Flash Mute

If you don't want to disable Flash content, but just to make a disturbing Flash ad shut up, you can install FlashMute, a small program that supports IE, Firefox, Opera.

When executed, FlashMute will put a new icon in your system tray. When clicking this icon, it will alternate between its normal state: "F", and the muted state: "F" with a red X across it. When in the normal state, Flash movies will be allowed to use sound output, but when the red X is displayed, Flash will be denied access to your audio hardware.

You can also use a shortcut instead of clicking the icon: Ctrl-Alt-M.

Disable Flash Advertising

Flash applets can be fun, but most often they distract you from the real content. That's the case with most Flash ads that include sound and animations.

The Macromedia Flash Player is implemented as an ActiveX control for some browsers, and as a plug-in for other browsers. If you don't want to see Flash applets anymore, uninstall Flash Player (macromedia.com).

If you don't want to uninstall Flash, but you want to be disabled as default, you can try Flashblock, an extension for Firefox that blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.

If you want to block just some Flash applets, you can install Adblock, another Firefox extension that filters unwanted content based on the source-address using regular expressions. You can disable, for example, anything that contains "/ads/" in its address.

In Opera, if you want to temporarily disable Flash, it's an easy workaround: just disable plugins (press F12, and uncheck "Enable plugins").

Otherwise, to simulate AdBlock, you should create a file user.css that contains this code (credit - http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/show.dml/8382):

embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"] {
content: url(http://img467.imageshack.us/img467/9899/flashblock2tp.gif);
}
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"].zichtbaar {content: normal; outline: none}

body:before {
position: absolute; visibility: hidden;
background-image: url("javascript:window.addEventListener('click', function(){var srcElem=window.event.srcElement;var tag=srcElem.tagName;if(tag=='EMBED') srcElem.className='zichtbaar';}, false)");
content:""}

The file should be copied in the same location that appears in Preferences/Advanced/Content/ Style options / My style sheet.

Disable animated GIFs

Firefox:
go to about:config
set image.animation_mode to none

Opera:
press F12
unselect Enable GIF animation

Internet Explorer:
go to Internet Options < Advanced < Multimedia
unselect Play animations in web pages

Safari Compatibility Test

How does your website look in Apple Safari ? Visit the Safari Test page, enter your url and you'll get a real-time screenshot of your page viewed with Safari. You can choose the resolution and the quality of the image.

Google Wallet: Make Payments With Google

"Over the past four years, Google has billed advertisers in 65 countries more than $11.2 billion in 48 currencies, and made payments to advertising partners of more than $3.9 billion.

As the number of Google services has increased, we've continued to build on our core payment features and migrate to a standard process for people to buy our services with a Google Account. Examples of this migration include enabling users to buy Google Video content, Google Earth licenses, and Google Store items with their Google Accounts. We also just began offering similar functionality on Google Base.

Looking ahead, we want to continue building payment services that meet the needs of Google users and advertisers. We expect to add payment functionality to Google services where our users need a way to buy online. " (Google Blog)

Google will provide a centralized place where you can make your payments, check your payment history. They might change AdWords philosophy: instead of visiting the website of the producer, you will directly buy the product through Froogle.

Related: Google to compete with Pay Pal

Google Page Creator

Google developed a simple WYSISYG editor for web pages. You can find it and play with it at pages.google.com. You can use up to 100MB of space for your pages and uploaded files. Your site will have an address like http:// yourgmailusername.googlepages.com/myferret.

Update: "Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. " Like Google Analytics and Web Accelerator, Google Page Creator stopped creating new accounts due to heavy demand.

Lazy Sunday Viral Video

Lazy Sunday is a music video starring Saturday Night Live cast members Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg that aired on the December 17, 2005, episode of the show.

The film shows Parnell and Samberg performing a rap about buying cupcakes at the Magnolia Bakery and going to see the movie The Chronicles of Narnia. It quickly became popular among Internet communities for its memorable lyrics:

Lazy Sunday,
Wake up in the late afternoon
Call Parnell just to see how he's doin'
Hello?
What up, Parn!
Yo Samberg, what's crackin'?
You thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?
Narnia!
Man it's happ'nin'!
But first, my hunger pangs are stickin' like duct tape.
Let's hit up Magnolia and mack on some cupcakes.
No doubt, that bakery's got all the bomb frostings.
I love those cupcakes like McAdams loves Gosling.

Two! No, Six! No, Twelve! Baker's Dozen!
I told'ja that I'm crazy for these cupcakes, cousin!
Yo, where's the movie playin'?
Upper West Side, dude!
Let's hit up Yahoo Maps to find the dopest route.
I prefer Mapquest!
That's a good one too.
Google Maps is the best!
True that! Double true!
68th and Broadway.
Step on it, sucka!
What you wanna do Chris?
snack attack, mutha----!

Hit the Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia!
Yes, the Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia!
We love that Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia!
Pass that Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia!

Yo, stop at the deli.
The theatre is overpriced!
You got that backpack
I'm going to pack it up nice.
We don't want security to get suspicious!
Mr. Pibbs and Red Vines equals crazy delicious.
Yo, reach in my pocket and pull out some dough,
Girl acted like she never seen a $10 before!
It's all about the Hamiltons baby
Throw the snacks in a bag and I'm Ghost like Swayze.

Roll up to the theatre
Ticket buying what we're handling,
You can call us Aaron Burr from the way we're dropping Hamiltons
Parked in our seats movie trivia's the illest!
"What Friends alum starred in films with Bruce Willis?"
We answered so fast, it was scary:
Everyone stared in awe when we screamed "Matthew Perry!"
Then quiet in the theatre or it's gonna get tragic
We're about to be taken to a dream world of magic

In the Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia!
Yes, the Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia!
We love that Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia!
Pass that Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia!

One of the sites that distributed the video was YouTube.com, but because of the copyright infringement, it had to remove the video. YouTube's blog states, "We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders. "

If you check the Google cache, you will see that Lazy Sunday had 4,568,973 views on 10 Feb 2006.

You can still find the video here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4245337360492479670&q=lazy+sunday (Google Video)

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/ (Saturday Night Live not-so-great site)

Related post:
Baidu vs Google (viral video)

Life in the Googleplex

Time features a photo essay about the life in the Googleplex. What googlers do when they don't code great applications? They swim, create graffiti, play volleyball, eat three free gourmet meals a day that can be eaten in a cafeteria adorned by artwork created by Google employees and unwind with a professional massage.

What's the best image search engine?

How To Create An Image Search Engine?

While crawling the web and following links, you should track the img tag and the links that point to images. Most images on the web are jpegs, gifs and pngs so you can detect them based on extension.

Now what metadata can you find about a picture? You can find information about a picture in the name, in the alt attribute, in the link description, in the text near the image and in the context of the page. Although the text that surrounds the image is sometimes relevant, nobody guarantees that the image doesn't illustrate a very small detail or something related to the topic on the page.

To see what's the best image search engine, I tested 5 big search engines (ok, Flickr is not a search engine, but it has great photos) against 20 searches.

Test searches

The first result for Larry Page on Yahoo. They sort of mock the Google guys.

personalities
John Battelle
Larry Page

Vladimir Putin
Andy Roddick
Tori Amos

feelings
fear
shallow
unrequited love
laughing child
tough argument

screenshots
gnuplot
paint shop pro
openoffice
freebsd
solaris [the book, the film, the operating system]

events
New York attacks
India tsunami
gnomedex
Robbie Williams concert
Oscars 2005

I looked mainly at the first result, but I took in the considerations the others if they were great.

The results:

The first result for fear on Picsearch.

picsearch.com : 17/20
Probably the best image search. It doesn't have many results, but the sources are carefully selected.
(bad results for: new york attacks, shallow, tough argument )

images.search.yahoo.com: 15/20
Hillarious results, not safe-for-work results, logos usually come first.
(bad results for: fear, tough argument, freebsd, new york attacks, gnomedex)

images.google.com: 14/20
Not as good as the web search.
(bad results for: fear, shallow, unrequited love, paint shop pro, freebsd, new york attacks)

pictures.ask.com: 14/20
Ask has really good related searches.
(bad results for: fear, shallow, unrequited love, tough argument, paint shop pro, freebsd)

flickr.com: 8/20
Where is the search button? The tags are great, but they restrict the search queries.
(bad results or no results for: shallow, unrequited love, laughing child, tough argument, gnuplot
paint shop pro, openoffice, new york attacks. india tsunami, gnomedex, robbie williams concert, oscars 2005)

Pandora - free music discovery service

Can you help me discover more music that I'll like?

Pandora is a great website that creates a streaming audio playlist of music based on any artist or track you suggest. Every artist, every song, every genre has some attributes that build interesting connections.

"On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever. Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. "

Similar services are: Yahoo! Launchcast (you can find it in Yahoo! Messenger) and Last.fm.

Google PageRank Update

It seems that a Google PageRank update is imminent.

To check what the Google Data Centers are saying about your PageRank use Future Pagerank, a tool that will query Google's various data centers to check for any changes in PageRank values for a given URL.

Some data centers, like 216.239.53.99 and 216.239.53.104, will show different values if your PageRank has changed. You will basically see two values: one is the current PageRank and the second one the new PageRank.

You can see in this screenshot that Xooglers, the blog created by two former Google employees (ex-googlers), increased their PageRank from zero to 7 in just 3 months. Xooglers has more than 1,570 links and many are from high-ranked sites like Digg.

Say Goodbye to FrontPage and Jeeves

Goodbye, FrontPage

Microsoft will close the book on its FrontPage Web-design program with the release of Office 2007, formerly known as Office 12, late this year.

Microsoft acquired FrontPage in the mid-1990s, and it soon outdistanced Adobe's PageMill and other popular low-cost WSIWYG Web-creation tools.

FrontPage does serve as the foundation for two different Web-design programs: SharePoint Designer 2007, which is intended for organizations using the SharePoint server-based Web-development platform; and Expression Web Designer, which appears to be outside of the Office application family.

Goodbye, Jeeves

As expected, the butler Jeeves will not be the logo for Ask.com anymore. By the end of February the iconic valet will disappear from the site he has graced since it debuted in 1996.

The decision to axe Jeeves was taken in September 2005 but he stayed in place while the company investigated how users felt about the change. The removal of Jeeves has been driven by a broader effort to re-brand the Ask search site.

Jeeves wanted to be a friendly and trustworthy wizard that will answer all your questions. It turned out that Ask Jeeves is just a search engine that knows about NLP (Natural Language Processing) and semantic web as much as Google does.

A former Ask employee started a blog that wants to save Jeeves: "I want to save Jeeves, and I want YOUR help.", but the decision has already been made.