4800 seconds of spontaneous surfing and sharing

Why protect your wifi from your dishonest, bandwidth stealing neighbors when you can piss them off by turning their world upside down… This how-to guide will walk you through the steps on how to invert images seen by a specific area of your network.

http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html

My dilemma awhile ago was that 3 pages were given to me in JPEG format. I needed to post them online as text. I tried a few of the online OCR’s but didn’t really got them working. Then I found A prototype of the DocList API. The demo can be used as an online service for converting those images into documents. It’s kind of buggy despite the images I tried were very clean but it beats typing from scratch.

Because Facebook decided to isolate itself from Google’s OpenSocial, if you’re a social app developer, you’d need to learn both Facebook API and OpenSocial API to penetrate all popular social networks. It’s hard enough to perfect a social app; and more pain comes when converting it to support on a different API.

From what I’ve noticed with the big players in the social app is that they have an architecture similar to this:

• Main App
• Friend dataset
• API Manager (selects Facebook or OpenSocial)
• App’s Database

There’s a promising project called OpenSocket. It let’s you add an OpenSocial app as a Facebook app. It’s still in beta and there are still some missing integrations but it’s a start. I’m optimistic for this project.

It’s kind of disappointing that Facebook is all closed doors. The whole thing with social networking is to connect. But right now in the web, we have silos of social networks.

One of the problems I always encounter when working with PHP-based systems is the maximum file size for uploads. By default it’s set to 2MB which now in the days of the gigs and teras is pretty scarce. There are two known ways to solve this.

First is to use .htaccess and add PHP directives to render the modification. Second method is to override the settings by creating your own php.ini. Unlike the first solution, you’ll need to copy-paste this file in all directories. That doesn’t sound nice especially if you’re using open source systems like Joomla which doesn’t hold back in folder count.

The dilemma comes in when you are in a shared hosting environment. You don’t have control over the php.ini file and some even block the use of PHP directives. These factors make our two solutions useless.

Fret not. After hours of scouring the internet, I found the solution here. We still follow the second method but instead of copy-pasting in all folders, we add a code in the .htaccess which does the “Apply to All” for your php.ini.

For a few days, my blog will look like Google Chrome. Why? Because I love the browser. Thanks to Ericulous!

I’ve been through a lot of browsers (if you don’t know what a browser is, I’m sure you can relate with these people) but none comes close to the browsing experience Google Chrome provides.

Lightweight

The installer is pretty small. I may talk about memory management here and we’d end up debating which of the top browsers has the smallest RAM consumption, but it sure leaves behind a browser that’s still stubbornly used by some people.

It Loses in Stop Dance at the Last Stage

If you know the party game, Stop Dance, and you’re one of the last contestants in the game, the party host will reverse the rules (play music, don’t move). Hmmm… It reminds me of another browser. When I turn my iTunes on, it hangs. Chrome gets kicked out since it didn’t hang.

Simple Yet Slick

Lastly, what I like about the browser is it does one thing correctly–it gives me room to browse. No useless toolbars; not even a title bar and menu bar. It’s just tabs, navigation bar and bookmarks. Everything I need. The default theme looks really good on Windows’ Aero.

If I only have 80 minutes to travel around the web, Google Chrome is my private jet.