10:37 AM
TheEpicChocobo
This blue glossy theme or android phones is pretty sweet. Designed by parsh a professional designer it stands a bit above other themes with a sleek look. It can be used with CyanogenMod and MetaMorph. He also offers up all his backgrounds and icons in a zip file. My favorite part of this theme is the clock widget, it’s got a steam punk mixed with Star Trek look and feel to it.
11:59 AM
TheEpicChocobo
So I was going to write up this post last week but decided to give it a few more days of testing to get a good feel for it. I’ve used it every day in my normal work, which consists of going through probably hundreds of tabs throughout the week and almost never closing the browser. Loading plenty of flash and sites with a lot of javascripting.
So what are the results? I would give IE9 Beta a 7/10. It is by far better than IE8 or lower. It does have most of the modern web standards, supporting audio and video tags from HTML5. It is much faster than other versions and more slim and compact. For me it scored a 95 / 100 on the Acid3 test. where IE8 only had a 20/100 and Firefox had a 94 / 100, so a bonus there also. Another improvement I've noticed is that the Remember Password doesn’t come up as a popup but instead a hover over the page at the bottom similar to how other browsers do it. Some of the downfalls to it, is, well that it’s Microsoft. Other than that, visually it does not have some of the features we’re used to in other version of IE. There is no status bar, instead when you hover over a link it shows in a little popup in the bottom. To me I find that annoying. I don’t mind losing some of the web viewing space for the status bar.
There are also very limited good or free add-ons for it as there are in Firefox and Chrome. Although a lot of improvements are built in to it, you can’t fully customize it and make it your own as much as I would like. It also does not and as far as I know does not support default re-opening your last session. Although you can still do it via the New Tab page. Also if you still need to view a site in IE8 or 7 it has an engine switching mode in the developer section by pressing F12. Though the developer section doesn’t seem to have changed at all from IE8 and not nearly as functional as Firebug.
So to sum it up, performance wise it seems good, a far improvement from older versions. Functionality and feel of it is lacking and takes some getting used to. So if you’re a dedicated IE user then this will be awesome for you and the greatest thing ever, and for us web developers, we can’t wait for everyone to start using it when it comes out in full release next year. For you firefox and chrome users it’ll still be a useless blue e icon on your pc, but at least it’ll look prettier.
| IE8 Acid3 Test | IE9 Acid3 Test |
5:00 AM
TheEpicChocobo
If you’re unfortunate enough to have an iPhone and really wanted to have a Droid phone instead but don’t have the money yet saved up to shell out for a new Droid X or EVO. iDroid should help you last long enough till you can actually get one. Or if for some reason you like the iPhone or want to seem trendy with one, but like the cool Android icons iDroid will work too. This is a theme however that will require you to have your phone jailbroken and have WinterBoard installed, but not hard to do. Another nice thing about it is that It’s Free. It’s got about 35 different icons, dock, background, lock screen background and some other custom UI mods.
How to Install
1. Your device must be jailbroken. (how?)
2. Make sure you have WinterBoard installed via Cydia.
2. Make sure you have the MacCiti source installed in Cydia.
3. Search for iDroid in Cydia, run the install.
4. Open WinterBoard and activate the iDroid Theme.
Brought to you by the letter A and FreedomChicken
11:55 AM
TheEpicChocobo
So I was going though some of my stuff here and realized I have a new unopened PS3 Monster Gamer 8’ Component Video/Audio cable. Not really sure when or why I got it, I don’t even own a PS3, but I was thinking of what to do with it. I figured why not give it away to some Bauer-Power readers. So that’s exactly what I’m doing. The contest details are below. I have made it as simple as possible for people to enter. There is only one entry per person and a winner will be chosen at random at the end of the contest. The winner will be notified on twitter and given a contact email address to collect name and physical address for shipping. This is 100% free no shipping fees or anything.
How do you enter? Well that’s easy, just send out the tweet HERE or just send the tweet “@FreedomChicken I want to Win a PS3 Monster Gamer 8’ Component cable! #freestuff” and that’s it. You don’t even have to follow me on twitter. Of course you can if you want and that would be cool.
Who is eligible? Anyone in any of the 50 the U.S.A. that tweets the message. Sorry everyone else. I don’t really feel like dealing with customs.
When is this going to end? The contest will end on October 1st 2010.
What is a PS3 Monster Gamer 8’ Component cable? A quick lookup on amazon.com for the best description and info so as to not have to paste it here reveals that would be one of these.
Why do I want this? Well if you have a TV that does not have HDMI inputs or those are being used up and you have some HD Component connecters free. It will give you better quality than your S-Video or Composite connections you’re probably using now.
3:50 AM
TheEpicChocobo
Droid phones are all in style now. Even taking a good grab of iPhone customers, which is awesome. So for those of us that are stuck in our contracts and not able to get a new Droid phone yet we have the BeDroid theme. Install it and you can pretend that you have a Droid phone till you actually are able to get one.
Granted it’s not free right now, but at least right now it’s only $0.99 on the BlackBerry AppWorld and if you’re into paying for theme’s it is totally worth it. I’ve gone through about 15-20 different BlackBerry Storm themes over the last few weeks and this is by far the most awesome. It’s simple, sleek and doesn’t use a ton of resources to drain the battery more like some other nice ones.
Theme Link: http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/screenshots/4698
By: FreedomChicken
2:00 AM
TheEpicChocobo
While working on my Political Genome Project site I came across an issue that took a while to figure out how to implement decently. That is to grab Wikipedia data and place it directly on my site. I didn’t want to use any clumsy iFrames or anything. I poked around for a wile and found out that there is actually a nice API for Wiki. The API can pull basically any info you want from any page on Wikipedia.
I wanted to pull the actual description / article from them and found that by using a url formatted like, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=google&prop=text&format=json , then you will get json data back of the full page. Now throwing this into a jQuery .getJSON request won’t actually work. I found that to get the data back properly for jQuery to use it i had to add &callback=? at the end which turns the url into, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=google&prop=text&format=json&callback=? . Now with the properly formatted url it was just a matter of dumping the parse text to a div on the page. That worked great and I then ran into another problem. The links were all wanting to point locally.
To fix the problem with the links not actually pointing to wikipedia that was an easy fix. While inside of the .getJSON function I had jQuery loop through and and find all a tags that were not child to the references object and added http://www.wikipedia.org to the href attribute. Then also just to not take people off my site if they click on a link I had all the links in there also target _blank.
Here’s a code sample of what I did.
In your Header:
$.getJSON('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=google&prop=text&format=json&callback=?', function(json) {
$('#wikiInfo').html(json.parse.text.*);
$("#wikiInfo").find("a:not(.references a)").attr("href", function(){ return "http://www.wikipedia.org" + $(this).attr("href");});
$("#wikiInfo").find("a").attr("target", "_blank");
});
In the Body:
<div id="wikiInfo"> </div>
11:44 AM
TheEpicChocobo
Sure there are tons of javascript rollover options out there. So what makes this one any better. Well it’s just simple to use, loads quickly, and no need to preload images. Sounds to good to be true? well it’s not. All you have to do is download my jRoller package and use the example there to add it to your site. I accomplish this by having all images and the rollover saved as the same image like the Red and Grey one on here. In the example just the grey will show and when you hover over it it’ll turn red. This works great with text headers that are a non web safe font and you want it to change color or background on rollover.
The usage is very simple. Simply put all your images inside of a container either table, div, span, whatever, and give it either an ID or 
Class of rollernav. You can modify the jQuery.jRoller.js file at the bottom to add/remove items. Then it will simply go through all the image tags there and reformat them to 1/2 the height of the image, thus cutting off the hover part, and setting it to the background of a Div that will move the background on hover. It does all this on load so it doesn’t have to reformat the page after it’s loaded and make your site look crazy for a second or so on slower machines.
I have provided 3 links here, a download with example, a download of just the js file in zip format, and a hot link to the file so you can add it to your blog or site without having to download it.
Hot Link: http://www.freedomchicken.com/media/10278/jquery.jroller.js
Download only the JS file Here
By: FreedomChicken
2:00 AM
TheEpicChocobo
With IE9 Beta just around the corner I figured I’d start off my new series of posts, Know your Browser, with the infamous Internet Explorer. From it’s roots in 1995 it has come a long way. Unfortunately it got old, obese and lazy. They stopped keeping up with the times and tried to make a come back in IE 7-8 but still fell short with no HTML5 support, ect… Granted I was a fan of IE 8 when it came out. But that was until I actually used it for a few weeks with 10+ tabs open constantly and it got slow again.
IE8 would rank about a 5 / 10 not the worst browser out there, but with it’s quirks of being able to let web pages change the rendering to that of IE7 depending on it’s meta tags. I guess that’s good to keep people wanting to see all their weird random sites normally and not move to another browser anyway, but this does not help people out there to get some better XHTML standards. IE has made improvements for RSS and Ajax support which did help to move it forward in the world, and it’s accelerators and WebSlices aren’t too bad.
With IE9 Beta coming up tomorrow it will be nice to try out with it’s 95/100 on the Acid3 tests and HTML5 video/audo tag support. Maybe when it finally releases next year Youtube will be able to start moving more off of flash video. One major problem I have seen with IE 9 being more important on the web is that it won’t have support for Win XP, and yes there are a lot of those people out there already. Especially in the workplace. Hell there are some places still on IE6 even… *shudders* But at least they’re working in the right way and as Microsoft loses more of the dominance with IE on the web they will conform more to the rest of the world.
By: FreedomChicken
11:11 AM
TheEpicChocobo
You guys ever get those crazy requests too from your boss? Things that really don’t matter at all and they only want to do it, because they thought of the idea. Well I get those all the time. This time it was to hide the Site Actions for our new SharePoint 2007 setup. I mean really, who cares if users can see the link/button, they can’t do anything and they’re used to seeing it from SP 2003 so it’s not like they’ll get confused about it. But anyway, the good team player I am I went in and figured out how to do it for us.
I’m not sure if this will work for everyone. I also did this like 6 months ago after searching for a few hours and not really finding anything. Probably because no one else care. But anyway, You should just have to wrap/replace your Site Actions code in your Template and it should hide the button from those who don’t have access to use it. I hope this helps out some of you out there that have the same request.
Code:
<style type="text/css">
#LeftNavigationAreaCell { display:none;
}
</style>
<SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl PermissionsString="AddAndCustomizePages, ManageLists" runat="server">
<style type="text/css">
#LeftNavigationAreaCell { display:block;
}
</style>
<table height=100% class="ms-siteaction" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0>
<tr>
<td class="ms-siteactionsmenu" id="siteactiontd">
<SharePoint:SiteActions runat="server" id="SiteActionsMenuMain"
PrefixHtml="<div><div>"
SuffixHtml="</div></div>"
MenuNotVisibleHtml="&nbsp;"><CustomTemplate>
<SharePoint:FeatureMenuTemplate runat="server" FeatureScope="Site" Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu" GroupId="SiteActions" UseShortId="true">
<SharePoint:MenuItemTemplate runat="server" id="MenuItem_Create" Text="<%$Resources:wss,viewlsts_pagetitle_create%>" Description="<%$Resources:wss,siteactions_createdescription%>" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/Actionscreate.gif" MenuGroupId="100" Sequence="100" UseShortId="true" ClientOnClickNavigateUrl="~site/_layouts/create.aspx" PermissionsString="ManageLists, ManageSubwebs" PermissionMode="Any" />
<SharePoint:MenuItemTemplate runat="server" id="MenuItem_EditPage" Text="<%$Resources:wss,siteactions_editpage%>" Description="<%$Resources:wss,siteactions_editpagedescription%>" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/ActionsEditPage.gif" MenuGroupId="100" Sequence="200" ClientOnClickNavigateUrl="javascript:MSOLayout_ChangeLayoutMode(false);" />
<SharePoint:MenuItemTemplate runat="server" id="MenuItem_Settings" Text="<%$Resources:wss,settings_pagetitle%>" Description="<%$Resources:wss,siteactions_sitesettingsdescription%>" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/ActionsSettings.gif" MenuGroupId="100" Sequence="300" UseShortId="true" ClientOnClickNavigateUrl="~site/_layouts/settings.aspx" PermissionsString="EnumeratePermissions,ManageWeb,ManageSubwebs,AddAndCustomizePages,ApplyThemeAndBorder,ManageAlerts,ManageLists,ViewUsageData" PermissionMode="Any" />
</SharePoint:FeatureMenuTemplate>
</CustomTemplate></SharePoint:SiteActions>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>
By: FreedomChicken
1:00 AM
TheEpicChocobo
What I mean by Big Brother 2.0 is the Internet and total electronic surveillance grid. Why is Narus at the top of it? That’s because they make mass surveillance systems and are the creators of NarusInsight which is a supercomputer system that was used by the NSA and other corporations. Their supercomputers can analyze data in real-time. That means it can pick up your emails, voip conversations, IM’s, ect… all in real-time as you’re sending them.
To try to better wrap your head around how massive their systems can be. They can analyze extract and put back together a conversation at a rate of 10 GB per second. They can also due to most Internet connections are limited they can monitor millions of connections at a time.
Here is a general video with a little more of the technical info of what the Narus Systems can do. Where they state that many governments and service providers use their systems for cyber protection. Much like AT&T did in 2006 but also used that system to give the government all the info they wanted on their users.
According to Narus’s Website their customers span one third of the world’s largest carriers. This also includes Mobile networks.
How can you get around these Narus systems? Well, the first thing you can do is try to get all your friends to switch to encrypted IM and Email simply by using PGP. There is an extremely easy plugin for Pidgin and Thunderbird. You can also switch to using encrypted services online. Like HTTPS Gmail or StartPage for internet search. This helps because Narus just throws aside encrypted data so it can keep up it's speed.
Souces:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS140435+10-Dec-2007+BW20071210?sp=true
http://www.narus.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narus
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908
By: FreedomChicken
1:00 AM
TheEpicChocobo
So recently one of our System Administrators had been tasked with updating all of our users to a new domain that we bought. He then though, “How do I add a new domain to all email addresses in Active Directory using PowerShell?” This is when he though, who better to help me do some scripting but, [queue heroic music] ‘FreedomChicken’! The ever friendly developer who with his powers of Debugging and Google Searching can single handily defeat evil Bugs and Hang-ups in applications and scripts. Now with Freedom chicken on the job the two were able to defeat this evil foe in a quick and timely manner. The result of this victory will be as follows.
PowerShell Script:
get-mailbox %username% | foreach {
[string]$smtpaddress = Get-mailbox $_ | select primarysmtpaddress
$addressarray = $smtpaddress.split("@")
$addressarray1 = $addressarray[1].split("=")
[string]$newmail=$addressarray1[1]+="@NEWDOMAIN.com"
$_.EmailAddresses+=$newmail
$_
} |Set-Mailbox
