Snippet IT » New and Happening

100th Posts For Snippet IT

szehau — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:53:55 +0000

Finally, this blog has reached 100 posts! Yeah!

It really takes a long time for me to do this because I'm not blogging this site full timely. Second, sometime I'm just out of idea what to blog.

I will try work harder to share more information on programming and anything related to information technology in this new year. Thanks for reading!

Happy Holidays from your Google team!

szehau — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:40:20 +0000

I just got a greeting card from Google Team. Do you have one?

The email entitles "Happy Holidays from your Google team!". Opps... when do I have a Google Team that works for me? Ha ha.

Anyway thank you Google! Happy Holiday too.

Google Wave Invitation Giveaway

szehau — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:20:12 +0000

I got my free Google Wave invitation from LiewCf, thanks for the invitation! Ok, now is my turn to give you guys, my blog readers, the free invitations.

First impression to Google Wave

To me, Google Wave is like a chatting program (e.g. MSN) where a few people can have collaboration in a channel (the Wave). Everything can be happened in real time (e.g. the message you type) and everyone in the Wave can see the chances in real time (almost). And it is also like a social website (e.g. Facebook) too where you can put in applications (Gadgets) and use it within a group of people.

How to Get a Free Google Wave Invitation?

It's very simple. All you need to do is to leave a comment in this post (with your email address) and state that you want to have a free Google Wave Invitation.

You will not need to do anything else in order to get the invitation but it would be appreciated, if you could subscribe to my blog feed. Thanks.

Be hurry, I only have 8 invitations in total. First come first served.

Invitations left: 1

Note: It may take some time to get the invitation arrive to you inbox (as according to Google Wave).

Wordpress: Catch A Spam Comment With Statcounter

szehau — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:21:59 +0000

Sometime your Wordpress' anti spam software (e.g. Akismet) may not able to stop all the comment spam because the comment looks too real to it and to human too. In this case, you will need to identify the comment whether it is actually a real comment or it is automatically submitted by software.

Someone who made a comment must have visited your site. That's it, if he or she has not visited your site but his or her comment is posted on one of your post. Then it is very high possibility that the comment is a spam comment.

How do you ensure someone who left a comment on your blog actually visited your site? The best way to do it is by looking at the IP address where the computer submitted the comment.

In Wordpress, when someone has made a comment, his computer's IP address is recorded. With the IP address, you can check the IP address against the IP address recorded in your website's stats counter.

One of the stats counter software that allows you to look up an IP address is Statcounter. After you have logged in into Statcounter, select your blog website's statistic and then click on the "Look Up IP address" link on the left.

Key in the IP address where your Wordpress comment entry came from and click "Search!". If an entry is matched, that means he or she who submitted the comment has actually visited your website before.

Google Chromium OS

szehau — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:29:16 +0000

Google Chromium OS or Chrome OS is an open source project created by Google that aims to build an operating system that provide fast, simple and more secure computing experience. The new OS is target for people who spend most of their time on the web.

The following videos explain in detailed what Chrome OS is:

What is Google Chrome OS?

Chrome OS Security

Chromium OS & Open Source

Chromium OS Fast Boot

The basic architecture of Google Chromium OS is pretty simple. Instead of loading all the stuffs by ordinary operating systems (like drivers, detecting hardware, kernel and etc.), the computer that runs Chromium OS directly load the necessary softwares (in this case, the Chrome browser and other multimedia stuffs) and does not need to load other inessential stuffs.

It is pretty interesting to go through how why Google builds up the Chromium OS. Although the project is still in very early stage, you can get involve in the project or to download the source code to have a test run. You can join them at the Chromium Projects website for Chromium OS.

Chrome OS will be available for consumers around end of next year. If you can't wait for the final release of Chrome OS, you can download Chrome OS VMWare/VirtualBox image and run it as virtual machine on top of your current operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux).

Download it at your own risk because it is still in early development stage. However it should not have much risk since everything will be running in a virtual enviroment.

Stay updated with Google Chromium by visiting The Google Official Blog and The Chromium Projects website.

PayPal: Withdraw PayPal Money to Malaysia Bank Account

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:05:41 +0000

Good news to all Malaysian who has PayPal account! You can now withdraw you PayPal account to you local bank account in Malaysia.

Previously, Malaysians can only withdraw their money using debit card and the withdrawal is quite high too. In order to lose less than 1% of total money withdrawn, you need to withdraw at least USD100 to minimize the loses in transaction fee.

PayPal now offers better option to Malaysians. You can now withdraw your money for a withdrawal fee of RM3 for amount RM40 (minimum withdrawal) to RM400. Withdrawal fee for amount of more than RM400 is free!

To add a Malaysia bank account to your PayPal account, login into your PayPal account, click Profile > Add/Edit Bank Account. Fill in you name, bank name, MEPS bank routing code, bank account number, re-enter bank account number and click continue for confirmation.

If you are not sure what is the MEPS bank routing number for your bank, simply click on the Details link next to the MEPS bank routing code text field, a list of major banks' routing code in Malaysia will be shown.

Develope a Mortgage Calculator and Win Up to $10000

szehau — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:37:29 +0000

If you are a programmer, a creative programmer, I have a good news for you. Mortgage Loan Place is having a programming contest - The "Super Sexy" Mortgage Calculator Contest. You can have a chance to win $10,000 of extra pocket money by developing a mortgage calculator. The winner's calculator will become the centerpiece of the tools section on Mortgage Loan Place.

What you need to do in this contest is to develop the best mortgage calculator on the Internet creatively. Your mortgage calculator should contain a minimum amount of functionality like taking the principal, interest, taxes and insurance as the main inputs and showing the monthly payment as the output. You can write your program in PHP, Java (I think they mean the Java language used in Javascript) and Ajax. The basic requirements are pretty simple to implement. To stand out in this contest, your program must be bug-free and you should also add in more features and functions especially on the presentation layer (on what kind of data you are going to present and how you present it).

I had developed a mortgage calculator but I think my program (a Java Applet) is too simple and it is not qualfied to enter the contest because it only helps in finding the mortgage monthly payment. Am I going to enter the contest? I think I don't have the time for now as I still have a lot of programming works on hand. Well I do have some ideas and I don't mind to share with you here.

If I'm the user of the calculator, what kind features will I look? Other than showing the mortgage payment, I think the calculator should be able:

to generate a table that shows different mortgage payments at different rates for the terms (and export it to an Excel file).
to generate a table or graph that shows the total money I will need pay for the loan after the loan term (and export it to an Excel file).
to reverse some calculations. For example, to calculate the loan term if I'm able to pay $X of mortgage payment each month with Y% of interest rate and the principal of $Y (and also generate a table for the output, for example: loan term versus $X-20%, $X-10%, $X, $X+10% and $X+20).

If you are not really sure how to calculate the mortgage payments or you want to add more features to your mortgage calculator, here are some useful materials from Mortgage Loan Place for your reference:

Video About The "Super Sexy" Mortgage Calculator Contest

The challenge runs from June 15th to July 31st, 2009. So hurry up and submit your very own, sexiest calculator!

Read more about Mortgage Calculator Contest.

Wordpress: 2.8.1

szehau — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:59:05 +0000

Wordpress 2.8.1 is now available for download. The main changes in Wordpress 2.8.1 is mainly to tightens security for plugin administration pages and also to fix many other bugs.

The upgrade is not a compulsory and it is recommended as some admin pages added by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users, resulting in information being leaked.

Below are some of the highlights:

Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.

Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.

The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.

A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.

Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.

Translation of role names fixed.

wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.

Upload error messages are now correctly reported.

Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.

Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.

SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.

Switched back to curl as the default transport.

Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.

Stricter inline style sanitization.

Stricter menu security.

Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.

RTL layout fixes.

Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
Translation of role names fixed.
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
Switched back to curl as the default transport.
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
Stricter inline style sanitization.
Stricter menu security.
Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
RTL layout fixes.

To start upgrade, simply click on the upgrade link on top of the admin page after you have logged in as an administrator. If you don't see the link, you can kick start the upgrade by clicking the "Tools -> Upgrader on your left side bar of admin page.

Gmail: Drag and Drop, Hiding and More

szehau — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:53:37 +0000

Gmail developers make more enhancement to the Gmail labeling. Previously, Gmail has the new label menu added with shortcut keys, now it comes with drag and drop, hiding and more features.

New location for labels

The new labels are now located at your left sidebar (or on the right, for those of you using the Arabic, Hebrew, or Urdu versions of Gmail). The labels are grouped together with other system labels such as inbox and spam.

Label hiding and showing

Instead of showing a long list of labels (if you have a long long list as what I have), Gmail now show only a few labels and you can access to the rest by click the more link.

You may have named your label ++somthing to make it on top previously. Now the control is on yours. You can simple drag and drop to reorder the labels.

Drag and Drop

This is the coolest feature I like the most. You can now drap messages and drop to label or drag label and drop to messages. Drag and drop messages to label is just like using the "Move to" label function. While drag and drop label to messages is just like using the "Label" message function.

WordPress: Version 2.8

szehau — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:02:46 +0000

WordPress.org has released its latest WordPress Version 2.8, named for noted trumpeter and vocalist "Chet Baker". WordPress Version 2.8 is now available for download.

WordPress Version 2.8 has some noticeable improvement to its to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. Besides, it is now much more easier to use than the previous versions.

Like the plugin's auto-installation feature in Version 2.7, you can now install WordPress themes with clicks in the Admin panel itself. You can browse, preview and then install the theme you like right from your blog admin panel.

The widget interface was completely redesigned to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings.

Here’s a quick video overview of everything in the new release:

Other WordPress Version 2.8 Highlights

New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

Read more at WordPress Blog and WordPress Codex about Version 2.8.

You can download WordPress Version 2.8 and install/upgrade your existing WordPress blog or you can use the automatic upgrade feature in WordPress itself (for Version 2.7).

Make sure you have backup your WordPress directory and WordPress database before doing the upgrade.

Wolfram|Alpha: A Computational Knowledge Engine

szehau — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:45:42 +0000

Wolfram|Alpha is a computational knowledge engine. Unlike regular search engines (Google, Yahoo and Live) which return a list of relevant websites on queries, Wolfram|Alpha processes the queries to return an actual answer.

For example, key in "Who is Bill Gates?" in Wolfram|Alpha, instead of returning a list of relevant websites, it will tell you that Bill Gates is a business person, his date of birth is 28/10/1955 and place of birth is Seattle, Washington, United States.

You can also key in a mathematical formula, for example " 200 + y = 300", and it will find the solutions for you.

Wolfram|Alpha's creator, Stephen Wolfram, described the search engine as "a new paradigm for using the computer and the web". Wolfram|Alpha is a long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and a growing collection of data to compute the answer.

Visit Wolfram|Alpha.

Bing: A New Search Engine from Microsoft

Bing: A New Search Engine from Microsoft

admin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:05:34 +0000

Bing or the "Google Killer" as said by some of the bloggers is a new powerful search engine from Microsoft. The search engine is still under beta testing but is running live as beta.

Bing was set to go live by tomorrow (3rd June). Microsoft’s Bing has replaced its old search engine Live and later this year they announced to launch ‘Kumo’ the internal code name of Bing Search Engine.

This blog rarely receives traffics from Microsoft's Live search engine but it starts to receive some traffics from Bing website this few days. Hopefully this will be good news for most webmasters that the Bing may bring more relevant traffics to their websites.

Windows Live Messenger: Beware of Unsolicited Messages Sent From Your Friends’ Live Account

szehau — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:49:01 +0000

Recently (Starting from the beginning of the year), I received quite a lot of messages with links from my friends' Live account on Windows Live Messenger. The messages were sent by my friends' intention and some of the messages were sent as offline messages.

As discover by a few other bloggers (LiewCf and CyberHQ), the links in the messages will redirect you to a MSN phishing site and ask you to key your Live account's username and password. The phishing site tries to trick you by showing you "your images" that have been uploaded to Live website if you login into your Live account.

The person's PC which sent you the unsolicited messages might have infected by virus or spyware. Among my friends who sent me the unsolicited messages, some of them are IT professionals. They are not aware what had happened to their PC. Some of them even do not install antivirus software on their PC and some of their antivirus software's virus definition database is not up-to-date!

Here is a list of the messages that I have received from my friends:

Phishing site - hxxp://CooolStufff.com
Phishing site - hxxp://PictureHostz.com/?user=msn_user_name&image=DSC00684.JPG ?!? ... HAHAHA!!
Phishing site - hxxp://SweeetOfferz.com
Phishing site - hxxp://Just.LikeItSoMuch.com
Phishing site - hxxp://PicBuckets.com/?user=msn_user_name&pic=DSC01425.JPG (A)
Phishing site - hxxp://img78294.PhotoBukkets.com/?user=msn_user_name&pic=DSC00425.JPG
Phishing site - hxxp://thats.nicestufff.com
Phishing site - hxxp://yeah.checkthizz.com/?msn_user_name
Phishing site - hxxp://my.greatestpicz.com/?msn_user_name
Phishing site - hxxp://ImageTalez.com/?user=msn_user_name&image=DSC00245.JPG ?!? ... HAHAHA!!
Phishing site - hxxp://img168.ImageStickz.com/?user=msn_user_name&image=DSC00678.JPG ?!? ... HAHAHA!!
Virus site - damn, saw naked pics of yours or maybe the one in pic is similar to you .... crazy lol hxxp://my-secret-gallery-download.com/pic_gallery.html
Spam message - I am done trying all the different fat burner pills out there. I finally found one pill that forces your body to drop a lot of weight very quickly. Its called Acai, costs just 5 dolars and I always order from hxxp://ridelock.com
Spam message - do u send me "Ever since Derek and I seen those Acai pills on Cnn and Oprah we have been taking them and losing so much weight so fast with no diets or excercise , we are living proof that it works like magic and they are only five dollars now to try from hxxp://dotedote.com"?
Spam message - Did you see the Acai Berry pills on Oprah the other day. I found a good source for 5 dollars. They really do work because I lost 6 pounds in a week. Try it too hxxp://tealrears.com
Spam message - I got so many messages about those acai berry pills that I decided to order them and guess what? I lost 23 pounds so far and its only been two weeks. I am living proof that they work and best part was, they only cost me five dollars to try over at hxxp://greatcan.com
Spam message - A word of advice from a friend here, I ordered those acai pills that I kept hearing about from everyone and on oprah too, well its been two weeks now and I lose 22 pounds and still losing more, I am living proof that they do work, try them for only five dollars at hxxp://lampbed.com

Note the website URL "http" has been replaced with "hxxp".

Some of the identical behaviors of the above websites are:

Ask you to enter your Live/MSN/Hotmail username and password so that the website can show your something (e.g. image and videos).
Redirect you to your localhost but remain the same domain.
Redirect you to your MSN's website but remain the same domain.

What you need to do when you receive this kind of messages:

Ask your friend if he or she sent you the message before you open the link. If he or she did not send the link, you should tell he or she that his or her PC might be infected by virus or spyware and ask he or she to install a good antivirus to scan their PC for spyware and virus. I'm using AVG Free antivirus which is pretty good and fast.
Do not open the link. If your still want to try your luck to open the link, do it with Firefox or Google Chrome. Do not use Internet Explorer because it enables VB-Scripts which allow malicious software to be installed automatically to your computer.
Do not download any executable file (e.g. exe file and exe in zip file) or screen saver (with file extension .scr) from the site.
Ask your friend to change his or her account password.

If you found a similar message that might harm user's PC, you can let me know by leaving your comment here and I will update the list above so that everyone aware about it. Help me to help others

Google Adsense: Integrate Your Adsense Account with Google Analytics

szehau — Wed, 06 May 2009 08:13:53 +0000

For the past few months, Google Adsense has been gradually inviting publishers to integrate their AdSense accounts with Google Analytics. On April 29, 2009, Google has announced that this feature is now available to all publishers on its Adsense blog and Analytics blog.

To link up your Google Adsense and Google Analytics:

Login into your Google Adsense account.
At the main page ("Reports"->"Overview"), you will see a link "Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics", click on that link.
Follow the on-screen instructions.

The video below explain the step by step linking process

Please note the integration may take few days to be done. After you have link your accounts, you will get some useful and interesting reports at Analytics. These are the reports you going to get:

The Top AdSense Content report allows you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance. For instance, if you find that some of your pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren't monetizing as well as other pages, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving these pages.
The Top AdSense Referrers report can help you see how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue.
Last, the AdSense Trending report lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.

The reports are pretty comprehensive and detailed. You can now analyze your site content by keywords, page, and etc to find out what kind of content can make you profit the most.

Check out this video to get a better understanding of how to use these reports:

Enjoy the new feature and happy earning!

Gmail: Google Search in Gmail

szehau — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:04:33 +0000

New in Gmail Lab. You can now search the web just right in your Gmail and you can add the search result into your email and chat.

To enable this feature in your Gmail, click on the "Settings" on top of your Gmail. Then click on "Labs" tab and look for "Google Search". Choose the enable option and click the "Save changes" button to apply the changes.

Snippet IT » New and Happening

100th Posts For Snippet IT

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Happy Holidays from your Google team!

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Google Wave Invitation Giveaway

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Google Chromium OS

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