Chromium is essentially a individual virtualization of Google Chrome with the Wine core. Chromium has sweet perks but some downsides as well. The Browser is a virtualization and therefore has the XP/Vista fell to it, creating an out of sync feeling one your mac. Its X|_|[] controls contrast against those positioned on the left on macs, creating confusion. But on the bright side, it is Chrom(ium) on a Mac, and it works.

Chromium, I know, will only act as a temporary fulfillment until the release of the full Mac version by Google.

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• How to prevent both users and bots from registering using image verification
• Testing Password Strength Using Google
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Registering for Yahoo

As far as I can remember I’ve never used Yahoo for anything. I AM the Google generation. Walking across the road, joining the darker side, was a scary thought, but when I saw the short registering procedure I calmed down.

The way they have set up their registering procedure is just about as good as it could get.

As you can see everything is where you expect it to be, divided into chunks like “Tell us about yourself…” and “Select an ID and password”. Even the less web savvy users might think “voilà this is done in 30 seconds”. And they would be right if it wasn’t for that #¤%)/(&=#087AAARGH”#(¤¤//!!…

Freaking spam protection!

I had used only one or two minutes entering my personal information, even choosing a decent account name. Everything went my way just until now. I saw the image representation of something that might look like text. Skewed, distorted, blurred.

Now you say, where have you been? Never seen that kind of spam protection before? Yes I have. Several times. And usually I don’t even think about it. This time I had plenty of time to think about. I just couldn’t get it right.

For example, what letters to the image above represent? If you guessed z7neG6Bz you would have been wrong. I never had a second chance, because now a new image was presented. Impossible to read. The third was even worse. Now at my fourth try I was sure I couldn’t be wrong. I probably wasn’t, but because I had typed in some wrong characters just before Yahoo had thrashed my password. So instead of accepting my, assumingly correct interpretation of the letters, I had re-type my password and then interpret yet another image.

For a moment let’s leave my Yahoo story and have a look at some other examples.

Examples of good and bad image verification

 Example 2, 3. – http://google.com/

These examples are pretty similar to my Yahoo experience. The letters are skewed and the tracking (space between each letter) is set to about -150. It is, at best, very hard to guess the letters.


 Example 1. – http://flatpanels.dk/

In this example from http://flatpanels.dk the letters are not skewed and the tracking is increased to make it easier to separate one letter from another. Instead a hefty grain filter has been applied. This makes it hard for machines to decode, but users without serious visual disabilities should not have any problems. The letters placement is vertically inconsistent, again this should make the bots have a hard time, but users can easily overcome this hurtle.

Conclusion

We see that Google and Yahoo uses the same hard-to-breakdown image-verification method. The image is very hard to interpret for both machines and real users. They have to do something about those nasty abusive bots, but when it happens at the cost of usability the battle against the machines has been lost.

Back to the Yahoo story. Yes, I did succeed after several tries. Not all the letters were hard to guess, but a image verification method is not good enough if only some of the images produced are readable. Back to the drawing board Yang and Page!

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As far as I know, strong passwords must contain numbers, letters and symbols. Have you chosen a strong password for example for your email account? Well then, let’s test whether that password is strong or not.

So how do you test it? The easy way is by using Google. I love Google since it has a lot of hidden services and hacks. Google has tried to help us by creating a new service (although not yet advertised) that will give a security rating for every password as follows:

1. Not secure
2. Adequate
3. Could use some improvment
4. This is secure

At this point, the page only shows the number relating to how secure the password is without any explanation of what it means, so bear in mind the score and refer to the legend above.

To see how secure your password is, use the form below. The response will be a number which you can compare to the list above to see how secure it is.

Original article.

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I use this entire system of working during any group project, web based or not. It provides a fast and efficient way for users to update and collaborate on shared documents. Just another service to make life better.

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enaresh.com
news.cnet.com
kurogane.animeblogger.net
googleblog.blogspot.com

Chrome is a browser based on Webkit just like Safari. That’s good news for designers as they don’t have to deal wth another peculiar set of HTML and CSS rules and exceptions.

Pixels for free!

The first thing that comes to mind when opening Chrome is the lack of chrome. The toolbar containing files, edit, bookmarks, etc. has been removed, the search bar known from IE7 and Firefox has been integrated into the address bar (Google has named this Omnibox) and the status bar is hidden by default and is set only to show it’s ugly face when you hover your mouse over a link. Let’s look at just how much extra space Chrome can offer in comparison to it’s two biggest competitors.

1. Chrome: 1663 x 930 = 1546590 pixels
2. IE7: 1659 x 904 = 1499736 pixels
3. FF3: 1663 x 867 = 1441821 pixels

To find the actual view port I took a screen shot at 1680×1050 and cropped the image to contain only the view port area. All browsers were set to their default configurations.

Chrome offers a blasting 1546590 pixels on a screen resolution of 1680×1050 pixels. That’s a mind bobbeling 7 percent more than what Firefox 3 can offer and 3 percent more than IE7.

If Chrome becomes the browser of choice we might see that extra space used to display more ads, bigger top banners and a like. With the extra space Google could fit even another sponsored link on top of the search results. Let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.

Performance

General performance seems to have increased slightly from Firefox 3, but the real performance gain is found in the way it renders JavaScript. Google’s own numbers show that Chrome are about three times faster than Firefox 3 and up to ten times faster then IE7.
blogs.zdnet.com
ejohn.org/blog/
Test the JavaScript performance yourself

The virtual JavaScript engine is called V8 and has been developed by a Danish Google division.

Chrome can be downloaded here but unfortunately it can only be run on Windows environments.

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Just a small heads up, as I type this, Google is in the process of yet another major update.

Holy Search Engine Optimization some of my readers and RSS subscribers might be thinking. What shall I do now?

Have no fear, there are some common starting points that if you apply these to all of your sites, you should be able to see the listings you once did as the norm.

• Proper naming structure
• Name your page titles with your keywords if possible
• Always have a sitemap
• Always include a robots.txt file
• If you must use a re-direct, be sure it’s server side, not with a meta refresh tag
• Don’t use hidden text
• Make sure your keyword phrase is included in your H1 tags
• Don’t optimize for more than 2 keywords per page
• Use text links where possible
• In any image, be sure to use the alt tag (describe the image, don’t use keywords).
• Use hyphens, not underscores when you name a page file
• Make sure your site has an error handling page
• Create a Google Sitemap and submit it to them (This is in addition to a typical sitemap)
• Offload all your JavaScript and CSS code (make it all off page).
• Don’t forget about meta tags

Be sure to follow these simple guidelines and you won’t need to worry too much anytime Google has an update.

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At the original writing of this article, Google Pack came with Adaware, Firefox, and other great tools. But for whatever reason, Google has removed them from the Google Pack download.

Google Earth

Have you ever wanted to instantly view anywhere in the world? Well with Google Earth you can. Google Earth allows you to view satelite images of the world up close. A better description of it is Google Maps times a million.

The program is for broadband users (do to the endless number of images you’ll be instantly downloading as you view the world), so if you’ve got dial up you might want to think twice about use this program.

The program comes in three versions: Free, Plus, and Pro.

Google Desktop

Using things called “Gadgets” you can add hundreds of features and tools to your desktop using a sidebar.

The sidebar can be set to display above everything, under everything, or a few other positions.

With this sidebar thing comes something Windows XP users have been needing for a while. A fast (just as fast as Google’s search engine most of the time) search for your computer.

The search is restricted to documents (word, text, images, html files, etc.), but its still a very helpful thing to have. More information on GDS can be found here.

This is comparable to Vista’s Sidebar. In fact, when I bought my Vista computer, it came with Google Desktop loaded instead of Sidebar and for a few hours I couldn’t tell the difference.

Picasa

If you’re a photographer, or just a person with a gazillion (or something like that) images, Picasa is for you.

In just a few moments after being started, Picasa hunts down and finds all of the images on your computer. But that’s not all it does.

Picasa organizes your images by year, allows you to further organize your images without leaving Picasa, lets you password project photo collections, and much more.

Google Toolbar

Using Google Toolbar, you can easily search using Google no matter what web site you’re on.

It is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. There’s really not much to say about this, since its pretty self explanatory. It works well with Firefox, because a lot of Firefox theme developers make it so the search bar blends in with their theme.

Photo Screensaver

If you’ve got yourself a bunch of awesome pictures and you’ve always wanted to make your own screensaver, then this is the program for you! Using Photo Screensaver, you can take pictures from your computer (or the internet) and turn them into a working screenaver.

Adobe Reader

Adobe reader is a free reader for Adobe’s PDF format. It’s like Adobe Acrobat without the editing/creating functions.

This is definitely a must have for those in the business world, as well as those that like to read the 500mbs worth of Star Wars books you downloaded (and by “those” I mean me).

Norton Security Scan/Spyware Doctor Starter Edition

Norton is a virus remover and Spyware Doctor SE takes care of trojans, adware, spyware, etc. These two don’t really require much explanation.

Personally, I would exclude these two from your download and pick up Adaware instead.

Google Talk

Google Talk is a simple and easy to use IMing software that lets you chat with GMail users around the world. GMail comes with this program built into their inboxes, but you can also download it and run it like you would AIM, MSN, etc. Google Talk also lets you do voice conversations.

Skype

Skype is basically the same thing as Google Talk, but without the GMail aspect. Its interface is no where near as simple or easy to use as Google Talk’s, but its still a great IMing program that I use everyday.

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How to integrate Google Analytics with your homepage or blog?

1. Sign up

2. After you have signed up, you will be asked to fill some forms. Enter your domain address (e.g. www.attackr.com), choose your account name and specify country and time zone.

3. You will be asked to fill in some personal information, do that continue and accept the terms.

4. Google now generates a JavaScript which will looke like this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-1925799-1";
urchinTracker();
</script>

The unique part of that script is the numbers “1925799-1″.

5. Insert that JavaScript into your web site. Preferably into the footer or the header. Note that this should be done on all your pages (e.g. index.html, contact.html, portfolio.html).

If you’re running WordPress just paste the JavaScript to the footer.php or header.php. This ensures that the script is called on all pages.

6. Exclude yourself. It’s quite discouraging to see that your brand new blog have 20 visits only to find out that they all come from the same person, namely you. Therefore, after setting up your account and web site, you should immediately create a filter to exclude all hits from your own IP.

To do this go to the filter manager (beneath you web sites), click add filter, choose a name, from filter types select “Exclude all traffic from an IP-adress. Now you will have to enter your own exteranl IP-adress. If you don’t know it check it out here or here.

7. Typing the IP correctly. Now lets say that your IP-address is 80.175.125.99. You would then have to enter a backslash (like this \) before each stop. If you IP was 80.175.125.99 you would have to enter 80\.175\.125\.99

8. Last step. Choose the domain which you want the filter to be applied to and click “add”. Press finish and you’re done. Navigate back to the your welcome screen by clicking “Analytics Settings” and wait a couple of days for the first results.

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