Download Ebook: C++ For Dummies 5th Edition

"Om Swastiastu"

Maaf ya jarang saya jarang membuat artikel lagi, nanti setelah pertengahan Februari baru saya mulai aktiv lagi. Sekarang hari minggu dan saya dapat menyisihkan sedikit waktu saya untuk berbagi lagi kepada kalian. Kali ini saya ingin membagikan sebuah ebook. Bagi kalian para programmer muda yang ingin mempelajari pemrograman C++, kalian berada di tempat yang tepat, karena sekarang saya akan memberikan kalian sebuah buku C++ yang terbilang lengkap.

Judul bukunya saja, C++ For Dummies 5th Edition, jadi buku ini memang ditujukan untuk orang-orang awam yang ingin belajar pemrograman C++. Ada banyak hal yang bisa kalian dapatkan disini.

Publisher: For Dummies; 5 Edition
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0764568523
ISBN-13: 978-0764568527

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Better Music Video Results in Google Search

Google updated the group of video search results sometimes intermingled with regular results, but only for queries bands and music artists.

"People often come to Google to find music videos, and this week we improved our results so now when you're searching for your favorite band or album, you'll find popular clips organized in a new way. For example, search for [michael jackson] and you'll find some of the King of Pop's most famous videos, including clear text indicating the length of the video, the album and the year it was published. The feature scans the entire web for video content and algorithmically ranks the best sources for each song. Rather than return repetitive links, we group results for the same song together, making it easier to scan and choose the song you're looking for."


The results aren't always the best music videos and Google should provide options to sort them by year, album, genre. Another issue is that, even though Google shows results from different video sites, the main link usually sends you to YouTube and that's not fair.

Google Places for iPhone

Why build a local search app for iPhone when the Maps app already lets you find businesses and local attractions? Apple's Maps app doesn't use all the information that's available about businesses, doesn't show photos, reviews and other details. That's one of the reasons why Google decided to build an iPhone app called Google Places.

"We realize the importance of finding places you'll love while you're out and about, no matter what mobile device you use. And Places with Hotpot not only helps you find places near where you are, it gives you the best places to go for you by personalizing your search results," explains Google.

The application integrates with Google Hotpot and uses your ratings and your friends' ratings to recommend other places. Google Places encourages users to rate businesses and to post reviews in order to get better search results and that's an interesting proposition. What's missing from the app is a list of business you've previously rated and the Hotpot feed that's now available on Google Maps.


Geo services are one of the key Google assets and it's very likely that Google will use them to create a stealth social network. Google Maps is probably the best mapping service and one of the most popular local search engines, so the social layer will have an important user base. Unlike Google Buzz, Hotpot doesn't have privacy issues yet and it doesn't feel like a different app because it's properly integrated with Google Maps.

Google Places for iOS can be installed from the Apple App Store and it's only available in English.

Google Goggles History

Until Google releases a desktop version of Google Goggles, you can see your previous visual queries at http://www.google.com/goggles/history even when you don't have your phone with you. Click on one of the images and you'll see the results, similar images and links to related web pages.


It's surprising to see that this service is not yet integrated with Google Web History and it's not part of Google Image Search.

{ spotted by François Beaufort }

Spell Checker for Gmail Search

Gmail added a feature that used to be available in the Apps Search experiment from Gmail Labs: a spell checker for your queries. For example, if you search for [anounced], Gmail will show a message above the results: "did you mean announced". Gmail doesn't have a special query spell checker, so it gets the suggestions from Google Search.


Gmail's search feature is a lot less sophisticated than Google's Web search engine, which replaces some of your words with synonyms or similar terms and sorts the results by relevance. Google could use the importance flags and other signals to find results that are likely to be important, the search engine could index attachments and it could become a module from a more comprehensive search engine that shows results from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Buzz, Google Contacts and much more.

{ Thanks, Joel. }

Conversation Mode in Google Translate for Android

Google Translate's app for Android added a feature that has previously announced by Google: conversation mode. The new option is experimental and it only works for English and Spanish, so it's more like an early preview. Conversation mode is a fancy name for making it easy to have a conversation in two different languages.

"In conversation mode, simply press the microphone for your language and start speaking. Google Translate will translate your speech and read the translation out loud. Your conversation partner can then respond in their language, and you'll hear the translation spoken back to you. Because this technology is still in alpha, factors like regional accents, background noise or rapid speech may make it difficult to understand what you're saying," explains Google.


The conversation is supposed to be fluid, but you still need to confirm that Google's voice recognition system worked well and tap the "Reply" button to switch roles. Here's a demo that shows the new feature in action for English and German:

Google Chrome to Drop Support for H.264

Chromium's blog informs that Google Chrome will drop support for H.264 in the coming months and will only support WebM (VP8) and Theora codecs.

We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome's HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

Google decided to pick sides, much like Mozilla and Opera, in an effort to encourage developers to use WebM. Right now, the only important website that uses WebM is YouTube, Google's video sharing service. Internet Explorer, Safari and iOS devices are unlikely to support WebM, while hardware acceleration and Flash support are expected later this year.

John Gruber thinks that "this is just going to push publishers toward forcing Chrome users to use Flash for video playback — and that the video that gets sent to Flash Player will be encoded as H.264". He also finds it ironic that Google Chrome bundles Adobe's proprietary Flash plugin, which is a great software for playing H.264 videos.

VP8 has a long way to go before becoming the codec of choice for Web videos and Google decided to make it more popular by dropping support for the competing codec from its browser. Last year, Andy Rubin said that sometimes being open "means not being militant about the things consumer are actually enjoying," but that's not the case here.

API for Google's URL Shortener

Google's URL Shortener has many advantages: it's fast (probably the fastest URL Shortener), it rarely goes down, it's integrated with Google Safe Browsing, it shows neat stats and it automatically generates QR codes. Unfortunately, Goo.gl didn't offer an official API and many application didn't support it.

Services like Goo.gl, Bit.ly or TinyURL are rarely used directly: Twitter clients automatically shorten links, browser extensions create short links, while content management systems convert the links so that people can share them. For example, Google Maps, Google Reader and Google News use Goo.gl to create short links for all their content.

Now other applications can use Goo.gl because there's an official API that's quite easy to use and has a generous limit of 1,000,000 queries/day. "You can use the Google URL Shortener API to programmatically interact with this service and to develop applications that use simple HTTP methods to store, share, and manage goo.gl short URLs from anywhere on the Internet," explains Google. The API lets you create short links, decrypt Goo.gl links, read stats and look up a user's history.


Google's new API can be used inside the new Dev Console that lets you manage multiple APIs, add traffic filters and get traffic reports.

{ via Google Code Blog }

Google Transcoder's Zooming Feature

If you're trying to load a web page using your mobile phone's browser, but the Internet connection is slow and you can't install Opera Mini, there's always Google Transcoder. Google's service shows a simplified version of the page that hides navigation links, removes scripts and compresses images.

Google Transcoder also has a "zoom out" feature that shows a screenshot of the page and lets you select the section you want to read. This means that Google has at least two databases of screenshots for all the indexed pages and Google knows a lot of about the structure of a web page.

Google Can't Find Paris

If you use Google to search for [Paris], the top search result is a Wikipedia page for PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space), "a privately-organised endeavour undertaken by various staff members of the information technology web site The Register to design, build, test, and launch a lightweight aerospace vehicle, constructed mostly of paper and similar structural materials, into the mid-stratosphere and recover it intact".

Most likely, the top search result should have been the Wikipedia page for the capital of France, but a bug replaced it with a page about a curious project.


Search for [the capital of France], and the second search result is the same page about the space project. It's as if someone performed a search and replace in Google's index.


Update (a couple of days later): It has been fixed.

{ a faux pas spotted by Jérôme Flipo }

Google Goggles Solves Sudoku Puzzles

Google's visual search tool has a new trick up its sleeve: solving Sudoku puzzles. Google Goggles 1.3 for Android scans barcodes much faster, recognizes print ads from the major U.S. magazines and newspapers, but most people will probably ignore those useful features and will try to see if Goggles can actually solve Sudoku puzzles. The nice thing is that this feature also works in the latest version of Google Mobile App for iPhone, along with print ads recognition.

"Now, Goggles on Android and iPhone can recognize puzzles and provide answers to help make you faster than a Sudoku champ. So if you ever get stuck, take a clear picture of the entire puzzle with Goggles and we'll tell you the correct solution," explains Google.

Maybe providing a hint would also be useful, especially if you want to solve the puzzle.




The new features show that Google Goggles has a lot of potential, but it's still not useful enough in the real world. An interesting article from Xconomy quotes Hartmut Neven, Google's technical lead manager for image recognition, who says that Goggles is not yet an universal visual search tool. "What keeps me awake at night is, 'What are the honest-to-God use cases that we can deliver,' where it's not just an 'Oh, wow.' We call it the bar of daily engagement. Can we make it useful enough that every day you will take out Goggles and do something with it?"

Android Addresses UI Shortcomings

It's amazing to see how much Android's user interface has changed ever since Matias Duarte was hired by Google to improve Android. Matias has previously worked on Sidekick, Helio and Palm's WebOS, so Android is a perfect fit for him. In only 9 months, Matias Duarte and his team managed to address a lot of Android's UI shortcomings: a virtual keyboard that wasn't good enough, an uninspired interface for multitasking, the hidden menus that required to click on a soft key to display them, inflexible soft keys that were restricted to a single orientation.

Here's, for example, the navigation bar that replaces the hidden menu for common actions in Android Honeycomb:


The Gmail app currently available in the Android Market requires to use a hidden menu to perform common actions like composing mail or going back to the inbox:


Here's a comparison between the Froyo keyboard and the Gingerbread keyboard. According to Google, "the Android soft keyboard is redesigned and optimized for faster text input and editing. The keys themselves are reshaped and repositioned for improved targeting, making them easier to see and press accurately, even at high speeds."


In an interview with Joshua Topolsky from Engadget, Matias says that Honeycomb is the future of Android in terms of user experience. His job is to make Android's interface so good that companies like HTC or Samsung don't have to spend so much time improving it. The stock user interface will raise the bar high enough to be more than a solid foundation.

You're not working on one product, you're not saying "we're one company, vertically integrating and making one product and we're going to focus on one market and we're going to try and meet that particularly need." But instead, the idea is that there's a common problem that every company that wants to succeed in making computing better, making computing mobile has and that's the fundamental platform problem. We're not only going to try to find a way to get everybody to benefit from it, we're going to do it for free. We're going to work on building this common tide that rises all boats.

It's interesting to think of Android as "the tide that rises all boats", a platform that accelerates mobile development not just for smartphones, but also for tablets, media players, digital cameras, TVs, cars, appliances and much more.

Drag and Drop Uploading for YouTube Videos

Why download YouTube videos when it's so easy to upload videos? Now you can drag and drop multiple videos on YouTube's upload page instead of using the operating system's file open dialog. The new feature requires a recent version of Google Chrome and Firefox because it uses HTML5 APIs.

Two other Google services that support drag and drop uploading are Gmail and Google Docs, but other services will probably follow suit.


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

YouTube's HTML5 Rickrolling

YouTube's HTML5 interface has a very cool feature: if you right-click on a video, you'll no longer see the boring contextual menu displayed by the browser that added uninteresting features like downloading videos. Instead, you'll get a much more useful menu that sends you to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" video.

Some would say that this trick reminds them of the sites that annoyed users by disabling browser features like the contextual menu so that people can't save an image or copy some text. But that's not what happens here: YouTube's terms of use forbid users from downloading videos and the new menu solves this issue by offering a better option. After all, why download a video when you can listen to Rick Astley's fabulous song?


There are at least two uncivil browsers (Firefox and Opera) that treat videos just like images and allow users to right-click on a video and download it. Firefox even lets you disable custom contextual menus for all sites, while Opera provides more granular options. There's even a developer that breached YouTube's terms of use by creating a Greasemonkey script with a strange name: Youtube HTML5 Beta "Save Video As" Unrickroller. Apparently, he lost his sense of humor or he's not a Rick Astley fan.

I'm not going to use any of these features and I'll switch to Internet Explorer, a browser that doesn't offer a download option for videos (mostly because it doesn't support HTML5 videos). Whenever I want to download a YouTube video, I'll ignore all those scripts and tricks and I'll read YouTube's terms of use, while listening to Rick Astley's song. They're a perfect match.

"... You know the rules and so do I ..."