Category Archives: Technical Notes

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Facebook’s Comment-by-Email Enhancement and Possibility of Future Privacy Violation

Facebook offers a new feature to its users which enable wall reply or comment directly from mailbox. This feature can be seen as another effort from Facebook to keep evolving and providing more convenience and a better user experience to more than its 400 million user base. From another perspective, however, concerns about security issue and the degree of exposure of this feature to user’s private data might be raised. As Facebook has been infamous for its inconsistent privacy policy, I would like to share some thought about this feature based on my quick finding.

The enhancement was observable in Yahoo mailbox. This enhancement might be observed in other third party email providers like Gmail or Hotmail, too. However, I can not guarantee the validity of the statement as I have no valid data.

To see the enhancement, you should opt-in wall or comment notification and configure the email client software to automatically display email content as HTML instead of plain text. Naturally, your Yahoo mailbox settings should have been configured to display HTML email by default. When you open the recent wall or comment notifications from Facebook, you will notice slight difference in the visual representation of the email. The notification email now also includes a text field in which you can type your comment and automatically post back to Facebook without having to log in first. The picture below shows the newly integrated text field.

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Google’s Pacman Doodle and the New Era of Interactive HTML

For the first time, Google put interactive doodle on the homepage. The doodle is the reinterpretation of the popular Pacman game created back in 1980. The interactive doodle will be on the Google homepage for 48 hours, starting from May 21st to May 22nd, 2010. According to the news released by the company, the doodle was associated with the 30th anniversary of Pacman game which was first launhed to public on May 22nd, 1980.

While you might have enjoyed playing the game, you might also be interested in getting to know why it is now possible to play game on an image. Yep, if you right click on the doodle and save it into a file, you will see an image like one depicted as the following:

Pacman doodle initial picture

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Using Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to Speed Up Content Load on the Web

Waiting for content to be loadedYou may have heard somewhere on the net:
You may notice that this website is loaded very fast. It is since it uses CDN to deliver static contents

This article will elaborate a bit about Content Delivery Networks or CDN. You will find information about what constitutes a CDN and how it can speed up content retrieval.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) is sometimes also referred to as Content Distribution Networks. It can be defined as dedicated collections of servers located on the internet which attempt to offload work from origin servers by delivering content on their behalf. In order to get better understanding of this definition, you will be provided a picture which represents an example of CDN.
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Quick Tip: Configuring Eclipse to Run for the First Time

Eclise GalileoFor Java developers, Eclipse is a convenient tool to develop software in broad range of programming languages. This tip is intended to help fellow developers who never use Eclipse before but are eager to start developing applications using Eclipse IDE.

Even though Eclipse is cross-platform, there is no guarantee that the tip provided in this post will also work for version of software and environment other than ones described below:

  • OS: Windows
  • Eclipse version: Eclipse 3.5 Galileo
  • JDK version: Java EE 6 SDK

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Comprehensive Guide to Java (JRE and JDK) Installation on Fedora Linux – Tips and Tricks

Sun's Java JRE and JDK on FedoraIn this article, you will be exposed to the installation of Sun Java in Fedora Linux. Although Java has been installed by default in every fresh Fedora package, the Java version shipped along with the OS package is the open-source version GNU Java instead. Some applications and frameworks may require Sun Java. Due to licensing issues, however, Sun Java can not be bundled with the default Fedora Linux package and should be installed separately. Although the installation steps in this article can also be reproducible in other Linux distributions, there is no guarantee that steps advised in this article will also work for other Linux distributions.

The installation of Sun Java in a Fedora Linux box can be seamlessly easy. Yet, some people especially those with minimum technical experience on *NIX OSes may face difficulties in completing the installation. This article tries to provide a comprehensive guide for the installation. It provides whole steps to be followed along with corresponding snapshots so that one can accomplish the installation successfully. It also shares some useful tips which may help readers in understanding the environment they are working on better.

Prerequisites and constraints

This installation assumes that the following requirements and constraints have been fulfilled:
1.    Installation will be conducted through the console prompt.
2.    User conducts the installation using root account.
3.    The software yum must have been already installed in the box.
4.    The software wget is already installed in the box.
Tip: if wget is not installed yet, run command yum install wget from the console and the software will be immediately installed.
5.    Fedora version used is Fedora 8.0 or newer.
Note: in legacy Fedora, there is different path in installing the compatibility libraries. You can check jpackage site for more information.
6.    JRE and JDK version to install is 1.6 (snapshots are for JRE and JDK 1.6 update 17)
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