Do you also find it really annoying that you see the same news on maybe 10 major websites and then on 100 other small web sites like blogs? I’m really asking myself why all the people do read an announcement on another website and then blog about it… I write this blog entry here, because Mozilla announced the release date for Firefox 3 which is definitly a really good point, but I got this news at least 7 or 8 times in my news reader and then saw it on 10 other sites on stumble upon. It’s just annoying.

Please bloggers… write some own content or do at least write a review about the software which will be announced or something like a feedback…

Popularity: 62% [?]

You have probably already noticed that Google changed its Favicon to a newshitty one… I found a website that tries to make a message to Google, so that they change their Favicon back . Please support this website, I really can’t stand this new garbled “g”!

http://www.bringbacktheoldgooglefavicon.com/

Popularity: 43% [?]

Some months ago I switched from Windows to Mac and want to tell you some things you will learn when you get your new iMac. This could also be a help for people who are thinking of changing their operating system soon.

One application for one area

In Windows I always had so many tools to come to what I actually wanted to do. Organizing my images was done by something like 3 or 4 applications. In Mac you will really soon see that most of the time there is one software which is handling everything for you which is in some cases good, but in other cases really bad. As an example, I really hate that iPhoto handles the photos so strange on my file system.

Closing the window will not close the application

In Windows, as soon as you close all the windows of an application, it will close the application too. That’s not the case in Mac. If you want to quit an application there, you really need to give the command to quit it, which is a bit strange in the beginning, but after a while it really made sense to me. How often did I close an application that takes ages to load on windows, just because I wanted to see a window behind?

Menu Bar on the top of the screen

In the interface of Aqua (which apple uses) is the application menu bar not on the top of the window of the application, it’s instead on the top of the whole display which was really annoying in the beginning, and It’s the only point which I’m still not really convinced that this is a good idea. The menu bar only displays the menus of the active application which is quite good, but I really think it’s annoying to see them on the top.

Powerful Terminal

Like all the other *NIX-based operating systems, Mac has a really powerful terminal (even if it’s not exactly as powerful as the one from Linux), but you will see that you can’t miss it anymore. There are so much things you do everyday without even recognizing them that you lose so much time with those tasks. The terminal is not only faster it also allows you to create really powerful scripts and command files (similar to the batch files on Windows) that are able to organize your computer. I created so many different scripts and I use the terminal to browse through my files usually.

A different community

The Mac community is way different than the Windows community! It’s smaller and most of the users are extremely proud of their operating system, which is good. But this doesn’t mean that all other operating systems are bad because Mac is better for what they think! I still prefer asking questions in a Mac forum than in a Windows forum because the quality of the conversations is usually a bit higher. I don’t want to say that Windows users are stupid or something like that, but Windows is in fact a mass product. And people who have no clue about computers or are not interested in it usually buy a Windows computer. For this reason, more users in the Windows community don’t know that much about computers.

There is no perfect operating system
Even if everyone says that Mac is so much better and it’s so much more stable, I really have to say that this is not true. I have my Mac now for something like half a year and had several problems, like freezing windows or applications that don’t answer anymore. I like the quote “99% of all problems lay between the monitor and the chair.” which is true, for ALL the operating systems!

Popularity: 82% [?]

This is an addition to this thread.

As we have already seen in the previous thread, SSH Tunnels are quite useful, this is why I wanted to show you an other way to use SSH to Tunnel your Network Traffic to a remote machine.

In this example I want to show you how it’s done with putty.exe.

First of all, you need tho enter the following things in the putty main window.

putty Main Menu

Then you need to add the tunneling part.

Tunneling

This may look a bit strange, because we forward everything to the localhost. The reason why we do that is, that we want to send all the connections of Firefox directly to the local machine, which will then send all the information to the remote server over port 9999. The server will then know that the data should be forwarded to the port 80 again so it can interact with the internet. This means, the traffic is only in the tunnel from the local machine to the remote machine, but not from the remote machine to the web server!

Popularity: 71% [?]

I started to work on a CMS in PHP and JavaScript for creating some of my websites which I produce for Telepadune. The main goal is it to have a really easy to use browser structure where the code, the data and the design should be splitted up. This will make it easy to navigate for the designers.

Right now it is actually more or less a framework but I really want to expand it’s features to a real CMS.

I will definitely write about this CMS/Framework again, as soon as there is the first Pre-Alpha release, but If you are interested in this project, then watch the forums which don’t have a domain yet…)

Popularity: 68% [?]

Im in school for two days of the week, where I’m really awared of script kiddies, sniffers and other freaks. For that reason I want to connect to the internet through a SSH-Tunnel, which will secure my connection a bit. I don’t want to go deep into the whole SSH technology, but we can say that the internet traffic will be encrypted as long as it is in the school network.

I have a school userprofile which I use only in school. This means I really wanted to have the connection built directly after booting my Windows. For this reason I created two scripts to establish the connection directly after the login.

First of all I had to download the plink.exe file, which is a cmd-version of the well-known putty.exe. I moved this file to C:\WINDOWS\system32.

Now the scripts. First of all I have the batch file to establish the connection. This scripts starts a dynamic connection to the server which will refer all connections on localhost through port 9999 to the server on port 80 (which is used for the web).

auto_link.bat

@plink -v -pw password user@server -D 80:localhost:9999

The second script is used for the Autostart which will call the batch file silently and hidden.

auto_link.vbs

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject( "WScript.Shell" )
WshShell.Run "D:\scripts\win\auto_link\auto_link.bat",0,True

Now you can edit your settings for Firefox or every other tool, that supports Proxy Settings.

Go to Tools - Options - Advanced - Network - Connection - Settings

Choose manual Proxy connection and enter localhost as host and port 9999 in the sockets5 section.

It should work now everytime you log into your account, if you copyed the vbs file to your autostart folder.

Popularity: 99% [?]

last.fm the beta

I subscribed to the last.fm page two days ago to see the new beta page of last.fm and it’s so much better. They didn’t add so much new features but they did improve the usability and the design so much, it’s so much better now to check all the stats and to connect to other people with similar taste of music. Even tough it takes a while to get used to the new design.

Last.fm Beta of my Profile

There are also some extremly nice new features.

Live scrobbling
Oh my god, I waited since the day I registered an account on last.fm for this feature! It’s just so much better to see the correct stats every time you log in to your profile. The waiting for Sunday is over now ;-)

Library
I think the best new feature of last.fm is the fact that you now really have your music everywhere you have a connection to the internet! Every time you listen to a track, last.fm will add it to your Library, and you can go to profiles of artists and add their tracks directly from there! This means you can have more or less all the music you have on your profile which is extremely cool! Especially in times like now where my iPod crashed again……

The only reason why I don’t use the Beta yet is the fact that it is extremely slow now! I mean last.fm was always quite a slow site, but now it’s just painful, I really hope they will fix it before they release!

You can find some more pictures on flickr

Popularity: 61% [?]

Earthworm Robot

I saw this really cool video of a worm robot today, and I would really like to know if this is a fake or not. I think it’s possible to make a robot with that if you have a battery and a CPU in each cube. The connection could be solved by some electronic magnets. I tried to get some more information about this robot, but I couldn’t find anything so far.

But watch the video!
http://www.rofl.to/earthworm-robot

Popularity: 71% [?]

Introduction

In our modern and technical world, the World Wide Web is a really important aspect for our economy and social life. There are several web applications on the internet to interact with friends or kindred spirits. Almost every economic tree has several reasons to present their offers in the internet. In our fast moving society it’s really important to create web applications which can be developed really fast and we should never forget the aspect of security.
I have already used three of the mainly used techniques to create web applications, ASP, JSP and PHP.

Syntax of the language

If you like the syntax of a language is more or less up to the user. In this section I just want to show a basic example of each language, before I start to compare these languages. These test scripts all show the current date in a format like “Mon, 19 Mai 2008 09:12:41 UTC”.

ASP

<html>
<head>
		<title>ASP-TestPage</title>
	</head>
<body>
	Hi there, today is the
	<%response.write(now())%>
</body>
</html>

JSP

<html>
<head>
		<title>JSP-TestPage</title>
	</head>
<body>
	Hi there, today is the
	<%= new java.util.Date() %>
</body>
</html>

PHP

<html>
<head>
		<title>PHP-TestPage</title>
	</head>
<body>
	Hi there, today is the
	<?php echo date(DATE_RFC822); ?>
</body>
</html>

Which one is the best?

First of all, it’s not possible to answer this question, because there is no best or worst language. It always depends on what the user needs, and what the developer likes to work with.
I used all of the three languages and I still don’t have a favorite language, because all of them have some good parts, and all of them have some parts which are really annoying. I created several casual websites with PHP. I used it because it’s extremely easy to use and it does the job. The problem of PHP is that you really need to create everything on your own. You don’t have predefined stuff like in JSP or ASP where you can just drag & drop to create your interface. I used JSP more or less only in school where we had to learn it (as I have never been a big fan of Java). I never really created a big project with it, but I used it for small websites there. It has actually some cool features like beans or stuff like that. It’s extremely easy to create dynamic components to reuse them in every web application. I can’t say much about ASP, because I just started to use it, but the first impression of it was just mind-blowing.

The problems of JSP

There are more or less two groups of people (hmm, starts like one of those geek jokes…), those who love JSP and those who hate JSP. JSP is in fact really future rich, which makes it a really powerful environment but it runs rather slowly. If you want to run JSP you will probably need your own server, because I don’t know any shared web hoster which supports JSP due the large amount of resources JSP uses.

PHP is widely spread

You can probably do everything with PHP that JSP can do if you have the knowledge. One of the main features of PHP is that it was originally designed for the web and only for the web. JSP was created from Java, which is an extremely important and powerful language nowadays. I would say it’s easier to learn PHP than Java, so I think it really makes sense to use JSP if you already know Java, but want to create some web applications now. A really cool part is that you can reuse some of your algorithms again. For all the other people who start directly from the ground, I would really recommend PHP.

ASP what can I say…

ASP is a really cool language especially because you can combine it with all the .NET languages, which makes it really powerful. The reasons are almost the same as for JSP. There are not a lot of web hosters, which allow you to use ASP pages. The advantage of ASP compared with JSP is definitely the speed.

Other languages

There are also other languages like Perl or Ruby, but I have actually never used them so far.

Conclusion

As we can see there are so many different ways to create a web application which makes it really fun. I would say everyone should choose the language he/she prefers, because all of them do their job. It just really depends on what you really want to do and which basics and capabilities you have. It’s a fact that hosting PHP sites is much cheaper than hosting ASP or JSP sites. Which is a main feature for almost all the private webmasters.

Popularity: 100% [?]

bux.to it really worked

A friend of mine once asked me to register on the site bux.to to earn some money. Of course he wanted to have me to earn some money too. I was not really confident, that this site will really work, but i registered because I’m a nice person.

The concept is really easy. You click on some ads and you will get money for it. This is what they say on the official page.

Earnings example (based on current averages)
» You click 10 ads per day = $0.10
» 20 referrals click 10 ads per day = $2.00
» Your daily earnings = $2.10
» Your weekly earnings = $14.70
» Your monthly earnings = $63.00

You can also pay to get some more referrals and this was the point where I really thought they just try to make some money on other peoples density. But a friend of mine payed and could double the money (or even more). I could not really belive it, but hey, who ever pays me for watching some ads is cool.

So, if you check it out, pleace refer to me ;-)

http://bux.to/?r=certif

But before you buy referrals you should read some other posts on google. There were some people which were not really lucky and got some inactive referrals which were quite annoying. But hey, sometimes you do have to take risks in order to profit.

Popularity: 54% [?]

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