I remember in order to get a Gmail account, I had to write a poem.  I don’t remember or have a copy of this poem, but here is what the Gmail Swap page looks like.  However, I do still have my emails that I received to my Gmail account in October 2004.  That email is nearly 6 years old! And I still have almost every email since then.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

We all know that Facebook’s application Farmville has nearly 70 million monthly active users despite its simplicity.  However most people do not know that Farmville was actually the child of a Chinese game that is also on Facebook, but has a much lower user base (currently 3,372,366 monthly users), called Happy Farm.  It lacks in organization and some features that Farmville has, but has other redeeming traits including nicer graphics, different items, and different abilities, such as stealing.  Being Farmville’s predecessor, Happy Farm was rated in the Top 15 Most Influential Games of the Decade.

Farmville and Happy Farm Similarities

Neighbors

Just like in Farmville, Happy Farm revolves around you having neighbors.  You need neighbors to build a bigger farm so you can grow more crops just like in Farmville.

Happy Farm allows to interact with you neighbors in a few interesting ways:

There are four ways to interact with your neighbors: helping care for their farms, stealing some harvest, sending gifts and sending messages.

Gifts

Just like in Farmville you can send and receive gifts.  There are 5 different kinds of gifts: “free gifts, flower bouquet, toy and decoration, some other special items.”

Crops

What would a farm game be without crops? Even though both have crops, Happy Farm tends to revolve more around flowers where Farmville includes many types of crops.  Also, Happy Farm crops tend to have pests on them so another action in the game requires you to remove the pests.

Farmville and Happy Farm Differences

Exchange Center

Happy Farm includes a place where users can exchange items such as Dog Food and Toy Seed.  Sometimes special items can be found here as well.

Pet Store

The pet store is where you can buy different pets to help guard your property from thieves.  Thieves drop coins if caught by a pet.

Stealing

Unlike in Farmville, you can steal neighbors crops in Happy Farm but simply clicking on their crop when visiting their farm and choosing “Loot Harvest.”

Conclusion

Obviously both games are fun and have their redeeming qualities. I think Happy Farm looks nice and has some interesting features, but its user interface is fairly complicated.  I started using the application and I couldn’t figure out where things were.  While Farmville uses words such as Market and Gift on its icons, Happy Farm just uses pictures, making finding stuff complicated.  Also, happy Farm doesn’t have much room for expansion, but for the precursor to Farmville I think it is pretty fun.   Obviously the rest of the Facebook population agrees with Farmville being the better of the two.

The first was Leapfish:

This gives a very generous estimate of a domain, obviously based on only popularity and not actual traffic, since I basically get none.

You can try their search for getting the value of your domain:

The other site is called Website Outlook:

This gives a much more modest and accurate result.

Search on Website Outlook. Enter your domain.

In addition there is another tool called Estibot.  This offered the lowest price of all.

Estibot

Finally I tried a tool called Valuate, which gave me the second lowest appraisal.

Results:

So which domain tool would you trust the most?

According to Google:

The data is generated based on the browser size of users who visit Google.com. Google says that it found that the install rate for Google Earth increased by a whopping 10% simply by moving it 100 pixels higher on the page.

Below is a screenshot of what this blog looks like on browser size.

This message is confusing (I had no clue what it meant) and confused a lot of people:

The non-intuitive message confuses people for several reasons. The abbreviation “PC” is misleading because it is widely understood — especially in the context of electronic office equipment — to mean “personal computer“, suggesting to many that the problem lies in the computer, not the printer. The word “LOAD” is also ambiguous, as it can also refer to the transfer of electronic data between disk and memory. Furthermore, the word “LETTER” is only associated with paper size in the US and Canada as A4 is the standard size used in the rest of the world. Thus, users encountering this message may believe that they are being instructed to transfer the data or content of their letter to the printer, even though they have already sent the job to the printer.

The particular quote my friend had was from the movie Office Space when a printer in the film displayed this and the main character exclaimed the above quote.

Linked the the PC Load Letter on Wikipedia was an article with the title “lp0 on fire.”  Relating to a printer article this really caught my eye since I knew that lp0 was short for laserjet printer on port 0.  I read this article and this is what it said:

The origin of the “on fire” message was in the 1970s when line printers were large mechanical affairs with a high speed drum rotating at 1200 to 2400 RPM and impact printing heads. Misaligned operating components could cause the paper to come into direct contact with the high speed rotating parts, generating quite a bit of paper dust and increasing the likelihood of a paper jam. If a jam was not detected soon enough, the accumulated paper dust, ink dust and paper could generate enough friction along the rotating drum to start a fire. Furthermore, the cleaning solutions used in the printers were usually alcohol based, the fumes of which also presented a fire hazard. However, there have never been any actual reports of printers which had friction-related fires.

I think it would be really scary if my printer caught on fire, but thankfully these were the old printers.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

Yatedo is the new generation free People Search Engine which lets you find and contact anyone on the entire web with any kind of information you have about the person you are looking for.

Now you will not have to have Facebook open when you are doing a school research project on Albert Einstein.  Instead just open Yatedo and search for both Einstein and your best friends.  I have requested an invite to this service, so I will see more of what it is like once I get one, but for now here is a screenshot of an info page.

The fastest way to lose weight, guaranteed.

The user statistics of my app.

Have you ever used Facebook? You have, have you? Well then I built a great application for you. The Have You Ever Facebook application. I built this Facebook application last year in a night, but never blogged about it. It was down for a few months while I upgraded my webhost, but now it is back up and slightly improved. I currently have over 3000 current users and approximately 250 monthly active users which has increased from about 150 before I upgraded it last week. This application allows you to ask your friends a question and have them respond yes or no to the question. I am trying to improve this application so that it can do more things, but I will to sort out the source code. In order to create this application I had to use the Facebook Develper’s PHP api. I learned a lot from this project.  I got the idea to create this application from the game we had to play at college orientation.  We stood in a circle with some sort of marker where we stood.  Then someone in the center calls out something that they have done or are wearing etc and everyone who has also has to move to a new spot.

To visit my application go to: http://apps.facebook.com/have_you_ever/

My Application

Click to Enlarge

I am writing this because I just finished my extremely long Facebook imitation program that was our required project in my introductory CS curse (this was an accidental misspelling but it seems fitting).  Starting this semester I thought the class would be extremely easy, and it is except for one aspect…the zhtml.  I thought zhtml would be simple, just like HTML, which I learned back in eighth grade, but of course it wasn’t.  Zhtml adds an enterprise version of “Ajax” capability to html (that I am sure not many enterprises use) on a special “zk” server.  It also allows you to call java code from java classes in your folder.  However, a lot of tags are added to zhtml and a lot are also removed from traditional html.  Zhtml does not allow much configuration as well.  Overall, I think zhtml is not a very useful language and creates a lot of frustrations.  They shouldn’t be teaching us a language that has no real world use and has many complications as well. Moreover, it gives 500 server errrors that are very difficult to debug.  Having worked with PHP for years, I am used to a web language giving me at least some indication or line number that causes it to fail, but the zk server gives you a message that sometimes helps such as the one below (which means you need to reset the session because your page is not compatible with older versions of the program you wrote before if you added attributes to a user.)

The zhtml changes standard html syntax.  For example, although technically okay, they make it so that there is no <center> tag.  Also they add a attribute to <div>  called visible.  Though typically in the css this now becomes  a normal attribute in the div tag.  This is useful for making certain areas visible based on a boolean return such as:

<div visible=”@{user.isFriend}”>This user is a friend.</div>

<div if=”${user.friends == 0}”></div>

The login "window"

Finally I finished this project on Friday night after several nights staying awake until 4:30 am…and now I am hoping I win the extra credit contest

While doing this project I discovered  many useful resources that enabled me to add features previously un-thought of to my application since our teacher had not given us the resources to utilize the full potential of zhtml.  These include the api to zhtml functions and official style guides.  They are linked below:

A few weeks ago a new application was featured on Lifehacker.com.  As usual I checked the website and wound up on a very useful program called TubeRadio.  Owned by Last.fm, the music website, TubeRadio allows you search for videos/songs on Youtube and play them right there in the browser.  It allows you to search for name of video, but even cooler is its ability to search for and fill a playlist with the whole discography of an artist.

The interface looks similar to iTunes, but unlike iTunes, it plays only youtube videos, but plays them just as a normal desktop mp3 player.    It evens allows you to share playlists like in iTunes.  TubeRadio allows you to repeat tracks, shuffle tracks of a playlist, pause, start, and skip tracks in a playlist.

At the bottom you can view lyrics, bios, and information about the band.  The best part is its free!  Just like with Pandora you can create an account that will save your playlists and preferences.  The only regret I have about TubeRadio is that I can’t figure out how to not display the video at the bottom since that would save my cpu since the flash player eats it up.  Maybe they have a feature to just play the music and not the video, but I don’t know it.

Also, Happy 2 Month Anniversary TubeRadio!  It turned 2 months on November 29, 2009.

[Update] After posting this I received an email from the owners of TubeRadio via Twitter.  Here are some points they gave me:

• “We use the last.fm databse of artists so their terms are that we have to put “powered by last.fm” on the site. Other than that, we have no affiliation with them.”
• “As much as we’d love to be able to offer an audio only stream, it’s against YouTube terms and conditions to do that, so the video _has_ to be there (it even has to be a certain minimum size!)”

TubeRadio is particiating in the competition for “Best New Startup of 2009.”  They would like you to vote for them at http://bit.ly/3H6XkV
Links:

Tuberadio.fm

Press Release Annoucing TubeRadio

TubeRadio on Facebook

TubeRadio on Twitter

VT Desk Graffiti

Here you can view desk graffiti pictures submitted by various people.  I suggest you help collaborate and submit your own pictures by visiting http://vtdeskgraffiti.com/send-us-your-pictures/

http://computing.vt.edu/internet_and_web/internet_access/exceedlimit.html

Today I will tell you how to make youtube videos into mp3s. I have been asked before how to do it and have done it on several occasions if a video on youtube has video unobtainable by other means. Usually this should be a last resort as the quality of youtube video audio is poor. When I say poor I mean it. Typical iTunes downloads range from 128 kilo-bits per second (kbps) – 192 kbps. Very good quality is at the upper bound of mp3s which is 320 kbps. Youtube videos are down to about 64 kbps…not very good, about the quality of an audiobook. Of course the more kbps a mp3 has the more range of sounds it can produce and thus have much higher quality. MP3s already cut the quality of CDs by taking out the higher and lower frequencies, which usually are not able to be heard by most people. Certain audio file formats such as FLAC are called lossless because they allow the audio to be played back on the computer with the same quality as on a CD. However, MP3 is not a lossless format because it compresses the audio to make a much more manageable file size, usually 2-20 mb compared to about 30-100 mb for a FLAC. Anyway, enough about file formats. If you still want to download that rare song from Youtube here’s how:

Method 1:  Let a Site Convert for You

This is a very easy step.  Simply go to the video page on youtube.  Then copy the url of that page from the address bar.  Go to Google.com and enter the search query: convert youtube to mp3.  Usually the top few sites work well.  They will have a form to enter the url of video and then all you have to do is press “convert” and voila, in a moment you have a link to download the mp3 of the video.  A very short and simple method to get the mp3 for your favorite song. 

Recommended sites:

http://www.youtubetomp3.net

http://www.listentoyoutube.com

http://www.video2mp3.net

http://www.vidtomp3.com

http://www.dirpy.com/

[UPDATE]: In the last few months, a new website called Dirpy emerged, and this is the program I highly recommend.  It allows you to edit the metadata tags describing a song, such as Artist, Album, Year, etc.

I searched for a bit, but no results and I was wondering if it were my fault that the poll was being cached.  But eventually I came upon a Drupal forum post http://drupal.org/node/523676 which gave a patch which is transcribed below:

diff -urp –strip-trailing-cr ../drupal-6.x-dev/modules/poll/poll.install ./modules/poll/poll.install
— ../drupal-6.x-dev/modules/poll/poll.install 2009-01-06 16:46:37.000000000 +0100
+++ ./modules/poll/poll.install 2009-07-18 22:29:37.000000000 +0200
@@ -130,3 +130,21 @@ function poll_schema() {
return $schema;
}

+/**
+ * @defgroup updates-6.x-extra Extra poll updates for 6.x
+ * @{
+ */
+
+/**
+ * Fix cache mode for “Most recent poll” block.
+ */
+function poll_update_6000() {
+ $ret = array();
+ $ret[] = update_sql(“UPDATE {blocks} SET cache = 2 WHERE module = ‘poll’ AND delta = ‘0′”);
+ return $ret;
+}
+
+/**
+ * @} End of “defgroup updates-6.x-extra”
+ * The next series of updates should start at 7000.
+ */
diff -urp –strip-trailing-cr ../drupal-6.x-dev/modules/poll/poll.module ./modules/poll/poll.module
— ../drupal-6.x-dev/modules/poll/poll.module 2008-12-18 16:46:20.000000000 +0100
+++ ./modules/poll/poll.module 2009-07-18 21:45:53.000000000 +0200
@@ -131,6 +131,7 @@ function poll_block($op = ‘list’, $delta
if (user_access(‘access content’)) {
if ($op == ‘list’) {
$blocks[0]['info'] = t(‘Most recent poll’);
+ $blocks[0]['cache'] = BLOCK_CACHE_PER_USER;
return $blocks;
}
else if ($op == ‘view’) {
@@ -776,6 +777,8 @@ function poll_cancel($form, &$form_state

// Subtract from the votes.
db_query(“UPDATE {poll_choices} SET chvotes = chvotes – 1 WHERE nid = %d AND chorder = %d”, $node->nid, $node->vote);
+
+ cache_clear_all();
}

/**

If this code looks strange to you you are not alone.  I was confused too.  I have patched files in linux before, but my webhost, Ixwebhosting, does not have access to ssh or the terminal in general so I was stuck.  This was an obvious bug and I could not fix it.  All I could find were links to how to convert a patch file to an exe on Windows, but first I have a linux server and also how would I have executed that anyway?  So I decided to do it the manual way, open the files and manually edit it.  Make sure you back up all original files before editing!

1. First open  ./modules/poll/poll.install and go to line 130
   Find

   function poll_schema() {
      return $schema;
    }

   and add after it

   function poll_update_6000() {
     $ret = array();
     $ret[] = update_sql("UPDATE {blocks} SET cache = 2 WHERE module = 'poll' AND delta = '0'");
     return $ret;
   }

2. Save and exit.  Next open  ./modules/poll/poll.module and go to line 131
   Find:

   if (user_access('access content')) {
        if ($op == 'list') {
          $blocks[0]['info'] = t('Most recent poll');
          return $blocks;
        }
        else if ($op == 'view') {

   and replace with:

   if (user_access('access content')) {
        if ($op == 'list') {
          $blocks[0]['info'] = t('Most recent poll');
         $blocks[0]['cache'] = BLOCK_CACHE_PER_USER;
          return $blocks;
        }
        else if ($op == 'view') {

3. In the same file go to line 777
   Find:

   function poll_cancel($form, &$form_state) {

     $node = node_load($form['#nid']);
     global $user;
     if ($user->uid) {

       db_query('DELETE FROM {poll_votes} WHERE nid = %d and uid = %d', $node->nid, $user->uid);
     }

     else {

       db_query("DELETE FROM {poll_votes} WHERE nid = %d and hostname = '%s'", $node->nid, ip_address());

     }
     // Subtract from the votes.

     db_query("UPDATE {poll_choices} SET chvotes = chvotes - 1 WHERE nid = %d AND chorder = %d", $node->nid, $node->vote);

   }

   and replace with:

   function poll_cancel($form, &$form_state
   
      // Subtract from the votes.
      db_query("UPDATE {poll_choices} SET chvotes = chvotes - 1 WHERE nid = %d AND chorder = %d", $node->nid, $node->vote);
      cache_clear_all();
    }

4. Save this file and upload.  Now the Poll block should work well.

First, the CD almost never works for anything…I’ve tried multiple CDs for router configuration and DSL configuration alike, but none have worked and I have always had to turn to manual configuration which I find very useful to know.

1.  Connect the router like the instructions that came with the router say.  Assuming you have a DSL modem or other modem that does not have wireless means, this means you connect the telephone cable or other internet cable from the wall to the modem.  Then take an ethernet cable and connect the output on the modem to the input on the router.  Now for initial configuration attach an ethernet cable to the router and connect it to your computer (I’m assuming its a portable one since why else would you really need wifi).

2. Open up an internet browser and enter one of the following ip addresses, depending on your router brand, into the address bar.  You may need to try several different ones:

3. Enter the username and password from above into the respective fields, submit, and you should find yourself in the control panel.  If these passwords don’t work for your router you may need to try the different ones for you router at http://www.routerpasswords.com/

4. Often times there will be a wizard that you can follow that will guide you through the process of connecting to the internet/setting up wifi.  Now usually though if you have done what I said you will not be able to access the internet if you load a page because the internet is not set up correctly.  Depending on your router you need to go to internet or WAN admin panel.  On my Trendnet, the WAN option if under the first menu, but on my D-Link there is a separate internet menu.  Either way find a form that has a drop down menu that has options such as DHCP, PPPoE etc.  Once you have found this menu you need to play around with the different options if you have not chosen the wizard to figure this out for you.  This is a tedious part as depending on your ISP (Internet Service Provider) you may have any of these.  At college, Virginia Tech, I must use DHCP option with obtain IP address automatically, but at home with Juno DSL, I must use PPPoE and enter my username and password for the DSL.  That is the part that took me a good hour the first time I set up a router.  It is probably a better option to use the wizard, but manual may be neccessary.  If all went well, you should now be able to load a website.

5. Now for wireless.  Again depending on your router you may have to search around for the Wireless configuration page, but you will know you found it if one of the fields asks for Wireless Network Name/SSID and another asks for a security type of WPA/WEP.  Once you have found this, you can create a name for your wireless network.  As for security type, I highly suggest WPA, and WPA2 if possible.  You will then be asked to enter a passphrase for the network.  I suggest something very random so that neighbors will not be able to leech from you wireless network.  Save your settings and test if you can connect to the network.