WordPress turns 5 – celebrate it with blogohblog

WordPress turns 5 last May 27th, oh!! I missed that date. Matt & co. has thrown a party at San Francisco on that day. Matt and team, you guys are amazing!! With your effort so far + wordpress communities on the whole, has enabled millions of people who’re not IT literate to be able to blog with ease.

To make the celebration even better, Jai of blogohblog is holding a contest which offer 5 premium wordpress themes as a reward. If you win, you can have premium theme from blogohblog or other premium theme of your choice (to be clear, it is single user license only).

wordpress turns 5 Wordpress turns 5   celebrate it with blogohblog

The contest is pretty simple, just blog about the contest and leave the the comment on the contest post. Winner will be drawn randomly once the contest end on June 15th. On top of that, 1 of the 5 lucky winners will get a free review by Jai, which is worth $300. Cool!!

If your wordpress blog is in dire need of new looks, wait no more. Get your fingers rockin!!

Blame popular user when twitter is down

If you follow twitter closely, you might have noticed the service disruption couple of times. Based on the recent Q&A post on twitter dev blog, it was mentioned that the reason of this downtime is below.

charles asks if there’s anything users can do to lighten our load. The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users – that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following – perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side.

Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails framework, and it seems that they have problem scaling twitter to cater for huge queries and mass users. But the down shouldn’t be that long.

twitter dev Blame popular user when twitter is down

On my past job, I was quite familiar with above mentioned problem, when the database starts utilizing huge number of resources (memory and CPU) but processes nothing (database locking and blocking). But most of the time the issue is resolved in a short period of time.

Perhaps this is what twitter lacking of right now.

Michael is confused as to why we don’t have “an army of geniuses working day and night”. We’d love to, but it’s easier said than done. We interview constantly and have a talented recruiter bringing us exceptional candidates daily. We’re careful about who we hire, though, because we’re trying to build a great team in a sustainable way. We’re currently exploring supplementing our team with consultants, and we’ve accepted strategic help from outside organizations who actually do have armies of geniuses. If you’d like to lend your genius to our particular problems, have a look at our jobs page.

Techcruch has more detail about Twitter’s downtime.

Negaraku – news aggregator for all

Fellow ‘hot’ blogger, Edwin of Noktahhitam had just released his latest work, Negaraku a web based news aggregator. It covers various topics such as daily local news, local political news as well as local blog sphere. (Read this first if you’ve no idea what I’m talking about). While aggregator itself is not a new service, the way he re-inventing Negaraku deserves credit from me. The comparable service in Malaysia are like Bloglah.org and Project Petaling Street but with a couple of difference that’s worth your attention.

First, he has categorized the news based on topic, and cleverly choose ever-hot topic in Malaysia, political news from both BN and PR MP’s blog as well as other independent political bloggers. This surely gives huge advantage over the others.

negaraku net logo Negaraku   news aggregator for all

The way the news are presented on the front page grouped by the authors is quite interesting. It is like magazine-style wordpress theme and I have seen it on some article directories as well.

Apart from that it has web 2.0 trait, which uses lightview for ease of viewing the article. There is also random flicker photos on each category page to make the overall page looks better.

Courtesy of Edwin, he has included blogjer.com a few days ago, and I’d already enjoy a couple of traffics from there upon checking my static this morning. This is what I love about aggregator since it is free, and it supplies the traffic continuously. Contact Edwin if you think your blog deserves the attention on the Malaysian Blogosphere page.

The ‘temporary’ downside is, since this project is still in beta, it still lacks registration and contact form. And as per the author, the code yet to be fine tuned and optimized, so you’ll notice a slight slow loading. And perhaps Noktahhitam, you might want to get a semi-dedicated or dedicated server if you haven’t done so. From your amung.us visitor widget, Negaraku has consistently receiving traffics even though it is only a few days old. Well done!

Overall, Negaraku is a promising website and with the Midas touch of NoktahHitam, there is no way Negaraku can’t become the best local aggregator around.

Off topic: I have viewed the html code (in attempt to view the platform icon smile Negaraku   news aggregator for all ) and found this hilarious comment. He seems to be ready if someone argue about this..ahaks

<!– I know, I know, I know… tables for layout, I know. If a web standards evangelist (like me) has to resort
to using tables for something, it’s because no other possible solution could be found. This issue? No way to do centered floats purely with CSS. The table box model allows for a dynamic width while centered, while the CSS box model for DIVs doesn’t allow for it. icon sad Negaraku   news aggregator for all –>

Ps: I’m surprised when one of our senior in the US read chedet and admitted that he is a long fan of him and admires his principle and philosophy.. No wonder he reached 1M hit in 1 month.

Dell mini notebook

I’ve written few articles about mini notebook before, such as our own own Makcik PC (which has yet to be in market) Asus IEEE and Intel Classmate

There is also HP Mini note 2133, which does not really get as huge attention as Asus EEE due to various reasons such as the low processor which uses Via C7 and the price tag which has higher than Asus EEE.

Dell became the latest player on this soon-to-be crowded market, (even though slightly late) with their own mini notebook version, which has yet to be officially released. At a glance, the design phylopsphy is based on Inspiron 1525 (that’s why some calls it ias mini Inspiron).

No spec released yet, but there is no optical drive included based on the photos released (sigh). Hopefully the final product will have optical drive , otherwise there’ll be less fun

Photos are courtesy of Dell and Gizmodo

mini inspiron 2 Dell mini notebook

mini inspiron open 2 Dell mini notebook

mini inspiron gizmodo Dell mini notebook

Google adsense get new favicon

adsense favicon Google adsense get new favicon

Google Adsense get new favicon. Looks better than the old one. Would this indicate that google will change it’s favicon on google.com?

Do you want favicon for your wordpress blog, without doing any modification to you code at all? Get this plugin here.

For newbie, what is favicon

update: 31-May-2008

Apparently, the favicon update is not only for google adsense, when I attempt to add new RSS feed to my google reader this morning, it shows new favicon as well. But the Google reader homepage still using it current favicon

feed favicon Google adsense get new favicon