Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Playing Runescape in Free world

Well Runescape a Java based MMORPG(Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) is no doubt attracting so many peoples. I am too a player of this game and i am trying hard not to get addicted. Here we talk about playing Runescape in the Free World.

Runescape has always been cherished for its game play. Though mostly Member Worlds were more enjoyable, but now, due to some of its recent updates, Runescape should be appreciated for its path to give Free Worlds with some good minigames to play. The new minigames are Duel Arena, The Bounty Hunter, Clan Wars and the Fist of Gutix. Though there are still no Quest updates for Free Worlds.

Duel Arena

It is one of the first minigame open for Free World. You can duel with other players for a friendly or a stake of 3k duel. You can choose how to duel, like, no food, no melee, no armors and many more. Well if you have any fight or quarrel with other players then it would be definitely worth a visit.

The Bounty Hunter

It is the heaven sometimes hell. When it first came out it was definitely a hell. It has multi fight, so a when you enter the arena a group of players would attack you and you would be pawned; so bad. Now this arena has been changed into a one on one fight. If you die here you will loose everything you have with you except the one which you protect with your prayer. But if you can kill then that would be treasure hunting.

Clan Wars

This is where you make a clan of players and then fight with another clan. It is a safe mini game and very enjoyable. When you create or join a clan you can be promoted to posts according to the leader. You are given some time before the fight to plan your strategies or just wait for an attack. When the bars are down you can start the fight, the last team standing would

Fist of Gutix

Probably the most liked and enjoyable minigame for Free World. You need to collect many charges as possible and should be more than your opponent to win. When you win you get ratings and tokens. The tokens are the heart of this game. From the tokens you can buy much new stuff and they are cool. If you are clever enough then you can win to a high level too but if not you are sure to loose. Just entering the center won’t do it, you need to run and escape out of the opponent’s sight.

So can these minigames really hold the load of Free Worlds?

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Did you dumped your Playstation?

If you did, it could have been a big mistake. The buzz among the audiophiles these days is that the original Playstation (model SCPH- 1001) could possibly be the best CD player ever made. It is said that if you were to purchase a player that match that quality, you'd be spending in excess of $6000 for it.

The peoples who dumped the playstation might be feeling too bad to wake up from the shock.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Yahoo! Answers, a Review

http://www.answers.yahoo.com
It would be a tension to get answers to lots of questions in Stone Age but it is not much tension nowadays. The internet is making it lot easier. So, Yahoo! Answers gives you the perfect place to get your answers. The website works on a simple cycle, where a user asks a question and many users answers it, which goes on all the time and unusually may have the vice versa.

I have used the Yahoo! Answers and trust me, once you get a hold of it, you would never want to leave it. I am still on it and now I am a level 3 (levels?? Just go on reading).

Yahoo! Answers is a free service and you need to have a Yahoo! Account id to log in to the web site. Yahoo! Answers has wide range of categories to choose from, A to Y (Z too, but in sub category). Here are some steps how to get started.

Getting Started
If you haven’t yet signed up for Yahoo! Answers then go to the web site and log in with Yahoo! Account id. You must have noticed a link ‘Get started’, so click it and fill up some forms and you are on.

Creating a profile
When you get started you are asked to create your profile first. Here, you can put your nickname, customize your avatar, fill about you form, give your IM and email id (they can be set to private). If you put your email and IM private then your fans or friends may not be able to contact you, except answering or questioning.

Asking a question
After logging into the site, to ask a question, just click onto the ‘ask’ tab. In the new page that opens up, you can enter your question and add more details. After clicking ‘next’, you get to categorize your question into various sub-categories. What impressed us most about this step is that Yahoo! Answers gave a list of the most probable categorizations, automatically choosing the best option every time! Once that is done, the site allows you to preview your question and gives you the option of modifying it. When that is done you can click ‘OK’ and your question is posted to get answers.

After you ask the question there is 4 hours time until you can choose the best answer. You can also comment on the answer. If you don’t get any best answers then click on ‘no best answers’ and it will go for voting where other members vote the best answer for you. Anyway if you just leave the question as it for 2 days then it will again automatically go for voting. The voting lasts for 3 days(after the 2 days) but if there is a tie then the days becomes longer.

Answering a question
You can see loads of questions, questions are asked every second. So choose your category and choose a question you can answer. You will be taken to the page with the question and some more details about it. You just need to click ‘Answer this Question’ button. Then answer the question and list any references or sources to your answer.

Getting points
To increase competition and improve the quality of answers on the site, there is a system of giving points which users can compete for. This is the where you get addicted, you greed for more and more points and most of all, the tag of ‘Top Contributor’ below your avatar in golden color. Here is the summary of the points.

Begin participating on Yahoo! Answers (One time) 100
Ask a question -5
Choose a best answer for your question 3
Answer a question 2
Deleting an answer -2
Log in to Yahoo! Answers Once daily 1
Vote for a best answer 1
Vote for No best answer 0
Your answer being selected as the best answer 10
Receive a “thumbs-up” rating on a best answer that you wrote (up to 50 thumbs-up are counted) 1 per “thumbs-up”

When you go on collecting the points you notice that your levels are getting increased. You start with level 1 and the maximum level is 7. You can only give thumbs up when you get to level 2 or higher. Other than level another thing to compete for is the tag of ‘Top Contributor’. Through research it has been proved that ‘Top Contributor’ be taken by answering as many questions as possible in a specific category. If you answer many questions days to days but changing categories then don’t be surprised for not having the ‘Top Contributor’. It is only when you have high rates of answers in a category, though you can get it for more than 1 categories. Remember ‘Top Contributor’ is temporary and depends on you.

Interface

The interface of the web site is very easy to use. There are tabs ‘ask’, ‘answer’ and ‘discover’ top. When you go on discovering the world of Yahoo! Answers you may want to add peoples who may be useful to you. You can add them; they will remain in your friends list and you on their fans list. Whenever you ask a question they will get noticed and you can get more qualitative answers. You can also email or chat (with messenger) with your friends or fans if they have email and IM enabled. A bad part may be; I could not see my email through the web site until I got email on my mail box and viewed it on the Yahoo! Answers website through a link. Hope you may find it and tell us how to see the email without logging into the mail box.

A positive or negative thumb can be given to answers; a total of 50 thumbs can be received by an answer. If the answer gets chosen as best answer then every ‘thumbs up’ is taken as 1 point. If a question is interesting then it can be given ‘stars’.

The privacy and security is tightly followed. If an offensive or inappropriate question is posted, it can be quickly flagged by users for removal from the site. Moreover Yahoo! Answers staffs also check for inappropriate answer or questions by themselves. My 2 answers were accused of not following the community guidelines and were blocked. I still don’t think my answers were out of the community guidelines. You send many replies to the Yahoo! Answers staff but they remain on their decision; there is only 0.1% chance to get an apologetic reply. Fortunately I was not banned. Once you get banned then it is possibly you are banned forever; so don’t try to get banned at least until you are a low level; when you get banned at high level you would only have to regret. Going through the community guideline is perhaps the best prevention.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Top Social networking websites... continued

hi5

http://www.hi5.com
In the name hi5 the most important is the 5. "Give me five" and you slap the hand of your mate. That's where the name hi5 came in. hi5 has a wide popularity in the Europe and Asia. Alexa

ranks hi5 as the top 10 website globally. hi5 was initially founded by Ramu Yalamanchi and Akash Garg in december 2003. Within 7 months hi5 made 1 million members and followed by 10 million members in less than 2 years. hi5 made a very fast growth within so much less time, which no social networking website had ever done. According to officials there are now more than 89 million hi5 members and has 17 languages.

Like every social networking website today, you have got features like uploading pictures, music and videos. There is a separate section for the music composers or singers. You can get almost all english superstars songs in its library. Like myspace you have a complete freedom to change the skin of your profile. You get to choose from a very large list of profile skins or you can just add you own HTML and css to your profile. If you have a good design then you can also publish it to other's use.

There is a system of giving fives to the friends, and there are many types of fives you can give them. Creating friends is simple, maximum of two clicks and you can be a friend of one another. Profile comment is a very widely used method of giving regards to your friends, though there is the presence of scrap where you talk about anything.... ya just anything. With the pictures you have you can tag your friends. Members can join groups, and the college groups. There is wide variety of groups to choose from. They are like forums and you can discuss related topics.

hi5 recently has made several changes in their features. Now there are applications that bloosoms on your profile. The applications are made by third pary developers and have nifty featues. A shout box is added. Now there is an extensive use of AJAX so that the user feels it easy using hi5. As you log in to the website you can see the recent updates of your friends. You have success meter that shows how many friends you have, your scrap, profile comment and fives.

Nothing more to say from me guys, just check it out.

bebo

http://www.bebo.com

Known as the third most popular social networking site bebo is one shop for all. It is mostly popular in Ireland and United Kingdom. The site was founded in January 2005 by husband and wife team Michael and Xochi Birch and had a major relaunch in July 2005. Bebo was then acquired by AOL on March 13, 2008.

Profiles on Bebo contain the same sort of information which sites of these genre do. Whiteboard widget looked new feature where the visitors can use to draw designs or write comments. There is a google map which shows the locations of your visitors and there are many more widgets to add to your profile. You can rearrange the modules on your profile page and also create and name your own widgets. There is a large variety of skins to choose for the profile page. You can also make one and publish it.


Bebo has a huge music section named 'Bebo music'. Musicians can upload their music on bebo. Although the Bebo Music section is intended for use by musical groups, the facility is also used by many to form clubs or societies, or as unofficial fan pages for established bands. Songs can be played using the Bebo media player and also be added to user playlist. Video uploading is also provided and there are contests all the time where videos are judged by the members and voted. Featured videos can be added by members to their own profile.

Bebo currently allow users to add their AIM, Skype and Windows Live Messenger usernames to their profile. Members can chat with Skype friends on bebo. While mailing friends you can choose the different skin for it. Friends can write stories for you and you can highligh images of your other half.

Bebo has a fair share of controversies. Bebo is blamed by police in UK for being used by children to organise brawls and mess fights. In Northern Ireland there was a case where Bebo was used to organise a sectarian fight. Bebo must address these problems if they want to provide resonably safe networking experience.


For more click here

Monday, April 14, 2008

Top Social networking websites

Though you may not know what's happening on your neighbor, you might still know about your internet buddies. The main aim of a social networking site is to enable people to link up. Well i have here some of the top social networking websites in the internet.

myspace


http://www.myspace.com
The big daddy in this genre, no other site has got as much publicity as MySpace has. It was started by Tom Andersen and Chris DeWolfe in November 2003 and was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in July 2005 for the value of US $580 Million.

As every social networking sites MySpace can add your pictures, make friends, upload music and videos, chat will your buddies and many more. Writing blog and inbuilt game choose option is an added feature which others has least. The GUI of MySpace offers a complete leeway to modify and customize your profile page. You can choose to change the color of the profile. You are the master of your profile, just you need to do is copy paste simple HTML and CSS code. MySpace profile editor is a good option too.

Whenever you create a new account, Tom Andersen (the founder) gets added to your friends list by default. Since he remains a friend of majority of the users it can be a place to get friends. MySpace has separate areas for film makers, musicians and comedians. You can add music to your profile and join groups you like.

As the site design goes, the user profiles is reported to cause problems from messed up views to browser freezes to music and video . In fact MySpace does not conform to W#C standards of valid HTML usage. Even more to go, MySpace is a haven for phishers and spyware. Safety for underage users also remains a concern.

With a extreme user base about 200 million and available in languages like French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese and of course English, love it or hate it, you cannot escape MySpace.

facebook


http://www.facebook.com
Facebook was the leader in social networking space until MySpace took that position. Facebook was originally started as social networking website for the college students. Though it is now available for anyone, it remains the most popular site for college students,with +69 million members and about half of them are college students.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerburg in February 2004 from Harvard University. In September 2006 Facebook became accessible to anyone. As in MySpace a user can modify their profile layout but cannot add HTML/CSS or Flash. Hence there in no problem with browsers and the profile loads comparatively faster.

Users can join the network and groups. There are lots of networks of colleges of different countries and can joined according to the country. Groups are places where peoples meet up with their common interests. Facebook allows you to add applications in your profile. Applications are like widgets that do like listing your all friends, list the books you like and many more. To view another profile you need first to be a friend of that member.

There is Facebook badge where you can share your information in other web sites. There is an activity log system which keeps track of everything you do while your stay at the site. Market place is a new feature added where you can conduct business.

With an easy setup/registration, its cool features, Facebook is truly worth a visit for non members.

orkut


http://www.orkut.com
Orkut is one of the most popular social networking site in places like India, Brazil and US. Orkut was started in January 2004 by Google employee Orkut Buyokkoten, a Turkish engineer. Orkut was launched keeping in mind the US market but it found more popularity in Brazil. The top 3 demographics are Brazil (56%), US (19%) and India(15%) while visits country wise are Brazil (72.5%), India (16.1%) and US (2.7%). The second data is more reliable as you can put any country as their place of birth or residence.

Orkut offers a very friendly and uncluttered interface in the tradition of Google, you don't have the customizable option like the MySpace. The members need to have a Gmail account. Members communicate through scraps (they are used widely in Orkut).

People can get together with groups (community), upload pictures, videos (you too have the Google and youtube videos) and many more. You have inbuilt chat feature same like the Gmail. RSS feed for your blogs as well as Orkut's very own blog open to all users.

With its popularity, it too has controversies. It has been banned in Saudi Arabia and Iran. In Brazil the charges of propagation of racism by users, in India the target of political parties and in the area of security the site is vulnerable to cross scripting attacks, phishing, malware and viruses.

Thats it about the Orkut, with the vulnerabilities Orkut is not getting less popular.

Those were the top 3 i got for you guys and more to go on here.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Coding Images with HTML table

After a long and tiring effort I have come to an end of my work, making images from the HTML tables. I got this idea from a post on w3schools, and it was fantastic idea.
So what I have made?
I first choose an image from my picture library. First of all I though to make a huge picture like the 640 X 480 resolutions, but threw that idea after I calculated the no of cells (table cells) needed to make it. 288000 cells are what I would be working if I did that.
So I turned out to a pretty looking picture from Yahoo Answers Avatar, an avatar of someone (he must be very happy) that was 48 X 48 resolutions. You guys might be thinking it is too easy; NAH! Think again. It is 2304 cells, which will still wrinkle your fore head and open your mouth.

Then going to the 48 X 48 starting had not yet begun. I opened the picture on Fireworks and magnified it to clearly see its 1 X 1 pixels and fit in the screen. Then I pressed Print Screen button on keyboard and pasted it on a new Fireworks page. I just took out the needed portion and made a jpg image that gave distinct colors on every 8 X 8 pixel with the 384 X 384 resolution.
NOTE: If you just enlarge the 48 X 48 image and make a picture then the image is blurred and more colors are added. So don’t do it.

The HTML starts here. I first made a table of 48 X 48 cells on Dreamweaver. The & nbsp from the cells were removed and height and width kept at 8 (px). The table was stretched and widened to 384 (px). The enlarged avatar was made background of the Table, you can see it undoubtedly fits the size of the table. Magnifying the page view made it easier and then just clicked on the first cell, picked the bg color chooser of the cell from the properties menu and click on the cell itself. (Because there is picture on the background, so the color code of the background is chosen for the cell)
This process was repeated until I finished each and every cell. If you are trying it, I suggest you to do it serially.
Then hope fully after 3-5 hours or some days I had some relaxation! But still a small thing was left; I almost forgot to remove the background image of the table. After I removed the image, it was impossible to single out the real image and the HTML table image.

Here is the result:
































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































Does it looks elongated?? Click here to see the non elongated view of the HTML table image.
File size :124.6 kb

Here's a code that will make it faster! It is a php code. Thanks beon_robot.

<?php
$image = 'picture.png';
echo '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-type"
content="text/html;charset=utf-8" /><title>Rendering "', $image,
'"</title><style type="text/css">table, table *
{margin:0;padding:0;border:none;font-size:1px;} td
{width:1px;height:1px;}</style></head><body><p>Rendering image at "', $image,
'".</p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">';
ob_flush();
$size = getimagesize($image);
$im = imagecreatefrompng($image);
for ($y=0,$ySize=$size[1]; $y<$ySize; $y++) {
echo '<tr>';
for ($x=0,$xSize=$size[0]; $x<$xSize; $x++) {
$rgb = imagecolorsforindex($im, imagecolorat($im, $x, $y));
$color = "rgb({$rgb['red']},{$rgb['green']},{$rgb['blue']})";
echo '<td style="background-color:', $color ,';color:', $color,';" ></td>';
}
echo '</tr>';
ob_flush();
}
imagedestroy($im);
echo '</table></body></html>';
?>




Change the bolded part to make some changes with the image you are using.