Agloco viewbar available

General, ,

AGLOCO the company that pays you shares to browse the net, has finally released their view bar.

This is the tool bar you install in internet explorer or firefox that will display ads that are contextually targeted, then all you have to do is use your browser and navigate like you always do, but now you're getting paid for it.

AGLOCO aims to be the company that is 100% owned by it's members. The idea is that if you see ads you should be paid for it, after all, the ads are renting your screen's real estate.  the company is founded by the people that had a similar company in the past,  All Advantage, but the new model is promising because they will not spend money directly, instead they will pay the members in shares, that members should be able to exchange at some rate in the future. 

Get the viewbar, install it and start owning a piece of AGLOCO.

The temple of sun

General,

Sun Microsystems created an online flash game for developers named "the temple of sun" as an attempt to get developers to try Sun studio 11.

The game is pretty much simplistic , you're in a temple similar to those created by the maya civilization but this one was created by developers to protect Sun Studio 11, because the people or their time were just not ready for it. you have to avoid some obstacles, collect some gold and answer C++ questions, and at the final you have to answer a question that can only be answered if you download sun studio and compile some code on it.

Unforunately sun studio doesn't install on my gentoo machine so there goes my chance to win up to $5000.

Linux apps anywhere

Linux, ,

LINA is a virtual machine that aims to run linux applications on any operating systems.

The concept is similar to the Java VM, write your application in C, C++ ( and other languages supported in the future ), compile it with LINA and it will run on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and maybe other OS. You will be able to run command line programs as well as gui applications that rely on GTK or QT and they will look native to the OS were you will run them.
Of course there is some overhead that will make your applications around 2x slower, but they say the performance will improve.

LINA VM and the tools that will be used to compile applications will be released using a dual license similar to MySQL's licensing model: GPL for those that release their applications under GPL and commercial for those that want to release proprietary applications.

The developement seems to have started 4 years ago but nothing has been released yet. The plan is to release the virtual machine and compiler tools this month.

Yet another perfect server

Linux, ,

A of howtos start like that "The perfect Server" or "The Perfect Descktop" or "The perfect Setup". Howtoforge has lots of howtos like that. Their latest "the perfect server" literally shows you, ( because the howto has more screenshots then words 🙂 ) how to install Centos 4.5 and the servers that you need for hosting sites with mysql, php, email ftp and a control panel - ISPConfig.

A howto for each version

This is not their first "the perfect server for centos" howto, they had one for centos 4.4 and one for centos 5.0. Wonder how much different is Centos 4.4 from 4.5 and more exactly how much different if the howto for 4.4 from the one for 4.5? Well they replaced the version everywhere in the text and luckily the install gui was similar so they did not have to change the screenshots :). For 5.0 they did not have so much luck, they had to change the screenshots, and a add some more.

Made for Robots

What I don't like about these kind of howtos is that they don't explain much about the software you're installing, and they don't tell you why you do what they tell you to do. At some point they show you a screenshot and the only text is "in the next screen click next". That's not very useful, you don't learn anything like that. If something goes wrong or if you're trying to set things up on a different distro or disfferent OS you will not know what to do unless you're lucky to find a similar howto for your distro.

One other thing I don't like is that they show you even how to install Centos. Why not do a separate howto just for that, this way I will not get bored by those installation screenshots and they would get more space for writing some more/good details about what they are doing.

vim windows and tabs

nix

Tabs are great, I don't know what I would do without tabs, they are everywhere, your browser has them, your editor has them, even your webmail has them ( see yahoo mail ). Well I just discovered vim has them too.

Before windows and tabs

I don't know why I never thought of this before. I was always opening each file in it's own vim session, but that's hard to work with, you can't copy/paste from one file to another using vim commands ( my, y`y, P ) , I used the mouse for that ( not the best choice ). And to switch from one session to another I had to always do CTRL-Z ( to put current session in background ) then fg x to put another session in foreground. That was until I discovered screen split.

Multiple windows

With vim you can split the screen vertically or horizontally and open a different, same or new file in each screen.

Pplit the screen horizontally - :sp filename or :new [filename]

Split the screen vertically - :vsp filename or :vne[w] [filename]

If you use :sp/:vsp with no filename specified then the current screen will be split in half and it's content copied to both screens.

If you use :new/:vne with no filename then it will just create a new empty window.

Move to the next with : CTRL-W j or CTRL-W <down arrow>

Move to the previous window with: CTRL-W k or CTRL-W <up arrow>

You can also jump more then one window by using a number after CTRL-W. For example CTRL-W 3 j will take you to the third window from your current position.

This was great for visually comparing sections of files or to do copy/paste , but you're limited by the screen size. If you split your screen in 10 you're not going to see much from any file.

The Tabs

To open a new tab :tabnew [filename]

You can move between tabs with CTRL-PageDown and CTRL-PageUp or type a number before CTRL-PageDown or CTRL-PageUp and you'll jump that number of pages.

You want to close all tabs except the current tab? :tabo

Close current tab - :tabc

Close n'th tab: :tabc n

There are a few other commands for working with tabs but it's likely you'll never remember all of them so I'm not going to write about them. there's always vim built in documentation for that.

Never underestimate the power of vim!

Do you know good vim tips and tricks ? Care to share in the comments?

google apps: check mail

General,

I went to google apps today and here is what I see on their page:

 With Google Apps, you and your colleagues can check email, schedule meetings, check email, chat in real time,....

So you can check email, schedule meetings, check email, chat, check email, share calendars, check email....hmm if that's how you're going to work I'm not sure how productive you're going to be with google apps. But yes I guess we are all addictive ( to some degree ) to checking our email and stats ... uhh they forgot to mention that, "check stats" - analytics, adsense, adwords, webmaster tools a lot of stats to check...gotta  go!  Have work to do. I haven't checked my email and stats in a long time.

de-mono-ification

General, ,

Today I removed mono completely from my gentoo system. I'm not sure how it got there, but gnome seems to use it the ebuilds in gentoo seem to have it activated by default. Well I don't need that, and it drew my attention on it when I did an update and it didn't want to compile. Well I had a pretty good solution for that. 🙂

It's sad that the gnome developers ( some of them working for novel ? ) chose mono for who knows what stuff they wanted to do. It's hard for me to understand this. When you have so many free-not -microsoft-.net-clones out there and when you already have your project written in C+, why in the world start to write pieces of gnome in mono. Yeah so Microsoft claims Linux infringes it's patents well let's make them right 🙂 , let's clone their main programming language that they love so much. Oh wait we're safe now that novel has made a deal with them.

The future is not so bright for gnome, I'm not sure I'm going to use it much longer. Gotta start searching ... What are your preferences in desktop managers ?

the ubuntu buzz

Linux,

there seems to be quite a buzz about ubuntu these days,. Digg and other similar sites are full of stories about "the perfect ubuntu setup", "the perfect ubuntu server" and others like that.

Well maybe not today cause now we have bigger problems.

We're shocked by engadget's / apple , iphone delay anouncement 🙂 , even though they also announced it was a mistake, basically fake news, apple fanboys seem to be still affected by it.

Another "big" problem seems to be with the Microsoft announcement that linux code infringes their patents ( come on ... you want more then novel and dell ? is red-hat the last one ? ) I think they also tried this back 2004 but this time they specified the exact number that each subsystem infringes ( kernel, email , gui ... ) so we're back at the old "linux contains code patented by microsoft FUD" but after this we sould see some more ubuntu stories.

Oh yes ubuntu is so hot, especially now that dell will ship desktops preinstalled with ubuntu.

I was never eager to try ubuntu, I don't know why but the whole "linux for human beings" didn't catch me. I guess I never knew linux was not for human beings before ubuntu.

Anyway few days ago I did my first ubuntu install. Can you believe that ? my first. and guess what ? I installed it on a brand new dell inspiron 1501 that had freedos pre installed.

First impression: ubuntu is not bad at all. But I didn't really get the chance to use it for more then one hour cause it was not my computer. My wife's friend just bought her computer and she wanted windows there but ended up with ubuntu 🙂 .

Good experiment, overall she liked it and still using it.

Stop playing with page titles

General,

This is more like a reminder to me then an advice for others to follow. It reminds me that I should stop playing with page titles and get them right from the beginning.

WordPress default post titles

When I first started this blog using wordpress the default template had something like "Patchlog ›› Blog Archive ›› Post name" for the post titles.

That's really not good for search engines. Having that "Patchlog ›› Blog Archive" in front of every post title is looking like all posts have the same title to a search engine because they only consider a small number of characters from the title when they index your pages, and because the part that makes them different is in the end it may not be considered or may not show up in results.

The first change and the imediat result
By the time I finally decided to change this, google had already indexed all my pages with the wrong titles. After I changed it google started to re-index everything because it thought that everything changed ( see how important the page title is ? 🙂 )

That was all fine but because it started to re-index my posts were not showing anymore in google results for relevant keywords until it finished the re-index.So during that time the traffic decreased till my posts were back in it's database with the new titles.

The second change

The only problem is that I did not get the page titles right so I had to change them again after the site was already re-indexed and I'm back in the dark on google.

Take for example my post about making squid 2.6 transparent proxy to work if you are used to squid 2.5 config. That post got more then 400 visits from people searching for squid 2.6 transparent or phrases containing squid 2.6 or transparent or proxy last month. This month got around 100 and I think that was in the beginning of the month before I did the second round of changes to my page titles because I did not notice any increase on those numbers in the last week.

So if you want to change something as important as your page / post titles and you know it will affect all the pages on your site, think twice before applying the changes to make sure you get it right the first time.

making money online

General,

This is a little out of topic on my blog, but lately I've been reading a few blogs about internet marketing, seo, web site monetization methods and other topics related to making money online.

John Chow is one of those bloggers making big money from their online blog and web sites. I read his blog to find out about the latest techniques and trends.

He writes on his blog John Chow dot Com about how he makes money from his ad network and his tech site thetechzone.com and gives tips and suggestions about how to increase your blog traffic and popularity. He basically shares his experience, telling you what worked for him, and what may work for you.

He gives advices about how to make money online  and how to  write on your blog but he also writes about cars, technology and dining so you'll get quite a lot of topics on his blog.

John Chow dot Com is blog that helps you make money online. If you do a review of his blog, he’ll link to you so his readers can check you out.