Monthly Archives: August 2010

Fighting Against Spam Comments, an Endless War for Blog Owners

I have been experimenting with comment settings in this blog to observe how willing spammers leave undesirable footprints aka spam comments on the blogs. Someone might have said that spamming is as pervasive as the web itself and it grows as the web evolves and reaches more audience. Still, having a hindsight experience in analyzing spam comment trending and behavior will be beneficial for me and also other website owners and bloggers especially when they are considering a loose commenting policy on their website.

Interaction in social web sites

As the web evolves to be more social, we can also observe higher level of interactivity on the web. Not only quicker page load, better content presentation, and improved system interface is interactivity characterized with, it also includes a simplified way of interaction among the website or web application users. In a bigger picture, interactivity encompasses user-application interaction and user-user interaction. If we talk about user-user interaction, we may think about creating such a user friendly platform for them to interact and communicate. Specific to blogging, user-user interaction can take form as commenting on the posts and also other user’s comment.

Now, here the question comes. If we can provide our users a friendly interface for interaction even for first-timers, can we expect for more quality interaction? And my personal answer to this is it depends on how good we are in implementing the website growth strategy. The first thing on which attention should be put thoroughly is the content. “Content is the king” is an undisclosed truth that tops the strategies towards website growth. I have been analyzing the growth of this technology blog by comparing number of posts in a certain month with the incoming traffic (user visits) for the corresponding month. I found two cases where traffic was higher than the average. The first case is the month with quality post(s) that drew users’ attention regardless of the total number of posts in that month. For the second case, it is the month with more posts, regardless of the quality, compared to the average monthly number of posts.
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Amikelive Adsense Widget 0.6 To Be Released at the End of August

It is very exciting to notice that Amikelive Adsense Widget 0.5 has reached around 1450 downloads after a month and one and a half week. My brain calculator says, there are around 35 daily downloads for the plugin. The number, despite still far from giga numbers, is frankly beyond my expectation. It is since the plugin is very simple by nature and the codes were created from scratch and tested for less than a day.

I would like to extend my gratitude to users who have been using this plugin on their WordPress blogs by continuing the development and improving the features. Amikelive Adsense Widget 0.6 is now on the way to the public release. One incremental feature in this release is streamlined Adsense configuration of the widget. On version 0.5, users have to manually copy and paste several Google Adsense parameters into the form. While I personally think that this does not require much time, some busy users out there may feel happier if this process can be simplified. And yep, I hear you. The configuration will be as easy as flipping your palm.

This version is scheduled to be available on downloads at WordPress from August 31st, 2010. So, stay tune!

Technical Paper: Energy-aware Security Management Utilizing Adaptive Security Mechanisms for Wireless Sensor Network

Energy has been an important subject these recent years. While some people are advocating more efficient and sustainable use of energy through the green energy movement, some scientific and engineering fields should include efficient energy usage into the equation in order to provide an effective solution. One of these fields is wireless sensor network. Wireless sensor network is a subdomain of distributed system. The network consists of distributed nodes that communicate one another wirelessly. As the name entitles, nodes are equipped with sensing capability (humidity, temperature, air pressure, etc) and these sensed data should be delivered to a collecting point, which is usually named sink node, to be processed later. Unlike traditional network that is connected to sufficient power-supply, nodes in wireless sensor network (other than sink node) are usually restricted to energy-constraint. The nodes are mostly powered by battery packages and due to the placement of these nodes in topographically challenging area, frequent battery replacement is undesirable. Thus, it is imperative to involve efficient energy usage in the design.
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Asian Countries Dominate Tweets on Twitter

A recent study from Semiocast, a Paris-based company, revealed Asia as the region where most tweets were originated. The region produced 37% of global tweets, a 6.5% increase compared to previous measure taken three months earlier. North America region trailed at the second position with 31% of global tweets, a 5% decrease compared to 36% share it took in the previous measure. Besides dominating the global tweets, the study also highlighted Asia as the region with the fastest growth of tweets.

The results were obtained by analyzing tweets over the period of 24 hours on June 22nd, 2010. By extracting the language in the tweet combined with processing geotag information in the tweet header, all tweets were then mapped to produce the country and region distribution. In the previous measure conducted in March 2010, one-week tweets gathered from March 21 to March 28, 2010 were used in the analysis.

At the country-wise, US still topped worldwide tweets with approximately 25% share. The percentage was a 5% decline from 30% share it gained in the previous measure. Asian countries like Japan, Indonesia, and South Korea steadily grew in number of tweets. Japan was accounted for 18% share while Indonesia and South Korea secured 12% and 2% of global tweets. The percentages for the three Asian countries had been a rise compared to their previous shares.
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Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, and other Developer Tools for Free

Since 2016, Microsoft had succeeded Dream Spark program with Microsoft Imagine. Some content in this post may have become obsolete. Find out more detailed information about the eligibility to download Microsoft’s software for free at the Microsoft Imagine website.

Title above can be misleading but it is actually a valid offer from Microsoft. The software company has been offering developer tools that consist of Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Expression Studio, XNA Game Studio, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Multipoint, Windows Server, and Windows Phone, all for free. Some software also comes with various versions that developers can pick and download. The options for Microsoft Visual Studio, for example, include Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, and some express editions of the language-specific versions of the IDE like Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition, Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition, and Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition.
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