phpBB Teams

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve done what I like to call Twitter Surfing. Following virtually every account link I see from person to person and seeing if they’re tweeting about something that interests me. If so, I follow, if not, it’s likely a dead end and I back up a bit.

I more than tripled the number of people I’m following, more than doubled my follower count, and through the process of following people, found a large collection of sites which I just didn’t have time to check out. So I bookmarked them.

This is the list for both my archival purposes as well as passing along things I find interesting to other people.

• Boagworld
• Social Media Agency | Room 214
• Mark O’Sullivan
• Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen
• A Random Seed
• Aza’s Thoughts
• SEO Book.com ~ SEO Training Made Easy
• SOASTA, Inc. - Delivering Reliability-as-a-Service
• Docstoc – Documents, Templates, Forms, Ebooks, Papers & Presentations
• Aprigo
• Radley Marx
• Twitter Payments Using Tipjoy
• John Resig - Blog
• WebMynd · A better way to search
• Chad Austin
• Free Online Invitations, Party Planning and Guest List Management from Anyvite
• Steve Blank
• Lijit | Search Tools for Your Blog: Increase Page Views, Search Stats and Reader Engagement
• The Experience is the Product | Better product management and products
• Real-Time Social Media Monitoring | Twitter Alerts | Brand and Reputation Monitoring | Filtrbox.com
• Social Networking Software and Social Business Software
• Soaking in Samsara
• Top Blogs on Twitter - Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, and more - Twittorati
• Resourcing talent aquisition search sourcing RPO - Greatpeople is the best of the best
• Welcome to HootSuite, the ultimate Twitter toolbox -…
• Popular topics and news from the Twitter public timeline - MicroPlaza, your Twitter news agency
• Gigya - the widget distribution network
• Social Mallard
• Vidoop - Strong Authentication for the Consumer Web
• Interscape Technologies - Build Customer Communication Channels.
• Microsoft joins HTML 5 standard fray in earnest | Business Tech - CNET News
• Home - The Digital Lifestyle.com: Windows Media Center news, podcasts, videos, forums and wikis
• Speckyboy Design Magazine
• Pay Off Credit Debt, Lower Interest Rate - Personal Debt Management, Budgeting Software | Mint.com
• Netflix Culture
• TripIt | Online travel itinerary and trip planner
• Mashable Jobs
• Collaborite - Tour
• building43 | We’re building43 - what are you building?
• Remember Everything. | Evernote Corporation
• Gregg Tilston - The Dialogue Only Begins Here
• Crager, Inc. - Business Resources | Marketing Solutions | Social Media Consulting | eBusiness Training
• Socialcast
• Get More Twitter Followers TODAY
• Twitter’s platform shortcomings
• Web Design and Development Tips, Tutorials and Related Resources - [Re]Encoded.com
• A Teenager’s Guide to Effective Freelancing

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Over the past few months, I’ve been watching Microsoft unfold various advertising campaigns and community involvement projects. They’ve been starting to put the “fun” back into producing software. And this just tops it all off:

Office 2010: The Movie
http://www.office2010themovie.com/

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Over the past decade, the internet has transitioned from being a place where only geeks hung out to a vast cloud full of information produce by anyone and everyone. We’ve gone from a select few making a website dedicated to their cat, to everyone and their cat having a website.

It started with Geocities, Tripod, and Homestead. These websites made it easy for amateurs to the internet to create a very basic website. In the light of modern times, these sites barely exist. But free web hosting continues in the form of free web hosting, free forums, etc. And it has hurt the internet.

1) Free web hosting caters to spam

Since most free web hosting providers are ad revenue based, they typically have very low standards for what types of websites are allowed to placed on their servers. And while some may have rules, they’re rarely monitored or enforced. This has opened the door spammers to create link farms in large numbers, sites that scrape copyrighted content, and just otherwise extremely low quality content.

2) Free web hosting is too easy to use

I’m all for websites providing increasingly easy ways of performing complex tasks — creating a forum on your website in 1999 wasn’t an easy task. But today, it’s a matter of simply signing up for a free forum service. And while I inherently have no issue with this, it allows users who have no clue what they’re doing to undertake very large tasks.

3) Free web hosting promotes technological ignorance

I’m a firm believer that everyone should have access to the internet. I’m a firm believer that everyone should be able to create their own content and place it on the internet. However, that being said, let’s face it: you have to be willing to learn how to do this properly. If you’re willing to pay for web hosting–which is an extremely small fee these days–you’re typically more willing to learn how to effectively manage, maintain, and promote your website. If you’re going to be running a forum, you’re more willing to customize it and encourage a thriving community. if you’re creating a blog, you’re interested in producing quality content. However, if the decision to make a website was made in the 30 seconds it took you to create that free website, chances are it’s not going to succeed.

4) Free web hosting limits the website owner

Okay, so let’s assume that you are a website owner who wishes to really learn about maintaining a website. There’s one problem, though: Free web hosts rarely provide the “customer” with the tools they need to learn. And when you try to ask the hosting provider to do something for you (which you otherwise could have done yourself), you’re met with horrible customer service and support.

5) Free web hosting discourages innovation

When signing up for a free website, blog, or forum, typically you’re presented with a small number of pre-fabricated templates that you can use–with no way to customize them. This, over time, produces a plethora of websites that look and function identically. The website owner is left with very little choice, and browsers of the internet are forced into seeing the same thing over and over again, with little way of distinguishing between content providers.

6) Free web hosting discourages quality content

Free website owners likely don’t truly care about the long-term destination of their website. If it fails, they really haven’t lost anything monetary, besides time. If it doesn’t get maintained, there’s no loss at all. There’s little incentive to produce quality content that people will want to subscribe to and read on a regular basis. You have nothing to lose, and nothing to gain. Unfortunately for the rest of the internet, they have to sift through loads of pointless content before finding what they were looking for or interested in.

7) Free web hosting is quite simply … cheap

And I mean that in more ways than simply monetary scale. If someone is going to become a website owner and maintainer; if they’re going to become a content producer; if they have something valuable to say and share with the rest of us, they should be willing to at least attempt to do a “good job” with it. If you’re not willing to give out something to secure your place on the internet, why would the rest of us want to hear what you have to say?

The free web hosting services cater to the “I want it now” ideology, with little regard for the planning and work required to produce quality content. The internet has been cut because of it. And unfortunately, I don’t think the blade is going away anytime soon.

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I was surfing around today, and came across some “miracle” wrinkle prevention/fix/whatever stuff. The blog style looked very familiar, but like Acai berry weight loss scam.

Once again, this blog detected where you lived to make it some sort of sympathy thing to get you to buy the stuff. But this time they made it blatantly obvious.

Here’s the code that did it:

Seriously? In case you don’t follow, all it does is use the maxmind geolocation service, looks at your IP’s city and state/region location to make it appears as though the person lives there. Absolutely ridiculous.

I’ll come out and say it, the Acai berries that you read about on the internet are a scam. It is that simple. Why? You need only look as far as the websites that alleged users of this “magical weightloss tool” run. In this post, I’ll be going through five different sites, supposedly run by five different people, but when you start looking at the websites, you’ll see that the sites have a lot more in common than using the same “unique” weight loss plan.

The first of these sites on this scam tour is a site that is owned by someone that claims to be a “Melora Brown.” Now, before I continue, I should note that if you decide to visit any of the websites I mention, you do so with JavaScript disabled. Some of these websites require a proxy, and I’ll explain why when I get to those.

Site 1:

URL: http://melorasweightloss.com/

URL: http://melorasweightloss.com/msn.php

Before going any further, take note of the differences in those two pages. How can someone have 3 kids and a wonderful husband, and then turn around have suddenly have 2 kids, but not a wonderful husband?

Image 1:

Image 2:

I’m also curious how she lost 47 pounds in one, but 43 in the other. Something not adding up here.

Site 2:

The next site on our tour is a blog supposedly owned by a Marie Campbell. She too claims to the a mother have 3 kids and the wife to a wonderful husband. You’ll soon notice a pattern here too.

URL: http://www.mariesweightlossdiet.com/blog/

Image 1:

Among other things, I want you to take note of the attractive blonde lady in the pink shirt. You’ll see that very same image on someone else’s site …

Site 3:

Next up is someone supposedly named Tracy Johnson. She too has 2 kids and an amazing husband.

URL: http://www.tracysweightloss.com/

Image 1:

Site 4:

This next blog is owned by someone who is supposedly named Ann Dickinson. She too has 3 kids and a wonderful husband.

URL: http://www.annsdietjournal.com/mystory20.html?t202id=747

Image 1:

Now I want you to take a good look at this. See the attractive blonde lady with the pink shirt? Apparently she gets around, and has at least two different names, Ann Dickinson and Marie Campbell. Are you noticing patterns yet? You should. Both in the “profiles” and what each blog entry says. Some of it is verbatim. Let’s keep going!

Site 5:

This blog is owned by someone who is supposedly named Maria Stevens, who also has 3 kids and a wonderful husband.

URL: http://www.mariasdietblog.com/?sub=mm_01

Image 1:

Image 2:

Image 2 is what is on this person’s blog. Yes, the entire image. The blog tries to fool the reader in to thinking the blog is “social” when it really isn’t. Someone just took all these images, put them together in to one image, and didn’t link the image to anywhere.

Site 6:

This blog is owned by someone who is supposedly named Becky Edwards. She doesn’t claim to have 3 kids or a wonderful/awesome husband, but take note of her picture. You’ll see her face on another body on a different site with someone else’s name. I won’t show the site here, but it is out there.

URL: http://www.beckysweightloss.com/

Image 1:

Site 7:

This site is owned by someone who is supposedly named Melissa Bishop. She has 2 kids, allegedly. This is where you’ll need a proxy. I won’t post an image to this one, but I’ll give you the URL to visit. Check out how where she supposedly lives changes depending on what IP you currently have from your proxy … Remember, disable JavaScript!

URL: http://melissasdiet.com/

Site 8:

This last site is owned by someone who is supposedly named Mandy Matthews, and claims to have 2 kids and a wonderful husband. This is another site where you’ll need a proxy. You’ll note that once again, where she claims to live depends on what your IP address is currently. It is really quite funny.

URL: http://www.mandysdietingblog.com/

So what’s my point? All of these sites are what I consider to be scams. They mislead people, try to get the empathy thing going by claiming to live whereever you live, they all say the same thing, and in some cases, images are reused! I still can’t understand how two different people can have the exact same face …

Stay away from Acai berries! It is a scam!

In case you don’t see the problem, the message is saying JavaScript is disabled in my browser (which it was), but the link uses JavaScript. Tell me, how is JavaScript supposed to be used when it is disabled?

There have been times in my life where I’ve wanted to get in to 3D graphic design. There’s this great program called Blender that I play around with from time to time. But there is just no way I can get to this level of incredibleness anytime soon.

Anybody have some tips for a graphic artist wannabe?

In this article, the writer complains about being invisible to women. The problem I have with this article? He has a girlfriend! He does not need to worry about being invisible to women when he isn’t invisible to his girlfriend.

I, on the hand, am invisible to women, and still single.

My maternal grandmother, 85 years of age, died in the early hours of August 24th, 2007. She parted us peacefully in her sleep with family by her bedside after a final two week long, strong and dignified fight; having had many years of gradually deteriorating health.

As a survivor of the Warlord Era of the then newly founded Republic of China, the Chinese Nationalist-Communist Civil War, Communist Collectivisation, numerous episodes of famine and lastly fleeing as refugees to the safe haven of British Hong Kong with my late maternal grandfather and then young children. She was the immovable rock to my maternal family and is survived by her son, my uncle; eldest daughter, my aunt; one grandson, myself; seven granddaughters and six great-grandchildren.

Dear DJ-ing friend Tracy can be such a moody bitch at times! ;) Put a smile (struggled to find a photo, sorry Traysay :P) back on her face by sponsoring her 10 kilometer run at Bristol’s Ashton Court Estate on the 30th of September to raise money for Cancer Research UK! She did after all bring the (girl-)sexy back and spins some mighty fine Minimal Techo & Tech House too boot! :P Sponsor her, you know you want to! :D

Ok, so here's the deal. The site does have a brand-spanking-new design done for it. I just need to find time to not only alter my site to have it, but also get around to porting my modified forums to phpBB3 and also do the new skin...

Boy, I'm going to be so busy...
Creator: NeoThermic

Having been using an Asus A7Jc since the last quarter of 2006 (having got rid of the old Samsung) and running Windows Vista since day one (pre-RC1 (build 5536), RC1 (build 5600), RC2 (build 5744) and now the released retail version (build 6000)), even the foresight of maxing out the “laptop” (as a 17″ widescreen tipping 4kg on the scales, it’s a desktop replacement really) to a generous 2 GiB of RAM, still isn’t quite enough considering how I abuse hardware via the dark art of multitasking. :P

As fully solid state drives are still extortionately expensive and/or don’t have the capacity of traditional magnetic platter harddrives, Vista allows the usage of compatible flash memory (like those used in USB thumbdrives or digital camera storage cards) to work alongside SuperFetch to improve system performance by using the flash memory to cache data that are typically small in size and would be randomly read from the harddisk.

Why is this? Whilst even the slow harddisk like those found in laptops would beat even the fastest commercial flash memory in sustained read and write speeds, flash memory access latency is typically 10 to 100 times faster by virtue of not having to wait from the data to come full circle on rotating platters, so when data is access is tonnes of random read/writes… flash memory has the upper hand.

For the average person using Vista, ReadyBoost is most obvious when enabled on systems with tiny physical RAM of under 1 GiB (Vista’s minimum requirement is 512 MiB) where the performance improvement approaches 50% faster! Systems with larger physical memories will see a sharper drop off in improvements less you happen to be one of those evil bastards (like me) that hammer a system close to or beyond available physical RAM.

So what about my experiences with ReadyBoost? Well, whilst I do have a thumbdrive and USB flash card reader… I really didn’t like the idea of having a system enhancement that dangled off a laptop (though by design, ReadyBoost will gracefully deactivate itself should the flash device fail and/or removed accidentally) so took advantage of the integrated SD/MMC/MS-PRO flash card reader where I could stick any one of the acceptable cards flush into the slot. ;)

Whilst the price differential between a 2 GiB and 4 GiB SD flash card was minimal, the recommended ratio between flash and real memory is 1:1. As I “only” have 2 GiB of physical RAM, I chose the former and in anycase, ReadyBoost actually compresses the cached data to a ratio of 2:1, so a 2 GiB will store roughly 4 GiB of data! Oh and the cache is encrypted with 128bit AES, which is as strong as the default encryption available with Vista’s EFS (per file/directory encryption) or BitLocker (full drive encryption), so wouldn’t have to worry about people snooping into one’s data should they get hold of said flash-cache.

After poking about on various online shops, I opted for a 2 GiB Transcend TS2GSD150 with superficially fit all the requirements for ReadyBoost. On receiving the goods and plugging it into the slot, Vista’s autoplay dialogue popped up and plumbed for the “Speed up my computer using Windows ReadyBoost” option.

Disappointingly, the tests came back saying the device was not up too the job, even with a few clicks in the properties tab to get Vista to retest the device. Figuring that the integrated card reader might be the bottle neck, I decided to full format the card using FAT32 and on checking the property pages, see that the card was now suitable for ReadyBoost! Wooh!

I can only guess that the default FAT16 formatted card was something that didn’t agree with ReadyBoost (formatting as just FAT will be FAT12 or FAT16. In any case, FAT32 is a more robust filesytem of the 3 and is the only way to make use of cards that are larger than 2 GiB, so this should always be the first choice for ReadyBoost.

Why not NTFS you ask? Whilst ReadyBoost does support Microsoft’s (as of Vista) transactional filesystem, it has too much overhead for such usage and is ill suited to the architecture of NAND flash anyway. In an ideal world, Microsoft would have added NAND specific filesystem support (akin the Opensourced JFFS2 or YAFFS) for ReadyBoost, eliminating the square-peg-round-hole situation as current.

Is the difference noticeable? So far, things look good… having let things cache for a while, one thing that annoyed me in Firefox when switching to Flash and/or AJAX laden pages if a 30-something second lag where the browser does jack-shit plus a lot of disk thrashing (not helped by the fact I have around 250 tabs open across 6 windows… parallel web-browsing at its finest!) are reduced to a mere couple of seconds and minimal disk thrashing! Wooh!

Even better though is for those of you guys and gals that are buying a cutting edge laptop this latter half of 2007 as ReadyBoost’s sister feature, ReadyDrive can be made use of by laptop featuring hybrid harddrives (traditional platter harddrive but with integrated NAND cache) or system platforms like Intel’s Santa Rosa with Robson technology without the need to attach dangly bits to one’s laptop and/or use up an integrated flash reader slot! :D

It was way back in the beginning of December 2003 with what was then phpBB 2.1 Milestone1, over the course of 4 and a bit years with the announcement on the 14th of January, 2005 by Paul “psoTFX” Owen (ex-Lead Developer) that phpBB 2.2 had evolved to become phpBB 3.0, and now… phpBB have reached yet another milestone, phpBB 3.0 Release Candidate 1, the very first version marking the end of the Beta phase and a sufficiently hardy release suitable for live installation!

phpBB’s Development Team Leader, Meik “Acyd Burn” Sievertsen, announced the release like so:

We are very pleased to announce the availability of the phpBB3 RC1 package. This is the first release candidate which is meant to become the Gold release if no more bugs or problems arise. Of course there may be more than one release candidate.

With this release we will give full support, allow uploading language packs as well as modifications and styles. Please note that during the first few weeks support questions may not be answered as fast as with the 2.0.x line. We also only give support to those having a clean RC1 installation, previous conversions or updates will not be supported. We encourage only those running the release candidate wanting to test out the new version, it is still recommended to wait for the full release; after all this is a release candidate.

Personally, I’m most excited about the fact this is the first public release which bundles the über-secret and outright über-sexy prosilver style for the user facing forums and the back-end ACP, which has had a tantelising “Development of” page over at phpBB.com since the site re-launch, where the only way to show how awesome it is short of printing screenshots out and wrapping ones naked body with them, is by the way of a good old fashioned Photogasm™!:

Those of you now bursting for some relief of sexual tension, can head over to the download page and test drive (or indeed start a brand new community!) using the phpBB 3.0 Release Candidate 1 package! ;)

For statistics spunky-monkeys, some more goodies for you to peruse:

• Bug statistics for the timeframe between Beta5 and Release Candidate 1
• Bug statistics since the opening of the bug tracker for phpBB 3.0.x

Summit of Olympus Mons is in sight… onwards phpBB 3.0.0! :D

In order to allow my female stag beetle to lay eggs, I went to beetle shop yesterday to purchase a few items to set up a new living environment for them.

1. Have all the items ready: plastic container with lid, breeding wood, special bettle fine mat, high protein jelly and the bettles (of course)
   
2. Lay a layer of fine mat on the botton of the container
   
3. Press the mat hard to exclude air pockets
   
4. Soak the breeding wood with water for 10 minutes and put it at the center of the container
   
5. Pour more fine mat into the container to cover at least 2/3 of the breeding wood. Put in jellies and bettles
   
6. Done!
   

This is a game rated 9.0 on GameSpot.

Because the EVIDENCE game I wrote about before is too hard to crack, I've given up after I reached level 5 and stucked on the last puzzle on that level, SESM.

Now, COH seems a very intersting real-time strategy game. But, too bad I wasn't able to enjoy the game to its maximum as my PC isn't good enough to enable all the nice graphic touches. Still, I'm going to try it. If anyone is looking for a walkthrough for COH, here it is. I'm currently on MISSION 03: Carentan.

Product Description
Company of Heroes is a WWII Real Time Strategy game that brings to life the journey of the brave men of Able Company as they fight across Europe in the greatest war mankind has ever known.

From the opening shots of the D-Day invasion of Normandy players will find themselves immersed in a rich single player campaign. Experience the cinematic intensity, courage, and bravery of the heroes that defined a generation, set against the backdrop of the most dynamic battlefield ever seen in a game.

* Essence Engine - Relic's next generation cutting-edge engine provides graphics quality and a physics driven world that is unprecedented in an RTS.
* Environmental Strategy - Real-time physics and a completely destructible environment guarantee no two battles ever play out in the same way. Destroy anything and re-shape the battlefield in your image! Use buildings and terrain to your advantage, or deny them to the enemy.
* Living Soldiers - Advanced squad AI brings your soldiers to life as they interact with their changing environment, take cover, and execute advanced squad tactics to eliminate all enemy opposition.
* 2-8 players MP competition via Lan or Internet - Go online with friends and join in the ultimate battle of Axis versus Allies.

MISSION 01: D-Day/Omaha Beach
MISSION 02: Vierville
MISSION 03: Carentan
MISSION 04: Carentan Counterattack
MISSION 05: Montebourg (Red Ball Express)
MISSION 06: Cherbourg
MISSION 07: Sottevast
MISSION 08: St. Fromond
MISSION 09: Hill 192
MISSION 10: St. Lô
MISSION 11: Hébécrevon
MISSION 12: Mortain
MISSION 13: Mortain Counterattack
MISSION 14: Autry
MISSION 15: Chambois

My mom bought a bread=making machine a few days ago. It's an amazing machine, to make a loft of bread, all she needs to do now is weight the ingredients, put everything into the machine, push a few buttons and wait for 2 ~ 3 hours. The end result:

Bottom left image: www.mothernatureking.com

After Matthew Lien's concert yesterday afternoon, I went to 光華商場 to get my EIZO panel protector ordered two days ago. Price: NT$3600, Cost: NT$3450

Front packaging

Back packaging

Before

After

At the same time, because my parents are complaining the typing sound is too loud, hence I also purchased a new keyboard, WINTEK ACK-230. Price: NT$455

New keyboard on top, old one at the bottom