Looking at how web applications are developing (thanks for HTML 5 and Google), it seems that web API are getting more and more common and even some newer web applications (or even desktop applications such as widgets) can be completely built on those APIs alone.

How’s this development going to impact the total performance and efficiency of the entire IT industry?

One thing that comes to my mind is dependency. If the main service were to have any downtime at all, all the services and websites using the API will experience downtime as well. Although Google seems to have shown extremely great uptime performance so far, we may never know.

By the way, just imagine this like a science fiction movie. An alien explorer has landed on a planet which was just recently destroyed by some war or disaster. All the computers in that planet uses cloud computing. So there’s no way to extract data from any computers which the explorer comes across even though there’s computers everywhere!

How’s cloud service going to overcome this problem?

Man in high-heel attack a top property agent

That’s what the headlines says in The Star online today. I would have though that a man wearing high heels was attacking a property agent, until I re-read the article.

Funny that just below that article, they reported about Miss Singapore’s bad command of English.

It doesn’t mean that you’re safe.

Being online is just like driving a car. It doesn’t mean that being inside the car won’t get you into a serious injury if you drive racklessly. When you’re surfing a website, you leave detailed information about your computer and your history. Computer viruses also plays a role in stealing your information and sending them to strangers.

Also, just because you think you’re using emails and don’t install anything you got from your email, it doens’t mean that you’re safe. sometimes, if you have stupid friends who would simply forward any emails with your email address in them, be prepared for SPAM… Lots of spams.

I don’t get it why some people are so careless when it comes to downloading files from the internet. Just because Torrents are easy to download nowadays doesn’t mean you can just simply pick a file and download. Ever heard of people being sued and sent to jail?

Sigh…

I still think nerds rule sometimes…

If you have used a public computer to surf the net and check your emails before, you might probably have forgotten to sign out of your email account before you left the computer for another stranger to use. That stranger can access your emails, change your settings, send emails from your account and even obtain sensitive information of you or your contacts. Just as easy as how I accessed someone’s email.

So, how can you make sure your Gmail accounts are secure and not accessed by others while you’re at home?

Checkout the screenshot above. Gmail has a section at the bottom to show your account activity. Let’s say if you have not touched your Gmail for more then 8 hours but the information shows that it has been accessed just 3 hours ago, then you know that someone has just accessed your emails! Either that, or you need some vitamins to boosts your memory.

What can you do about it? You certainly do not want to drive all the way back to the Internet cafe to whack the person using your account and just to sign off from there. You certainly also wouldn’t want to wait until that computer’s log-in session is over (Waiting for it to log out itself). You are most certainly unable to do it in time before that stranger is able to compose a new email titled “all your email are belong to us”.

All you have to do is to click on the details link and be presented with this screen.

Then, click on the “Sign out all other sessions” button to make the computer you’re currently using the only one signed in. Which means, you’ll be sure you’re the only one with access to your own emails!

Google will remind you that anyone with your password can still sign into your account and will ask if you want to change your password. It’s a good practice to have a complex but easy to remember password. That makes it harder for some software to decrypt your password or for others to guess your password just by viewing at your keyboard while you’re typing.

Try a combination of alphabets and numbers including at least a symbol and make use of the shift or caps lock.

The safer way to surf using a public computer is still to always clean all the browser’s cache and cookies after using it. Or the safest way is not to use a public computer at all as you might not know if there’s a keylogger (which can record all your computer actions) infecting that computer.

Are you an iGoogle user? Do you use the weather gadget in your iGoogle? Do you find it hard or strange that the town/state which you selected isn’t really correct?

I’m staying in one of the area affected by this bug and this bug hadn’t been fixed for months. Perhaps no one have actually reported it or Google just didn’t seem to care.

However, there’s an alternative way to add your own state’s weather report  into your iGoogle.

Go to your normal google.com search page and type “weather: [your town]” without quotes and replace [your town] with the place you’re staying.

Then, you’ll be presented with the weather forecast and an option to add it into your iGoogle.

Tada! Now you can plan your picnic ahead of time!

Here’s something interesting.

Add the code &fmt=18 to the end of your youtube video to get better stereo.

When you read an email, or composed something nice to read, it’s always nice to share out the laughter and the nice words or pictures you got. However, most people who just simply forward email without thinking and thus causes a bunch of junk mail or computers with viruses to pick up all your email addresses.

Have you ever wondered where those people always get your email address from? Well from your friends!

Just a few months ago, I had an email account which is clean. No spams, no junk mail and I’ve only used it for official purposes such as to sign up for something or subscribe to some electronic magazines. Everytime before I put my email address into an input box and click submit, I’ll read through the terms and condition and the privacy policy. I’m not one of those guys who would just simply click on agree or yes just for the sake of installing somethin in my PC.

Anyway, My email was clean for the few months and up to a whole year without any spam. UNTIL the time when I gave my email to one of my friend and he mass forward a whole lot of emails into his buddy list.

That’s when it all started. With only 1 or 2 spam at first every day, to at least 10 spam emails in collected daily. That’s not all, because I’m using this email for some official stuff, I need to filter out my spams to see if I’ve missed anything or if anything is accidentally moved to the spam folder. Usually, there’s always 1 or 2 important emails in the spam folder.

This has made my life reading emails a lot slower and harder. All thanks to the few persons who never used their brains when forwarding their junks.

So if you’re one of the people who thinks sharing something funny you get from your email is nice, think again! Don’t forward them or at least, use the BCC field to fill in all the email address of your friends!