//beconfused

I’ve been thinking about how computers work together lately and it’s amazing that one device can connect to the next and then to the next and so on to form the internet. I never really thought much about it. You can say I sort of took things for grants. I started using it almost a decade ago and it’s really exciting to watch it grow. In recent years, the growth seem to be accelerating. Perhaps the dot-com boom is back. Erm, sorry I take that back, speaking of the words ‘dot-com boom’ brings bad luck.

You knoiw – one of the reasons Singapore broadband prices aren’t really cheap is because Singaporeans love to go to the other countries websites. The data has to travel half the globe to reach you! In contrast, countries like Korea, Japan, China, United States, United Kingdom and – erm, United States – have most of their citizens visiting their own country’s website.

Is this because they make better websites than us? Is this because they are more loyal and prefer localized content? Is it because they have cheaper broadband?

Actually the answers for the above questions are all ‘yes’ in my opinion. Our favorite websites are probably YouTube and Friendster. I for one can testify to it, I love United States websites. I do not visit local websites for example (with the exception of ChannelNewsAsia.com and blogs, I love local blogs).

Is there any local websites that you know of? Any top-secret plan to start one? I love to hear what people has to say about this.

Intel, Microsoft and Japanese online payments company Bit Wallet have teamed up to develop a mobile PC platform designed to bring computing to those traditionally considered to be unfamiliar with shopping online, browsing the web or sitting at a desktop PC. Like housewives, apparently.

There’s no mouse or keyboard, to make it more friendly for folk unused to such input devices, and Intel, Microsoft and Edy said they want to see apps with simple, button-based interfaces to come to the platform the better to appeal to people with little or no PC experience.

(Slate DT FeliCa.)

It looks likely the first device will be manufactured by local hardware company PBJ, which has already used Intel CPUs in its existing mobile devices.

More at Reg Hardware

Anyway, I think this is a good effort. This is a rather small news but I like the idea that they’re targeting housewives. Housewives is perhaps of the least tapped groups of people in the society to use computers. Exposing them to new technologies may be a good idea. And in return, I too hope that computers are easier to use since computers have to be housewives-friendly in future.

Our computers are just too hard to use. My aunt is still stuck thinking that the monitor contains the CPU. I encouraged her to get a Mac already.

If the price is right, I’ll snap up a .asia domain, hahaa… It just sounds kinda cool and I’m proud to be in Asia.

Internet to get .asia addresses

Starting in October, the first net addresses ending in .asia will be assigned, DotAsia Organization Ltd. said Thursday.

The non-profit group, representing countries including China, Japan and India, will start giving names to governments and registered trademark holders in October, and follow up with companies in mid-November.

Potential registrants must be based in Asia, including Australia and New Zealand.

Source: CBC.ca

Great little experiment with 9 different hosting companies to figure out which ones can withstand the traffic surges caused by Web 2.0.

When too many people visit a website at the same time, it tends to slow down the server so badly it starts to time out. Below is a list of web host that is being tested to see how well they can withstand the Digg effect. The list is not fantastic but still worth taking a look if you’re looking for a host. I’m hunting for a new host already. My host has been great but it isn’t going to support my bandwidth much longer unfortunately.

I intend to host multiple websites too so I’m looking for web host. Probably going with MediaTemple. They seem to be pretty good at what they do.

read more | digg story

The HTML5 draft reflects an effort, started in 2004, to study contemporary HTML implementations and deployed content. The draft:

• Defines a single language called HTML 5 which can be written in HTML (HTML5) and XML (XHTML5).
• Defines detailed processing models to foster interoperable implementations.
• Improves markup for documents.
• Introduces markup and APIs for emerging idioms, such as web applications.

I kinda blog about this HTML5 thing for my own benefit. I just thought it would be useful to take a look at it again another time. They are introducing new elements such as <dialog>, <figure>, <nav>, <header>, <footer>, <datagrid>, <progress> and more. Good news is that getElementsByClassName() is going to be added.

And it would seem like HTML5 is stepping in to help developers expand the capabilities of their web application. It appears that the internet is very serious about moving to the direction of web applications. It may be a good idea to prepare to enter this industry. I’m entering it and I’m pretty optimistic about it.

Elements such as <header>, <article> and <footer> isn’t really necessary, but if developers were to all deploy these tags, they probably isn’t a need for those feeds at all. Every website can easily become feed-enabled.

They’re dropping some elements though, such as the <u>, <frame>, <frameset> and <center>.

Unfortunately, with all these additions, HTML5 is getting more complicated. The learning curve would get steeper. There use to be a time HTML is about layout and positioning and everyone’s using <table>. But things are changing, it’s about layout and XML items. They just sort of changed direction or something. Teachers are probably going to find it hard to explain a macro picture of why those new elements are present in HTML. My web publishing teacher in school isn’t even teaching me CSS that time! In fact, she’s still teaching about font tags when it is already deprecated. CSS was a ‘read-up’ thing. Good to know, don’t need to know for examinations.

Just want to share my thoughts about HTML5, hahaa… Sorry that this post is a little disorganized, I typed in a hurry.

This document describes the differences between HTML4 and HTML5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes that have been made to the language.

read more | digg story

You can have a good representation of how each of the components in your website loads. It’s pretty cool and quite user-friendly too! //beconfused loads kinda slow I think.

The Full Page Test loads a given HTML page, including images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes. In this way, the Pingdom tool mimics the way a page is loaded in your browser.

read more | digg story

A voluptuous anime bunny woman, created in time-lapse using thousands of lines of HTML code to individually create and color table cells as pixels.

That really test sanity, doesn’t it?

read more | digg story