Wall street journal has revealed that Google is preparing to announce a new online storage service. This service will allow users to upload their data on google's servers and use whenever they want.
Google Drive will be compatible with PC and mobile phones. All files will be accepted : documents, music, films, pictures.. etc. Google's challenge is to make this service available all the time so they won't give the user a hard time! Google is planning to make it easy to access to the service and there will be some fees on unlimited storage. Yahoo and Microsoft have the same service but Google's project will be definitely bigger.
Some critics around the upcoming service mainly about the illicit uploads. In the opposite side some privacy defenders are upset with manipulating the users data. Some will be sent and never seen again!
Just to answer those. Google had it all : mails, photos, address book and blogs what the difference would it make if he gets our data too?! This keeps me wondering again :" Is Google a monopoly?"
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Thoughts about Google's online storage service : Google Drive
Graphic solutions for web developers.
A web developer isn't a designer. You can be a PHP genius but you you're pages won't be attractive as some designers do. I feel frustrated when my own PHP chat page was badly presented while I spent hours to fix the code. I'm not a photoshop expert and I really don't have the artistic touch to treat pictures and create my own banners and buttons. Fortunately, we can find everything we need on the net.
The round corners pictures.
Round corners was my first source of frustration until I found this website which allows you to get your round picture in a second ! Round corner pictures are really sweet to present and I highly recommend it.
Curvy corners
Still dealing with the same problem here; the curvy corners. I liked the website dedicated for this issue. It gives you some tips and tutorials about making your own curvy corners and how to blend your header with the background color.
Javascript effects
Actually I don't recommend to use too much javascript in your page even if you like the effect that it makes because it will slow down your page loading and your visitor will hit the "X" button before he can see anything of your content but there are some light scripts that you can use as the javascript menu.
All you need to do is to download a javascript editor like this one and start to make your own scripts or download this free javascript menu maker .
Beware that you're code must fit most browsers or else your visitors will start complaining abou the bugs on you page.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
France forbids illicit downloads
After we witnessed some acts around Peer to peer network in USA now the French government aims to make some regulations to forbid illicit download.
This will to fight unauthorized downloading come from the highest scale of the French government. It was illustrated in the statements of Nicolas Sarcozy, The president of France :
"We run the risk of witnessing a genuine destruction of culture ....."And for describing the situation of Internet nowadays he added :
" a lawless zone where outlaws can pillage works with abandon or, worse, trade in them in total impunity. And on whose backs? On artists’ backs.”The government was to pushed to act from the whole film and music industry so it has come to an agreement with Internet providers to warn their users with messages if they download illegally and they will cut their Internet access if they ignore the warning.
Now fighting illicit download is becoming an international movement. governments are trying to put more regulations to forbid it so what comes next ?
PHPBoost for web newbies
PHPBoost is an Open Source CMS dedicated to Web newbies, developed by a member of the francophone SDZ programming community. This CMS can be a solution for people who wish to make a dynamic website without having any PHP programming experience. Thus, newbies can install it in few clicks and easily edit their content via the Framework given by PHPboost.
These are the main criteria of PHPboost 2.0 :
- GNU/GPL liscence.
- strict and semantic xhtml 1.0 code
- Multilingual
- Easy to edit ; contains many themes and templates
- Good users management ( groups...roles..)
- Url rewriting
- Automated updates
Although you can create your own design thanks to the templates system, the addons given by the CMS are enough to resond to all you needs. There is also a good documentation (fr) to help you.
try PHPboost
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Successful bloggers full story : Bryan Clark
I think it's encouraging to tell you some stories of successful bloggers. If they can do it so do you. I won't be talking about those blogging "superstars" as John Chow and others like him.. I will be talking about people who started from scratch and were so determinant to achieve their goals. I'm talking about somebody who were able to make a great success in a really short period of time. It's Bryan Clark with the "One Man's Goal" blog. Bryan's goal intended to create a respectable income by being a full time blogger within 365 days and after only four months he sold his blog for $8,500 !!
- One Man’s Goal was 4 months old
- Pagerank 4
- Over 10,000 backlinks
- 1,500 daily pageviews
- 750-1,000 daily unique visitors
- $941.27 Last Month
- SOLD for $8,500
Onemansgoal.com niche was about blog monetization. Traffic sources were mainly from social bookmarking sites, specially Stumble Upon. Monetization methods were from direct advertising, paid posts and adsense. Bryan Clark was so active and able to post one quality article per day. His writing style is original and able attract readers.
The blog was put on auction in site point and sold to Austin Long. You may be wondering why he put so much money in such young blog? Let me tell you that Austin was intelligent because he gained a loyal audience that he probably couldn't create it and his investment will give its fruits soon.
Monday, November 19, 2007
A lot of noise around Peer-to-Peer
As many of Internet users were so excited to use the file sharing system P2P. Many producers find it very difficult to live with such network by considering it a violation to their copyright. Some universities are paying money to cut P2P from their network and investing in producing anti-P2P software.
Today, the university uses a nearly $60,000 software and hardware package from Audible Magic to stop file sharing on its network and pays about $16,000 for support, maintenance and regular database updates that allow the system, called CopySense, to detect newly released music.
Peer to peer has another problem with traffic filtering efforts and data control. Comcast is having some accusations about manipulating data floods and bandwith and cut roads to P2P.
Comcast denies it has blocked any traffic outright, but admits to using "network management" techniques to handle the rising tide of peer-to-peer traffic, and thereby maintain service for all of its other customers
Will we see some regulations forbidding using this network ? We know that there are giant proprietary software makers which aren't very comfortable with P2P and they are very powerful and can easily create any rule they won't.
Is google a monopoly?
Through the last ten years google has been growing fast, gaining many loyal users and creating a huge business opportunities around it as advertising and search engine optimization. Other companies have tried to imitate the google way of work and started to create its own text advertising programs, even started to compete Google adsense in the web advertising market.
Moreover, google's page rank has become a very trusted criterion in websites evaluation. Highest PR owners sells more expensive ad spots and even in website markets as SitePoint (where people buy and sell websites) people refer to PR to fix their first price.
And here we come to the point where google used his weapons to kick his competitors by cutting down PR from their affiliates. So is that an antitrust move? PR is google's tool and he can make what he wants with it...
Google has also slammed paid links users and cut off their PR. As we all know google is responsible of the relevance of his search results and he don't want to have links to show up first because its owner paid more ! But don't you think that Google exaggerated by cutting down PR that way? I think that wasn't because of the relevance of the search engine but to make bloggers and webmasters get away for paid links programs as payperpost. Because these programs were loved by bloggers because they generate a respectable revenue and for advertisers because it creates better keyword density to their link.
Finally, I am afraid that Google gets to the point to be a beast that can not be fed and turn into a manipulator of the whole network because it started to show some signs of Power and monopoly... What do you think?
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Laptop autonomy problems ... no qualified batteries to satisfy the costumer needs
For all laptop users you must have felt what I feel ! The autonomy issue that all mobile computers users are bitching and moaning about. The laptop batteries are an obstacle to fullfill the meaning of a mobile computer because you will not be able to spend the whole day without charging you laptop's battery !
A little hope .. we heard about Intel and Panasonic working on a 12hour battery two years ago but still see nothing on the market..
Instead of being a part of a crazy race of speedy processors I think that hardware constructors should have taken care of autonomy issue and be closer to satisfy the user's needs.
The American military technology laboratory has made a new invention which is a 30 years continuous power without a single recharge ! Using semiconductors and radioactive materials an energy source. So this is an extreme solution because people don't want to be infected by their radioactive laptop battery. I think they will stick with the electric wire !
Making money with free software ..
It seems to be a very famous question : how can free software developers make money to live. They spend a lot of time and effort on something that they'll never sell..
This is the main dilemma between proprietary software and free software. The problem was dealt in the REVOLUTION OS documentary that we previously recommended to watch. Actually, the documentary stated the Bill Gates's open letter where he critics amateur developers and he wonders how can a professional work -as coding complexed piece of software- be free! He stated that this kind of work will lack quality and good technical support.
Time goes and days have proved that Gates was wrong!
I don't want to compare MS products to OpenSource products because Windows is enough to prove that Bill Gates was wrong but let's discuss the money part ...
First of all Open Source developers are development lovers. Nobody forced them to code for free.. They're just looking for the honor of contributing on the Open Source community and of course they're trying to satisfy their need by coding a good piece of software. An Open Source developer is an unsatisfied user so he try to fix the code to satisfy his needs and share it with the community.
In addition, they could be paid in many other ways. For example through paid technical support. Which is The " Cygnus " firm case. It was the first firm that made a respectable revenue from selling technical support. How does it get costumers ? Some firms won't just wait an answer in a forum to know how to install Linux on their servers.It will recruit professional Linux users to install it on its device and assume the responsibility if anything gets wrong..
There another way of monetization. It's called paid documentation. If we make a web tour we will find many paid ebooks about Linux hacks and written by some linux experts.
We have also to mention that we have to be careful and not to mix the Free software concept and the free of charge meaning because Free software can be sold and bought and there are many paid linux distributions as RedHat and OpenSuse... So we have to stop mixing the term of "Free software" to "poor developers" because being a Linux savvy and an Open Source developer is very important on the professional scale and it will allow you get an important job someday!
Now I want you to read this interview with Linus Trovalds made by "First-Monday" and these are some quotes of what Linus said about what motivates an Open Source developers to code for free. ( From First-Monday)
XHTML/CSS newbies paradise tutorial
This tutorial contains the following parts:
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Part 1 : xHTML Basics
Learn what xHTML is all about...
And how to use it to design your own website!
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Part 2 : Some CSS to make it pretty
Now that you know xHTML basics...
Go ahead and give your webpage some style!-
1) Using CSS
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2) Text formatting with CSS (part 1/2)
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3) Text formatting with CSS (part 2/2)
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4) Pseudo-formats
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Part 3 : xHTML & CSS, unleash the power!
No, we are not quite done yet!
Combining xHTML and CSS makes magic come true!-
1) Bulleted lists
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2) Wrap it up! (part 1/2)
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3) Wrap it up! (part 2/2)
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4) Let's design your website!
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5) Tables
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6) Forms
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7) Now what? (Conclusion)
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Part 4 : Appendices
Appendices are filled with a lot of information you will find useful while designing your website, quick reference guides, and explanations on how to publish your website.
You do not have to read these tips, you can just use them whenever you feel like it while you are going through this tutorial.-
1) Publish your website
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2) W3C standards
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3) CSS Properties list
- Text formatting properties
- Colour and background properties
- Boxes properties
- Position and display properties
- Lists properties
- Tables properties
- Other properties
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4) xHTML Tags List
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Social networking market .. competition to get the biggest pie
Too much money spent on social websites just to be the one to benefit from the advertising fruits. The last one was Microsoft that bought a piece of Facebook after a 240 million dollar deal. Microsoft start a new advertising concept on Facebook which os "Social ads" which allows advertisers to target costumers by age, gender and interests.
The biggest deal in the social networking market was with Myspace, considered as the number one in social networking, Google was interested on it. It was a $900 Million dollar deal on search and contextual ads. Myspace membership is growing by 5 million a month which makes ads on it gets a huge number of users.
The smallest deal was the partnership between Yahoo and Bebo. Bebo considered as the third social network in USA and counts about 1.7 million user.
Now as we see there is a competition between giants if Internet industry to get the social networks. After every one of the gets his piece of social networking i think the new challenge is how to get more users to the network. Myspace is number one but the gap between it and Facebook is too small. Every social network have to care about security and privacy issues because vulnerability to hackers is very bad for its reputation. Recently we heard about hacking Alicia Keys Myspace page.
Second, Google is making a great work to attract people to Myspace by making it an open social. This will allow developers to make many open source application around Myspace. Consequently this will create a space to creative minds to attract users. In the other hand microsoft is so determinant to fix her network losses and put a huge budget to expand her online revenue.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Fedora 8 full review.. an art piece !
Fedora fans waited long five months to receive the new Fedora 8 distribution named "WereWolf". Developers worked on making a fedora a more stable and secure distribution and tried to make the use of Linux simpler and easier to Linux newbie. And this is a review of its newest features :
Codec Buddy (aka codeina) :
Fedora doesn't put any of protected codecs by copyright. The problem was that the user has to install it on his own. What is not always simple for most users. This is why Codec buddy was made for. To help installing what you need so you can listen MP3 and watch movies without making a drama of it..
PulseAudio:
Fedora 8 has integrated the last sound server. The main goal behind that is to offer audio addicts a better integration of new sound technology. Like decrease sound notifications while watching a movie.
System-config-firewall :
A better Firewall configuration. Easy to install with step by step setup.
System-config-selinux :
From now on, the configuration of SELinux is independent from the Firewall. Pepole seem to be very impressed with this new SElinux because it seemed very innovative and original.
System-config-printer :
The printer management system is better. It automatically make the waitinh line list. This modification is very helpful because users complained too much about it.
Java Support with IcedTea :
A Java system totally free developed by RedHat. This edition is only for 32 and 64 bits systems. IcedTea exclusively include an implementation of a web based code of gcjwebplugin with a new security management system.
NetworkManager 0.7 :
Completly rewritten in order to satisfy new networks as WiFi, providing a speedy connection and a better integration thanks to API Dbus and WPA for WiFi.
Extended laptops compatibility :
Thanks to "Smolt" software. Development crews focused on the "Standby mode" problems as the "Suspend to Ram" and the "Suspend to Disk".
Package management:
Pirut, the package management, had many modifications to satisfy many users' request. The new Pirut will make package setup easier specially for new users.
Fedora 8 Themes :
With every new Fedora version we find a new theme. The last one had some modifications titled " Nodoka ". The Wallpaper is softer titled "Infinity". Buttons and windows has also changed. The most original about this theme is the wallpaper. Its color change during the day progressively from blue in the morning to smooth purple in the evening.
Virtual mode :
it's a mode of use progressively increasing the number of its users. F8 developers focused on the security issue. In fact, thanks to the integration of a new library it's possible to encode the SSH/TLS format inorder to make access more secure. Other graphic modifications of the virt-manager made it more clear and compatible with the newest system functionalities.
FEL (Fedora Electronic Lab) :
This product was developed by the embedded crew. It's goal is to integrate a huge number of application dedicated to professional electronic developers in order to make a LIVE-CD dedicated to universities.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
After Ubuntu Dell is offering SUSE
Dell is responding to linux users and starts to sell computers with Linux installed on instead of Windows. It was after Ideastorm made in its Dell Blog. The costumers first asked for Ubuntu Feisty Fawn it was released in UK,USA,France and Germany. Now Dell is trying another Linux distribution in a different market. Actually, Dell and Novell has made the deal ; to buy Dell OptiPlex™ 330 and 755 business desktop with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 installed on in China !
Mr. Francis Kam, Marketing Director of Dell, said, “In the past few years, more and more users have begun to pay attention to the good value, ease-of-use and safety of Linux. We cooperated with Novell to launch computers with pre-installed SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system to better meet user demand.”
So it's clear here that Dell is working on something which is to be the first first constructor to invade to Linux fan market. And through Dell staff statements we can read they aren't satisfied with latest edition of Windows, something that were said by Acer director.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Eee PC ... everybody walks with a laptop
It was in the 16th of October 2007 when Asus has announced its new Eee PC.
It's considered as a UMP computer ( Ultra-Mobile Personnal Computer ). A UMPC is a small laptop with a screen of 7" to 10". UMPC arent' very famous because they used to be very expensive until this new Eee PC which could make a revolution of the UMPC market because Asus made this computer to make it accessible to everybody with low prices. The price should be between 200$ and 300$.
Eee PC is and abreviation of « Easy to learn, work, and play, Excellent Internet experience and Excellent mobile computing experience ». There 4 versions of Eee PC for the moment Eee PC 8G, Eee PC 4G, Eee PC 4G Surf and Eee PC 2G Surf and They have in common the following caracteristics :
- Screen of 7"
- weight : 920 gr
- Distribution : Linux Xandros. a Windows XP compatible
- Micorphone.
The diffrence between these versions is the memory capacity and the integrated camera in PC 8G and PC 4G. The PC is able to establish a WiFi connection as well.
The release of This laptop will be in mid novembre in United States.
Ok you may be wondering : "who made this device? Asus ? I've never heared about that name before !!"
Asus or ASUSTEK is an enterprise made by 4 engineer ACER. Asus is a hardware constructer It made graphic cards and several ships for computer.
Asus has many innovations in the hardware field like the " AUDIO DJ " that allows PC to play audio VD even if the computer is shut down. Asus is the author of the «Artificial Intelligence Non-delay Overclocking System» named "AI NOS" for overclocking CPU.
The basic forum.. a nice and simple forum CMS
It's a forum created with PHP and MySQL by "Spintronik" a member of The SDZ programming community. This forum can be distinguished from ordinary forums CMS as PHPBB and Invision Power by being Free and more simple to use.
- The Codes are very clear and simple and can be modified easily
- Very nice layout which respect the W3C norms.
- Stable forum and safe..
> Official website of The Basic Forum
> Download The Basic Forum
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Best Digg strategy to hit the first page !
You always wonder how do people get dugg that much! After some days i figured out how to get some extra diggs and it's time to share it.
1- You should have friends.. a lot of them.. let say about 1000 friend on digg and let's hope you're using a junk mail for shouts notification or you'll have to unsubscribe from it. Having a lot of friends will allow you to broadcast your post to many people. So once you post your article on digg click on "share" and shout it to everybody.
2-So what you should say to your friends when you shout you should say something to urge your friend to digg your post. Let me tell you that : diggers are very lazy ! They find responding to your shout and digging your article is exhausting specially when they feel that they'll get nothing in return. So you should :
- Make a clue to the content of your post and tell your friends it's interesting and you should take a look
- Tell them that you will digg them back if they digg your post.
- Be nice, don't be pushy and don't forget to say "Hello.. please... thanks etc..."
3- You should add recent diggers. New diggers don't have friends and they will feel excited to have people interested in them and they will do everything you ask until they'll discover the "truth". Because diggers who have more than 1000 friend won't respond to shouts. Because they recieve hundreds every day and they won't waste their time with them.
Following these steps you will get valuable diggs that could allow you to hit the first popular page. Just to mention that traffic coming from digg.com is a quality traffic because you'll receive only interested readers and that means an extension of your audience.