Design Idea

Perhaps the craziest of the time travel paradoxes was cooked up by Robert Heinlein in his classic short story “All You Zombies.”

A baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. “Jane” grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She falls in love with him. But just when things are finally looking up for Jane, a series of disasters strike. First, she becomes pregnant by the drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery, doctors find that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her life, they are forced to surgically convert “her” to a “him.” Finally, a mysterious stranger kidnaps her baby from the delivery room.

Reeling from these disasters, rejected by society, scorned by fate, “he” becomes a drunkard and drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970, he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop’s Place, and spills out his pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and abandoned, on the condition that he join the “time travelers corps.” Both of them enter a time machine, and the bartender drops off the drifter in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan woman, who subsequently becomes pregnant.

The bartender then goes forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops off the baby in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time travelers corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together, becomes a respected and elderly member of the time travelers corps, and then disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop’s Place in 1970.

The question is: Who is Jane’s mother, father, grandfather, grand mother, son, daughter, granddaughter, and grandson? The girl, the drifter, and the bartender, of course, are all the same person. These paradoxes can made your head spin, especially if you try to untangle Jane’s twisted parentage. If we drawJane’s family tree, we find that all the branches are curled inward back on themselves, as in a circle. We come to the astonishing conclusion that she is her own mother and father! She is an entire family tree unto herself.

Courtesy:  Suprbay

Heres a trick to disable yahoo messenger version 9.0 ads.

I did not check for other versions. Guess it should work for other versions too.

1. Start -> Run -> Registry Editor (regedit.exe).
2. Navigate or find the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Yahoo\pager\Locale
3. In the right pane, locate a value named Enable Messenger Ad with default value as 1. Set the value to 0.
4. Restart Yahoo! Messenger 9.0.

Thats it. Enjoy Ad free messaging with Yahoo Messenger.

If you’ve been using BitTorrent to download any of the more popular files, such as the latest episode of some major TV show, you may have found yourself receiving lots of “Wasted” data. This is data that has been discarded after being deemed corrupt or invalid by your BitTorrent client. Every so often, you will have received more wasted data than the size of the files you are downloading!
This is happening because Anti-P2P organizations are actively polluting P2P networks with fake peers, which send out fake or corrupt data in order to waste bandwidth and slow down file transfers. At its worst, when downloading major copyrighted torrents, as much as a fourth of the peers you are connected to can be attributed to various Anti-P2P agencies. There is also a much more serious side to this. Once you’ve established a connection to one of these fake “peers”, your IP has been logged and will most likely be sent to the RIAA/MPAA!

But there is a way to fight back! If you are using the latest µTorrent (1.5), you can employ a little known feature called IP filtering. The author of µTorrent has gone out of his way to hide it, but it’s there nonetheless.

But before we can activate this filter, we need to retrieve a list of currently known Anti-P2P organization IPs.

This is most easily done by downloading the latest blacklist from Bluetack (the same people who wrote SafePeer for the Azureus BT client) at http://www.bluetack.co.uk/config/nipfilter.dat.gz This list is updated daily, and contains all known Anti-P2P organizations, trackers and peers, aswell as all known Goverment/Military IP addresses as collected by the Bluetack team. Once downloaded, extract and rename the file original filename “ipfilter.dat” to “ipfilter.dat” in preparation for the final step.
EDIT ADD: FOR EVEN HIGHER SECURITY

Paranoid pipfilter.dat.gz

Description: This list is all the blacklists bluetack makes put into a .dat.gz file for emule, now this will block some isp and also alot of things one may not think needed. Use at your own risk. This will have to be unzipped and then replace the .dat file manualy, in the config folder.

Version: Filesize: 0 bytes

Added on: 29-Apr-2005 Downloads: 39034

Download 1

rename to “ipfilter.dat”

security related:

Download 2

To make the list available to µTorrent, you need to place the renamed ipfilter.dat file in %AppData%\uTorrent. Go to Start -> Run and type %AppData%\uTorrent at the box. Click Ok button and a folder will appear.

After placing the ipfilter.dat in this folder, start µTorrent and go into preferences (Ctrl+P), then click on “Advanced”. In the right hand pane, make sure that “ipfilter.enable” is set to true, and then close the dialog. That’s it for the configuration.

You can verify that the list has been loaded by looking under the “Logging” tab of µTorrent, where you should see the line “Loaded ipfilter.dat (X entries)”.

Congratulations! You are now protected against most of the garbage-distributing peers; and the likelyhood of the RIAA or MPAA knocking at your door has been substantially reduced! I’d go as far as to say that you shouldn’t be using µTorrent at all without this feature turned on! And even if the law enforcement side of it doesn’t bother you, you should still be interested in reducing the amount of garbage data that gets sent your way, which in turn leads to quicker downloads, and isn’t that something everybody should strive for?

Note: It’s advised that you update the list at least once a month, to keep you updated on the movement of the Anti-P2P organizations. One tool that will aid you getting these updates is the “Blocklist Manager” from the same people who made the list; go to http://www.bluetack.co.uk/ and download it. On a related note, this note from the µTorrent FAQ should come in handy: “To reload ipfilter.dat without restarting µTorrent, simply open the preferences (ctrl+p), and press enter to close it again.”

Microsoft will release the first beta of Internet Explorer 8 in the first half of 2008 that will have full support for web standards. And the new browser will be known as “Windows Internet Explorer 8″.

Website designers will be able to write websites based on standards, insert a flag that tells IE to render in IE8 standards mode, and IE will then switch its rendering engine to use this new mode.

Thus IE8 won’t break the layout of existing websites coded for previous versions of IE (IE7 or IE6, for example). They’ll behave in exactly the same way in IE8 unless website designers opt-in to IE8 standards mode by placing a simple tag at the head of their HTML document.

It is not immediately clear if Windows IE8 will be available for Windows 2000 and XP versions.

Recently users of Fastelco have been facing unusual events of logging into other accounts apart from theirs.

It had been reported that users are facing problems with GMail, Facebook, 248am.com

Some discussions can be found at 248am Forum

DNS Cache Poisoning might be a possible scenario at Fastelco.

More information on DNS Cache Poisoning can be found at

DNS Cache Poisoning - Wikipedia

Theres an easy way to get the PDF passwords cracked without use of any costly software in windows like PDF cracker where you got to pay for that $hit.

Even if you got torrents, its still not worth a shot.

Crack PDF passwords with Ubuntu 7.10

Go to console and type the following commands:

$ pdftops protected.pdf out.ps
$ pstopdf out.ps out.pdf

Where,

protected.pdf is the protected PDF file

out.ps is an intermediate output of the protected PDF file

out.pdf is the final cracked PDF file

Thats it for the day. More hacks to come.

Highslide JS is a cool JS by Torstein HΦnsi.

Later about Torstein, lets get to Highslide JS.

Necessity/Problem/Requirement:

You got thumbnails (sometimes loads of them) and want users to check out the larger versions of them, without reloading the page and also dont want something like Lightbox

You got to display an HTML link (eg. login page), Scrolling HTML content, AJAX content (Dynamic), Content in IFrame, or to Display Flash, either as a group display as gallery show or individually, Highslide JS is for you.

Compatibility:

Its compatible with all major browsers and falls back gracefully with older versions like IE 4.0 or Netscape 4.79.

Installation:

Its just a walk through. Any novice web developer or otherwise could easily figure it out.

Documentation:
There is very nice put documentation for Highslide JS.

Support Forum:

A cool and active support forum with active involvement of the author makes it one of the very supportive forums for Highslide JS.

Get any issues with Highslide, the forum is where you gotta go.

Forum

License:

Creative Commons License Highslide JS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 2.5 License. This means you need the author’s permission to use Highslide JS on commercial websites.

Download:

You have configurator to exactly get what you want out of Highslide JS

Download it NOW !!

1. The 3 month wait between updates, when I get a site done in 2 weeks!
2. Higher Pagerank means more backlinks, that doesn’t make the site any better design and functionality wise.
3. Did you ever play any games Playstation, Wii, sometime or the other you cheat. Damn! Google doesn’t allow you to cheat. You get penalized buying backlinks.
4. t is based only on backlinks rather than traffic, it should be a mix of both, it could be a very popular site that no-one links to.
5. People with high PR sites make a lot of money selling links, but people who have good ethics can’t make any cash from it, it is just a title.
6. It is so unorganized, peoples PR drops to zero overnight for the whole damn sake of that we got to suffer the DANCE of Google.
7. High PR sites are suckers to the core mostly. It’s expensive and what the heck it doesn’t make life any better.
8. It will NEVER die! It’s like those college gang violence “It will never die, just mulitply”
9. People spend hundreds of dinars every month just to get to PR3 which will get them nothing but “stature” and a title, it is just insane!
10. It is run by Google. Google have enough things corrupting webmasters minds (SERPS, Adsense etc.) they should just kill PageRank so we can stop spending money on worthless backlinks!

These points are mentioned solely for fun. It’s also some experience which web-designers experience in their day to day job.

Any familiarity of the below mentioned points to anyone/events/incidents is purely coincidental

1. During the initial meeting, tell the designer that you need all the functionalities of Facebook, with YouTube video features, should have gadgets like in Yahoo and as simple as Google. Of course your budget is limited and you need the quotation within 2 days.
2. When you receive the quotation, you write an email, saying that, your friend’s brother’s friend can do that for 1/3^rd the price freelance.
3. After your web-designer presents you mock designs, tell him that you like the first design but it’s not quite what you want and when he asks what would be your like, tell I don’t have any suggestions. When he’s done with the improved design ask him for another 10 changes and then after completion, brag him that all this is really crazy, the second design is good enough for you after all the mess he had made with the first.
4. Call your designer every 5 min and tell him that you could not see the changes you requested on the testing server. Even after repeated requests from your designer to refresh your cache, you call him and lose your temper that the designer is trying to fool you by saying it’s done.
5. You promised to give the content in electronic format the next day after the quotation approval date. You don’t talk about the content for another 45 days and then call the designer to ask if the site is done.
6. When the designer calls for the content, you tell your secretary to pick up the phone and tell him you are busy in a meeting. This continues till the designer gives up for 45 days, if he plans to call.
7. You tell you will provide hosting in the contract and when the site is done, you show a server which doesn’t have a Web Server application, Database and Application language. You continue to argue with the designer, that hosting means providing a computer (hardware only). It’s the headache of the designer to install and configure web server, database and application technology. You are paranoid about security.
8. You insist that there will be no remote/FTP access to update the content, if you ask for any, sometime later. Your office is 50 KM away from designer’s firm and even for a word change the designer needs to come to your place, take appointment with the IT Manager and then have his ID checked thoroughly, go through a security check and then update the content. Company Policies you see.
9. Call the designer that the site is NOT FUNCTIONING in Antarctica, where your boss is on a vacation. Ask the designer why the heck it is not working in Antarctica and remind him that you have paid a HUGE amount for the site and also remind him about your friend’s brother’s friend who’s still giving a 1/3^rd rate proposal.
10. Delay the payment by telling that your boss is on a vacation in Antarctica and he needs to sign the check to release the payment.

Websites are like people on the Internet.

A website represents an identity which speaks out loud to the whole world and says who it is.

It is also considered like your best friend who speaks on behalf of you, on the internet to other people in the real world.

People interact with people to do a lot of things. Example, convey messages, talk, do business, have fun, play, organize, plan etc.

Some of these people got pets on the Internet called Websites. These websites talk to other people all over the REAL world. So, instead of people interacting with people alone, now anyone can interact with the whole world, SIMULTANEOUSLY at a single moment using a website.

Now that sounds tremendous.  

Does it mean that a website can act like a salesman who can talk to the whole world at the same time about your business?

Or like your personal PR agent who gets your publicity, not only to the local region but to the whole world.

Oh! Yes, you are right.

It’s a good idea to have a website in this present time, as the world is getting increasingly globalized (what I mean to say is, you get a American product in a tribe in Africa. How? Now that’s globalization)

Websites are easily accessed by anyone who has a computer connected to the internet.  As of September 30, 2007, 1.244 billion people use the Internet according to Internet World Stats.

That’s huge lot of people.

Will be writing series of articles in understanding websites, their role, benefits, design, costs and other issues.

Part 1 Series would be broken down as follows:

1. Whats the big deal about websites?
2. Can I have a Website?
3. What are the benefits of having a website?
4. How much will it cost me to have a website?

Peace ~

The debate of comparing PHP to ASP needs to be understood from the ancient times of the internet evolution.

HTML, the fundamental building block of the internet, remains largely unchanged since the first browsers.

Back end programming, however, has been experiencing growing pains since CGI was introduced. Traditionally, web pages were given added functionality via CGI, programs typically written using traditional programming languages such as C or Pascal, or Unix shell scripts. One of them was Perl, which was quite famous among the web-developers.

Perl remained the mainstream solution to web backend programming for several years until 1996, when Microsoft introduced a product known as Denali, which used the VBScript language in an attempt to attract web developers yearning for a simpler alternative to Perl and C. In late 1996, Microsoft renamed Denali as ASP 3.0 and released it to the public bundled into IIS at no charge.

The concept caught on, and ASP quickly grew to become one of the most popular web development languages, partly due to the Microsoft marketing machine, and also due to the timely release of a much desired concept; inline code, coupled with a simpler language, provided the right conditions for a multitude of up-and-coming web developers to jump on the bandwagon.

1996 proved a pivotal year for back-end web development as a new web language called PHP was gaining popularity. PHP is a recursive acronym for PHP Hypertext Processor, originally started in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf as a Perl wrapper to simplfy his back-end programming. By the end of 1996, PHP was in use by 15,000 pages. In 1997 PHP3 - the first widely-used version of PHP - was released, growing explosively to being used on over one million sites by the time PHP 4 was released in April, 2000. PHP’s rapid growth signifies a marked change in the direction of web development, a paradigm shift from awkward and time-consuming back ends of Perl through kludgy ASP and now to streamlined PHP.

PHP draws it’s strengths from C and from Perl; the language is simple and easy to understand. PHP’s simple structure allows beginners to easily pick up the language while advanced tasks, such as file uploads, graphics manipulation and database connectivity are easily within reach of the beginner. PHP’s vast power and unsurpassed functionality is derived from the huge storehouse of built-in extensions that are bundled with each PHP installation, offering far more functionality than could ever be desired by the most wanting developer.

Advantages – Disadvantages

PHP: PHP is an object oriented language + Scripting language
ASP: Scripting only language

PHP: Cross Platform + Open Source + Support for Major Oss + Functions with Major Web Servers
ASP: Windows Based + Expensive + No support for other OSs + Functions with only IIS

PHP: Easily extendable with many extensions (eg. Simple capabilities, such as FTP, data compression, file uploads, XML, MD5, encryption and email)
ASP: One has to pay for 3^rd party extensions.

PHP: Complex functions such as dynamic images, IMAP, SNMP, dynamic flash, PDF, native access (non ODBC) to Oracle, Ovrimos, Postgre, Sybase, mSql, MSSQL, Ingres, Interbase and Informix databases, LDAP, and sockets, just to name a few, are available for free to any installation of PHP
ASP: These functions are not available with ASP (and probably never will be) available with ASP.

PHP: PHP is a more mature language than ASP. PHP has been around since 1994
ASP: ASP has only been around since 1996

PHP: PHP has a huge base of developers working on it every waking minute of every day; bugs are usually fixed within minutes of being reported and new features are being integrated daily.
ASP: Bugs take eternity to get fixed or probably unless you are a big company, your bug report is considered lost in space.

PHP: Primarily, PHP runs on notoriously fast Unix and Linux servers which have for years outpaced Windows running on comparable hardware.
ASP: ASP is significantly slower than PHP, for obvious reasons. ASP does not run on any operating system other than Windows, and even then, only in IIS and PWS. I could discuss countless reasons why IIS makes a terrible web server.

PHP: MySQL is a database that PHP closely integrates with; it is a very powerful database that rivals Oracle in speed. Like PHP, MySQL is FREE, and blows most other databases out of the water.
ASP: ASP natively supports mostly Access and MSSQL easily. Microsoft expects you to develop using Access and when your webpage outgrows it, to switch to MSSQL, an extremely expensive option. What most people don’t realize is how quickly you can outgrow Access. Although you’re technically limited to around 30 simultaneous connections, realistically it’s closer to 5. Not many websites can survive such limitations. Most moderately sized websites require over 1000 simultaneous database connections. In addition, Access is SLOW. And you forego a lot of cool database functionality such as stability, transactions, replication, stored procedures, triggers, and so on. There are so many reasons not to use Access, I can’t even begin to elaborate on them here.

PHP: While even the best software has glitches, PHP has surprisingly few. The PHP development team has an outstanding reputation for fixing bugs, and in order to streamline the process they even have an online system through which new bug reports can be submitted. Most bugs are resolved within 24 hours
ASP: There are a huge number of outstanding bugs in ASP which will probably never be fixed. Unless you’re a major corporation, chances are that your bug report to Microsoft will likely go unanswered.

And finally, PHP is free; ASP isn’t. The cost of running an ASP-based website implies a full Windows server platform; development costs are higher, software licenses are expensive and, speed, security and flexibility are all sacrificed.

There’s a reason that UNIX and Linux are dominant in the server market; cost-effective, security and performance leaves nothing for a debate.

I am glad to announce that kuwaitwebsitedesign.com has been launched on 9th of Dec, 2007.

This would accelerate our efforts in delivering some quality code and also would give a thrust to momentum of our motivational levels.

Hope to set higher levels atleast for sometime until we break them again.

Before we get into a debate about Fixed Vs Liquid, lets get to know some definitions.

Definitions:

Fixed width layout: A fixed design is one that has a specific width and does not scale to fit the browser window. Fixed width sites can be aligned to the left, centered or occasionally aligned to the right.

Liquid Layout: A liquid design (also referred to as a fluid or dynamic design) fills the entire browser window by using percentages rather than pixel values to define the width.

Hybrid Layout: A Hybrid approach uses both fixed and liquid elements. Take for example a three-column layout where the left and right columns might have a fixed width while the central column scales to fill the intervening space. This central column would expand and contract as you resize the browser, or when viewed at different screen resolution.

Pros and Cons:

As many things in life, each approach has gradually evolved on its own and traditionally each of the above approaches has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages – Fixed Width:

1. A fixed design gives the designer significantly more control, in that he or she has fixed space to work with.
2. Text line lengths are easy to control as are the placement of text and images.
3.  Allow images to be placed exactly in relation to other elements and type sizes
4. Allows for predictable default printing behavior

Disadvantages – Fixed Width:

1. May create a type size that is not optimal
2. Takes control over page size and text size away from the user.
3.  Doesn’t take advantage of screen resolutions and may produce large unused portions of window space that could potentially increase the amount of scrolling users have to do (this is especially true at higher resolutions) and gives an impression that the design is floating on the screen or that it appears dwarfed by the browser window.

Advantages – Liquid Layout:

1. Allows for maximum use of space or screen real-estate. Also allows the most control over sizing by the user, because a user can resize the website to their preferences.
2. Allows text size to be changeable by user preferences, making it easy for people with vision problems to increase or decrease the text size on the page while the layout adjusts around the increased size automatically.
3. When designed correctly, it sets your website look slightly apart from competitors, considering most websites use a fixed layout.

Disadvantages – Liquid Layout:

1. If the screen-size becomes too large or too small it can produce unreadable text, or hard to read/scan line lengths
2. Can cause problems with default page printing. (A separate print style sheet can be used allowing for perfect printing from any page despite a liquid layout, but if a separate style sheet for printing is not provided this con is valid)
3. As the website size changes, the image size to text proportion may create a less desirable look.

Recommendations and Analysis

Most websites should probably be designed with a fixed or “semi” fixed layout. It guarantees readability and controllable presentation of content. With that said, if your website contains a large amount of text based content (more then 3-5 paragraphs per page) or if the website would greatly benefit from a non-standard design scheme use liquid.

If you’re still not sure, choose fixed. A fixed layout is easy to maintain, and assures readability by all users and is easier for a web designer to code perfectly. A poorly done liquid layout will cause more problems then it will fix and annoy potential users.

In many cases, a hybrid approach works best. This is where the majority of the design is actually fixed but the design visually tricks the user into thinking that it fills the whole screen by having background elements scale. Take for example the page you are reading now. Although there is a fixed reading area, the blue fade in the background helps to give the illusion that the design scales.