a staggering count of 150 million users according to Mark Zuckerberg (Founder, Facebook).

Country population breakdown:

Turkey – 71,892,808
Canada – 33,515,000
Australia – 21,468,700
New Zealand – 4,280,000
———————-
Total 131,246,508*

That, my friend, is really impressive! It makes you wonder how they keep their systems running smoothly, how they scale up rapidly.

Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. “It’s almost a new challenge every day,”

Jonathan Heiliger (Vice President of Technical Operations, Facebook)
CNET interview

That’s not the only thing, Facebook has more than 10 billion photos! Some additional stats:

2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site daily
Over one petabyte of photo storage
Serving over 15 billion photo images per day
Photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

Truth is, impressive is an understatement.

*Source: Wikipedia

del.icio.us Tags: facebook,statistics,cnet,petabyte,terabyte,jonathan heilieger,mark zuckerberg

NETTUTS Proves Content is Still King

aj — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:07:13 +0000

I’m an avid subscriber of NETTUTS. A popular tech blog that covers a wide range of topics about web development such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails. I was curious how many of their pages are actually indexed at Google and I tried to learn more.

Let’s take a look how many pages at NETTUTS are indexed. Note that this will vary from one location to another, as well as ISP used and nearest datacenter used by Google (I’m currently testing this in North America and the count is going to be variable and approximate).

Let’s hit “site:nettuts.com” at Google. They have approximately 588 indexed pages. Now let’s see how many backlinks they have. Let’s hit “link:nettuts.com“. They have approximately 1,400 links going back to them.

The numbers above are not really that much. However, what matters here is when you look at their RSS feed subscriber count, they have 14,400.

So, what’s the point? Sites like NETTUTS still proves that content is king. It doesn’t matter 100% how many pages of your site are indexed at Google, what’s really important is that you deliver quality content to your visitors.

The rest follows.

del.icio.us Tags: nettuts,google backlinks,content is king

ABS-CBN Acquired Minority Stakes In Multiply.com. Friendster Losing Steam Over Two Day Outage

aj — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:00:16 +0000

ABS-CBN, in a statement said that it will acquire 2.5 million shares (5 percent stake) at Multiply, a Florida-based social networking site. Multiply is the second largest social networking site in the Philippines after Friendster.com. Multiply.com maybe catching up slowly with Friendster.com in terms of unique visitors (see Compete estimates below).

Friendster on the other hand, the most popular social networking site in the Philippines may be losing its steam after more than 2 days of downtime due to a data center power outage in Santa Clara, California. You just can’t seem to wonder how did Friendster allowed itself to be offline? Was it because it had a single point of failure? Having one data center housing more than 85 million users? Could a data mirror in Asia have helped since most of their active users are there?

In any event, Multiply just got a strong partner in the Philippines – media giant ABS-CBN. But will Multiply be able to grow their user-base in the Philippines with the help of ABS-CBN and overtake pinoy-favorite Friendster? The answer to this question might be sooner than later.

What are your thoughts?

Sources: Business Mirror, ABS-CBN

Technorati Tags: multiply,friendster,philippines,asia

del.icio.us Tags: multiply,friendster,philippines,asia

Tad’s Meme on FriendFeed

aj — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:30:56 +0000

Today is “Tad’s meme” day on Friendfeed.

Tad Donaghe started a simple spark posting a photo and a simple instruction “Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair – just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.” and guess what happened? It just spread like wildfire! Boy, it was a fun day at Friendfeed!

Here’s the photo that started it all:

And the rest followed…

(Click on the above image for the original size or you can visit the album here)

So, are you in this collage? I hope you are! Because we had a lot fun today at Friendfeed!

It was also a good day to push and leave the FriendFeed Beta!

UPDATE: Collage updated

Youtube’s Top Viewed Today RSS Feed Is Totally Broken

aj — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 03:40:32 +0000

How? All the video links have changed to http://youtube.com/v/FPd4yk0x-eg.swf now for you to watch it you’ll have to copy the video code (ex “FPd4yk0x-eg”) and paste it on a URL changing it to http://youtube.com/watch?v=FPd4yk0x-eg for it to work.

Youtube team must have forgotten this particular RSS feed when they updated something.

I also noticed a new button on the video player window. Not sure what it is though. See below. This must be the latest update that broke all things up at the RSS feed.

Drop An "O" At Google

aj — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:03:58 +0000

So how do you drop an “o” at Google? Just append “&num=100&start=990” without the quotes at the URL after any search.

Google will surely drop one “o”. I wonder why?

Credits

Three Guys And A Hurricane On HurriCam

aj — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:53:59 +0000

While the powerful Gustav Hurricane Category 3 leaves Cuba, New Orleans residents already started to evacuate. Except for some people and three guys with a webcam.

I don’t know who they are but they are streaming live right now from New Orleans.

So, if you want to know what is happening at that part of the world, logon to their stream now and join the stream.

Just be safe guys and the rest of you out there at the path of Gustav.

The Javascript RockStar Dude Is Dead. Long Live The Konami Code!

aj — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 02:20:10 +0000

jQuery.com pulled the Javascript Rockstar graphic responding quickly to user feedback.

The jQuery team left an Easter egg on the website as a token of appreciation. Just enter the famous Konami code to view it.

Hint, it’s really cool!

jQuery’s Logo And Website Gets A Redesign

aj — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:40:35 +0000

Personally, I say it looks good. Not great, but good. Some jQuery users however don’t like the redesign. Get the scoop on jQuery’s blog.

ASCII Email SPAM Is Here. We Hate It!

aj — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:04:25 +0000

Yes. ASCII email spam is here and we hate it. This is what I got today (below).

There were no links on the email which means people will never have to click on something. But still, it’s annoying.

Email providers, please do something!

Preview The Uber Cool New FriendFeed Design

aj — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:43:17 +0000

Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit and the FriendFeed team broke the two month silence today launching the newly redesigned FriendFeed. VentureBeat spotted and reported this four days ago.

New features includes:

Friend List
Friend lists enable you to organize your friends into groups, get updates from your family separately from your coworkers, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

Best of day and Best of week Summaries
A “best of” page for a friend lists shows you the most popular entries among people in the list for the day/week.

Enhanced Photo Posting
You can now upload photos with your posts. The photo uploader lets you select and upload multiple files at once with no additional downloads required.

New sidebar link, favorite friends, groups, rooms and a lot more.

Head to http://beta.friendfeed.com and see the cool new FriendFeed!

Force FriendFeed To Refresh Your Tumblr Feed

aj — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:45:51 +0000

There are many ways you can refresh your feeds on FriendFeed. One of my favorite is Hao Chen’s “FriendFeed Refresh Feeds Button” userscript. However, if you are not a Greasemonkey fan or you simply do not use Firefox, there is a way to refresh a feed on FriendFeed.

I took Tumblr as an example for this post. So here goes… I just posted something at Tumblr and I can’t wait for FriendFeed to schedule the crawling of my feeds. Here are the quick steps to force FriendFeed to refresh it immediately:

1) Assuming you are already logged in, click on the “Share something” button (image)

2) Now, click on the “Import your stuff” link. No, you are not going to import your feed again.

3) Once you’ve done that, click on the feed that you want to be “refreshed”. In this case, I chose Tumblr. Click on it.

4) You will see something like this (below). Now click on the “Refresh feed” link.

5) You’re done! You should see the content now on your Friendfeed.

It should be noted that you shouldn’t abuse this functionality as it might put some stress on FriendFeed’s servers although I’m pretty sure they can handle it.

By the way, I am using the “Cleaner FriendFeed” userstyle in case you were wondering why I have a different look and feel. You can also use Cleaner FriendFeed. All you have to do is install the Stylish Firefox plugin then install the Cleaner FriendFeed userstyle.

Anyway, hope this helps someone today.

SURF JACK: Even HTTPS will not save you

aj — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:01:10 +0000

There’s a new security tool that Surf Jack that allows one to hijack HTTP connections to steal cookies – even ones on HTTPS sites. Works on both Wifi (monitor mode) and Ethernet.

Here’s a proof of concept to steal session cookies on HTTP and HTTPS sites that do not set the Cookie secure flag.

Surf Jacking Gmail demonstration from Sandro Gauci on Vimeo.

It’s really a scary to see that even Gmail was vulnerable before to these types of attack. So, how about Yahoo Mail? And what more if you use Hotmail Live? Makes you really think if there is such thing as 100% security nowadays.

Globe Innovation Convention: Globe Labs Launch – "Enriching lives through Innovative Communications"

aj — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:26:39 +0000

Spreading the news

Date: August 7, 2008 (Thursday)
Time: 7:30 AM – 5:00 PM
Venue: Isla Ballroom, Tower Wing, EDSA Shangrila

Globe Labs is a new organization within Globe Telecom whose mission is to help bring in the newest future technology services at the earliest market-relevant time. We explore new and future technologies, and partner with developers to create new Internet, wired and wireless applications.

What Globe have in store for you: Learn, Build, Compete and Succeed

Discover the different opportunities with Globe Labs
Learn how to use Telco tools and various development platforms to build innovative applications
Join the Globe Labs Challenge and compete amongst the best

PHP User Group Philippines, Inc., being one of the institution partners of Globe Labs, has been given 200 SLOTS for this upcoming big event.

We are inviting PHPUGPH members to attend. T-SHIRTS designed for PHPUGPH would be given away as freebies plus exciting raffle prizes awaits you…

***FIRST 300 individual registrants gets a GIFT***

Below are some links of articles regarding the event:
From Businessworld (Entreprenews)
http://entreprenews.com.p…in.php?id=062508.gonzalez
From the Inquirer:
http://technology.inquire…gets-3G-mobile-developers
From the Manila Times:
http://www.manilatimes.ne…htimes/20080627tech5.html
From Manila Bulletin:
http://www.mb.com.ph/INFO20080627128372.html
From PCWorld:
http://www.pcworld.com.ph…5&ID=H,485,PWP,PWP-16
From Yugatech:
http://www.yugatech.com/b…pens-globe-labs-division/
From Globe Labs website:
http://www.globelabs.com…./News/Forms/AllItems.aspx

More information here

Google AdSense Team Cares About Newbies, Creates A Poem For Them

aj — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:09:02 +0000

Here it is:

“Publishers with websites, creating content
Wondering about their sites
If with their content, they could show some ads
Before the day was done
Something in AdSense, was so inviting
Something about those ads, was so exciting
Something in our Help Center
Told them they must be one
Publishers with websites, yearning for earnings
They were just publishers with websites
Up to the moment
When they placed their first ad code
Little did they know
Revenue was just a click away
A happy-user-generated click away and –
Ever since that day, they’ve been monetizing
Newbies at the start, they’re now optimizing
It turned out so right
For publishers with websites.
Newbie, newbie dooo, da da da daaaa da…”

Originally posted here

.Me Domain Landrush Starts Today 8AM PST

aj — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:07:44 +0000

Top level domain extension dot me (.me) landrush starts in an hour (at least to us).

Grab one here.

Wuala’s Social Online Storage Is One Cool Backup App

aj — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 02:18:25 +0000

Wuala is a new social online storage from Zurich, Switzerland which allows for secure file sharing, online backup storage and remote file access. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage.

A Wuala user starts with 1GB of online storage but can get as much as they want, either by trading idle disk space on their own computer or by buying additional storage. As a new user, I preferred the idle disk space trading. It makes more sense than buying additional storage for now.

All files on Wuala are encrypted on the users’ computer and the user chooses who gets access to which folder. Is it secure? Yes. Wuala employs the 128 bit AES algorithm for encryption and the 2048 bit RSA algorithm for authentication.

Wuala’s desktop application is available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It can also be directly started from within the browser.

So how do you get it? Wuala is opening up Alpha for everyone starting tomorrow July 17 to 21. You can get access over here.

Here’s an installation walkthrough and some screenshots for the Windows Vista user

After installing the desktop app, you will be prompted with the above window. New users will need to click the “Create a new account” link.

Use invite code “OpenDays” from July 17 to 21.

Complete the above form and note one important thing, you should choose a password that you will remember. Wuala will not provide password recovery.

Here’s their explanation:

“NO PASSWORD RECOVERY! WUALA ENCRYPTS AND DECRYPTS ALL FILES LOCALLY. YOUR PASSWORD NEVER LEAVES YOUR COMPUTER. WE DO NOT KNOW OR STORE YOUR PASSWORD. THIS PROTECTS YOUR PRIVACY, BUT ALSO MEANS THAT, APART FROM SENDING YOU THE HINT YOU CAN SPECIFY ABOVE, WE CANNOT HELP YOU RECOVERING IT IN CASE IT GETS LOST.”

Finally, complete the form above.

Once you finished with the registration, the desktop app will automatically open up. It should look like the one above.

Customize the desktop app to your liking.

Start inviting your friends via Facebook, Skype or by simply entering an email address.

The above is the world tab. It’s everyone’s shared files. You have the ability to create your own groups where you can share private stuff.

Sharing access rights is easy. Right-click a folder and select “Access rights…” Start sharing with your friends. And please do let me know what your thoughts are for this app. I’d love to hear them.

My overall first impression of Wuala is that it’s so easy to use, install, configure and customize. And did I already mention it’s free?

I’m already a user of Dropbox, Mozy and Zecter on my Windows machine. I have Dropbox and Mozy on my Mac. Wuala is definitely a nice, not to mention a very cool addition to my backup and file sharing efforts.

If case you missed their pitch at LIFT Conference here’s the video below

And lastly, Wuala’s presentation at Google Tech Talk (sorry, embedding is disabled).

About the founder of Wuala, Dominik Grolimund
Dominic is 26 years old and studied Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He founded the software company Caleido in 1998, and developed the Caleido Address-Book, a professional contact management software, of which over 35,000 licenses have been sold so far in Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

Wuala looks like a good buy for a Google social backup service. Not to mention a very good addition to their talent pool.

Google Realizes Auto Adding Contacts is a Bad Idea for Gmail

aj — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:38:49 +0000

This is great news for all Gmail junkies. I personally dislike that (un)feature. Here’s what Google posted on their blog:

“Google has finally realized that it’s a bad idea to automatically add to the list of Gmail contacts all the people you’ve sent an email. An updated version of Gmail’s contact manager has a separate section for the people you’ve emailed: “suggested contacts”.”

I love this move. Now, I have to give some time cleaning up my Gmail’s contacts because it’s currently marred with emails I don’t personally know.

Love it Gmail team!

More information

Ajaxian’s "Javascript, Rebranded….. Check." Post marred with hidden Viagra Div tags

aj — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:48:28 +0000

I get feeds from Ajaxian daily and love the posts there. It was surprising to see today that I got a post marred with Viagra and Cialis links. (See below)

Were they hacked? Or did somebody accidentally copy/pasted a JS code or a hidden div on the post? In any event, hope they can fix this soon.

Oh and one more thing to note — Google Reader allowed it to show. Ungh!