Google Reader is terrible, its confusing to use, the UI is terrible. It took forever to load my blogs from the OPML file and the feed lists tend to disappear. This one from google has a lot of problems.

What a waste !!!!

Wordpress.com Invite

Most of us know about FREE blog hosting provided by wordpress.com . I was lucky enough to get an invite today . So far the interface is amazing and is really simple to use.

Now I also happen to have 1 invite to give away. The person to get is the one who leaves the best comment at to what they would do with their wordpress.com blog :)

UPDATE: I will be emailing the lucky winner the invite tomorrow.

Post Rita pics , thankfully nothing major happened and right now we are having beautiful weather.











Finally some sunshine

Since PHP and Security have been in the limelight these past couple of days, here is an excellent little flash tutorial that gives you hands on experience with some common security lapses that can occur when coding.

GNU Prolog is driving me nuts !!!! They need more tutorials

UPDATE: A good tutorial http://cui.unige.ch/DI/cours/1804/GNU%20Prolog%20manual.html

i need to post more

In other news I have moved all my pictures from textamerica to flickr.

Although I have yet to have that trouble here, but it is nice to see blogger implement word verification for comments. I have had this problem at my f2o site , but have curbed it with comment moderation.

Lets see what other features are going to be packed in.

Wow, some radical changes are being proposed for PHP 6.0, some of which are

Remove register_globals completely
Remove magic_quotes_*
Remove safe_mode
Remove some stuff that has been marked deprecated since PHP 3/4
Remove various function aliases

One thing is for sure, this means people will have to change their code radically in order for it to work on php 6.0 .....

Should be interesting to see how things shape up

http://shiflett.org/archive/135

I just finished redesigning my f2o site and one the "new" things that I wanted to add was AJAX. Since for my site the only place that it seemed obvious was the forms . After some searching here is a nice tutorial that shows you how to mix php and ajax and use it to validate forms: http://particletree.com/features/smart-validation-with-ajax

I am definitely impressed with MSN maps on first use.

First thing that comes across is the load speed, it definitely kicks google out of the water, even though im pretty sure their servers must be loaded since they just launched. Another aspect that stands out is the smooth scrolling, another +1 for virtual earth.

They have also included some features such as "locate me":- ( cant say much since both google and microsoft cant find my house and simply give me the map of houston ), "scratch pad":- which remembers all the places you searched for and also keeps track of where you last left off using cookies.

MSN maps is brilliant, though I dont see myself completely switching to either service I will surely be using them both side by side while comparing the results.

As most of us know msn's virtual earth will be releasing tomorrow. Thanks to the google cache you can have a look at the web page here

After coding in C and C++ for such a long time , it really takes some effort to keep in mind that there is a quite a big difference as how strings are evaluated in languages such as PHP or javascript when enclosed in double quotes as compared to single quotes. Proper use can definitely help in performance wise.

I think its safe to say the general rule of thumb when it comes to deciding when to use what is use single quotes when outputting plain strings and html with no variables since the PHP parser wont have to look for variable, and use double quotes when there are variables, special characters, symbols .

Here is a nice PHP benchmarking site http://www.blueshoes.org/phpBench.php

Something that would be cool is to have the complete map of the USA ( google map) with major highway intersection cams. Basically all the cams on one map.

I so hope they dont screw up the transformers like how they do with everything else

With the Google Maps API release, I definitely wanted to play around with it and come up with something fun. First thing that came to mind was to show the various highway cameras on the maps and in those small boxes show a screenshot of the current conditions. I now present to you Houston Traffican Cams powered by the Google Maps API which can be found here http://kashif.f2o.org/gHoustonTraffic.html . The maps shows about 10 popular intersections with little markers. Click on the little markers to show a little camera shot .

These are the intersections that it is currently showing ( If you would like to see more, leave me a comment :) ):-

I-10 at Heights.

I-10 at TC Jester.

I-610 West Loop at Bellaire Blvd.

I-610 West Loop at Beechnut

I-45 at Cross Timbers.

I-45 at Tidwell .

I-45 at Little York.

59 at Hillcroft.

59 at Weslayan.

59 at Shepherd

59 at Beechnut.

Please let me know if there are any improvement that I can make to it. If there are other intersections that you would like to see you can visit the Houston Transtar and drop me a line at kashif-khan at excite dot com.

Excellent little tip to use your gmail account as an organizer

http://www.tipmonkies.com/2005/05/12/use-gmail-as-a-personal-organizer/

After a simple little test, seems like yahoo maps have the most up to date information. They were able to locate my place while the other services like google, a9 didnt even know that it existed. +1 Yahoo

Is anyone actually surprised that yahoo released its maps api soon after google ??? http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000136.html

Anywho, this will surely lead to some amazing applications using the power of AJAX

Finally !!!

An excellent guide for PHP programmers who wish to make their code more secure

http://phpsec.org/projects/guide/