My review of the updated Blogger interface

As I've stated in my previous post, I've just come back to writing on my blog again. It feels really good to be typing nonsense again, especially since my ThinkPad has one of the most comfortable keyboards I've ever used.

Anyway as I was writing my previous post, I stumbled upon a small bar with blue text on the top of Blogger's composed page. It said something along the lines of "Try Blogger's new interface". I was intrigued, because recently Google has been redecorating and redesigning the interfaces of many of their web services, starting from Gmail to Youtube and Docs. Being tired of the default Blogger interface (seriously they've been using that for more than 10 years), I was intrigued and decided to give it a try.

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Consistency

Finally, Blogger looked like a proper Google Web Service rather than something separate from the rest of the services. The interface is highly inspired from Google Docs (which I greatly use and recommend) and Google+ (which I do not really use but highly recommend for other people who do not like Facebook). The sense of minimalism is apparent in the design, as well as intuitiveness. All major functions that you are ever going to need are on top of the area you are editing your post on, but then again, that's the de facto interface design of mostly everything you type text on.

However, added on top of that editor and its buttons is a row of very cleanly-laid and good-looking text and buttons, as well as your Google+ name and picture. However, the prominent "Google bar" that appears on most Google services such as Docs, Calendar and Gmail appears to be missing, but I don't really care since adding it probably makes it look out of place. It might also prove to be quite distracting.

I highly suggest that Google replace the buttons on the main toolbar though -- they appear to have been taken from Blogger's last look. I suggest that they use something similar to Google Docs' monochromatic, minimalistic buttons.

Editing

As a coder one might expect me to prefer editing my post in Blogger's raw HTML editor instead of the WYSIWYG editor Blogger provides. That would have been the case before Blogger updated its interface, as I find the editor to be ugly and boring as hell. However, with the new redesign I'm now more apt to use the WYSIWYG editor instead. It feels so clean, and the minimal design always inspires me. But that doesn't mean I don't need the HTML editor -- I still use it to fine-tune the elements of my post.

While I'm on that topic, the HTML editor appears to be very well designed as well, and it is noticeably wider than the Compose mode (I will now address the WYSIWYG editor as the Compose mode from now on). That's good because HTML tags can take up a lot of space and no one likes too many newlines.

Cons

No interface is complete without its flaws. As such, I will now proceed to list them here in this section.

No option to easily change formatting styles in Compose Mode

Someone who is experienced in word processors would prefer using "Formatting Styles" to format their bodies of text rather than just manually editing them. This is important for consistency, and it can also save you a lot of time.

However, on Blogger's Compose mode, there does not appear to be a menu or a button in the main toolbar that allows me to quickly switch formatting styles. This is disappointing because I have to go to the HTML editor and wrap my headers into appropriate header tags in order to turn them into headers. And yes, I know it will work as well if I wrap them in tags inside Compose mode, but it would look pretty much out of place with the rest of the interpreted text.

No indication of whether your post has been (automatically) saved

Google Docs has this neat little feature on the autosave that tells me whenever the document I'm working on has been automatically synced and saved to Google's servers. I really like that feature because I am paranoid that my files might not have been saved and that the next unfortunate crash of my browser would be the end of my work.

Blogger does not have that feature. The system automatically saves your work everytime you stop typing for a while, but it does not have that persistent indication that your work has been saved. While you are not typing to ponder some thoughts, Blogger automatically saves your work, and the Save button on top of the main toolbar briefly turns into a "Saving..." button that indicates that your work is being saved. While that is quite comforting, sometimes I'd like to know that Blogger has already saved my work some time ago while I stopped typing to ponder my thoughts, as I usually do so for extended periods of time and I usually leave myself in a state of short term memory loss afterwards.

My suggestion? Put something that tells me when the last edit I made was saved somewhere. I'm not saying the Save button should be removed entirely (as shown in Google Docs), because I think for this matter, it is still necessary.

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I think that's all I have to say about the new updated Blogger interface for now. It's pretty, intuitive, and most importantly, minimal. There's just a couple of stuff that they should try to fix here and there. I'm quite too tired of further scrutinizing the interface and adding more feedback, because at the time I'm writing this it's already really late. But I do expect improvements to happen in the future, somehow.

The 3 best and worst websites I have visited this 2011

With computers being one of my areas of expertise, it comes to no surprise that I'm an avid user of the Internet. I've been on the Internet since 2004 and from my experience, the standards in website UI design have changed dramatically over the years. There are some who took the aspects of design further, leading to beautiful websites that are also easy to navigate. However, there are also websites who disregard UI design, which impacted the overall usefulness of their websites.

Here are the 3 best websites I have visited this year, along with their bad counterparts.

1. Good: Newsmap.jp

URL: http://newsmap.jp

Don't let the URL fool you, the site is not in any way written in Japanese. Newsmap is a small website that grabs news from various news feeds around the web and displays them in a neat, color-coded grid boxes. These boxes are arranged according to importance and popularity using size. So essentially, the most breaking and controversial news are displayed in large text, while the not-really-that-popular ones are in smaller text. You can untick categories in order to hide them and give more space to other categories. Finally, news feeds can also be arranged according to country and region, although support for all countries and regions are still incomplete (unlike Google News).

Bad: Inquirer.net

URL: http://inquirer.net

Inquirer.net is the web site of the Philippine newspaper "Philippine Daily Inquirer". Like most other Philippine websites, it has lagged behind in terms of UI standards. For example, it uses an awful lot of tables for its layout, resulting in too many columns and rows displayed on the homepage. It makes navigation difficult, despite multiple navigation bars in the top and bottom of the site's home page. However, they are successful in their efforts to put the most breaking news on the front, where they are easy to spot. Additionally, they use a pleasant and well-balanced color scheme that is easy for the eyes. They need some work on the layout, though.

2. Good: Reddit

URL: http://reddit.com

Reddit is a place where people share links and rate them by giving upvotes and downvotes (similar to Youtube's like/dislike system), and give comments to content posted on the site. One good feature of the site is giving the users the ability to create sub-reddits, which are similar to subcategories. There are subreddits for different kinds of topics, like gaming, worldnews, etc.

Bad: Digg

URL: http://digg.com

Digg is a competitor to Reddit, since Digg also allows its users to share, rate and comment links. However, content on Digg has been recently monopolized by large media outlets, leading to most of its users leaving and finding more "open" link sharing sites (a large number of them migrated to Reddit). Digg had a good design before the "Diggpocalypse", however, after that everything became too blue and it was a lot harder to navigate than before.

3. Good: Imgur

URL: http://imgur.com

imgur is an image hosting site. The description probably ends there, but what I like about imgur is its very minimalistic approach to hosting its users' images. You just have to select your images, upload them either individually or as an album, and when it's done, you will be given links of all kinds. And those links are free from URLs to imgur, unlike other image hosting sites like Imageshack...

Bad: Imageshack

Imageshack is another image hosting site. It is reliable, however, the interface of the whole site is very, very messy, with advertisements everywhere and such. Also, the interface is not very intuitive, and new users can get lost trying to navigate its screens. Worst of all, Imageshack adds URLs to the links it gives to you for your images. For example, its pre-generated BBCode for forums has a link to Imageshack ("Uploaded with Imageshack.us"), and if you remove that part, the BBCode and the image will not work.

Result of no-protection XP challenge

When I installed Windows XP on a virtual machine on my laptop some time ago, it wasn't just because I want to experience nostalgia from using old OS'es, it's also to challenge my resilience on security and protection.

How does this challenge work? It's easy. I will never install any anti-malware software on my computer for some weeks or so. Additionally, since my copy of Windows is not genuine at all, it won't receive important security updates from Microsoft, so that's another layer of protection removed. Then I would do whatever I always do online. Trolling, researching, reading the news, maybe even download some pr0ns for...safekeeping. So there. I'll go out in the wild without anything watching your back for a few weeks, then I'd download Trend Micro House Call to scan for malware that came through.

Why did I use XP? Because with all the Windows versions I've used, XP was the most vulnerable, wherein I had way too many run ins with malware in the past. I believe XP is the most vulnerable operating system out there when it comes to malware. It's like a Thai prostitute - ugly and full of viruses. The only advantage XP has over its successors is that it uses way less resources than Vista and 7. So there.

Of course, I took every security precaution available. To safeguard myself against keylogging, I used LastPass to encrypt my logins and on-screen keyboards while inputting usernames and passwords. I even used Tor so that those tracking websites won't be able to remotely view my geolocation.

Results

House Call just finished scanning my computer for malware, and it found something. Great thing is, it's alone, and it's just some regular adware that I probably got from browsing pornographic websites (you know those popups of Adultfriendfinder and other sites? They give you that). The file detected was cmdow.exe, and its corresponding threat was, according to Trend Micro, ADWARE .0737EEDD. According to the data in the link, this spyware does nothing but take my browsing history and send it somewhere for marketing purposes. Well they're in for a big surprise then.

Also, cmdow.exe, according to further Googling, is not originally a fatal binary file, but a tool designed to modify commandline windows, such as not allowing the user to close the window (because some users freak out at the sight of an ugly DOS-prompt and close it immediately, hampering some installation procedures in the process). However, in this case, I don't recall having to use this, and I don't really need it, so I just removed it.

I also managed to install and run Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware (an excellent software, I might add), which managed to snag a trojan executable and a dangerous registry value. Also, it detected three potentially dangerous security settings, which was the Windows Security Center being turned off, but I intentionally set it that way for this challenge.

After a quick system reboot, I decided to run a scan again, just to be safe. I won't be posting any more details and its results, because that would be a waste of time.

Conclusion

• It is possible to be malware-free without some sort of security software


• Windows XP is very vulnerable to attacks


• Virtual machines are probably the best way to protect yourself against malware, by using a fake OS as a shield

Nostalgia is a pain in the ass

After successfully installing Windows XP on a virtual machine, I was immediately amazed at my recently-earned power of installing multiple operating systems on my notebook without having to buy another system or use multi-booting. I’ve decided to amp up my virtual machine craze and install one of Windows’ infamous builds: Windows 98.

Apparently I have downloaded not only an image of Windows 98 SE but also Windows 95. I don’t plan to install Win95 right now since I’d like to try out the operating system I’m more familiar with. The first build of Windows (and first operating system) I’ve ever touched was Windows 95, and that was like twelve years ago. But I’ve been with Windows 98 for a long time, before I made the jump to XP in 2002.

I used VirtualBox for virtualization, because I love open-source applications and I dislike the corporate feel of VMWare. The virtual machine for Windows 98 isn’t really that taxing for my laptop. I think Firefox would grab more system resources than Windows 98 inside a virtual machine. I just needed 64MB of RAM, which is really a lot for Windows 98, and a 4GB virtual hard drive. I took the specifications off my old Compaq notebook which is retired and resting in my closet. It ran Windows 98, and was one of the most powerful notebooks during its time. A Pentium II 366Mhz, 128MB of RAM, 4GB of HDD, what more could you want in 1998?

Installation

Windows 98 takes longer to install than Windows XP, because 98 has all that 16-bit crap that happens to slow down its processes on my virtual machine. I laughed at the fact that the boot setup installer mentioned that a HDD larger than 512MB is considered “huge”. I should probably go back in time and show them a 32GB SD card.

The installation process of Windows 98 was flawed and boring. Sure, it only has 8-bit colors during installation, and while I’m installing a new OS I don’t really need Aero effects. I think Windows 98 should have just used a text-based installer, because it does its job of looking pretty very badly. Also, the processes are not streamlined to a “set it and go outside” layout, unlike its older successors. After one hour of waiting, you are expected to input some information, wait for another twenty minutes, input more information, etc.

It even took ten minutes to set up “Plug-and-Play”, one of Microsoft’s failed attempts to monopolize by “supporting” numerous devices through easy installation. It was developed before the days of USB, wherein buying a mouse will most likely include a floppy disk inside for drivers.

Trying it out

After a few more setting changes by Windows 98, I was greeted by the familiar 16-bit interface, the gritty colors, the 640x480 resolution. The interface was very slow, probably slower than the average Filipino’s computer riddled with all sorts of crap. This was due to the fact that Windows 98 and its predecessors schedules (or prioritizes) its tasks poorly.

So, despite Virtualbox having the ability to run Windows 98, it does work, but it’s so slow it’s not really that useful. I can’t even connect to the Internet because this “MSN Internet Access” program thinks I’m some guy stuck in the late 90’s by trying to convince me that I’m using a dial-up modem to connect to the Internet.

Conclusion

While currently Windows 98 on my system is highly uncomfortable and slow, it works. Maybe the basics, but at least it boots up despite crashing and BSOD’ing itself a couple of minutes later. I’m yet to try out Windows 95 though, and maybe installing a couple of other operating systems such as Arch Linux and Chrome OS.

Ancient Sulatang Tapunan attacked by lazy spambots

I was surprised to see that my already rotting Yahoo Mail account, which I dumped due to the reason that it simply sucks, has received a blitzkrieg of emails in a short succession. About 80 emails with the same subject of “Friendster Blogs: New Trackback on your post “<some post here>” flooded my inbox. The body consisted of the following line:

San diego casinos

And that’s it. Usually another line that says “WIN WIN WIN” follows it. I laughed it off and presumed it was just lazy spambots who managed to penetrate the shitty security of Friendster blogs. I’m really glad I moved out of that shitty excuse for a Blogging platform and moved to Blogger, where it’s much more secure.

I’m thinking of limiting the comments people can post on Sulatang Tapunan’s blog posts, so that I can prevent simple HTML script injection (the one problem unprotected blogs face all day) from trolls. I don’t think I have to worry about SQL injection though, since I don’t own or manage the server Sulatang Tapunan is sitting on, and there are no login forms or whatsoever on the blog.

My quick experience of deleting my Friendster account

Right now, those crazy kids are all about Facebook. Being a member of Friendster for about six years, and a member of Facebook for five years, I've decided I don't really need my Friendster account anymore, and the information stored there could impact my identity and the future. Not to mention that if I get to become a target of a raid, trolls would have more targets for them to mess up, so there.

This is also an opportunity for me to say that social networking sites nowadays are so desperate and have completely lost the sense of originality. Just take a look at this screenshot I took when I was on Friendster's front page:

Go to Facebook, login, and compare the Facebook front page to Friendster's. Familiar, right? I'd like to let you know that about three years ago Friendster never looked like this. It looked a lot more like MySpace.

So in conclusion, dying social networking sites are keeping themselves alive by stealing ideas from popular sites of their time. I can't argue with the logic, as 90% of people using social networking sites don't mind the difference anyway.

Although I have to give Friendster the credit of allowing me to cancel (or delete) my account quickly. I was just given one form and was not bombarded with regret with the "Your friends X, Y, and Z are going to miss you!" page in Facebook. Also, I don't have to freeze my account for 14 days, and I'm pretty sure they actually delete my files and information from their servers.

So goodbye, Friendster. Thanks for all the good times, and nightmarish memories.

I'm going to delete my Multiply next because it's another useless social networking site that could hurt me in the near future.

Why people should f*cking wake up and fix their Facebook profiles

Right now, Facebook is in a roll. I actually signed up there when some of my machinima-directing friends made a group there for they find the site cool. I didn't, and I left my account rotting there for four years. Then the Facebook asteroid suddenly crash landed in my country and put Friendster into extinction, and quickly everybody had Facebook accounts which were indefinitely wasted on playing one-track games for one-track minds.

Right now I don't use Facebook for leisure. I hate it because of all the Farmville requests, force-tagging me in photos, and people ditching proper IM platforms because they believe that the shitty embedded Java chat is better than a regular IM client. If I were to use Facebook, I'd use it to track someone, organize myself with other people, stalk someone, and arrange events. I think social organization is the only "productivity" you can get with Facebook. Too bad people missed that part because they were waiting for their sunflowers to grow in Farmville.

Oh, and about that stalking part, that's actually a very easy thing to do. I've been doing that even before I'm into Facebook. But it's not about ethical hacking and making your screen look like it's from the Matrix just to stalk someone. You just need some skills on human psychology.

Take advantage of a common Facebook tradition of accepting everybody who asks using a friend request. Create a fake profile, add a picture of a hot girl or a douchebag and load up all kinds of BS you could think of into that profile. Then start luring in the morons. Earn someone's trust, make him/her think you're his/her boyfriend/girlfriend, and invite him/her to meet at some public place. Then don't go there, build an excuse, and promise to meet up again. Repeat. That's just one of the many things you could do to destroy someone on Facebook. I could go into more damaging and dangerous techniques, but I wouldn't go into any more details for the safety of others.

That's all thanks to Facebook's shitty privacy settings, where, by default, your profile and all its useless information are visible in Facebook's growing public directory. Think of it as one big phonebook - everything you have written on Facebook that is set to public is accessible there - from seemingly harmless information like your name, your applications, your Farmville, to more serious ones like your complete address, your telephone/mobile numbers, etc.

I actually tried the trick of texting a complete stranger in Facebook - I used an old SIM card and jacked it in my PLDT WeRoam 3G Dongle, picked a random stranger in the Philippines, and I quickly found her mobile number. I texted random shit to that person using my computer, and she responds like a charm.

Are you afraid? Want to change your ways. I'm going to help you with that. Here's what you have to do:

1. Remove all sensitive information from your public profile. You can choose not to delete them, just set them to viewable by "Only Me".
2. Remove and unassociate unnecessary applications from your profile. Applications are always given full view of your information, and that's not good. Keep in mind that quizzes are separate applications, and I found them hard to remove from my profile. Right now I only have my useful desktop applications (TweetDeck, Pidgin, Miranda, Trillian, etc.)
3. Remove yourself from the Facebook public directory. This can be done by going to Privacy Settings > Applications... > Public Search. If you're under 18, the setting is turned off by default, however, it is wise to turn it completely off even if you're over 18.
4. Remove Instant Personalization. Instant Personalization is a feature used by partner websites that automatically updates your settings and profile there using your Facebook profile. This could save you some time, but it is potentially dangerous to your privacy. It is wise to turn them off, just go to Privacy Settings and you'll find it there.
5. Limit the amount of information accessible to your friends. It's not just your friends - it's also for the applications your friends use.

However, the best defense for your privacy on Facebook is, to not use Facebook at all. You can deactivate your account on Facebook, however, it's difficult to do so, as it takes quite a long time. Since I'm lazy and don't want to point you in a certain direction, I'm just gonna give you a "Let Me Google That For You" link.

Think Facebook is still safe? Here's the torrent that contains over 100 million Facebook profiles harvested by an efficient person named Ron Bowes. This isn't illegal in any way, because every user included in this database actually agreed to have their information displayed in public. It only takes a simple dataminer to automatically collect the data, because Facebook is not protecting public data and it makes them available to anyone for anyone to use in any way. Go, download the database, and look for your profile there. If you find it, change your privacy settings right away, if not, good job.

Our parents are pointing their fingers in the wrong direction: Why video games and television doesn’t lower our attention span

Long title today. Ok, let’s get this started.

There are recent articles circulating on the Internet claiming that the reason for the diminishing attention span of people today is due to excessive video games and television.

In my own honest opinion, I believe that the statement above isn’t true. Yes, video games and television does contribute to the lower standards of attention span today, but they’re not the only ones that are responsible. The convenience of modern life today is most likely the main culprit in this growing problem.

Let’s compare how people get their news 100 years ago to how they do that today. A century ago, when people wanted to get their news, they would get out of their homes, go to the nearest store that sells newspapers, buy them, and take them home for them to read. Seeing that having to stand up and walk outside is quite a hassle, society invented convenience – instead of having customers go to the stores and buy newspapers, newspapers hired young children to deliver newspapers to those who subscribe to the service. When child labor was considered illegal, newspapers then resorted on news stands, a slower but less slave-labor’ey than using children for the job.

Right now, if you still wake up every morning, open your front door, and pick up that dirty slab of paper on your porch to read its contents, you’re most likely above 35 years of age. We just don’t do that anymore. It’s a hassle.

That’s just about it. Because technology moved towards speeding things up – making things easier, quicker and with less waiting times, we are forced to keep up with it, or at least encouraged to. Who needs snail mail when you’ve got email? Better yet, why use email when you could instantly contact anybody who’s online using the many instant messaging platforms available on the Internet?

We’ve got way too many stuff to make us lazy – televisions eliminate the need to go to an event and watch, phones and Internet communication eliminate the need to actually go to a friend’s house and have a chat, and we have the food delivery industry because most people are too fat to move their fatasses around just to get to the nearest McDonalds that they need to have people fetch food for them. People even came up and made the Segway, probably one of the those early spawns from hell that spells doom for humanity. It eliminates the need to do the one thing we have been doing since accomplishing bipedalism – walking. Walking. You’ve learned that when you were one to three years old. Why would you give up now?

Not trying to sound like a 60 year old deranged beardy man who constantly yells at children on the street to get off his “lawn”, but in my honest opinion, technology is really making us lazy. We’re even lazy to listen to people because we’re accustomed to just exchanging thoughts with each other through text messages and tweets that are less than 140 letters in length.

Did you read all of that? Good, you’re probably in your late thirties or more. If you just scrolled all the way down here and didn’t bother reading, get out of here, kthxbai.

Why I absolutely hate Yahoo (and why I am still using it)

WARNING: Rant inbound. If you don’t like listening to a person bitch about what he hates, flee. Flee now.

These days, Yahoo is known as the international version of AOL. It’s clunky, cheesy, and the only Americans who seem to be using it at the moment are those who believe chain spam mail about a creepy girl appearing at your closet tonight or Bill Gates eating your hard drive if you don’t send an email to everyone in your contact list within eight minutes.

I absolutely hate Yahoo. Really I do. The search engine is just another crappy competitor of Google, and has failed miserably doing so. Bing is ten times better than Yahoo search, and we all know Google is ten times better than Bing. Yahoo search is clunky, full of ads, too purple, too family oriented, and too…friendly. It does not appeal to power users like me.

What I hate most about Yahoo is their mail service. Yahoo mail is one of the most crappiest mail services I have ever seen. It is like the greatest shitty e-mail service of all that you’ll think God himself crapped out Yahoo mail to remind people of retarded people sending chain mail to each other. The interface is just plain awful – very, very little space for people like me who use 4:3 screens, and there’s too much things going on screen – worthless ads about some untalented old “singer” named Kelly Clarkson, deals on car air filters, and other flash ads that were actually made in 2003 but Yahoo was too busy annoying the shit out of its users so they left it there on purpose. The interface is also very, very slow. The massive orgy of Javascript and Flash in the interface slows down any computer with a browser to a crawl. That’s why I switched to Mail Classic, in order to not have my computer molested with unnecessary JS.

But yet I’m still using Yahoo despite my opinions of it being the shittiest thing on the Internet since Geocities (funny thing to know, they own Geocities too). Why? Because of the same reason why I’m still on Facebook despite me hating it also – everybody’s  on it.

My professors use Yahoo Groups to upload lecture notes, worksheets, etc., so not having a Yahoo account to access this groups would be a bad idea. And it appears 98.3% of the Philippine population uses Yahoo as their Instant Messaging client, so I still maintain a YM account, though I don’t use Yahoo’s crappy IM messaging client, I use a much more stable and lighter Miranda IM.

Yahoo is also where I got my first email address. That email address is what I still use today, as I have since 2004. I signed up for Hotmail shortly after that, but I realized Hotmail is somehow shittier than Yahoo during that time, so I quit and let it rot under a million spam mails every month.

Thinking of switching to Wordpress

When you ask a web designer, a professional blogger, or a tech geek about a good blogging platform, almost all the time, their answers would be Wordpress. And it’s true, most of it anyway. Wordpress allows great flexibility, its engine is open-source and can be loaded up into your server (some popular websites such as the Cheeseburger Network uses Wordpress technology), if you feel hosting on Wordpress.com is a little sleazy.

I’m thinking of making that switch. As a amateur graphic designer and tech enthusiast I would definitely enjoy the flexibility of Wordpress. However, there are some things in Blogger that I cannot live without, like integration into my Google account. I don’t use any of those “account and password” management softwares, for I don’t trust them at all with my data. So having multiple accounts for e-mail and blogging would be hard to manage. I wouldn’t want that.

Next, Blogger is easy to set up, and even though it does not allow you as much flexibility as Wordpress, you can still make your own Javascript widgets if you would prefer so. Also, Blogger still has a pretty good user database, despite Wordpress overshadowing it. It’s not like people don’t like Blogger; Blogger is in fact, one of the most preferred platform for people when it comes to personal blogs. It’s only when people plan to make professional blogs that they use Wordpress and/or the Wordpress engine.

There are also other blogging platforms available other than Wordpress and Blogger, like Tumblr and LiveJournal. However, I don’t prefer Tumblr and LiveJournal because I don’t want sad people posting unnecessary comments on my posts just because I expressed disgust for Twilight or a lesbian named Justin Bieber or something. I like to keep things civilized.

So there you go. Hopefully I won’t get an aneurysm trying to decide whether to import my blog to Wordpress or not. Google is doing a good job maintaining Blogger, and as long as they keep it up, I’m staying there.

Changed the layout again

And so I have changed the blog layout yet again. Call me picky, but I think the last layout was quite getting bland and boring for me and most of my readers. Sure, it’s minimalistic, it doesn’t hurt your eyes because it’s not one of those “bright text on black background” templates, but it was getting boring.

So I switched the template to this nice little one I found on the net, named "Newspaper". Once again, my inability to have motivation to create my own XML templates are apparent, and led me to grab other people's templates from the web. Thankfully, these templates are free for my own personal use, so long as I credit them properly.

I have some problems with this theme apparently. Live Writer does not seem to read its XML properly, and now I have to resort to raw HTML editing, but it's ok, I never liked WYSIWYG editing anyways. However, when I switch to preview mode it appears that my paragraphs are not seperated into seperate paragraph, which leads to weird looking posts. I added approprite < p > tags, by the way.

Hopefully this blog will work well despite the difficulties. I tend to trade performance and reliability for aesthetics. If something goes wrong I'll just revert back to the old template, or go find a new one.

The beauty of multi-platform im clients

Instant Messaging (IM) has become an integral part of almost everybody who uses the Internet. IM evolved from Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and provides an easy platform for instantly communicating with other people in realtime without having to rely on an external server, or easily engage in private chat.

Of course, IM relies on servers to do its work. Luckily, several Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and many others provide IM clients and servers for your convenience. You will just have to create an account, download their client, and start chatting.

However, there is always a chance that you will have a friend who uses a different IM client. Perhaps your crush is using MSN and you have AOL, and you know that communication with him/her is essential for your progress with your relations with that person. You can sign up for MSN and download its client, but having another IM client stand alongside your own takes up precious memory space that could have been used for something else.

This is where multi-platform IM clients come in. Multi-platform IM clients are IM applications that allow not only one, but multiple IM accounts for you to use. You can use AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Skype, and any other IM server in just one application.

Here are two examples of excellent IM clients, and how they compare to each other.

Miranda im

Miranda IM is a lightweight, open source instant messaging platform. It is very simple to use, and will not interrupt from your workflow, since it does not take up a slot on your taskbar. It only appears as a notification icon. It is also highly customizable – with skins, sounds, plugins, scripts – anything to your heart’s content. And if you got the skills, you can download the source and take a peek under the hood, and maybe tweak a little stuff while you’re at it.

Pros

• Very, very lightweight
• Open source
• Extremely customizable
• Supports many messaging platforms and IRC

Cons

• Does not show up in the taskbar – can be hard to adjust to
• Can be confusing for non-power users
• You will have to customize it well to suit your needs

Trillian

Trillian is a proprietary multi-platform IM client. Unlike Miranda, it is not open source, and your rights to the software is quite similar to that of Yahoo and Live Messenger. However, it is a step up from the aforementioned two, as Trillian can support plenty of IM clients, and includes Twitter and Facebook.

Trillian, unlike Miranda IM, is also available in other platforms, such as Mac, the iPhone and Blackberry phones. A “Pro” edition is also available for Windows for a price.

Pros

• Powerful and intuitive
• Easy-to-navigate interface
• Includes Twitter and Facebook support

Cons

• Not very lightweight unlike Miranda IM
• Proprietary software
• Requires a Trillian account

Pidgin

Pidgin is an open source IM client that supports plenty of chat networks. It is originally a project for Linux, but has been ported to Windows for the convenience of the non-Linux savvy computer users. Like Miranda, it is lightweight, open source, and has many different plugins to improve its usability.

Pros

• Open source
• Supports Linux and its distros
• Easy to use
• Can connect to Facebook and Twitter
• Has plenty of plugins

Cons

• Not really that lightweight in Windows
• Not as customizable as Miranda IM

Multi-platform IM clients are very useful if you want to keep up with your friends, co-workers, and family who use a different network other than yours. However, one noter about MPIMs: most of the time, they do not support some proprietary features of the default chat network clients, such as video conferencing, VoIP calling, and playing games. But if you don’t really need those features and would just like to simply keep in touch with your people, multi-platform IM clients are for you.

Hacked the entire layout

So, here it is, folks. Sulatang Tapunan has finally gone minimalistic. This is a huge redesign since most of the eye candy that were present in the last layout are now gone. No more of the annoying, common sidebar that most blogs use. That one’s getting old, and it’s a reminder of the web design of the 90’s, no matter what we add on them. Youtube widgets, translucency, Javascript and all other forms of 21st century Internet effects won’t make website sidebars better. That had to go.

Also, this typography style blog template that uses the “Georgia” font family is so elegant, that it feels soothing and relaxing. It helps the reader stay focused on what they are reading on the blog and will not get distracted by any unnecessary element in the website.

The template itself is focused on text. I wonder how it does for images…

 

Ah, it does the picture beautifully, just as I wanted it to. Take note that I am writing this post in the very awesome Windows Live Writer. It automatically adds the subtle shadow effect on every photo that I add while I write my posts. However, I can always choose to use other effects, but WLR does drop shadow by default.

Also, I hate color. Colored blogs hurt my eyes. Black text on colored background makes my eyes watery and tortures them in the process.

4 things you probably shouldn't do on the Internet

Let's face it, the Internet is very much like a post-apocalyptic world at the safety of your own machine. Everyone lives at their own regret, and nobody cares almost about anything except themselves. You know that "friend" who just invited you recently on Facebook? That's just the friendly neighborhood serial pedophile-slash-rapist-slash-Internet predator.

Typical Internet user.

You might go out and say, but the Internet is such as nice place! No, it's not. Perhaps yes, if you limit your activities to playing boring games such as Farmville, but when your activities expands to 4chan, Wikipedia, and MySpace, you and your Internet life can get killed easily in over 9000 ways possible and impossible at the same time by 500-pound nerds-slash-cyberbullies-slash-WoW players who spend their daily and nightly lives in front of their undergraded computers. Certain safety measures are to be observed, and the most crucial of them are here:

4. Posting too much personal information

The Internet is a place where people primarily does not care about stuff about other people. You go to that school? Who cares. You live over there? We don't give a horse's ass. You just read the whole Twilight saga? You have just reached the point that even Jesus doesn't care.

Well who does care? This could be one of your friends (whom you have met and befriended personally in real life of course) and/or your typical friendly neighborhood serial pedophile-slash-rapist-slash-Internet predator.

This guy. Yeah, that's him.

Keep in mind that when you post personal information over at sites like Facebook, it is possible that people (by default is your first-degree friends) can see them clearly. You might ask, "What's wrong with my friends seeing my address and sexual orientation?"

Take a good, hard look at your friends list and count those who you have met personally in real life. The average Facebooker has about 67 in 100. The 67 people might be okay to be viewing your personal information, but what about the other 33 who you just invited to be your friend just for the sake of giving you energy packs in Mafia Wars or as neighbors on Farmville? Can you guarantee that they'll just see your information and say, "What the hell, this is just some common, uninteresting person on the Internet whom nobody cares about"? One of them could see your address, go to your flat, and God knows what would happen.

3. Being overemotional

As a general rule stated earlier, the Internet does NOT care about what you feel about things, provided that they are about your personal life. If your boyfriend dumped you, we don't care. If your mother just committed suicide because your father ate your 3-year old sister and cheated on his wife over 9000 times (and presumably raped you too), you have again reached the point where Jesus does not care.

Your mom just died? Well, okay...Next prayer please!

Of course, there are two forms of emotion in the Internet: emotive and overemotive. Here is an example of an emotive statement.

My girlfriend just dumped me, but I don't really care. No really, no need for tears or anything, there's plenty of other girls out there, I just need to find the right one. Peace out.

Notice the sense of emotion in the statement. It is moderated and controlled, and that's good. Now here's the same statement, only this time, it's gay emo overemotive.

MY GIRLFRIND JUS DUMPEDM E!!!11 That BITCH!!!111!!one! :(( D: THAT SON OF A BITCH NW BOYFRIEND OF HER S IS GON DIE!!!11!! x(( AND WHILE I'M THERE, I'M JUST GONNA GO KILL MYSELF...!!!11!!!1 :(( :(( :( x(

Notice the difference between the two statements. On the first statement, the act of expressing emotion over the subject is moderated and controlled in a very civilized manner. However, on the latter, the emotion flows out like a volcanic eruption, or a shitstorm carried by some tsunami in Indonesia or something. Also, notice how the writer of the second statement loves the Caps Lock and his obsession with exclamation points (while failing to input them correctly) and smileys.

Keep in mind that being overemotional on the Internet does not only lay on the lines of personal conflicts and problems. You can also go overemotional if you, let's say, go on a cybertantrum, AKA repeatedly yelling why Farmville is on maintenance when you really need to harvest those weed you just planted.

2. Discussing serious subjects (religion, race, etc.) on social networking sites

Social networking sites composes primarily of many different kinds of people: the first one being teenage girls while the second being sociopaths pretending to be teenage girls. Both have almost or no grasp of reality and the world's most serious issues. Hell, they don't even know what serious means.

This looks serious enough.

But whatever you do, do NOT post anything serious on Facebook, or any social networking site for that manner, or even Twitter. Try using a forum that welcomes serious debate, such as Pointless Waste of Time, where all remaining real people with real minds and logic reside and discuss about many different topics. No sociopaths and teenage girls to ruin your day.

1. Posting indecent photos of yourself

You probably got drunk one way or another in your lifetime, whether during your angsty teenage years in high school or in your last dying breath and effort to gulp down the last bottle of whisky down your already dying system. Oh, the memories! What did you do after such an ordeal? Was it lay down on the sidewalk trying to sober yourself? Get behind the wheel and perform a nine-car pileup? No? Was it taking photos of yourself and post it somewhere where every dumbass with the Internets can see it? Yes? Well, good job, mate! You just gave yourself the title of "World's Smartest Retard"!

A failed miserable attempt at attaining the title of "World's Smartest Retard".

What's wrong with getting drunk and spreading a visual memory of it around the world? The problem is, once your butt-ugly shot of you wasted on the floor with dick marks all over your face exits your computer's hard drive and into one of Facebook's corrupted photo servers, everyone you considered as your friend on the said social networking site will be able to see it. Oh, you just remembered it was there? Go ahead and delete it, quickly! Whoops! Too late! They already saved it on their respective hard drives and are ready to spread the word (ahem, digitalized photographic memory) to those poor souls who are too illiterate to use the Internet!

A presumed photo of a poor soul who is too illiterate to use the Internet (and to speak English)

Note that being drunk is not the only ground for indecency. Nudity and violence are also grounds for indecency, but if you are a pornstar or a sociopath you're probably fine. Hell, even Photobombs and poorly shopped pictures can attain the tag of being indecent for thine eyes of public.

My eyes! They burn!

What you could do instead:

Why Typing Maniac should be nuked

Introduction

Typing Maniac is a free application on Facebook. It is a game that encompasses three skills: Your finger agility, hand-eye coordination and your ability to quickly decide logically based on the visual representations on the screen.

The game itself is a good way to give your fingers a workout, in a non-geek way (trolling on 4chan). While playing the game, not only your fingers are exercising, but also your coordination and logical reasoning. While playing, you have to be quick at choosing which words pose as the greatest threat and look for the quickest solution for that nuisance. If all goes smoothly, you'll win (until you reach total RAM breakdown at levels 35-40).


Implications on society

The game started out as a simple way of bragging to your friends how many hours you've wasted typing nonsensical words falling down from your screen. Scores evolved from the mediocre 5,000 worm to the 600k+ alien. Everything was going fine. Those with overly-stretched fingers due from gripping basketballs too much were defeated by the geeks whose main lives is the Internet.

Like this, but worse.

Until recently, someone at somebody else's bottom of the list got pissed of how much he sucks at this game and how much time his geeky friend has wasted on the Facebook application. He thought of a plan to overcome his suckness. Some call it cheating. Internets people call it hacks, or h4x.

Cheat Engine (yes, they really named it that way) was a cheating tool (duh) that revolutionized how online gaming worked. It gave way to overly-protective game hack protection systems that usually think your defragmentation program running in the background is a hack. Slowly, Cheat Engine was dissolving like salt sprayed with water. However, the geeks who write their code (and not resort to copy-pasta techniques) kept the business alive.

See?

Numerous hacks surfaced the Internet. There is the simple Speedhack, which supposedly slows down the processing of your web browser. Its downside is that it also slows down the game and its responses, so your accuracy will decrease with noticeable results. Another hack is the Facebook bot, where a bad-written piece of code will do the typing for you, while you lurk Rule34 for homosexual midgets and post pictures of children in /b/. Again, the geek types invented more innovative ways to cheat, like the "get-the-same-word-over-and-over-again" hack, and the "score multiplier" hack. To take advantage of the retarded jocks trying to take advantage of those geeks, the geeks added price tags to their bots. That's right - just a bundle of text resembling code for only $9.99 a pop.

Am I pissed?

Now, my measly score of 1,190,872 is beat through underhanded techniques, or, in 1337speak, the h4x0rs. One of my friends posted a score of 2M+ ending on Round 38, method of hacking is probably FB bot, because those bots aren't written correctly or much to even be accurate.

Pictured above: You, while playing Typing Maniac

I'm not pissed at my loss. It's kinda better than being labeled as "typing-maniac-geek-with-elongated-speedy-fingers", or any other childish remark a child would label a civilized person. I laugh at the fact that immature children are trying their very best to beat my mediocre score.

Look, it's just a game. Who cares if you beat me. I don't care. Your mother doesn't care and would rather go as a hermaphrodite dancer than see her son/daughter turning into a hacker with no life. The world doesn't care, especially the Internets, for Internets laws forbids hax0rs. We frown upon hax here.

Only 1 in every 100 children in Nepal gets to touch a keyboard, nor even use a computer. In Afghanistan, it's 1 in every 1000. And in most parts of Africa, the figure goes up to an unbelievable 1 in every 10,000. Sometimes it goes up to 1 child touching a computer per 50,000 other children. Think about it, everytime you finish a word in Typing Maniac, the very souls of computer-less children haunts your very soul. Please keep note of that.

We're in your Internets, damning ur s0ulz.

Sometimes the best option would be to go to the nearby wilderness, get a cup of coffee, and ponder, "Why the fuck am I wasting my time trying to beat measly high scores when I can just get a life?" There's two ways that scenario can end. (1) You shoot yourself in the head or jump down a cliff, because you're too retarded to reflect in solitude or (2) You stand up, go back to the city, get a job, stop living with your parents and actually live. You're doing the human civilization a big favor just by contributing to its growth, instead of sticking yourself in the computer all day, all night, doing your best to beat someone's score on an entirely retarded game.

Have you finished thinking about it yet?

Updated blog layout

Since the notebook template was getting old, I updated the blog with a new, and probably better template with an awesome background. As such, I didn't make the template, all credits go to Ray's Creations. Tell me what you think about the new template - is it awesome or does it suck?

Also - I'm trying out the new Blogger post editor - should be better than the old one.

Friends for sale: One of the most retarded Facebook apps ever

A few weeks ago or two I decided to check out Friends for sale, since I'm getting request to accept an invitation to join the game so both parties (me and the sender of the invitation) will get a 1,000,000 coin (currency in the game app) bonus. Of course, I accepted since I'm being curious and want to fit in since I've already got like 15 requests to use this app.

Turns out that allowing Friends for Sale to utilize my Facebook profile was a bad choice.

After signing up, I took a look around. I have a million coins to start with instead of the usual 250,000 coins. I bought my brother, for a measly 100,000 coins, since nobody in history bought him yet on FFS. When I bought him, I was given the option to give a name for him as my new "pet". I named him "asswipe" and just moved on and bought more people, sometimes from others who already owns them.

Instant bitch, just $120,000 to be exact.

Finally, the million coins were fully consumed, and I have to find more money. To earn money without using paid-by-cash credits, one must issue commands to his/her pets to do chores for him/her. Also, those commands are not "Sit", or "Walk" or "Take a shit". The commands are targeted upon one of your friends in Facebook that you choose. For example, I could order my pet to hug one of my Facebook friends, and I could even order my pets to pick up poop then shove it at one of my Facebook friend's face. Once the command has been issued, the pet and the friend will both be sent the notifications, " ordered to you! Will you accept or reject?" for the recieving friend and " ordered you to . Will you accept or reject?" for the pet. The accepting/rejecting part is completely optional. The pet owner will still be paid coins for issuing the command, even if the pet or the friend or both rejects or ignores the notification.

This is the problem with FFS. Everytime your owner orders you to pick up poop, you recieve a notification. When someone orders their pet to shove crap up your face, you get a notification also. This mass sending of worthless notifications greatly reduces productivity and will drown out the more important notifications down the list.

If you hate walls of text and completely ignored the paragraphs above, here is a list of things that made Friends for Sale completely retarded:
1. You can name a pet with anything you want. Constantly I get bought and got named "fag", "douche", and "asskisser" a couple of times. I told a friend to buy me, give me a proper name, and I locked my contract to avoid further namecalling.
2. Too many damn notifications. I don't need to get one every damn minute. Can there please be an option to remove this?
3. There's no sense in this "game". All your doing is either making fun of that prick from school or just trying to make yourself popular by buying your friends virtually with virtual currency in a completely virtual world. I'd like to see this happen in real life. Hopefully you'd understand.

So there it is, Friends for Sale, the ultimate Facebook application for the friendless nerd who wishes to extend his or her thin social line. Want to feel like having a little pet to prank your friends with endless notifications? Want to feel like a boss and bitch people around when you're just a hopeless 40 year old dork living with his mother? Friends for sale makes all of these possible.

The users of Friends for Sale, after spending 20 hours a day playing.

5 things that are destroying the Internet

The Internet is such an awesome place. I have not stopped using it since I was introduced to the "World Wide Web" somewhere in 2004. It was an awesome place filled with good people, cool websites, and honest information.

However, today, as the Internet became cheaper, more and more people flocked to it. During the course of 2004, there was a troll for every 35 internet users. Now, in 2009, we have a troll for every 5 internet users. That's a huge difference.

Anyway, here are some things on the Internet that made it such a corrupted place, but sorta somehow making it awesome at some point:

5. Web advertisements

Ranging from the plain Google adbot to the complex and annoying "BUY ME TO NOT DIE" adware malware, web advertisements have changed the ways of marketing and increased the efficiency of targeting customers more than 100% than of mass calling strangers on the phone and billboards. With over 75% of the human population hooked to the massive link, advertising your junk online has become a norm that has been accepted by the community for years. Some advertisements are on a good side, they depict their wares clearly, honestly, and unannoyingly. Horrible advertisements, on the other hand, gives way too many superlative qualities about the product and tries to attract your attention by hijacking your browser and opening 200 instances of the browser application that redirects to their [the advertiser's] web site, which is usually pornographic.

Web advertisements have been used by website owners to earn revenue to pay for their hosting fees. Google has AdSense that can easily earn you revenue for every retard who clicks on the Google ads, thinking that they are legitimate when they're just pointless, irrelevant words that a Google bot just picked up. There are also other companies who offer more solutions by letting you pick who you are going to sell. Least that's much better than Google ads who displays websites about child pr0n on a children's site.

4. Chat

In the first few years of the Internet, communication through computers were limited into two options. First, creating websites that would take a long while to publish. Secondly, and the best solution would be writing an email.

Emails back then were not those HTML hogs that takes a minute to load even on the fastest connection on earth. They are simple messages that resembles text messages, minus all those shortened words and abbreviations like "lol". When someone has to lol, they would say, "I must say I laughed out loud." If someone has to call somebody else a fag, he would say, "I must tell you you're a homosexual." The early days of computer communication was excellent, if only that dial-up and computers weren't so expensive.

Somehow someone got tired of taking an hour to write a simple, constructive paragraph because he can't type at a measly 20WPM. His solution? He built the instant messaging platform.

Instant messaging, otherwise known as IM, is built in order to "instantly" send messages back and forth between two parties, hence the name. It functions almost the same way as emails, although much much faster. In the course of years, IM has evolved from two-way communication to multi-way communications, otherwise known as chatrooms. They are those rooms where the first thing people would ask you is you age, sex and location, and if your credentials fit their needs they'll ask if you have a webcam.

Instant messaging allowed people to see each other through webcams shortly after. This evolved to the practice of camwhoring, or whoring yourself in front of a webcam to get paid by some creepy stranger. It won't hurt if a hot chick is camming for you, but it would suck to know that, even homos do this shit. Gives me another reason to steer clear away from cams.

3. Unnecessary paid stuff

Let's say you have to download a very small batch (.bat) file in order to run a program. So you Google for that file, then you found the only mirror hosting the file. You are ready to download when a dialog pops up, saying that you have exceeded their bandwidth limit even if you just got there for the first time. Their conditions are: Shit out your money to get your file or die.

This has been one of the most annoying nuisances in my experience. I am supposed to download something small and some download site stops me because I've exceeded bandwidth, or I'm Pinoy, or whatever. I'm guessing these "exceeded bandwidth" dialogs are probably a scam to rip money off my wallet just because it said so. And no, I'm not shelling out twenty dollar just to download a 20kb file.

A good solution for this is to enforce payment for the uploader only. The idea of shoving a toll up the downloaders' asses is retarded. No, really, it is.

2. Locality restrictions

Also know as "GTFO Asian/African/European/Australian shithead" dialog, it is the message you get when you view a site and it says that the content you requested is not available in your area. You go to a free internet TV site and it says that the video is not available in your area just because you're not in the American region, or Canada for that matter.

This applies to online selling as well. You want to buy that awesome thingy-whatever-it-is on the Internet since it's not available locally. Now you are about to pay for that thing and discover that they only ship in North America. And that doesn't include Mexico.

1. Anonymity

This is the granddaddy of all plagues plaguing the Internetrealm. The power of anonymity is all powerful. You can pretend to be a football jock to impress a hot babe when you're a 35 year old virgin living with his mother. You can be anonymous and troll on /b/. Hell, if anonymity can be applied in real life, hell is gonna break loose. In fact, China is facing the crisis of anonymity at the moment. You can look at three Chinese guys and tell that they're all named Chan at some point. Or, a couple of Muslims and tell that they're all named Muhammad.

Anonymity is the process of creating a separate identity that is partially or completely different from your real life credentials. You can be a sexy babe on the Internet when you're a 350-lb woman in real life. You can pretend to be Michael Jackson; you can pretend to be 2pac; you can pretend to be just about anything. Hell, I guess that's what the Internet is for.

Twitter vs. Plurk

Recently I made myself a Plurk account, since I feel so left out by my friends I don't want them to label me as a nerd who doesn't join their league of people who makes accounts and just parks them there forever. After I signed up, I got what I expected - a somewhat rip-off of the ever popular Twitter. Except there are some more shit here than Tweetster, like, there's karma (points that you accumulated while wasting your life on the site) that you can endlessly shove into your friends' faces, and a timeline, which gives a more in depth list of plurks (equivalent to tweets) in a timespan. The timeline is kinda useful, at least for now.

Another thing I noticed about Plurk is that 99% of its users are all Pinoys. Holy shit. Am I still on Friendster? I thought that crap's dead, but it seems Pinoys decided to amp it up by creating an obvious rip off of Twitter. Now here I am again, I stepped on another trap that led to me getting surrounded by a mob ob retards who are obviously wasting precious internet bandwidth. If I find a Chinese guy on Plurk, I'll call him Best Friend in Zombieland.

There's unlockable stuff on Plurk, which will fuel the need for nerds to keep on shouting crap like, "I just got myself a XXXL pair of briefs today" or "Why should I go outside when all of my 'friends' are here on Friendster?" You can get a very retarded avatar of a pig who lost its head when you get 20 karma, then you get more weird doodles of a three year old when you gain more karma. There's also more smileys to unlock with karma so you can torment an innocent person by endlessly showering him with a barrage of smileys.

I'm just gonna keep my Plurk account running in case I pick us signals from actual humans, not teenagers in their stereotypical angsts. Maybe I'll find a Chinese or Black dude to actually communicate with, and not share useless links to Twilight or Harry Potter porno.