Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 07, 2011 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

WordPress.com DDoS Attack Comes from China
Last week WordPress.com sites experienced sporadic availability while a particular unnamed Chinese-language site was the focus of a DDoS attack.

Judge Approves Sony’s Request for Logs from George Hotz’s Site
Sony has been granted the right to get IP addresses of anyone that visited George Hotz’s website going all the way back to January 2009. They also won subpoenas to get data from both YouTube and Google over the PlayStation 3 jailbreaking lawsuit.

Microsoft Counts Down IE6 Usage
Microsoft has launched a site, ie6countdown.com, that breaks down the IE6 usage share based on geographic location.

Apple Announces iPad 2
The new Apple iPad 2 will be available this Friday (March 11th), and will include dual cameras as well as a faster CPU.

BlackBerry PlayBook Launching April 10th?
Have you been wondering when BlackBerry would be rolling out their PlayBook tablet? According to Boy Genius Report the OS should be finalized on March 31st with the tablet launching in retail locations on April 10th.

Google Removes 21 Malicious Android Apps from Market
Those running a version of Android older than 2.2.2 are susceptible to the malicious code found in 21 different Market applications that were all posted by a developer called Myournet.

Picasa Web Gets New Homepage
Google’s new Picasa Web homepage puts a focus on both your albums and the albums that have been shared with you.

Evernote for iPhone Completely Redesigned
Evernote, one of my most-used services, overhauled their iPhone app from the ground up. The most useful new feature for me is the ability to attach multiple images to a single note.

Google Accidentally Resets Gmail Accounts
A serious bug in Gmail started causing all emails in some user’s accounts to disappear, and it’s estimated that around 150k accounts were affected.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

RidNacs – Free Folder Size Visualizer
This free Windows app will help you identify large files and folders, and also integrates with Windows Explorer.

Fine Tune Windows 7 Aero Color
AeroTuner is a free application that lets you customize the color, glow, blur, and stripes found in the Windows 7 Aero interface.

Compare Airline Delays Using Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha puts a lot of information at your fingertips, and one thing you may not have thought to look for are the causes for delay for particular airlines.

Video Shows Upgrade Process for Windows 1.0 to Windows 7
This awesome video is like a highlight reel for the upgrade process from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7, and then goes on to test the backwards compatibility aspect.

Improved iPhone Notification System for Jailbroken Devices
Jailbreakers can grab the free MobileNotifier download from Cydia that will replace your existing iPhone notification system with something a bit more usable.

Remotely Control a Mac Using AppleScript
This guide walks you through how you can write AppleScript code on one Mac that can be executed remotely on another Mac you own.

Using Windows 7 Jumplists for Quick Application Launching
Jump List Manager is a free application for Windows 7 that lets you add custom shortcuts to its Taskbar icon. This is useful for creating a list of your most used programs without cluttering up your Taskbar.

Store Unlimited Small Photos and Short Videos in Picasa
Google apparently doesn’t count small images (under 800 pixels) and short videos (under 15 minutes) against your storage allocation.

–Downloads–

• CDBurnerXP 4.3.8.2521 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Evernote 4.2.2.3913 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Firefox 3.6.15 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Firefox 4.0 ^{Beta 12} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Flash Player 10.2.152.32 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Foobar2000 1.1.5 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Google Chrome 11.0.686.3 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• iTunes 10.2 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Miranda 0.9.17 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Paint.NET 3.5.8 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• PeaZip 3.6.2 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Picasa 3.8.117.38 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• SeaMonkey 2.0.12 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Thunderbird 3.1.8 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• uTorrent 2.2.1 ^{RC 2} [Homepage] [Mirror]

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 31, 2008 by CyberNet.

It has taken a little while to get to this point, but WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this weekend. The biggest thing about the new version is the completely revamped administration area (pictured to the right). It not only has a new color scheme, but has also been reworked to make you even more productive. And the cookie system has been made more secure, and so any of our users will need to login again to our site.

Note: I noticed that you can switch back to the old color scheme by pulling up your profile page. The new layout will remain intact, but the colors will be changed.

I upgraded our site to WordPress 2.5 yesterday, and I have to say that it handles itself quite well. Performance is better according to some early benchmarks I’ve done, productivity will definitely increase, and best of all WordPress is now able to upgrade plugins for you. Since nearly all of the changes have been made to the administration section of WordPress you should find that the upgrade process will go rather smoothly. Very few themes should break as a result of the upgrade, but there could be issues with some of your plugins.

I also spent some time getting our Recommended Tags plugin working on WordPress 2.5. There is now a version available solely for the WordPress 2.5 series because of the significant changes to the administration screen. I considered rolling both versions of the plugin into one, but overall the performance is better by keeping them separate.

Want a better idea of what’s new in WordPress 2.5? No problem! Here’s an overview of the features organized according to users and developers:

User Features

• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
• Dashboard Widgets — you can customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, news from your local paper instead of WP news.
• Multi-file upload with progress bar — now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.
• EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template.
• Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too.
• Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.
• Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.
• Concurrent editing protection — now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done.
• Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they have an update available. Now we take that to the next logical step — downloading and installing the upgrade for you.
• Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.
• Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos.

Developer Features

• Salted passwords — we now use the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them impractical.
• Secure cookies — cookies are now encrypted based on the protocol described in this PDF paper.
• Easy taxonomy and URL creation — probably best illustrated with an example: I can call register_taxonomy() with a few arguments to register a “people” taxonomy and whenever I edit an image I’ll see a UI like tags has for identifying the people in a photo, and these will be URL addressable with /person/firstname-lastname/.
• Inline documentation — the vast majority of the new code going into WordPress include inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.
• Database optimization — we haven’t changed the table layout in this release, which is one of the reasons so many plugins work fine with 2.5. We have added a few new indicies and made a few default fields more flexible based on some bottlenecks we found on WordPress.com.
• $wpdb->prepare() — now almost all of the SQL in WordPress is prepared first, and the same functions are available to your plugins. This should prevent elementary SQL escaping issues.
• Media buttons — the add media buttons above the post are both expandable, so you could have an “Add Google Map” button if you like.
• Shortcode API — the new gallery functionality is powered by the new shortcode API. Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. The Shortcode API is fully documented.

Get WordPress 2.5

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

WordPress.com is the home of nearly 1.4 million blogs, and in a days time they receive upwards of 12 million pageviews. There’s roughly 75,000 new posts among those blogs each day, along with 30,000 comments (not including the ones caught by Akismet). For that reason WordPress.com is an accurate measure of what tools the blogosphere is using.

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, has posted some browser and operating system stats for the 115 million pageviews on WordPress.com in the last month. I’ve created pie charts using the information he posted to make the data easier to visualize:

As you can see IE has a much smaller market share among the blogosphere compared to the normal web usage stats. There were a few shocking points, and one of them is the slow adoption of Internet Explorer 7. I would have thought that the blogosphere would be more inclined to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.

The other thing I found interesting was the relatively small Mac usage…Linux is even catching up to the Mac. Windows of course rules the operating system market with a whopping 90%, but the PSP managed to scrape in nearly 35,000 pageviews from the 115 million.

WordPress.ORG is a slightly different story when it comes to the stats, which is probably because the people visiting the site are slightly more tech savvy. These people are likely looking to start their own blog on their own server, and that’s not exactly something the average Joe would do. Here’s what the stats look like for WordPress.org:

• 52.73% – Firefox
• 36.77% – Internet Explorer
• 5.65% – Safari
• 2.89% – Opera

More WordPress.com stats are available here, including how many YouTube videos are embedded each day, how many files are uploaded, and how many blogs are being created. Check it out…it’s pretty interesting.

Source: Photo Matt [via Mozilla Links]

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Anti-Gay group Straight Pride UK is abusing the DMCA takedown process to censor work by a journalist. No surprise there—the DMCA is twisted for all kinds of dumb purposes. The inexplicable part? The hate group filed a takedown on… its own press release. How dare you say that we said the words that we wrote in a press release.

Read more…

As we had reported earlier, the deal Yahoo made to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion is now official, and in our previous report, we asked how Tumblr users are feeling about this. We expect that there will be mixed feelings, […]

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