Spring 2010 Semester Courses Added
The courses for current semester (Spring, 2010) were added. The links for this courses are not live yet. Once the redesign of the site is finished (which is tomorrow), I will enable the link and gradually add the content to each course.
Use Google Reader to Monitor Web Pages Without RSS
Google Reader recently receives an update. It now has the ability to automatically look for RSS feed once a web address is entered into the Add Subscription box. If it can not find any feed, Google Reader would monitor the web page. According to this Google OS post, the ability to monitor the web page changes is based on the popularity of the web page. However, it cannot monitor the web page that requires user login and the web page that contains frame, and it can only monitor web pages that written in English.
I will stick to Google Reader’s RSS feature. As for some sites without RSS feed, I have been using Update Scanner Firefox Extension before I switched to Google Reader. It can monitor almost anything, including web pages that contain frame and support multiple languages on the web pages. It can also can monitor the pages that require user log in as long as the user is logged in and has the correct cookie information.
IE doesn’t Follow Web Standards and Make Web Developers and Customers Suffer (Updated)
Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) discovered a big security flaw by the Chinese a few weeks ago. They used this security flaw to hack to the Google’s main server. Meanwhile, Researchers has discovered more security flaws in IE that could let an attacker to take control of targeted computer, according to an article from Mashable “More Security Flaws Found in Internet Explorer“.
UPDATE: Similar article found on daniweb.com. It also mentioned about Firefox and Chrome. I like the first sentence of this article, “Another day, another IE flaw!” It means that the Internet Explorer patches that Microsoft offered are useless.
I read lots of complains about IE not follow web standard, thus web developers are frustrated about cross-browser compatibility for their websites. As a web developer and a GNU/Linux user, I test my website in Windows XP through VirtualBox from time to time. However, I do not test the cross-browser compatibility in IE. I test the functionality of my warning box in IE. If Internet Explorer is presented, the site stops loading and displays an error message in the warning box to encourage users to switch to other browsers in order to block the IE users.
The future version of Youtube might not support Firefox
Recently, YouTube has opened its TestTube HTML 5 service to allow users to experiment with HTML 5 version of YouTube. Unfortunately, TestTube only uses H.264 codec to display the video which Firefox doesn’t support. H.264 is a non-free, licensed codec. In order to use the codec, video content publishers needs to pay $5 million license fee every year. Mozilla supports free and open solution. Its Ogg Theora codec is similar to H.264 codec. Not only its video quality is the same as H.264 (sometimes maybe better), but also it can easily convert to a large variety of video formats. According to “Will Idealism be Firefox’s Downfall?“, Google might use On2 codec on the future version of YouTube, which is better than H.264. If not, YouTube users will be switching to other web browsers that supports H.264 and Firefox will be history.
Experimenting with Second Life
I was experimenting with Second Life last week. Sadly, the Linux version of Second Life is still in beta and I couldn’t get it to work on my Fedora 12 x64 laptop. I forced to use the Windows version under Vista. I experimented with it for a while and found out that it requires more CPU and graphic power usage than other GNU/Linux games that I played. Not following these system requirement, I tried to run Second Life under 32-bit Fedora 12 on my Eee PC 1005HA netbook. It run successfully and then crashed to the command line after I logged into the game. Then I tried it under XP on the netbook., it run successfully. However, the game didn’t run as smoothly as on the laptop. I think Linden Lab should lower the system specification for Second Life to make it run on the older hardware like other Linux games in order to attract more Second Life residents.
E-book DRM Are Coming Soon?
Piracy has become a major problem for the content publishers. Because of it, music and movie publishers added DRM (Digital Rights Management) to protect their copyrighted contents. However, pirates have begun to pirate e-books and other digital contents thanks to the DRM technology. As a GNU/Linux user and my belief in copyleft, I’m against using contents on the internet that are DRM-protected. I believe that the consumer should own the ownership of the content once they purchased it from the content owner.
Read more:
Digital piracy hits the e-book industry – CNN
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