I’d like IE to die, rather I’d like IE6 to die. Only because it’s a pain to design and develop for the worlds most hated browser—any developer will tell you that they curse IE6 at least a couple of times a month.

Can I not have a well structured CSS document without adequately supporting this browser as well? Meh, might I add we all love to write well structured code. Of course there are ways to get around the bugs and shortcomings of IE6 and IE7.

Yet it won’t:

As of May 2011, 10.9 percent of Internet users around the world were still using the outdated browser. Many of these users are in Asian and Arab countries. China has the the biggest user base with roughly 33% of Internet users accessing the Internet using IE6, and South Korea in second place with about 22%.

Most of the organizations that we create web pages for here in Pakistan have Windows XP installed with guess what? Default IE6 installed. Some people will install Firefoxcomm and Chrome, however most upper level management use the default IE6 to test the websites we create for them.

This is an age old rant and we’re all quite used to it already, just had to b!tch and moan about it. Ahhhh,I feel better already. We’re pretty much stuck, especially here in the Eastern world.

You do know that you can render IE in Chrome? Just use this extension.

Yup, Grupow is built in Flash…

Out of the 20 odd sites I surfed through yesterday on The FWA this caught my eye. One can only imagine the code behind this beast, darn fine concept and execution. Interaction designers have all the fun eh?

Here I am fiddling with my blog again, it’s been a while blog and I’ve missed tinkering around with you . While looking for some inspiration I thought I’d add a page for my personal quote favorites.

Actually it all started out while I was scanning Good Reads the other day (I totally endorse this site). As a beginning listing a few quotes that made sense to me wasn’t a bad idea at all—hopefully it will get the creative juices running….

“My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition. ” – Indhira Ghandi

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” – Socrates

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” – Marcus Aurelius

I’m a partial blogger, however today I feel like starting up a new category on my blog: Interesting http requests. Everyone surfs the web, but I pay special attention to stuff out there that is unique and useful —built by people who love the web and are excellent at what they do. Yes and many times I’ll sneak in some news and global affairs clips as well

• JoliCloud
  Jolicloud is a cloud desktop that makes it easy to manage your Web apps, files and services all in one place.
• Sencha
  Create amazing apps built on web standards.
• http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android
  A full Ubuntu desktop, on your docked Android phone.
• http://newsmap.jp/
  Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.
• Russia, China & Iran back Assad
• Russia, China and Iran showed support for Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, on Monday, just days before an international meeting which is likely to put more pressure on him to step down amid an increasingly bloody uprising.
• Graphic Designers are ruining the web
  Think of it as the Library of Alexandria on steroids. And remember that it’s as accessible to someone in Africa on the end of a flaky internet connection as it is to a Virgin subscriber in Notting Hill who gets 50MB per second on a good day.
Russia, China and Iran showed support for Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, on Monday, just days before an international meeting which is likely to put more pressure on him to step down amid an increasingly bloody uprisingRussia, China and Iran showed support for Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, on Monday, just days before an international meeting which is likely to put more pressure on him to step down amid an increasingly bloody uprising

Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) marks a major milestone for Android design. We touched nearly every pixel of the system as we expanded the new design approaches introduced in Honeycomb tablets to all types of mobile devices. Starting with the most basic elements, we introduced a new font, Roboto, designed for high-resolution displays. Other big changes include framework-level action bars on phones and support for new phones without physical buttons.

Are you and Android App Developer or interested in eye catching Android applications? If you are you’re in luck, now you can follow guideline and learn how to create exceptional Android apps. Apps that are simple to use, navigate and use subtle effects to wow end-users.

How wonderful it is to see Google put more emphasis into the design and UI of their new version of the Android Mobile Operating system.

Occupy Wall Streets best slogan yet is “We are the 99%” which has been waived around banners all over the world by crabby protesters.

See more “We are the 99%” banners..

Wealth is uneven and ALWAYS will be. Talent is uneven and ALWAYS will be. Risk Taking is uneven and ALWAYS will be. Men are unequal in their gifts and capabilities. There are competitive advantages, and Trade seeks to equalize this. And that is the basis of Capitalism and the Market.

Cowboys and Indians—the top 1 percent have made out like bandits over the past few decades.

• Only 2% of Americans according to the Small Business Adminstration own a business that employs at least one non-relative employee.
• 2% of Americans employ the other 98%.
• Employees are 90%. Management is the top 10%. Ownership is the top 2%.

Are the top 99% the symptom or the disease? Try watching the video at TED.

I’m a Google and Chrome fan because of their tools and the simplicity and performance they adhere to—apart from search this is exactly what the company and it’s engineers have excelled at and has for many years. However untangling the browsers privacy issues to give you more personal freedom is a different art all together.

Google’s browser Chrome is lightweight, responsive and performs fantastically even when browsing many tabs at once. We can thank  the Chromium Open Source project for giving users more stable, faster and safer web experiences.

Having said that, with the increasing amount of hackers compromising individuals and other companies information, it’s important to think of how to protect companies & individuals from snooping on your personal privacy. It’s quite obvious that Google’s interface to their users is the web and web browsers, while Apple’s is the screen. That is why you as an end user using Google (or any other product for that matter) should understand how their privacy policy and terms work, and in this case especially for the browser. Have you ever looked? You should go ahead and read through the notice if you haven’t.

One should realize that maybe Google Chrome’s policy is not good at all when you realize:

• If you use Google Chrome, Google will know every URL you type into the location bar.
• Google will know (almost) every partial URL you type into the location bar.
• Moreover, they will know every word or phrase you type into the location bar, even if you type it and then delete it before pressing enter.
• They will also know every word or phrase you type into the location bar, even if you type it and then delete it before pressing enter.
• All this information can be linked with your main Google account, because Google sends your cookie along with every automatic search it performs from the location bar.

If you are at all doubtful that they actually do this then try downloading fiddlr (A web debugging proxy), and shows that for nearly every character you type, Chrome sends a request back to Google.

At least they give you options to disable their data collection services, the only problem is most of your average users don’t understand what’s really going on “under the hood.” It’s wise to get an understanding about how they collect data and then try to tweak it for better privacy results. Anonymity matters to me for these simple reasons, and I think they should matter to you as well:

• Prevent people from watching and learning what sites I visit and my physical location.
• Protect your communications from irresponsible corporations.
• Protect your privacy from unscrupulous marketers and identity thieves.

How can I tweak my privacy so that Google and third parties don’t receive all my data?

1. First get to grips with how Google uses your data which they say is just standard log information collected and used to further help improve the user’s experience. Fair enough, however, each Google Chrome installation contains a unique ID that identifies its user, and for the average user it’s tough to remove that ID.  So the first task is to do this. You can easily achieve your goal by using UnChrome to anonymize yourself.
2. Cookies. Are they safe? This is an endless debate, but the fact remains that near to all websites use them to track and remember you so turning them off could lead to unexpected results when browsing with cookies on.
   After you click on the little wrench on the top-right side of the browser, goto options > under the hood > content settings and check “Ignore exceptions and block third=party cookies from being sent. This will help you block those third party vendors from tracking you.
3. If you have read this article you should know that this is where Chrome learns the most about you, by logging your data. They even say that they use only 2% of the data they receive, along with the IP addresses of it’s users in Chrome.  To disable these features goto little wrench on the top-right side of your browser, goto options > under the hood and disable these features:
   
4. Google uses the omnibox (search address bar) to help you search faster—no other browser has this feature and at first glance it’s really cool. Goto the little wrench on your browser > options > basics and disable Instant for faster searching and browsing.
   
5. Concurrently you may also disable the Chrome Auto-fill options and never save passwords, or prompt the user if you’d like to save your password for a particular site. You may also set your default search engine to Bing or Yahoo, but know that if you do this then they will receive your data (whatever’s left of it after you have tweaked) instead of Google.

Another Preventive Measure To Browse More Safely:
Along with tweaking your cookies, options and search one of the safest ways to use Chrome is the Incognito Mode.  Briefly what you want to know about browsing in this mode is (a) webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito aren’t recorded in your browsing and download histories and (b) all new cookies are deleted after you close all incognito windows that you’ve opened.

If you use Google Chrome in incognito mode, it will not transmit any pre-existing cookies to sites that you visit. Sites may deposit new cookies on your machine while you are in incognito mode, however. These cookies will be temporarily stored and transmitted to sites while you remain in incognito mode. They will be deleted when you close the browser or return to normal browsing mode.

How Much Does Google Already Know About Me?

What’s really interesting is that Google knows a LOT about you already. Sign into your Google Dashboard and you can clearly see what data of your they already have in their systems. I just checked that out while writing this post and they know almost everything about me including my address, phone number, email, websites, blogs, social media connections, contacts and a hell of alot more.

I can’t help but thinking how much data they have in their centers and how that number is growing exponentially with more and more people using their services. You can try disabling your web history as well, but at this stage for both you and I, it probably doesn’t matter.

The point of this whole article is to get to know how privacy works in Google Chrome and clearly understand the preventive measures you can take to help people / companies from snooping or your data. Make no mistake of it, you are being watched in some form of the other, whether it’s Google, Facebook, Microsoft, an ISP which or even a third party snoop.

Protecting yourself online is an art that even the most novice user should understand and embrace, especially with the internet in this day and age. I’m certain that end users don’t have control over everything but it’s clearly important to understand and use what you can control now and prepare yourself for the future.

Bonus:  Try using Tor and defend your personal freedom and privacy while browsing online.

..ترجمہ اردو کے اس مضمون

Nokia enters into patent license agreement with Apple:
Espoo, Finland – Nokia announced that it has signed a patent license agreement with Apple. The agreement will result in settlement of all patent litigation between the companies, including the withdrawal by Nokia and Apple of their respective complaints to the US International Trade Commission.

iPhone 4 – Unlocked (GSM) – 16GB Black
You can now buy and unlocked iPhone4 at Apple with all features + active micro-SIM card to use on any GSM network worldwide.

Thieves Found Citigroup Site an Easy Entry
Using the Citigroup customer Web site as a gateway to bypass traditional safeguards and impersonate actual credit card holders, a team of sophisticated thieves cracked into the bank’s vast reservoir of personal financial data, until they were detected in a routine check in early May.

—Revealed: How Citigroup hackers broke in ‘through the front door’ using bank’s website

Facebook planning IPO on $100 billion valuation?
Facebook, the social-networking site that is one of the most closely-watched private companies in the world, is likely to go public by the first quarter of 2012, say people familiar with the matter, at a valuation that could be pegged at north of $100 billion.

—Facebook loses 1.5 million users in Canada, 100,000 in the U.K.
and around 6 million in the U.S. as well.

Google has applied for Google Maps license in China: report
Google needs a license from China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping to continue operating Google Maps in China. Recently, requirements for a mapping license were relaxed to allow for foreign online mapping providers, such as Google, to engage in joint ventures to provide the service.

]]> http://blogspot.fluidnewmedia.com/2011/06/this-week-in-tech-june-1/feed/ 0 http://blogspot.fluidnewmedia.com/2011/02/sheeple/ http://blogspot.fluidnewmedia.com/2011/02/sheeple/#comments Sun, 27 Feb 2011 02:49:27 +0000 admin http://blogspot.fluidnewmedia.com/?p=3405

I love political cartoons and their burlesque depictions of world leaders and events. I spent a couple of minutes laughing at some paradoxical funnies today and thought I would share a couple that really struck me as satire too funny not to pass on.

The Weak Dollar

Surging Oil Prices and Alternative Energies

With all do respect Sir [President Obama], I do like you at least you pronounce the names of people and countries properly, which means you make an effort to understand culture and people. It was just funny..

Megalomaniacs and their sons

Is This Uncle Sam?

It’s not just Arizona and the immigration laws, hoardes of funded politicians are wiping their dirty a$$$$ clean with the constitution of America, a truly great piece of paper (no pun intended!)

Who will be the next ruling state?

Imran Hosein says that book knowledge is great, but one must also see the light. He explains in one of his lectures that one cannot see a black ant on a black stone on a pitch black night, it’s impossible. Only the human with Noor, can see the ant sitting on that stone on a pitch dark night. Overlooking the truth one becomes a misguided sheep, what are you going to be?

Aside: All images are property of their respective owners, I found them to be useful in conveying a simple message. Please find more like this here: http://cagle.com/

This is a wonderful video and well worth sharing, I loved the concept and the way it was presented with the robotic prototype. For technology dreamers and innovators such as Fabien Hemmert (a PhD student at the Design Research Lab, in cooperation with Deutsche Telekom Laboratories) it all starts there. He shares a fascinating talk on TED about the future of Mobile phones and technology behaving more human-like and although the video is brief and this might be quite far into the future the results are mind boggling.

Fabien talks about making digital content graspable, and how to get the digital to the physical. I’ll let him explain as he does a far better job, but I really wanted to share this quote as it made alot of sense to me as we progress into the future of mobile touch and technology.

Humans should get more technical in the future, rather technology get a bit more human.

Note:
I found this video whilst browsing to one of my favorite sites, TAT. If you’re not aware of TAT The Astonishing Tribe AB, you should be. They are an extremely innovative growing group of engineers, visual artists and interaction designers who eat, sleep, and breathe user interfaces. The do lots of cool things and to describe a couple of them I wouldn’t miss (a) Astonishing and free Android wallpapers (b) The future of screen technology