t was only a few months ago that my colleague’s forum got hijacked and vandalised, never to come back on-line again. Over the weekend, my host came under a denial of service (DoS) attack because of outdated, non-secure installations of phpBB (not worthy linking to), which proved to be far from reliable. Several sites including mine were suspended for hours in order to avoid another such attack, which brought the server down and crippled it for 40 minutes. I was possibly among the culprits as my phpBB installation was not patched up properly.

WordPress 1.5 likewise. Security flaws are continuously discovered and about 4 fixes have been released in the past few months. If you install software, make sure it is secure, patched up and avoid installing it whenever unnecessary. More installations lead to more maintenance and potential loopholes.
 

Audra Ang, an Associated Press writer, reports about a Beijing clinic that treats online addicts.

All the children here have left school because they are playing games or in chat rooms everyday,” says the clinic’s director, Dr. Tao Ran. “They are suffering from depression, nervousness, fear and unwillingness to interact with others, panic and agitation. They also have sleep disorders, the shakes and numbness in their hands.

The descriptions sound a little freaky, but I have known people whose entire life was dependent on their computer.

Hmmm… 5 AM… time for lunch…

SS Zen Garden is a site illustrating the power of design using cascading style sheets (CSS). It accepts submissions from professional designers and allows visitors of the site to browse, participate, and appreciate a variety of different styles. Navigation among the styles and heavy page loads are rather slow, so why not use the following screenshot gallery of styles from CSS Zen Garden?

Judging by the official Firefox Roadmap, the release of Firefox 1.1 is near.

Quoting the site:

We are planning for a Firefox 2.0, but will divide the planned work over (at this point) three major Milestones, 1.1 (July 2005), 1.5 (unscheduled) and 2.0 (unscheduled). All major development work will be done on the Mozilla trunk, and these releases will coincide with Gecko version revs.

If you have free time in your hands, you can use Burning Edge to keep track of the Firefox changelog.

I caught the following photos on Dvorak Uncensored. It is still unknown where these toilet facilities come from exactly.

On the left: view from outside
On the right: inside-out view

Rather then making sarcastic remarks, let your imagination lead you to problems with such ‘innovation’. Innovations are said to be truly dead; the above is an evidence.

The iMac I sometimes use at work. It’s
rather obvious I’m right-handed.

have a few pet peeves when it comes to the placement of peripherals for the sake improved interaction. For instance, I would strongly encourage placing the mouse right next to the keyboard and adjacent to the keypad (not diagonally). The thumb is then close to the secondary ENTER button and only a mere distance from the arrow keys, which are frequently used for navigation, for example in file managers or text editors. Conversely, the mouse can be picked very quickly to assist editing.

At the same time, the left hand remains poised over the left section of the keyboard, close enough to SHIFT, ALT and CTRL (or equivalent) which are better off used as keyboard accelerators (shortcuts) at the speed of will.

magine yourself the following scenario:

You open a page filled with links and adjacent to each individual link is a little visual page preview generated on-the-fly — a pseudo-screenshot if you like.

Ever since the inclusion of tabs in major browsers, navigation of several destinations at once (forking) has been possible. Nonetheless, under normal curcumstances, only one page could be viewed at any given point in time. Several previews, much like thumbnails of imagery, can increase productivity significantly. Allow me to illustrate this graphically.

In this text-only page, on-line preview
of destination pages would help greatly

To make such extended hypertext protocol viable, bandwidth barriers must be breached. Every link in any given page (with a possible threshold on the number of previews) will result in site hits. This inconsistent and unfamiliar behaviour has implications on server load, statistics and even CPU load which is required page rendering. Perhaps one can argue that RSS feeds have had a similar impact.