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The overly anticipated and over-dued release of Microsoft's new operating system OS Vista hasn't made a good reputation in the public's eye so far.
First of all, there is five version of Vista each for different level of users.
Secondly, it's extremely heavy in processing power and requires very powerful computers to run. I wonder who'd want to spend another few hundred to upgrade an already fully functional computer, not to mention OS.
And now, news just came out that Microsoft will monopolise OS security market (aka free antivirus and firewall for all) built into it's new Vista. No third party antivirus softwares are allowed. period.
http://news.google.com/news?q=microsoft+security
Now, I wonder what will Norton, McAfee, Avast, AVG and every other existing security software corporate giant feel.
"We're dead!"
"That's the end of the tunnel!"
"We'll need to schedule a bankruptcy meeting!"
"Maybe we can start selling padlocks to our consumers!"
"Ramen noodle shops sounds like a good idea!"
This is really cool, Google added tabbing to their personalised homepage project, we can add as many tabs as possible, too. This will help with loading time significantly and it's a good thing, very good and way better than the other module hacks.
Oh by the way, the modules that I wrote are now listed in Google Directorys. Yahoo!
Check them out!
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?q=blogdrive
Have fun
Funnily and oddly, website traffic dropped approximately three fold. Bad, very bad. What could be the reason?
Being a blog hosted on Blogdrive, naturally at first instinct the blame would go to Blogdrive's bad down time.
Hey come on now, we (I above all  ) should all know better than just blaming Blogdrive. Some form of investigation was taken and guess what I found?
Google is the culprit:
 sigh...
Google Trends plots how popular a search term is over time. Basically, how many times people type into Google to look for such information. So, the previous entry shows you the search volume over the last two years and where those searches comes from.
Google Trends can also show you the comparison between two search terms. Such as: Blogdrive, Blogspot.
skype, msn messenger, google talk, icq, yahoo messenger
What about Love and hate?
What about sex, porn, nude, naked?
What about boys and girls?
What about Brad pitt, orlando bloom and johnny depp?
This google trend thing is really addictive.... it really is!
http://www.google.com/trends?q=blogdrive
Give very interesting results, here it shows clearly the trends in Blogdrive traffic. Where it comes from and what do they mean? Blogdrive is a Californian-based company but apparently most of it's customer ... are based in South East Asia? True or False.
Cities
| | Top results | | | | 1. | Kuala Lumpur Malaysia | | | | 2. | Petaling Jaya Malaysia | | | | 3. | Manila Philippines | | | | 4. | Makati Philippines | | | | 5. | Jakarta Indonesia | | | | 6. | Singapore Singapore | | | | 7. | Sydney Australia | | |
Regions
| Top results | | | | 1. | Malaysia | | | | 2. | Philippines | | | | 3. | Indonesia | | | | 4. | Singapore | | | | 5. | Australia | | | | 6. | Mexico | | | | 7. | India | | | | 8. | Canada | | | | 9. | United States | | | | 10. | United Kingdom | | |
Languages
| Top results | | | | 1. | Tagalog | | | | 2. | Indonesian | | | | 3. | English | | | | 4. | Portuguese | | | | 5. | Spanish | | |
Many people come to this blog due to my previous entry wanting to find out how to cancel Windows Live Mail beta.
Why would anybody want to switch back, you ask?
Well, I guess that very question speaks for itself. Livemail needs to put more work into making it more user-friendly.
Here's how to switch back to regular hotmail interface: 1) Log into your Hotmail account, 2) Go to Options. You can find it on the top right hand corner. 3) At the bottom you'll see "Beta opt-out", Click on it. 4) By opting out, you'll revert back to your original Hotmail account and basic features. There you go. It's not too difficult, is it? Tags: Windows, Live Mail, Beta, Hotmail, Gmail, Microsoft, Google,
For those of you who never get a chance to see what's within the upgraded account packages, heres one of the very cool feature: Site Statistics. To be honest, I totally forgotten I have this feature until a few days ago.
Requests Today: 15459
Requests over the last 30 days: 698405
Daily Hits:
(personally, I don't know what the blue dots stands for and why is it increasing.)
A pretty cool graph and list of types of useragents. As usual, MSIE is the most common at 80% while firefox stands for around 20%. Also, if you look close enough you'll see some search engine bots, Googlebot (4495) and Yahoo! Slurp (10215).
The rest of the site statistics package (Referer, Request) are pretty much similar to this one. Referer shows the 20 most popular referals, while Request shows the 20 most popular file/image/page. I can't show you here as they are kinda confidential.
The Recent package shows the last 10 request. It features IP address, Referals, File request and date/time.
That's all folks.
Tags: Blogdrive, Site Statistics, Stats counter,
In the previous year, we see lots of small startup or small companies being bought up by big media giants to be key players in their industrial roles. Sites such as blogspot being acquired by Google and hotmail acquired by Microsoft.
Not that I want BD to be sold to other parties, but it's an interesting speculation.
Here's an interesting read on what Hungry Media giants are looking for in small companies:
Also of interest are sites that allow people to play casual interactive games; store, send, manipulate and print photos; build and store blogs; and research and shop for big-ticket items like cars. Also eliciting interest are "next generation" Web sites, like those focused on allowing people to search the universe of blogs more effectively.
The media companies' interest has to do with the continuing shift in the ways Americans consume entertainment and shop. Just as the advent of cable television carved up a once-concentrated block of network TV viewers, so has the Internet — with its literally millions of Web sites — created highly fragmented niche audiences.
For big companies, the key is to build or buy Web sites that attract those niche audiences, but in substantial numbers. For a Web site to pique the interest of mass-market advertisers, it needs to have at least a million unique visitors a month; to be considered a major takeover candidate, it needs to have five million unique visitors, said Sharon Wienbar, a managing director with BA Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture firm that invests in Internet content companies.
Note: Photobucket was mentioned in the article. Seems like Photobucket's most valueable asset it's their user base.
Tags: blogdrive, photobucket, internet, media, companies,
This is the uniformly distributed diagram of number of visitors around the world that comes to this blog. This time round ( see the old one), it's more evenly distributed around the USA, while the rest of the world is still a mystery. For example, why isn't there many canadians, china, south africa, austrialia, south america or even russia that visits here? It appears my topics only cover the English speaking regions (and some middle east). Interesting graphs. Geo Map Overlay. References: Blogdrivers' locations, Tags: Analytics,
I recently received an invitation by Microsoft to try out their new product, Windows Live Mail Beta. It's a brand new interface of webbased email exploiting the AJAX application structure. It's Microsoft's attempt to compete with Google's now very famous Gmail. In simple words, it's a new version of Hotmail.
Getting Started
First, an invitation. If you don't have one, there are some methods you can try to get them. To use Live Mail, I have to go through a transition process between my Hotmail account and Live Mail. This transition process will move all my emails, contacts and everything into Live Mail account. So, it doesn't mean that you have to sign up for a new email account or anything. Microsoft promise that if at any stage, I would like to opt out of this beta service, I can. That's promising enough for me. 
What's special about Live Mail?
Everything you have in Hotmail is available in Live Mail. Live Mail uses AJAX technology, similar to Gmail. AJAX is not actually a technology but a very dynamic interface utilising Javascript and XML, this gives the end user some very cool features and fast browsing without having to reload the page all over again. Upgrading to Live Mail gives you 2GB of free space instantly. 8 times better than the regular 250MB. The whole page is divided into three columns. One for major folders, one for the list of emails with subject lines and contact, and the last one to view your selected email. It is also possible to resize the columns according to your liking. Right Click. You can right click on where ever you want to see a list of options. For example, right click on the "Junk Folder" and select "Empty Folder". Or right click on a email message, and a few options such as "Reply", "Delete", "Forward" and "Move to" will appear. Drag and drop feature. Haven't tried it out but you are suppose to be able to drag inbox messages into Junk Email. Calendar is available with dynamic interface as well though I haven't ventured into it but I'm positive it's gonna kick ass.
Beta being Beta have Beta bugs
Yes. Beta bugs are one of the things you have to expect when you become a beta tester. While the interface have still plenty to improve on such as user friendliness and all, it's no where near as happening as Gmail. One of the things that Live Mail promise is speed but even after utilising AJAX, speed isn't what they have. I suspect this may be caused by too much client side programming. For example, to write an email. Inserting a contact is not easy, it is very slow due to a special feature that calls up similar email contact that is suppose to be smart enough to know who are you writing to. But it's filter go through the process over and over again that it lags behind. This incident occurs for the body part as well. Spell check is a wonderful feature, but it's very slow. There are always a delay in whatever you want to do. It makes a http call in every click and every key you type.
Conclusion
It's still in the beta process and working hard to impress the beta testers. I have high hopes for this product. But whether or not I will move back to hotmail is definitely not going to happen. Well, maybe for the Calendar feature. *Updates: It appears it's easy to sign up for Live Mail, just go to their sign up page and do it on your own.
**UPDATES: For those who would like to know how to cancel this service, click here.
References: How to get a Live Mail Invitation, LiveMail Ideas, Live Mail Signup, Live Mail Blog,
Tags: Live Mail, Beta, Hotmail, Gmail, Microsoft, Google,
This is taken from the stats package by Google Analytics. Man, I just love to look at the orange dots over and over again because it shows where the majority of BlogDrive users are in this tiny little world. The bigger dots shows a higher concentration of BlogDrive visitors.
(click for a larger image)Somehow, it does makes you wonder: 1) What happened to the Canadians? Don't any Canadians uses BlogDrive at all? You can only spot a couple of dots, and that's it. o_O 2) What about China? Are they all blocked? 3) And Russia? 4) Where are all the South Americans? Weird... Maybe BlogDrive should now morph into multi-linguality to accommodate other countries. As you can see, most (actually all) of the countries which are active in BlogDrive are English-literated regions, and then there's the rest of the world. No matter, it's still beautiful to look at.
A couple of days ago, BlogDrive added some divs tags to all [blog title] texts, wrapping them up and labelling them with a unique ID:
<div id="XXXXX_kdub1">[blog title]</div> XXXXX being some random number. This change has caused some of the scripts I did not work properly. Luckily, it's not a very big change so it's not exactly obvious. Or rather, I'm just a damn good javascript programmer that the scripts just degrade gracefully automatically. *wink* Right, the scripts can be fixed. So, it's not something to worry about since all it needs is my time to sit down and remanipulate the [Blog Title] strings to omit the divs. The problem lies in all the completed, flawless templates. There are more than two hundred fifty of them, and I don't think there's is anytime to look at all of them, and determine which is would fail. Also, my previous method of using [blog title] in <title> tags (to aid in search engine ranking) would now fail to serve any purpose. Maybe BlogDrive should do that automatically for permalink pages, since it'll gain search engine ranks. It's a win-win situation if they do it, since both bloggers and BD gain popularity. However, there might be some specific yet unknown reasons why they have not implemented it. Contrary to what many people thinks, getting ranked in Google is actually much more of a compliment than "leaving tracks on the internet". If you want to blog, you should know well enough what you are opting for.
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