Articles posted on May 2007

Today, Google hosted a developer day for 5,000 developers worldwide at San Jose convention center. The highly anticipated Google Gears - an open source browser plugin which enables the creation of offline web applications via Javascript - was unveiled.

From gears.google.com
Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

Once in a blue moon, something comes up that you can’t resist trying. We caught wind of such an application. Particls or PARTiCLS (with an italicized i) is a desktop application that churns news alert gathered from all of the Internet. News catered to your interests will be served by a news ticker-ish bar on top of your desktop. This is every news junkie’s dream come true - 24/7 updated news every single second!

The awesomeness of Particls is just too great to keep to ourselves. With some spare time to kill, only a multi segmented review about Particls would do it justice. Here’s PART 1 - The Basics.

We’re back. Problems have been plaguing our servers the past few days, so we didn’t get to post new articles. Meanwhile, our laboratory has been busy reworking our frankenstein creation, the feeds digest and giving it a new bride. Many thanks to those who have pitched in their suggestions which, we’ve taken into consideration when reworking the Zhongg Feeds Digest.

The feed url has been changed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/MalaysiaTech. To those who have subscribed to the earlier feed, the old feed will redirect to the new one, no worries :). We’ve hooked up with feedburner to provide better compatibility and statistics. The rest of the fixes are rather minor, best that y’all give it a go to see them changes.

Come June 1st 2007, many Google AdSense publishers’ account will be disabled. Specifically, those that are of ‘Made For AdSense’ (MFA) or ‘arbitrage publisher’ nature. This news follows numerous reports of publishers receiving notices from Google regarding the disabling of their account, citing the reason as their use of AdSense is an unsuitable business model. The ‘unsuitable business model’ being generally understood as MFA sites.

So a little background story here for the uninitiated. Arbitrage is defined as “The simultaneous purchase and sale of similar commodities to take advantage of price discrepancies between markets”.

Following the 31 Malaysian Tech Blogs post, we wondered if there’s a way to view all the blogs’ feed as one instead of subscribing to 31 feeds. Long story short, here’s our Frankenstein creation :

Zhongg Feed Digest
URI is at: http://www.zhongg.com/scraper.php http://feeds.feedburner.com/MalaysiaTech

(subscribe to the feed to have a look)

Share, reuse, and remix — and win!
Share your original or derivative creative works and win cash prizes! Winning entries will also be featured on the Creative Commons Malaysia web portal and the first Creative Commons anniversary celebration in July. Besides cash prizes, winners are also eligible to win the People’s Choice awards which are based on online voting.

With the infinite number of websites on the Internet, how do you differentiate your site? What separates the men from the boys is precisely 1.0. While silly Web 1.0 boys are playing with their paintshopped .bmp images on tables, the Web 2.0 men are braving the wwwilderness, armed with bright oversized fonts and unspeakable names.

Does your site have what it takes to be truly Web2.0? Find out now! Zhongg proudly presents 2 tools that will show you just how Web2.0 you really are - www.certifyr.com and web2.0validator.com.

Today’s linkfest is close to home (that’ll be Malaysia). I scoured the Internet, far and wide to bring you my virtual neighbors. A large portion of them were picked up from Technorati

So here they are, 31 Malaysian technology blogs that you may or may not know. Each is unique and the blogs vary in languages and focus. The list is ordered roughly from blogs with high ratio and amount of tech articles to the low ratio ones.

Most of you readers out there have probably seen at least 1 of these Get a Mac ads, but can’t be bothered standing in front of an Apple store to watch all of them. Here’s a compilation of 15 ads from Apple’s “Get a Mac” a.k.a. “Mac Guy VS PC Guy” series. Enjoy!

Today’s digest is dedicated to all those who have been hacked by ‘Jamaycka’ with lessons of basic web maintenance as well. Zhongg.com was defaced on 12th May by a ‘Jamaycka’ who left this message behind:

Note very important :
Some People thinks I am from Jamaica.
I would like you to know that I am Not from Jamaica.

There are some people feel jealous of me but I am not care
this name just my nickname
I’m HaCked your system

Many reports have surfaced since then about Jamaycka targeting Malaysian websites, a large number of them running Wordpress. Websites are probably still being defaced as you read this, the count of defaced websites by Jamaycka has surpassed 9000. Someone needs to put a stop to it. That person probably isn’t you or me. What we can do is try our best to get out of the way and keep our site up and running in the meantime.

This mini guide is divided into 3 parts
1) Cure - dedicated to restoring a website hacked by Jamaycka
2) Prevention - avoid future attacks
3) Backup - CPanel script to automate the backup routine

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