Low energy consumption color palette for web applications

There are quite a number of “green” moves recently by few big computer-makers. One of the “green ” activities involved is to reduce the energy consumption for the environment. According to a recent survey by Sun Microsystems, computers have made up about 3-4% of the total energy consumption of the whole world. Since there is more and more computers and gadgets coming into this world, we all have the responsibility to this energy efficiency before it eats up the energy of the whole world!

As a blogger or web developer, what can you do for saving some energy? Adjust the color of your blog or web pages to use those consuming lower watt by your CRT or other monitors. Your monitors use more power to display some colors than others, such as white and bright colors can use up at least 20% of power more than dark and black colors. EnergyStar has recently published a wattage ratings for different colors and thanks to Mark Ontkush has picked up 6 colors, which form a low-wattage color-palette as shown above, suitable for use in web-applications as your contribution for lower energy consumption. The hex code of the 6 colors are as follows:

#822007 (rusty red)
#000000 (black)
#b2bbc0 (blue grey)
#19472a (forest green)
#3d414c (cobalt)
#ffffff (white)

The white is included here as the accent color. Perhaps, I shall consider redesigning TechChee to follow the low watt color pallete.

via [Boing-Boing]

World wine web! Grow your vines on the web!

World wine web, that isn’t typo, bringing wine online! It’s new kind of online service provided by Crushpad. Crushpad helps its registered members to have at least virtual experience of running their own winery, which is just a mouse click away. If you’re a member of Crushpad, you can make at least one barrel of wine a year. It will cost around $5,000.00 to $10,000.00 to produce one barrel a year. Members can monitor their winery by e-mail updates, live chat and web cams provided by Crushpad’s staff. Members can also fly over to visit their winery during vacation. Crushpad even lets members decide what style of wine they want and what kind of grapes they wanna use.

This is a pretty cool and revolutionary idea of bringing wine online. On the other hand, one more interesting story is, an Australian winemaker, Stuart Bourne, has recently made use of the Internet technology for tasting his wine online. What he did was to have all his invited tasters sent with his wine samples and tasted the wine together with those tasters online using web chat and web cam. The bad side was he had to stay up to 4am in order be in sync with tasters in the United Kingdom and North America.

via [ShinyShiny], CNN News

It’s time for Google to steal contents or data from others!

Google is one of those well known and widely recognized by its originality? I’m not sure, you judge it by yourself. To me the Internet (especially on the blogosphere) are more or less flooded with similar content  and data everywhere, in order to achieve speedy productivity! Even no exception for Google. This time, Google is being attacked with an official statement, claiming that Google‘s Chinese IME (Input Method Editor) is stolen from the word bank of Sohu’s IME. Word bank is the software component that recognizes “pin yin” and convert it into the correct Chinese characters.

How did Sohu prove that Google copied their product? That’s the trick within the IME software, where there is a script called “ME fingerprints” that predicts and converts what the user types at once into the characters. And the way Google‘s IME does it for the word bank  fingerprint of “zhao li yang” is exactly the same as how Sohu’s IME does it! A coincidence or simply stealing?

via [GearFuse], source

Price rise 7% for domain name, Verisign will pocket $27 millions more a year!

The recent fuel hike would have resulted rises in prices in quite a number of sectors. The impact would be the increase of transportation fee, food and other commodities and also followed by the increase in labor cost etc. The domain registry for .com domain names (as well as .net and others), Verisign, also has taken this opportunity to adjust its price, a rise of 7%. So the whole sale price for a .com domain name now has raised from from $6/year to $6.42/year. Leaving those registras (companies that register sell domain names to end users) having only little margin to play. It’s expected that there would be same amount rise in selling price of domain names by these registras.

Currently, there are roughly 65 million .com domain names registered worldwide. The rise of 7% will also make Verisign to pocket at least $27 million dollars more per year. Verisign would probably take further action into a renegotiated contract with ICANN, to continue to raise wholesale prices 7%/year.

source

Google’s April Fool jokes

So today is the April fool. But people surrounding me seem to be lacking some kind of sense of humor and they’re not making any jokes at all. Perhaps, they’ve forgotten that today is the day to fool others. But, anyway Google has never forgotten the April fool and has taken it seriously. The April fool jokes by Google are as usual, center around its product. They have two solid fake products this year, they are the Google Paper and also the Google TiSP.

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Whos.amung.us shows the number of concurrent users on your site

Here is another new kind of visitor tracking service for your site, it allows you to trace up to the number of concurrent users on your web site at a given time. A neat tracking widget, provided by Whos.amung.us. It’s pretty easy for you add it to your site. There isn’t a need for registration and setup. Just go to whos.among.us and copy the HTML code there and paste it onto every page of your blog/website. And you’ll get the widget on your site as shown below.

This widget is pretty useful for tracking the activities and behavior of users on your site. As you click on the widget above, you can trace up to the stats of the recently visited URLs and popular pages. It also provides a firefox extension that shows the total number of readers on your site at the bottom of the browser at all times. I’ve found a little glitch with this widget, it seems like it doesn’t differentiate the concurrent users by IP address. I’ve experimented using both Internet Explorer and Firefox accessing the page with the widget, it shows me two instead of one.

via [TechCrunch]

Yahoo Mail announces unlimited storage!

Seriously, I’ve not logged in to my Yahoo Mail account for a couple of weeks, after switching to using GMail. That is mainly one reason, or just my own bias. GMail is much speedier and provides better organization for my email, which the way they do it, getting email organized in threads, simply the way I love. Having emails grouped in threads is much easier for me to go through the list of emails in my inbox and easily to pick up only those wanted for reading. I don’t choose a web mail account based on the storage size they offer. I switched to GMail is not because of it offers bigger storage size than Yahoo does, mainly because of it’s greater in usability. To me, I do not need such a big storage size, as I normally kick out all those junk mails and also delete those emails that I’ve already read if they aren’t the important ones. I only keep those important ones in my inbox or in a special folder.

But it seems like now the web mail service providers are trying to compete in size. And Yahoo will give its users unlimited email storage starting in May 2007. The current Yahoo’s storage limit is 1 GB per account (2 GB for $20/year premium users). With this change, Yahoo leapfrogs Gmail (2.8 GB and growing) and Live.com Mail (2GB). According to Yahoo’s Vice President of Mail, John Kremer, the new unlimited storage affect all Yahoo mail users. I personally feel that having bigger storage just like encouraging users not to read their emails that often. You know, several years back when Hotmail offered a mere 2MB storage, was like an urge to push us to read and delete our emails more frequently. Of course, Yahoo’s users are subject to Yahoo’s abuse policies. Users to follow “normal email practices” and not engage in activities like using Yahoo mail for basic online storage. Abusive accounts will not be summarily deleted – users will be notified by Yahoo and/or accounts suspended, but users will still have access to the data. What I can think of the kind of abuse would be getting friends to send you all the porn clips and store it on Yahoo forever.

The Yahoo Mail’s interface surely is great, it’s just like having an Outlook Express on the web. Perhaps, it’s only great for those connected with high bandwidth and PC loaded with high memory. As the overly loaded AJAX/DHTML effect somehow makes scrolling and fetching emails a bit sluggish. The unlimited storage offered by Yahoo will not be an attraction to me for switching back. I still prefer GMail, unless I purposely wanna abuse it, to use for storing junk mails or porn clips, till I get banned by Yahoo!

Source via [TechCrunch]

The evil intention behind make money online review

I did have a thought yesterday that John’s intention of offering his linkback review, was to push his blog to be ranked number one on Google for the search of “make money online“. And John, you’re almost there! I remember that I did have a quick check and searched Google for make money online, before writing review post for John Chow dot com. It was still on the second page of the searched result. And I missed to capture the screen to show you guys here. It was only a few hours later, then John Chow dot com managed to squeeze itself into the first page, but was positioned near to the bottom of the page. But today, it managed to secure itself for the top 5 positions on first page. Anyway, John you’re kinda smart. Here is another little contribution from me to help you get to the top!

Digg’s got 1 million registered users

1 million, is it a big figure? Well, to my surprise, it’s only 1 million. I’d always thought that Digg would have a much bigger registered users database.

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CWIHosting suspended my account! Welcome to my new server!

If you guys managed to see this post, I’d like to say “Welcome to my new server at BlueHost.com“. This webhost is really speedy, I’d like to thank OhGizmo very much for having introduced BlueHost to me!

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