ajb{log} » Research

Adobe BrowserLab: New web service to test your web pages on different browsers and operating systems

aj — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:22:52 +0000

Adobe BrowserLab is a new cool web service that helps you test your web pages across a different web browsers and operating systems.

Adobe BrowserLab currently supports Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on both Mac and Windows XP. Just enter the website’s URL and it will take screenshots of your web page on different browsers and platforms. It displays the result using 1-up (on its own screenshot), 2-up (side by side comparison) and my favorite Onion Skin View (as shown below) where you can quickly pinpoint differences.

One awesome feature of the Onion Skin View is you can use the a slider to fade in/out of each browser screenshot. Pretty cool!

Hopefully Adobe will support more browsers and operating systems in the future.

Technorati Tags: browsers,browser testing,adobe,browserlab

Google knows some of your WordPress.com Username and Email Address

aj — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:42:29 +0000

I’m not sure how/why these activation URLs were crawled by Googlebot but yes, Google still publicly shows some WordPress.com usernames and the email addresses associated with the username.

Ha! Now all hackers need is the password (no pun intended). Clearly, this is not good. But who is to blame? Google? WordPress? Or the end-user? Quite frankly, I am not sure. But I do know that it is time to change some of those information starting with the email address associated with that account.

Also, don’t forget making your password a bit stronger/longer using uppercases, numbers and character combinations.

So, how do you get this result? Simply enter “site:en.WordPress.com “your account is now active”” or click this link.

How do you find if your username was crawled? Add your username at the end like this:
“site:WordPress.com “your account is now active” johnsmith”

I suggest you change them now. It’s better safe than sorry.

Technorati Tags: wordpress.com,wordpress,google

Google AdWords Gets A New Interface

aj — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:43:02 +0000

I just logged in the new interface of Google Adwords. The look and feel of the new AdWords is now very much like Google Analytics.

First screenshots of the new Google AdWords interface.

Do you like how it looks like? To fuel the fire, I’m using Google AdWords everyday and I can definitely say that this is a huge improvement. The new ajaxy interface gives it a desktop-app-like feel. I’ve tried loading it in Google Chrome and was blazing fast. The old interface for me was very clunky and slow. So any improvement from that is a jump ahead.

Kudos to the Google AdWords team for making this improvement. It’s really cool!

del.icio.us Tags: google adwords,google,analytics

Windows Calculator Pi (π) Easter Egg

aj — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:58:16 +0000

This might be very old but I just accidentally found this easter egg on my Windows computer…

Copy this word in quotes “pi” and paste it (CTRL+V) in Windows Calculator (calc.exe) and you get the first 32 decimal digits of pi (?).

Cool huh? By the way, I’m using Windows Vista (yeah, I know). Not sure if this works on other versions of Windows. Try it and let us know in the comments.

del.icio.us Tags: pi,calculator,windows,3.1415926535897932384626433832795

My Top 40 Most Read RSS Feeds

aj — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:06:25 +0000

From my 319 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I have read 19,662 items, starred 64 items, shared 131 items, and emailed 43 items.

Here are my January 2009 top most read RSS feeds:

FriendFeedLinks – Home
Hacker News
Engadget
Gizmodo
Google Video – Top 100 New Videos
CrunchGear
The Inquisitr
Startup Meme
Boing Boing
YouTube :: Most Viewed Videos – Today
Design You Trust. World’s Most Famous Social Inspiration.
VentureBeat
Lifehacker
TechCrunch
FeedMyApp
Dvorak Uncensored
Tech Blog
Design Float / Popular Entries
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
KillerStartups.com – all
Cult of Mac
FirstShowing.net
Mashable!
Css Creme
ReadWriteWeb
Mployd.com – Where hiring happens
CSS Globe | Web Standards Magazine
Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome
Search Engine Watch Blog
swissmiss
GigaOM
Photo Basement
The Apple Blog
Web2List
launch feed
Hot Chicks with Douchebags
Abduzeedo – design inspiration & tutorials -

del.icio.us Tags: rss feeds,google reader,subscriptions

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

How To Find Your Google Profile And Search For Other Google Profiles

aj — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:17:33 +0000

I’ve been searching for a quick link to Google Profiles on Google.com and there really isn’t one that is obvious to the regular users. It’s actually buried in a help page from Google.

So, here is the link to your Google Profile, making it easy for everyone else who is having a hard time looking for it.

http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me

Want to search for someone else’s profile on Google? Easy. Let’s say you are looking for Barack Obama’s Google Profile. Just go here…

http://www.google.com/s2/profiles?q=

…then simply enter “Barack Obama”.

That was easy right? Yeah I know, it’s pretty cool.

del.icio.us Tags: google profile,google profile search,barack obama

Interesting People at FriendFeed

aj — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:24:40 +0000

Here are the people I find interesting at FriendFeed

Mona N.

Cee Bee

l0ckergn0me

Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

Here are the awesome people who finds me interesting!

Morton Fox

Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

Michael J. Cohen (mjc)

Cee Bee

(jeff)isageek

Who are yours?

del.icio.us Tags: friendfeed,interesting people

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

Google Ads Testing Click Coordinates?

aj — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:50:49 +0000

I don’t know if this has been announced already. But I just noticed a URL parameter on Google Ads. Coordinates.

They’re probably starting to track click coordinates on graphic ads. Google can/should provide Google Adwords users heatmap statistics on graphic ads pretty soon. A feature already being offered by Crazy Egg for some time now.

Technorati Tags: Google,Google Ads,Google AdWords,Coordinates,Crazy Egg

del.icio.us Tags: Google,Google Ads,Google AdWords,Coordinates,Crazy Egg

Load Friendfeed Real-time Beta On Your Firefox Sidebar

aj — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:50:56 +0000

Friendfeed launched today a cool beta feature, Friendfeed Real-time. Here’s a quick tip on how to load Friendfeed Real-time on your Firefox sidebar:

1) Add this to your bookmark http://friendfeed.com/realtime?embed=1

2) Right-click the bookmark

3) Properties

4) Tick the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”

5) You’re done!

It should look like the screenshot below

Now you get the best of both worlds in FriendFeed. The standard view and real-time view at the same time.

Enjoy!

Are games a waste of time?

aj — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:37:26 +0000

This was a question posted at Friendfeed last Thursday. It was a simple question I had with a co-worker and we both need answers from different people with different opinions and perspective. Here’s the result:

I ?d playing Starcraft and Warcraft + Playstation. – Me

Expensive but by no means a waste of money – Joe Dawson

Moderation – directeur via NoiseRiver

Heck no. If something is fun and/or entertaining, it’s never a waste of time. – Alex "Lasagna" Scoble

Nope – Lindsey Smith

Only if you do it wrong. – Bored

for a Philosopher’s take — think of the value of drinking parties (Plato) – Michael Maranda

Depends on what type of games you’re talking about. I think there’s a lot more value in complex tabletop games and games like chess than in dumb Flash games online or whatever. – Rochelle

I have pretty much abandoned gaming in favor of social media. I was a several-hours-a-day PC gamer for 10+ years. I like to think that SM has more possibility of a return on my time investment than WoW did. – Daniel J. Pritchett

Nope, because I rock at Star Wars Battlefront II. – Steven "The One" Perez

I sure hope not. I was really sucked into Sims 2 for a couple years. Now I play a few times a week. Mostly to design houses. But, I’m still a sucker for ‘casual games’ like Diner Dash, etc (bigfishgames.com). I get lost in trying to beat the damn things. – Yolanda

Games recharge my brain and leave me refreshed to think about other things, a lot like a good walk. – Jennifer Dittrich

one exgamer says no – Dobromir Hadzhiev

No. Games can improve mental and physical dexterity, mental acuteness, memory, etc. There have been studies done. And *applauds* Alex’s answer. – JMakesAwesomeSauce

Honestly, I’d rather read a book. – RachelW

Depends on your priorities, but for me, I enjoy games. – Rodfather

no. Because some times you just need to escape the doom and gloom – Duncan Riley

Not if it’s Sorry or Life. – Thomas Hawk

Games are a release from the horrible world outside. They can bring joy and relaxation and bring down your stress life. They are a great interactive entertainment media. How is that a waste of time? Waste away I’d say. – Kol Tregaskes

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted." – Bertrand Russell — Sometimes it’s wasting time, just like movies and reading, sometimes it’s useful. It does have benefits for hand-eye coordination, problem solving skills, teamwork, tactics, reflex improvement, vocabulary, cash management, etc. – xero

I don’t know… is maintaining sanity a waste of time? – Michael W. May via twhirl

Only if you think it is. – Mona N.

Absolutely not a waste of time. – Clay Newton

Scrabble stimulates neurotransmitters. – Shelly Weiss

Really, I don’t think that matters so much. What’s important for our health is to intentionally indulge in completely frivolous "waste of time" activities on a regular basis. Playing games, feeding ducks in the park, blowing bubbles, coloring with crayons. If it feeds your spirit, do it, no matter who says it’s a waste of time! – Heather Sillypants Mina

Everything is a waste of time, then you get put in the recycle bin. Use your time the way you want to. – Sam Levine

No more a waste of time then being on FriendFeed. I can gain social interaction using both and at the same time be happy that I took something away from each. (No matter how trivial, it’s still a small sense of accomplishment and fun.) – David Cook

Thanks for participating guys. Appreciate it! – You (edit | delete)

I’ll come back and answer once I finish Missile Command – Glen C

It has been argued that humans are "homo ludens" more than they are sapient. That said, I personally find that they can easily become a time tax, and tend to avoid them, preferring to spend that time on more solidly creative activity. – david beckwith

So, having read all the above opinions, what’s your take?

Watch the 2008 Presidential Debate Between Barack Obama and John McCain [Online Streaming Video]

aj — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:43:46 +0000

For those who haven’t seen the 2008 presidential debate between Republican nominee Senator John McCain and Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama.

This is one event you shouldn’t miss.

Hope you’re having a great weekend.

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.

How do I submit my site to Baidu?

aj — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:48:04 +0000

First off, what is Baidu? Why does it make sense to submit all your websites there? Ok, simply put, Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. According to Compete, the Baidu has more than 1.5 million monthly visitors. And that’s the main reason why.

I can’t understand Chinese. How and where do I submit my site? Here’s how:

1) Go to this URL: http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html

2) You should see something like this:

Just enter your URL (web address) on the first input box.

3) Enter the code that you will see just right at the bottom (It’s Y2C2 in my case. That code changes randomly).

4) Click the submit button beside it and you’re done!

Easy huh?

Here’s the URL again http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html, bookmark it for future use.

Here’s the English translation if you really wanted to know.

Google TechTalks

aj — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:29:56 +0000

New Videos from googletechtalks

Trend Micro: RUBotted (Beta)

aj — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:17:02 +0000

Bots or zombies can secretly hijack your computer to send out spam or attack other computers through the Internet.

Be safe and install RUBotted now. It makes the Internet safer.

What is RUBotted?

RUBotted monitors your computer for suspicious behavior associated with Bots, a form of malicious software that can secretly take control of your computer for criminal purposes. Upon discovering a potential infection, RUBotted immediately prompts you to scan and clean your computer.

My computer is clear. Is yours clear? Check it now.

Operating System Requirements:

    * Windows 2000 Professional (with the latest Service Pack installed)
    * Windows XP Professional or Home Edition (with the latest Service Pack installed)
    * Windows 2003 Server (with the latest Service Pack installed)
    * Windows Vista (32-bit version only, with the latest Service Pack installed)

Woopra is a breath of fresh air for web analytics

aj — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:28:57 +0000

I’m probably one of the first early users to get access to Woopra‘s beta couple of months ago. Quite frankly, I didn’t use it. I felt Woopra wasn’t going to be as good as what we currently use (Google Analytics). I even said to myself, “it’s just gonna be another Google Analytics with the same sets of data. What can they probably offer? What else is new?”

But as soon as I read about Woopra on CenterNetworks this morning, I gave it a whirl. I logged in to my Woopra account, copy/pasted the JS snippet on Mployd. I thought it would take some time for the data to funnel to my dashboard.

And so I tried to download and install the Woopra desktop application. To my surprise, data from the site is already crunching in!

Here’s a screenshot of the Woopra desktop application on my machine after I installed it.

See that? After 10 mins I’m already getting what I need to know from our visitors. That’s really neat!

And one cool thing about it is that it sits on my desktop/system tray for quick access. Woopra integrated a lot of awesome features into the app aside from analytics. There’s just too much to list them down here.

The Woopra desktop application is currently available in beta to Windows, MacOS, and Linux (note that Java is required to run the app).

We know that Google Analytics dominates the free web analytics space. I’d say Woopra can quickly become #2 with the added innovations to the app.

I’ve tried almost every single free web analytics app out there and Woopra is a breath of fresh air. I simply love it.

–aj