Die2Nite - a cool zombie game with a twist

I've been playing quite a few games lately since I don't have a lot of activity. And I'm also waiting for the Christmas holidays and I have very little productivity.

So I've been playing DinoRPG for quite a while now, I guess about a year or so, on and off. This week a new announcement came up from the developers saying that they've launched a new game: a zombie game. I guess they planned to launch it before Halloween, but didn't make it. The game is made by MotionTwin, the guys that also have great and popular web games like MyBrute (La Brute in French), Dinoparc and AlphaBounce.

The game is called Die2Nite (pretty cool considering it's zombie game) and here's how it works. You are a simple citizen stuck in a town with a lot of other Die2Nite citizens and each night a large number of zombies will attack your town. You need to gather the required materials to upgrade your town and survive the night.

The thing is there are a lot of items that you can find walking around the Die2Nite map and many of these can be used in different ways by either combining them with something else or transforming them in something else, more useful. The number of items is impressive and so is the number of combination that can be achieved. The Wiki's really come in handy here (Die2NiteWiki.com and on Wikia).

Each day you get 6AP (Action Points) to use for your daily activities like exploring, building at the Construction Site or carrying out the dead bodies of your dead comrades (citizens that died in town because of the previous zombie attack).

Of course other things can be done with your AP, but once they're consumed you can have a refill by drinking water from the town's well, eating something, taking drugs or drinking some alcohol (the last two have some funny side effects).

The twist in the game is that the whole town needs to work together to survive the night. If people don't communicate and collaborate the town will be overrun and everyone will be dead.

Death is something relative in Die2Nite, because once you die you can start all over again in a new town with new citizens. And the fun starts all over again. You gain points to your soul (the only thing you can't lose) from these experiences in various towns. I guess there's a ranking someone, but I couldn't find it.

If you want to give Die2Nite a try, go right ahead. And let me know if you like it or not. It looks really fun so far and I see it as a game I'll keep playing for a while.

QWOP Game - running is pretty hard

Most of you have probably already heard about the QWOP Game. It' all over the Internet. That's how I found out about it. But for those of you that don't know it yet, here's what it's about.

The QWOP Game is a running simulation game in which the aim is to run as far as possible. You control the legs of your character (named Qwop) and try to synchronize the movement as best as possible. It's apparently pretty hard to achieve a good running distance. All I got so far are 6.8 meters and that after a lot of practice.

The game is controlled using just 4 keys. Go ahead, guess which keys... That's right: Q, W, O and P. The Q and W are used to control the thighs while O and P control the calves. The way you use these keys should mimic the human body movement in running as accurately as possible if you want to run the 100 meters.

A few tips the game developers give us is to start leaning the body forward at the beginning, tapping the O key. Also there seems to be a surprise at 50m and another one at 100m. Has anyone found what these are?

In any case, go ahead and give it a try. You could experience small problems accessing the game page, probably caused by the huge popularity the game is enjoying lately. More information about the game can be found on foddy.net.

If I find some really good tutorials on how to get a better distance I'll update this post. If you find any, please let me know. Also I would like to hear what other people have scored on this game. Leave a comment below. I'll keep practicing a little longer but it's king of frustrating.

Oh, I almost forgot. The link to the QWOP game is below:

Play the QWOP game

KingsAge - fully upgraded city

Today I had some more spare time. I tend to have a lot of that lately. So I decided to find something to do. Being at work, I couldn't exactly play Starcraft, so I began browsing the web in search for a nice little browser game. I came across KingsAge so I gave it a try.

The first thing that stood out was the fact that the map overview resembles the one from TribalWars so I thought that this one is made by the guys at InnoGames. But it's actually made by Gameforge Productions GmbH, the creators of Ikariam.

Now here's the funny part: Grepolis (from InnoGames) looks like Ikariam (from Gameforge) and KingsAge (from Gameforge) looks like TribalWars (from InnoGames). It's like these guys just copy each other :). I'm kidding of course.

But back to KingsAge. I always find it more exciting if I know what I'm going at. In other words, when it comes to browser based games, I want to know what my village/town/polis or whatever it's called, will look like. I want to know how a fully developed city will look like. And since I already made a few mock-ups with Grepolis in the past, I thought I'll give this one a go too.

And here it is, a KingsAge fully developed or upgraded city. And I must say that it looks pretty nice. I don't know why but it reminds me of Age of Empires. As almost any strategy browser game, most buildings have 3 different images that show their level of development. So there are 3 images below, each showing the buildings in the 3 different stages. Some buildings (like the Memorial or the Hideout) have only one image no matter the level and that's why they look the same in all images. The Residence has two images.

I can't really form an opinion on whether I like the game or not. I'll have to play it for a few days. But so far I'm not really impressed with anything in particular. It looks like it's just one more browser game.

PS: These are mock-ups, manufactured images, don't think I've reached that level and that my city is fully upgraded. I might even quit playing in a day or two. Please don't ask me any questions regarding the game also. I'm a newbie too. Check the Help pages and the Forum. You'll find all the information you need there.

aTokens from Entrecard - a new currency platform

A few days ago I remembered that there once a website/service on the Internet that got a lot of attention in the past. I remember every single blogger talked about it and everyone thought it was such a great service. Important players on the "make money online" sector made it really popular and people flooded in. It was called, and still is, Entrecard.

Both praises and critics emerged in regard to that service. Some people, including me, thought it is in no way beneficial to building a community. All it did was attract mass droppers and that's about it. Contests were held and prizes were given. It was a really agitated time for Entrecard. And then nobody seemed to pay attention to it anymore.

By accident I stumbled on a Entrecard drop box about a week ago and I remembered all about it. So I created a new account just to see what else is happening with it. Apparently the community, even if it's not that active anymore, is partly still there. The large players have left. But new people still join.

But this post is not about Entrecard, but rather about a new service they are promoting: aTokens. It seems it's yet another virtual currency platform, but aimed at the social networking area this time. aTokens stand for (a)ppreciation tokens and it's meant to be a way to show your appreciation towards someone. I still don't know what that means in the real world.

The creation of the account is rather simple and it allows you to connect your account with your existing Twitter account, for faster registration. It even has a built-in messaging system similar to the one Twitter has.

To fuel your account you can purchase aTokens through PayPal at a price of $4.99 for 100 tokens. The tokens can latter be transferred between users or can be redeemed for cash or coupons. The main advantage I'm seeing with the redeeming part is the fact that it will attract a lot of people and that's a good thing for a website like this. For any website for that matter. The good part is that aTokens don't just sprout out from the ground. They are created only in exchange of real cash. I guess that creates a stable economy.

Even if it sounds pretty good now i doubt it will last. The thing I suspect will happen is a lot of dead accounts will populate aTokens and it will soon roll over and die. Unless some real hot-shot from the high players makes it popular and some high-traffic online shop adopts it as a form of payment. I hope I'm wrong.

In any case, head on over to aTokens and give it a try. And hey, if you found this post useful I don't mind if you send a few aTokens my way :)

Mathletics - the children's mathematical resource

Mathletics - I came across this by accident earlier today, and since I noticed that I haven'tpublished anything else lately, I thought I should give it a go. Oh, and I also found it interesting.

Mathletics, run by 3P Learning Pty Ltd, describes itself as "Australia's most used educational website". I can't argue with that, since I don't live in Australia and I've finished school a few years now. But even if it's dedicated to Australian kids we all know that maths is universally identical no matter the country. It doesn't even matter on what planet you write a formula, according to maths, the result will always be the same. We can't say the same thing about physics for example.

Mathletics is aimed at students aged 5 to 18 and is one of the world's most used mathematics educational website. It is built in such a way that it will help student improve those aspects that they feel uncomfortable with. The website provides children a fun way to learn what most of us consider a torment: mathematics. if something like this would have existed back in the days I went to schol, maybe the stress would have been a lot less present: "Will I pass this year? Will the teacher flunk me?" The horror!

Mathletics UK is the website's version aimed at those students that live in the United Kingdom. There are also versions for some other countries across the globe, like the United States, Canada or South Africa. More details can be found on their official blog, at blog.mathletics.com along with the website addresses.

So,if you have a child that's not doing so great on maths, go to the Matheletics website and give it a try. It's most likely not the means to turning your kid in a maths genius, but at least it might get him to learn a few things. And maybe, just maybe,pass the year.

To validate or not to validate?

This post is intended to address the issue of HTML validation from my point of view. I will try to point out the advantages and the reasons a web page needs to validate (again from my point of view of course), but I will try to line out a few other opinions on the matter. Long story short, I will try to answer a simple question: "Should I care about validation or not ?"

What is HTML validation?

For those of you that still don't know what validation really is, here is the short explanation. Validation is the process by which an HTML or XHTML page, meaning it's source, is brought in accordance with world wide accepted standards. What this means is actually writing the source code of the page in such a manner that is respects all the guidelines implemented by the W3C (that's the World Wide Web Consortium). In order to make sure your web page is valid from an HTML or XHTML point of view, you can use a lot of different tools, but my favorite is the online one provided by W3C at http://validator.w3.org. Simply type in the URI of your page or copy/paste your code and hit the "Check" button. That's it.

Does it even matter?

Believe it or not, it does. There are people that say that validation is just something that developers thought up to brag about their skill. Others just don't care if it's not valid as long as it works. But here is where the funny thing comes in. For it to work it still needs to be coded after some specific guidelines, so unintentionally people do give a though to validation. After all, they do want their pages to look nice, don't they?

There are many situations when a page full of errors looks flawless, the layout is just the way it was planned. That doesn't mean it's right and that it doesn't need to be coded differently. It just means the browser is aware there are bad developers or that errors might slip by unnoticed and it just ignores the situations and renders things just like nothing happened, mostly "guessing" how things should have been.

So browsers fix things for me. Then why should I bother to validate?

The idea here is that browsers can't fix everything. There are situations when you do need a valid page and a well thought out structure. One of the most common situations i when you're using JavaScript, like the many wonderful frameworks available out there (jQuery, MooTools, Dojo to name just a few). These don't bother to check your code, they just use what they are given.

For example if you forget to close a paragraph (<p> tag), the browser will render just fine. When it finds the next paragraph tag or the next block element, it assumes you closed the previous one. But if you use some JavaScript code to work on your paragraph tags, let's say for example that you want to change their background when you hover over them, errors will appear. JavaScript will assume that the paragraph ends when it meets the closing tag (</p>), but that will cause the change to be applied to the next elements (maybe other paragraph or maybe lists), until that closing tag is met.

That's all? Closing tags?

No, that's not all. Because browsers continue to evolve and improve, a strict set of rules is required. And these rules must be respected by everyone, both website owners and browser developers. If they are ignored, progress will be just a long list of hacks and fixes from either side. Browser developer will try to support obsolete and sometimes wrong interpretations of standards just to please the users and not render the pages chaotically. And website owner and developers will try to work around browser incorrect renderings by various CSS, HTML or JavaScript hacks.

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In closing, I would like to say that I try my best to make every page as valid from a W3 point of view as possible. There are situations when it's jut too much work and it's not worth rewriting the entire code just to shift a few pixels. But these days things are a lot more easy. Modern browsers even support standards not yet officially recognized in preparation for when they will be made generally accepted, like CSS3. The only thing developers need to do is focus on the new implementations (which are already pretty old by now) and leave behind the old hacks. And if a browser doesn't display the page the right way, it just means it's the browser's fault. Most likely it's an outdated version and the users should upgrade for their own sake.

On the same note, I would like to keep a moment of silence for the soon to be dead and hopefully forever forgotten, IE6. Your death's coming soon.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Version Market Share

Grepolis - fully upgraded city

Because I had a little spare time on my hands I started playing Grepolis, the latest game from InnoGames. I enjoy this kind of strategy games but they can be very time consuming and you get really frustrated when you lose everything you've worked for over night. That's the reason why I quit playing by the time my city is fully developed. But this time I decided I would have a look at how a fully developed city would look like. And If anyone else is interested, here's a sneak peak.

The first one show the Grepolis city with all the building at the level 1 and with the Oracle and Thermal Baths built. Some of them will change appearance as they level up but some will remain the same. The second image shows the Grepolis building at intermediary levels and the last three show the city with the buildings at their top level. Also the Olympic Games and the Triumph are in full display and all the buildings that have animation have been activated, as if they're working. Sadly, I don't have the patience to make an animated version of the town so you'll have to settle for the static ones.

Because certain building in Grepolis city view share the same spot in town, the last three images show the various buildings in this order:

1. Library and Tower
2. Theater and Trade Office
3. Thermal Baths and Oracle

One thing I didn't manage to display is the Statue. I'm not even sure how it's supposed to look like, but it should occupy the same place as the Oracle, Tower and Trade Office.

And after all the trouble I went through, I found this little app that would have made everything extremely easy. It even shows the Grepolis statues. Bummer! Oh well, that's life. At least my pictures have the Olympic and Triumph in town :-)

Oh, oh, and if you find the pictures helpfull and would like to give the game a go, please use this link: Sign up to Grepolis. Thanks.

Tori's Eye - great jQuery app

Every once in a while I remain amazed at the wonderful things people can come up with. These are the things that make me realize that there are so many things out there to learn ( or to get "inspired" from).

A few days ago I bookmarked this website: Tori's Eye because I remained truly fascinated at the way it operates, even without going into it's deeper workings. What it does is it monitors Twitter for a certain hashtag or keyword and it displays all tweets related to that specific tag as flying birds.

I came across it via webdesignerdepot.com in one of the list posts displaying some original uses for jQuery. I immediately fell in love with it. This just shows that great web animation is not reserved for "in-house" environments as Flash or SilverLight and others like it (are there any others?)

I posted it here because this is one of those things that I really like and I would like to share with everyone, even if they don't recognize the genius behind it's inner workings.

Human stupidity in one of it's many moments

This is one of those things that get me stunned every time I read them. And on top of that they get me terribly amused occasionally. This one in particular got me thinking, mostly because I loved that movie when I was a child: "are there people around really that stupid?". Here's how it happened.

I have one of those widgets on my iGoogle homepage that gives you all sort of weird fact. This one is called "Gullible Info" and it's from http://www.gullible.info/. It's an entire collection of weird "did you know?" facts sentences there. I say sentences because I'm not sure all of them are true. But this one really amused me. It went something like this:

Disney's "The Never Ending Story" sparked 28 lawsuits from customers who were furious that the movie had an end.

How much fun that is? I imagine the defense attorney trying to explain to the judge something that everyone else in the courthouse (including the judge) understood: it's just a title, it refers to the action and story of the movie, it wasn't meant to be "never ending". That must have been one hilarious trial.

I don't know how the attorney/s pleaded his/her/their case, but if I would have been there I would have probably blamed it all on Michael Ende, the author of the novel :)

There are not many things that amuse me in this world, but human stupidity never fails me!

Google Chrome: First impressions

Finally, it's here. As you might already know and as I said earlier today, Google recently announced the launch of their own browser, Google Chrome, version 0.2.149.27. I can't emphasize enough how much I waited for that download link. And the second I reached it, I immediately installed Chrome.

I said in the previous post that I'll get back to you with the first impressions I have about this new application. And here they are. In fact this entire post is written from within Google Chrome.

The first thing I did was check the About section of the browser. I have to say I did't make head or tails from it. I've seen there Mozilla/5.0, AppleWebKit/525.13, Chrome/0.2.149.27 and Safari/525.13. Well, they did say they took the best from all browsers and improved it, but this is getting me dizzy. Let's keep moving on.

One thing that annoyed me from the start is the fact that it installed with the language based on the country I'm in. Although this is seen as a feature for many people, let's put it this way. I hate the way Copy/Paste and other "standard" actions sound in my language. They don't seem natural. I looked for them once for 5 minutes in a drop down menu (a different application) and they were right there in front of my eyes. I know I could have used the shortcuts, but I had a sandwich in my left hand :). Anyway, it's a good thing you can change that from the Options menu.

The next step in the installation was very pleasing. It detected that I have other browsers installed on my machine an offered to import the default search engine, which was Google. And of course, later on, I was able to import the History (visited pages, user settings, passwords) and Bookmarks from my already installed browsers. But one thing eludes me tho: where are my imported bookmarks taken to?

I told you about the Options menu. Well this has been moved. In fact the entire Menu bar has been moved and cut down to just 2(two) buttons. Since it's still in Beta, I imagine this thing will change over time, maybe more buttons and menu items will be added. The Menu bar is now located at the same level with the address/URL bar. The Status bar has disappeared completely. It just appears in the lower left corner when you hover over a link, with a fade in and fade out effect. That's a nice touch in my opinion. Also the standard Title bar that we encounter at almost all Windows applications is gone, being replaced by the Tabs bar. All of these changes are meant to help the user in it's online activities, reducing the screen space taken by the browser to the bare minimum. Another change that I enjoy is the fact that the "Bookmark this page" button that in Firefox 3 was incorporated in the Address bar is in front of it in Chrome. I like this because in Firefox I continually bookmarked pages trying to click the "Go to" (this replaces the star only if you edit the current address, but I sometimes use it to refresh the current page. And yes, I know I could have hit F5, I just don't feel like taking my hand off the mouse sometimes. Or putting down that sandwich :) ). The Search box we encounter in most of the modern browsers has disappeared completely. In fact it has been incorporated into the Address bar. Multitasking?

One of the main features of Google Chrome is it's ability to generate independent processes for each tab. Although this means a greater stability for the application as a whole, when it comes to closing a process, you got me there. Having 5(five) tabs open means the Windows Task Manager shows 7(seven) active "chrome.exe" processes. How am I supposed to know which one is which so I can close it? I guess it will be the one that hugs my entire CPU or memory. Well, no. Another thing that may prove useful is the "about:memory" page. It shows you how much memory each of the open tabs consumes. And because each tab has it's own process, it also shows the PID's (Process ID's) of each tab. This way you know exactly which one is causing you trouble.

One other thing that annoyed me was the fact that when I closed my last tab, completely by accident, the application closed. Of course, closing all the tabs means I'm done and it's a high chance that I will close the browser. But you're not giving me a chance. It would have been nice that the moment you close the last tab, to have the browser display your homepage or that Most Visited page you see when you open a new tab. That's just a personal choice maybe.

Regarding the JavaScript optimization the Google team promised, I'm waiting for some benchmarks to be made by more qualified people, but from what I could tell, there is some improvement in speed. Also there seems to be a pretty good integration with Google Gears, although I never interacted with that too much.

The download manager is pretty cool, it opens in a tab of it's own, no more pop-out windows. Seems easy to use, even if I haven't tried it out yet. How hard can it be? From what I can tell, it has similar functionality like the one in Firefox.

When viewing various pages I noticed an incorporated box informing me that there are some errors on those pages, things like unclosed tags and such, and it would stop the page from loading beyond that point. While this is a great tool for web site developers, I highly doubt the casual user will find any use for it. Unfortunately I didn't manage to disable it. On the other hand it might convince or at least make aware website developers of the need to validate their websites. And speaking of developers, there is a dedicated menu for them where some tools are located: View Source, Debug JavaScript, JavaScript Console and Task Manager.

And those are pretty much my first impressions of Google Chrome. It still has a lot more things to work on and a lot more features to add and improve. Still, it indeed offers a fresh new perspective of how a browser should work. I'm saying this from a resource management point of view. Anyway, I expect to see great things from this browser. Who knows, maybe one day, I'll even make it my browser of choice.

Google Chrome: the new way we see the Internet?

Like many other people, I've also learned about Google Chrome, the browser Google is planning to launch. To me and probably to many others, this came as a surprise. The collaboration between Google and Firefox is a long and fruitful one. So why did Google start to develop it's own browser, instead of investing more in Firefox?

One possible answer comes from their announcement made on the official Google blog: "Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web". Everyone likes to say that. But can they really deliver?

I took a look at the comic book they made to introduce the features of Google Chrome. What can I say? Looks awesome. The fact that each tab is a separate process with it's own memory allocation and it's own CPU thread would bring a lot of stability to the browser itself (or we could say "browsers", seeing that this approach actually replicates multiple instances of the browser being opened at the same time). I can't remember how many times I had to kill Firefox because of some crappy designed web pages or pages overloaded with Flash, JAVA applets and JavaScript snippets, taking my CPU to 100%. And keeping it there. And that meant closing even the working tabs. Thankfully there was the Session Restore, but it's still not a pleasant thing. So regarding the multi-threading part, I can hardly wait for it.

Now the JavaScript applications. Well, don't get me started. Yes, they're nice, they're useful. But they're huge and resource consuming, they're sometimes slow and they slow down your entire machine. I sure hope their solution works. You can find a detailed explanation of it in the comic book. But with every solution, comes a whole new set of problems. Making JavaScript driven applications use less resources might mean that people will begin to create even more complex applications, and also begin to disregard optimization. Much like what many programmers did when they got better CPU's and a lot more memory. They got lazy.

As stated by the Google team, the Google Chrome browser is largely based on existing Open Source applications. They took what was working and improved it, in their own vision. And what was not working, they made it work. Or at least tried to make it work. I guess the user will be the judge of that. Things like the quick buttons starting page (Opera had that, from what I remember) and the anti-phishing/malware warning that pops out when you're on a suspected page (I remember seeing that many times in Firefox) just prove that the Google team took really into consideration the user.

Since it's still in Beta (and on top of that I haven't had a chance to try it out) I still can't say for sure what I like and how I feel it behaves under "stress". But I'll consider making a new post after I give it a spin. By then I'll be able to say what I like and what I don't particularly like about it. But being a Google fan, I'll try of course to see all the benefits.

Until then, you can find more information on TechCrunch.com here and here.

Divert Your Course

Probably anyone that uses an Instant Messaging service, like Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger, knows about the fact that people share stuff like funny images or text, nice websites and anything else. You happen to come across something you like and you want to tell people about it so you just mass message everyone in your list. But I'm sure I don't have to explain to you how that works.

Today I received one such link, and here it is: Divert Your Course - moonbuggy. It's from a website called moonbuggy.org (don't ask me why, I haven't gotten that far). The most I can tell you about them is you can find all sort of funny or weird stories there. Stuff like these make your day just a little bit better. Besides the fact that this amused me, it is something that happens everyday. I don't mean ship captains asking buildings to move :). I'm talking about people getting too much power and abusing it. I'm not also referring to a specific nation, because people like that are found all over the world.

I guess it's just something with the mind of weak individuals. I'm not sure, I'm not a psychologist (boy oh boy, thats a tough word to spell). In any case, such situations have been depicted even in cartoons and movies. You could call it a template. All situations have a certain pattern they follow and it goes something like:

• man has no power/respect and is undermined my colleagues/family
• by a twist of faith man gets power (promotion, wins the lottery, receives an inheritance)
• man immediately starts to use the power he gained (authority or money) to prove to the world that he is worthy of respect
• soon man starts to abuse his power
• in the end two things can happen:
  • man realizes the error of his ways, changes himself and helps people, then a stupid unrealistic ending where everyone stands around the fire, eats marshmallows and they laugh and smile at each other like idiots
  • man makes himself look like an idiot in front of the everyone

Of course, we can see in which category this particular case fits in. But no one can help it. If it weren't for such people, we wouldn't have funny things to read every once in a while.

By the way, today was not the way I expected to be either. It was yet another relaxing day. I'm starting to get used to this kind of "work". But I still think it's the silence before the storm.

Now that got me really mad !

Wandering from stumble to stumble (StumbleUpon, that is) I've just read an article published a few days ago in Times Online here. The fact that this article is 100% accurate doesn't bother me. I know first hand what Romanians are capable of. I mean, I'm one of them. What really bothered me was a comment left by Graham from Loughborough, England. Labeling an entire nation as "Nazis or gypsies" based on the bad deeds of a small percentage of them is utterly stupid in my opinion. The fact that only the bad things about people makes it to the head lines of the papers doesn't help. It' doesn't tell you anything about a nation. It just points out bad actions of individuals. If we would generalize in that manner, we could simply say the following:

• all Americans are trigger happy and war fanatics
• all Iraqis are terrorists
• all Britons are arrogant
• all German are Nazis
• all Russians are communists

And the list can go on for every nation of the world. I don't mean any offense, I'm just trying to make a point of what preconceptions may lead to. And another thing, stating that Romanians are gypsies is probably one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Romania itself has a gypsy problem, or to be more ethnically correct, a Rrom problem. I'm talking here of the Rrom population that has been granted Romanian citizenship. That doesn't mean they're Romanians, they hardly follow Romanian laws and they're the major cause of crime related problems that the world heard about. I'm not saying Romanians are saints, just look at it this way: if you ignore all the crimes where Romanian citizenship Rroms were the cause, then you would have never heard of the Romanian crime rate. It wouldn't be close to 0, but it wouldn't be that high.

And one last thing. Again, I'm not saying that Romanians are innocent. For what I know, it's possible that they're the ones scamming people on eBay or who knows where else. But who is stupid enough to buy the town hall, a MIG (that's a fighter plane, for those that don't know) or a helicopter for that matter(an older story, also a Romanian involved, also on eBay) on an online market place? I mean, come on people, what the hell are you thinking?

Following the big boy's steps

You've probably all seen the famous John Chow AdWords campaign "Your Blog's a Money Maker: Do you have a blog? I'll show you how to make money from it 100% free". I know I've seen it so many times I'm sick of it. It's true there's something catchy about it. I mean, who wouldn't dream of quiting their 9 to 5 job and make and income from the comfort of their own home?

John Chow is really one of the big rollers in the business of making money online. His web page has formed a real community around it. And I don't think that there is someone out there, that tries to make money from a blog or web page, that is not subscriber to his feed, either by email or RSS. As one of the "big boys", he has a lot of people that try to mimic or to use the things found on his blog. One of these actions is the subject of this post. As I said, you probably know the campaign. Today I've come across something very similar. I fact it's exactly the same thing. Here's a screenshot I took right here on The Yoboo just a few minutes ago:

Notice anything strange? I wonder if you can have a copyright on AdWords campaigns? Oh well, I decided to go to that web site (I didn't click the ad as that would have been against AdSense rules) and see what it's all about. And yes, as I expected it's another money making tips web site. I didn't have the chance to browse through it as I absolutely had to come back and tell you about it. And about something else that I found truly hilarious. This is a screenshot of the MoneyBlogger.org homepage:

That's pretty funny, isn't it?. Anyway, no harm intended.

Let's get back to business

That's just one way of saying that I decided to return to my monotonous life. I've been quite busy these last two weeks and I expect I'm not done yet.

I had a little spare time today at work and I read a few of the feeds that I'm subscribed to. One thing popped right up. It was from the Yahoo! News: Technology News feed and the headline was like this: "China shuts down pornographic Web sites". Damn! Of course they must have a good reason to do that. They claim that it has"perverted China's young minds". Well of course that's a bad thing, but my question is as follows: how did those children managed to enter the damn web site? I'm not willing to pay for something like that when I can get it for free from other websites. And those aren't Chinese from what I know. Somebody must have given them access to a credit card in order for them to purchase a membership. Parents maybe? Or were those web sites with free access? And I didn't know about it? Damn again!

Anyway, China is well known for it's censorship and strict rules regarding not only pornography, but also political and religious areas, freedom of speech and who knows what other things. But that's not any of my business. I'm just surprised how did such a political regime survive for so long. From what I can remember there were revolutions all across the world at the beginning of the 90's, all directed at the abolishment of more or less tyrannic regimes. And that was almost 20 years ago. Hmmm ...

Face lifting for Live Search

I'm not using Microsoft's Live Search too often. In fact you could say I try not to use it at all. I don't like it and I can't give a certain reason why. I just don't. This is just to make things clear so you don't get an weird idea like I'm trying to promote something that Microsoft created. Cause I'm not. OK.

Today I came across Tafiti, a project that describes itself as an "experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results". And I was like "Hmmm ... Useless!" For me anyway. I can't find any use for it right now. But the reason I'm telling you about it is it's nice interface developed using Microsoft Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. At least that's the official description I've found on their website. The front-end is cute, quite Web 2.0, but it reminds me of those "all flash" websites. Those really pissed me off. They would take forever to load and would slow your system to a stop. Of course it's not entirely true in this case, but it's close enough. On my system anyway. The animations are nice and the way you can arrange the search results in a tree view is original. I like that one. Not very user friendly, but interesting. One annoying thing is that you have to install the Silverlight plug-in. I expect we'll be seeing a lot of websites incorporating this technology in the future, seeing as it's main purpose is video streaming.

All in all, Tafiti left a good impression on me from a graphical point of view. Maybe one of it's main disadvantages is that it uses Microsoft's search engine :-) .