A Page from a Programming Book - [IMG]
This is epic. You will get a kick out of this if you are the programmer type.
This is epic. You will get a kick out of this if you are the programmer type.
Pedal to the Chrome metal: Our fastest beta to date for Windows, Mac and Linux
Tuesday, May 4, 2010 | 8:31 AM
Here in Aarhus, Denmark -- home of the V8 project, Chrome’s JavaScript engine -- we’ve been tuning, testing, and polishing the V8 engine to give Chrome a hefty boost in speed.
Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.
Today’s beta release also includes a handful of new features. Not too long ago, we introduced bookmark sync into the browser, which allows you to keep your bookmarks synchronized on multiple computers using your Google Account. Beta users can now synchronize not only bookmarks, but also browser preferences including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, and language. By popular demand especially from avid Chrome extensions users, you can now install and use Chrome extensions while in incognito mode.
Under the hood, today’s release contains the goodness of some new HTML5 features, namely Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop capabilities. Additionally, this is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome, so that you can browse a rich, dynamic web with added security and stability -- you’ll automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome’s auto-update mechanism.
To try out all these new features, download Chrome on the Windows beta channel, or download the Mac or Linux betas.
Lastly, with this beta’s crazy speed improvements, we designed a series of equally unconventional speed tests for the browser. While the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks have their strengths, we felt that more could be done to measure speed on the browser. Here’s an early preview of how we designed, built, and implemented these speed tests. Stay tuned for the full results; we’ll post them here tomorrow.
Watching web pages load at 2700 frames per second reveals unexpected artifacts. If you're interested in the technical details, read on in the video's description drop-down in YouTube.
Posted by Mads Ager, Software Engineer
My favorite thing about free products is the price – usually. SMSBackup for Android is an exception to this rule because I would pay real money in a heartbeat for an application as simple, efficient, and useful as this has proven to be to me.
What this Android app does is allows me to back up text messages using my phone (either manually or automatically) to my Gmail account. At the end of this article, I will go over a few user cases that I personally have found useful that you may not think of right out of the box.
Obviously, if you’re backing up to your Gmail address, you’re going to need a Gmail account first. Feel free to use your personal Gmail account, or make a new one just for your backups. In this tutorial, I made one specifically for my phone. If you don’t want to use Gmail (you’re just that cool) then this tutorial isn’t for you.If you really are that die-hard anti-Gmail then you do have another option. Get a Gmail account anyway – but set it up to forward all incoming mail to your real email account. Then have your email account just filter the email from [your Gmail account] to a certain folder so it isn’t always cluttering up your inbox.
Step 1: Configure Your Gmail For IMAP
This is really easy – log into your Gmail account and go to settings. Within settings, navigate to the ”Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. Once you’re in there, scroll down a bit until you see the “IMAP Access” section. All you need to do is change it from “Disable IMAP” to “Enable IMAP“. If you got stuck on this step, just check out the screenshot and do as I did.
Step 2: Get SMSBackup
On your Android device, hop on to the Android Market and search for “SMS Backup“. You’ll notice that there are ten or so applications with this name – pick the one with 4.5-5 stars by Christopher Struder. Go ahead and download/install the application on your device.
Step 3: Configure SMSBackup With Your Gmail
This step should be pretty intuitive, but what kind of person would I be if I left out the most important step? Start up SMSBackup and you’ll see the following screen.
This part is pretty straightforward; click “Username” and “Password” and put in your Gmail credentials. Once they verify, you can modify your advanced settings, or check/uncheck the “Auto backup” feature. For me personally I check this box – although it probably saps a bit of battery and does use a bit of my data connection, I think there are some benefits that outweigh the cons (and I’ll explain why at the end of this article).
I also set the “maximum number of items per backup” (also in advanced settings) to 200, because that’s the maximum length per convo that my Droid keeps. Got a question? It’s probably been answered before in the SMSBackup User Guide. Check it out.
NOTE: In “Advanced Settings“, I told it to upload items as “read” for my first backup. This is because I’ve read all the texts and when it uploads, I’ll get 100 “unread” SMS messages. I only want the NEW messages to be unread; so after my first backup I’m going to un-check that box so that my new messages are unread (and therefore I’ll know when I get new messages).
Step 4: Run A Backup
Once you’ve configured everything you want (it’s very straightforward; just decide what you want) go ahead and tap “backup now“. The first time you run a backup, it’s going to take a few minutes maybe (depending on your connection). Later however, you won’t even notice it’s going on.
After my initial backup, I went back to “Advanced Settings” and told it to upload new texts as “Unread” so that I’ll know when I get new stuff – and I’m not cluttered with the old stuff anymore.
Step 5: Check Your Gmail
Did it work? Log into your Gmail account. The first thing you’ll notice is that there are NOT a ton of new emails in your inbox (unless you’re just that popular – but they won’t be your text messages at any rate). Why is this? Well, thankfully SMSBackup uploads them and labels them, then shoves them in that label folder.
As seen below with my completely new Gmail account, the texts are tucked away in a little labeled folder called “SMS” (name configurable in the Advanced Settings panel in SMSBackup).
What I like about this is the fact that I can see when I have new TXT’s uploaded, but they aren’t intrusive. In this case I’d actually uploaded my texts as “unread” (accidents happen) so there are 95 “unread” SMS-labeled messages.
To show you what a thread is like, I texted Google (466453) asking for my local weather. Since I had selected to automatically back up my texts, about 30 seconds later I got the conversation thread in my Gmail account SMS folder.
Have you ever received a text with a person’s address/email/name (for Facebook, etc) or something related? Well, now you’ve got that information in your Gmail which makes it that much easier to access and manipulate (I’m sure you can think of something).
Earlier I mentioned that I like to have mine automatically sync to Gmail rather than manually backing it up. I do this for several reasons. If I lose my phone or have it stolen, I can instantly see any text activity on the phone right from my Gmail. I can figure out if the phone is even ON by texting it from another phone, and seeing if it uploaded a received text to my Gmail. There are several other ways to use this sort of capability, but at a basic level I have already found good use of the aforementioned feature.
Additionally, this makes it REALLY easy to go find past text messages. I don’t know about you but if I want to find a message that I sent/received more than a week ago, I have to scroll up quite a bit and get a little lucky before I can spot what I’m looking for. Now that your texts are in your Gmail, you can search them with the Gmail search algorithm which is FAR superior to anything on my phone. I’ve used this quite extensively and found it to be an excellent method of sifting/reading text threads very quickly.
What did you think? Do you find this kind of application useful? After using this free app, I can’t think of anything else that I want it to do – it’s perfect for me the way it is.
What about you – did you like it too? Let me know in the comments section; I’d love to discuss this!
There are a lot of great free and paid project management solutions available online for teams, but if you already host your own site, you could easily put together an easy-to-use project management system using WordPress.
There are several reasons to use WordPress. If you’re already hosting your own website, there’s no extra cost, unlike the more popular project management services. Wordpress is easy to use and highly customizable with themes and plugins, allowing you to create your own project management blog to suit your needs.
Wordpress can easily be accessed on the go with mobile apps for Windows Mobile, iPhone and Android phones. And lastly, you aren’t at the mercy of another service, with the peace of mind and security of hosting your content yourself.Choose A Theme
Once you have WordPress installed, the first thing you need to do is choose a theme. Theoretically any theme will do the trick, but there are a few themes that have been designed specifically with this concept in mind.
P2
P2 is a free WordPress theme that allows you to post updates from the front page of your blog. Users have the ability to embed images, audio files and videos all from a Twitter-like update box.
The theme’s customisations include a custom header and the ability to change the background colour or image. You can also restrict posting access and hide the comment threads by default.
P2 can be used as a means of keeping other team members apprised of your latest updates in any given project, by using categories and tags as a means of keeping the posts structured.
If you choose to use the P2 theme, and would rather keep your updates private, you will need to install the plugin Members Only, explained in more detail below, in order to toggle your privacy settings.
GTD Templatic
GTD Templatic is based on the P2 and it makes it even easier for a team to collaborate privately, sharing files and content, all from the front page of the project management blog.
Setting GTD Templatic up is painless. After you have installed and activated the theme, you can choose whether or not to display post titles, make the blog private, enable file attachments and enable email notifications.
Users can post updates from the front page, attach files to each post, and tag their posts in order to maintain an organized structure. However, if you would like to embed any media in your post, this will have to be done from the back-end of the blog.
One of GTD Templatic’s best features is the ability to selectively notify other members when you have posted an update.
GTD Templatic, like P2, is very reminiscent of Twitter, using a simple and minimalist approach for project management.
Prologue
Prologue is the simplest option of all, where updating from the front page is limited to text updates only. Of course, adding updates from the back-end includes all the standard WordPress options for posting.
Unlike P2 and GTD Templatic, where comments appear on the front page, each update has to be opened in order to view the comments.
Prologue’s customisation is limited to a custom header, and like P2, in order to limit access, the plugin Members Only must be used.
Adding Plugins
Once you’ve chosen your theme, there are a variety of plugins that can be added to your blog to enhance the experience.
CollabPress
CollabPress is the ideal plugin to use together with any of these themes, as it adds the much needed organization and structure to the back end of the project management blog in order to effectively outline projects, tasks and deadlines.
After you have created your project, you can create tasks, assign them to specific users, notify them by email of their task, and give them a deadline.
The CollabPress dashboard features a section with all recent activities, a section with your personal tasks, a calendar, and links to each project.
CollabPress settings include enabling email notifications and setting the level of access, which makes it the only project management plugin listed here that allows users who do not have admin privileges to access the plugin.
WP-Project
WP-Project is a useful plugin to use if you have several clients. You can create as many projects as you need, assign the project to a client, and add tasks, keeping track of your progress, marking each task as completed once it is done.
In order to have access to the WP-Project plugin, users must have admin privileges.
WP-Task-Manager
WP-Task-Manager can be used in conjunction with WP-Project if a more elaborate task management system is needed.
With WP-Task Manager, users can add tasks, assign them to specific users, and assign deadlines. Other users can also comment on the tasks, and mark them as completed once they are done.
Like WP-Project, a user must have admin privileges in order to access the Task Manager at all.
WP-Polls
If you would like team members to vote on various issues, you can install the WP-Polls plugin, and have polls featured in the blog’s sidebar.
After activating the plugin, create your poll and take note of the poll’s number.
Under ‘Appearance,’ select Editor, and choose Sidebar.php and insert the following snippet of code:
<?php if (function_exists(‘vote_poll’) && !in_pollarchive()): ?><li><h2>Polls</h2><ul><li><?php get_poll(INSERT THE POLL NUMBER HERE);?></li></ul><?php display_polls_archive_link(); ?></li><?php endif; ?><?php if (function_exists(‘vote_poll’) && !in_pollarchive()): ?><li> <h2>Polls</h2> <ul> <li><?php get_poll();?></li> </ul> <?php display_polls_archive_link(); ?></li><?php endif; ?>
This will result in the poll appearing in the sidebar.
Members Only
In the case of P2 and Prologue, the plugin Members Only will ensure that no one else can view your content.
The entire blog will only be accessible to members who are logged in, and you also have the choice of redirecting visitors to a specific page on your website.
Post From Site
If you would rather use a theme of your choice, Post from Site is a plugin that gives you a quick link to creating a post from the front page of your site.
The plugin has elaborate settings, toggling the creation of posts, categories and tags, uploading images and enabling comments, amongst others.
Once you have installed and activated the plugin, be sure to add the following snippet of code to your theme, where you would like the link to appear:
<?php if (function_exists(‘post_from_site’)) {post_from_site();} ?>
So for example, if you would like it to appear in your sidebar, once again navigate to the theme file, Sidebar.php, and insert the code in the file.
Clicking on the link will result in a window overlaying the blog, enabling users to add a new post.
Once you have your site set up, you are ready to start adding users. This can be done easily from the back-end of WordPress, and remember if you plan on using the plugins, you have to give your team members admin privileges. As you add users, their credentials will be emailed to the email address you provide.
If you need help getting started with Wordpress, be sure to check out the MakeUseOf PDF Guide on How to Build Your Own WordPress Site. And if you don’t have your own self-hosted website, check out Jeffry’s article on how to get one for free.
Have you tried to use WordPress for team collaboration? Let us know what you thought of it in the comments.