_{This is a speed test of your browsers javascript engine, yes, javascript can be a primary factor of speed. Once the html and script have been downloaded by your browser, it must get parsed and processed by your browser. I honestly wasn't surprised as to which browser outperformed the rest, it's code is written so low level.}

_{Javascript Browser Speedtest}

Just announced, CNN has just launched a new department, I-Report and it's recruiting the entire world to become reporters!

They even include a ToolKit which gives some trade secrets for taking the perfect photo or video.

The proliferation of video devices and computers should make for a very interesting experiment. I beg to wonder how much CNN will censor or shape the reports submitted by users to their own agenda.

A little while back I was doing a gig for a gentleman very familiar with patent trolling. He was constantly digging at me to deliver him ideas, ideas that could be produced into a consumer product. Being accustomed to solving logic based problems through software, it was to be an interesting task. To make a long story short, one of the ideas both he and I prefered was a small desktop device that would:

1) Accept receipts, business cards, scraps of paper with a recipe, any paper within certain dimensions into a double sided scanner, which would scan and OCR

2) Temporarily store OCR information to internal cache, and triple check consistency of reaped data. Snapshot would be sent to a workstation client, which in turn would request confirmation from a user that all data was acquired. Once confirmed, the "machine" would transfer scraps of paper to a shredder device that would then permantely destroy original copy

3) Share data to Personal Information Datastore and link back to electronic reproduction.

Unfortunately, this idea was never followed up on, heck it wasn't even patented (Want to make it happen, let me know!).

Today I read about Intuit's launch of their 2007 version of Quicken personal finance package, which they tout as a virtual file cabinet.

"The ability to easily download or scan important financial documents and create a permanent digital archive inside Quicken makes perfect sense to people and will certainly help them locate these documents at tax time or years later if audited."

I certainly hope this is an attempt towards something resembling my idea. To be free from all of these pesky little papers that I seem to amass on a daily basis, would be a welcome blessing.

I am one of those "old timers" when it comes to HTML design, heck I still remember using Archie to find good junk! Hence, for the longest time, I avoided using CSS for anything other than maintaining look and feel when doing web design, HTML tables were the only way to go for positioning elements on a page.

One of my first attempts was RespectThyCustomer, I was intent on adding rounded corners, an almost mandatory feature for any site looking for the over-hyped Web 2.0 moniker. So I went a Googling for some rounded corner CSS examples and was bombarded with 1001 different way to do one thing. Baffled, and not wanting to spend way too much time, I began looking for a wizard, something that would take all of the grunt work out of this task that is supposed to be menial. I came across several different wizards, none of which truly impressed me, but I settled on one, and trucked forward.

Today, after speaking with a good friend, he showed me his little wizard that he built. Wow, was I impressed (yes, his CSS Kung-Fu is much better than mine), not only is quite adaptable, the code is quite small, and it can be actually be emailed without necessity of attaching an image.

Check it out here!

Thanks Dave!

So, have you heard of LinkieWinkie? An enigma, wrapped inside of a puzzle that calls itself a social experiment.

"a very altruistic little site and loves to be talked about." - Quote

A spider of some sort that crawls the blogosphere in search of mentions to itself. Using it's uknown logic, it then adds links back to the reference on it's home page.

When you run a WHOIS lookup you get this:

Registrant:
   Denise Russell
   33 Kirby Drive
   Telscombe Cliffs
   Sussex
   BN10 7DY
   UK  
Record created on 22-Jun-2006

So we can deduce that the "creator" of this little project hails from the UK and this domain was registered fairly recently. It seems to have developed quite the following based on its traffic stats in a very short time, perhaps just all the blogos-buzz.

Yes, I'll bite as well, I'm interested to see where this leads and curious as to the amount of traffic I'll receive if my link does make it on to the home page!

I'll report any findings back here, Cheerio!

Other sites where LinkieWnkie is mentioned:

http://arteccentrix.blogspot.com/2006/07/what-is-linkiewinkie.html
http://thisbiochemicallife.com/2006/07/26/what-the-hell-is-linkiewinkie/
http://www.senserely.com/james-the_meaning_of_linkiewinkie.php
http://rumboard.com/2006/07/linky-winky/
http://thepinkpanther.typepad.com/pinkie/2006/07/follow_up_linki.html

PS:

http://www.linkiewinkietracker.blogspot.com/
http://postmodern-living.blogspot.com/2006/07/linkie-winkie-take-3.html

Just found this great little trick!

Have you ever attempted to Remote Desktop connect to a server running Terminal Services and received the dreaded "Too many active connections" ? Fret no more! Just open up a command line and type:

mstsc -console

This will open you're RDP client, type in the server addres, and voila! You're connected to the rarely used console session!

Thanks goes to Jon Galloway through Haacked

In 1956 IBM introduced the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), the great grandfather of the most widely used desktop storage device, the Hard Disk Drive. Oh what a long way we've come! This behomth was the size of two large refrigerators, weighed a full ton, required an air compressor to protect the heads, and it's total capacity was only 5 megabytes!

 The Hard Disk That Changed the World

One fundamental problem with driving these days has to do with accountability. People can do whatever they want as long as a cop doesn't see it regardless of the type of headache they are causing other people.

Well, if you cause trouble, draw a few eyes, or are a great driver then you are likely to show up on Platewire. Platewire is a site that allows you to enter the plate number of a car that you came across on the road as a flag, hazard, flirt, or award. If you don’t have a pad and paper handy in the car you can always call-in a plate number and retrieve it later.

Gratis Internet, the company that started with Free Condoms and earned their mark giving away Free Ipods, are closing up shop.

It appears that the lawsuit filed by Elliot Spitzer, New York state Attorney General, affected them tremendously. Being an ex-employee of this company, I saw this coming, primarily due to the fact that they hired a COO from a completely different industry, who after 3 months, still didn't understand how the company generated revenue! Just goes to show, a business model based on breakage, will eventually break.

All of my condolences go out to my ex co-workers, half of which were laid off this week. Peter Martin, one of the co-founders left the company last week.

Another internet saga comes to an end.

Gratis R.I.P.

PS: Here is supporting documentation. Besides the fact that half off the staff has been laid off, and "more cuts coming" whispers are heard through the galley, the lawsuit filled against Gratis request at minumum $500 per New York residents email address in their database. As NYC was one of their top cities in a database of over 150 million email addresses, you do the math.

There have been volumes written on the mysterious formula behind PageRank, so I won't explore that here, but I do believe I've found another piece to this puzzle.

It started about six months back, I began developing a small site for a client. It was not the best setup, for reasons beyond my control, the only development server, was the production server (Ugh!).

For the first 2 months, the only visitors to site to speak of were the client, his staff of eight, and myself. As I was primarily working on the server through Remote Desktop, I used the vanilla server install of Internet Explorer, sans Google toolbar. 3 months after launch, the site still had a PageRank of 0, besides a random stumbler, traffic was to this site was negligeable. Around this time, I was working on another web app for the same client, and the topic of PageRank came up. I instructed the client and his staff to install Google toolbar, with Advanced Features disabled (They work from a low speed DSL line, so I figured every little bit counts). Through work achieved on this project I was finally capable of seting up a somewhat more robust development environment.

As I was able to work remotely from my own workstation, not Remote Desktop, so I began viewing the initial site from my browser, which has the Google Toolbar's Advanced Features turned on. Within 2 weeks, to my surprise, the PageRank value of the site showed (1/10), although the traffic was still nothing to speak of. Out of curiosity, I contacted my clients office and requested that everyone browsing this site enable Advanced Features in their Google Toolbar. Less than 3 weeks later, the sites page rank was (4/10)

Now, I've actually been able to repeat this on 2 other sites, and I'm still paying around with the variables. I'm curious to know if anyone else has come across anything similar.

"The internet has become an ever evolving entity with sublte patterns that emerge if you know where to look."
-Me

moo.fx is a superlightweight, ultratiny, megasmall javascript effects library, written with prototype.js.

It's easy to use, fast, cross-browser, standards compliant, provides controls to modify Height, Width, and Opacity with built-in checks that won't let a user break the effect with multiple crazy clicks. It's also optimized to make you write the lesser code possible.

moo.fx has been successfully tested with: Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. It should work in most of the gecko browsers too. Only Height and Width will work in Opera, since that browser does not support opacity.

The developers of this library have done it again, an excellent release from Italy, this years World Cup champions!

Get your copy today!