Being in web development – nothing irks me more than slow web browsers. I typically use Google Chrome (because of its rendering speed and the javascript engine which is written into the browser) but during any web development the “IE Clan” of browsers still accounts for some 70% of the market and therefore development and testing on it is a must. When I upgraded my browser sometime ago to the latest IE8 – I was astounded by the sheer lag of the browser on Vista Ultimate when loading pages, new tabs and even just in starting. Because I don’t really use the browser regularly – it has never really bothered me – but more recently I have been doing some testing on it, and the slow response time is just so painful.

Luckily, I have discovered a solution that improves IE8 Speeds hugely on my PC – regsvr32 actxprxy.dll - from the command prompt. This command re-registers the ActiveX Interface Marshaling Library – which controls ActiveX/COM object interfaces – or in normal English translation – allows your PC  to load IE faster. This results in seriously increased performance and therefore with some other minor tweaks – allows you to have a smoother IE8 experience. To get it all happening simply follow these steps in Vista:

1. Press the Start Button and type into the Search Bar – cmd.

2. It will appear under the Programs list, and you can right click on it and Run as Administrator.

3. A new black window will appear with the command line window on c:\Windows\system32>.

4. Type into this window regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

5. A prompt should appear with DllRegisterServer in actxprxy.dll succeeded. Click OK & Restart your PC.

6. You can stop here – but if you don’t notice any improvements continue.

7. Once restarted open IE8, go to Tools –> Internet Options –> Advanced –> Reset (this will reset browser to default settings)

8. Close & Restart the Browser and you will go through the Welcome to IE8 screens again – here is where you need to adjust things:

• Select Suggested Sites – No
• Select Custom Settings
• Set your Default Search Engine (Google, Yahoo or Bing)
• Select Yes to Updates
• Select Turn Off Accelerators
• Select Smart Screen On
• Select Compatibility View Off

9. Once this is done, you should see some serious improvements in your browsing and rendering experience :)

Drop a note in the comments if this has worked for you!

If you are into Social Media and the Internet – the Facebook.com/Vanity-URL experience is – or speaking in past-tense was - a must  for you. On the 13th June 2009 at approximately 2PM Melbourne, Australia (GMT+10) – Facebook opened their service to include Vanity Urls – that is, instead of the old “facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789” – you could now have “facebook.com/YourName“. If you still haven’t done this, you need to goto www.facebook.com/username/.

The response was unbelievable – more than 500,000 names were registered within the first 10 minutes. Lucky for me, I was able to secure the exact name I wanted – which makes things much easier now to tell everyone where to find me on Facebook. Unfortunately, for the millions of users who did not login when the process began – most, if not all, of the common English name associations would be taken inferring – much like emails – that you will have to have a combination of letters and numbers and wont be able to secure the name you want.

My name is common with more more than 1000 other people around the world – so having to be quick off the mark was pretty essential. Luckily – the exact name I wanted was not one of the “suggested” names or combinations – so I had to select more “Choose your Own Name”. My trick was that I had previously setup “Copy/Paste” for my name, so I was able to quickly hit Ctrl+V on this field and then select the “Set Username” – meaning that I was luckily enough to get in immediately – while more than likely, another Tim Davis around the world was typing the exact name. I was in all likelihood – only milliseconds ahead.

Now you may be reading this post thinking “you are such a nerd” – but for me – having an easy-to-remember facebook URL makes life so much simplier. I can tell friends, family, colleagues and business associates where they can find me on Facebook without forcing them to remember combinations of letters and numbers – which often get lost, can’t be remembered and could result in lost opportunities. Considering that once a name is set – it can never be changed - I don’t necessarily think it was such a bad thing to be online for and secure a little piece of Facebook real-estate.

If you secured the name you wanted, drop a note in the comments :)

It has been absolutely fascinating to watch the technological developments unfold as the world judges the probability of a Swine Flu pandemic. The current primary information repositories seem to be entirely based on information being released from the World Health Organisation (WHO) Swine Flu site located here, and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States located here. Google has released an interesting tool to plot the spread of the disease from their website which you can check out here which maps the latest information from a number of sites in a RSS feed. Interestingly, if you check out the Google News site you can also see the sheer number of stories being published around this disease, and more than 10,000 Tweets on Twitter are being posted every hour in relation to the latest news and information showing that real-time information surrounding the disease is quickly accessible.

The sheer number of searches being conducted online is clearly illustrated on the Google Trends search feature, which highlights a sharp rise in “swine flu, swine, flu, influenza” searches compared to the normal number of searches at the beginning of April.

What is most surprising, is the media’s massive exposure of the disease and the unprecedented global response to prevent the disease from entering nation States borders. To be frank, the sheer amount of coverage of the virus shows the power of new social media and most importantly – the gravity of the disease and perhaps the hype surrounding it. At the very least, the Internet is allowing people to stay so informed around the latest outbreaks that it is almost impossible to decipher all the relevant information. Perhaps more importantly, is the effect of the disease in our already fragile economy. Some news stories have stated that the economic impact of even a ‘mild’ dose of the disease would be around $330 Billion USD  in lost output as the world shudders and people remains indoors. Of course, on the absolute end of the scale the damage would total around 142.2 million lives and cost more than $4.4 Trillion to the world’s economies – something that we could ill afford considering the current financial crisis.

Thermal imaging scanning to detect body heat in airports, surgical face masks, commercial airline pilots being required to report the health of passengers, doctors and nurses at airports, quarantining ill people in their homes and even an increase in the sale of gas masks are the responses taken thus far to prevent the spread of the disease. If Mexico is anything to go off, increases in food shortages and clean water could also be a problem. Of course, this is all very much an ‘alarmist’ view and is not balanced in perspective to the number of people who die each year from influenza through a standard winter. At the moment, very few people have been affected by Swine Flu as a proportion of the standard number of people affected by influenza each year. But as is standard in this day and age – the sensationalist attitude of the media prepares everyone for the worst and an ill informed populace over compensates as a result.

Of course, whenever there global fear surrounding the disease – someone always seems to come out on top financially. The makers of the two most effective anti-virals against the disease are Biota Holdings Ltd and Roche Holdings AG who each produce Relenza and Tamiflu respectively – both the most effective influenza drugs on the market, and both seem to have an solid impact on Swine Flu. Smartly – Google have always denied advertising on drugs as part of their Adwords program and all searches related to Swine Flu – are advertising free. But of course, if the media continues to hype the disease and not report the truth of the spread accurately – then more and more people will begin to become alarmed about the disease – leading to the natural probable cause of panic.

So in writing this article, and doing some basic research online – it seems the most prudent course of action to take at this stage is simply standard smart and healthy personal care. This would include, both from common sense and from the CDC FAQ and Swine Flu and You pages, the following:

1. Cover your mouth when coughing
2. Sneeze into a handkerchief or tissue
3. Keep your hands clean at all times – my recommendation are the hand cleaners that don’t require water.
4. Avoid touching public surfaces and then touching mucous membranes (nose, eyes, ears, mouth etc)
5. Stay away from sick people
6. If you’re feeling ill – don’t go to work – go to your Doctor and take their advice.

Realistically, this is advice that is common to all genus of diseases and viruses – not categorically ‘just’ for Swine Flu. Most importantly, stay informed about the relevant outbreaks of the virus – but don’t start necessarily digging your outside nuclear bunker or moving to the country just yet. While the age old axiom – ‘better to be safe, than sorry’ – does ring true – I think that keeping healthy, fit and taking the proper precautions should ensure that the world contains and eradicates Swine Flu.

Stay Safe & Healthy! :)

I see many interesting on projects on the web everyday – tonnes of new technology mediums which are launching or adding new features, or startups that are getting their product ready for launch. There are also countless other projects which are just impossible to see – merely because I have just never heard of them, the almighty Google hasn’t indexed them, they are not in English or simply because they remain undiscovered and not as yet “popular” by the masses. That changed today when I found a really cool project while just surfing around the web looking for peoples experiences in user interface design. I would say that I effectively just stumbled onto this site in my search (and no, not using stumbleupon).

The site I found is called we feel fine and it is a fascinating journey into the world of human expressionism. What is so unique about this project is that it deeply explores the web and the countless number of human emotions which are posted every single second online. Currently, the site just explores weblogs and extracts huge amounts of metadata from these sites which it then compiles into feelings in a structured manner. To quote from the site

We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). 

The site has a database of several million human feelings and it increases by around 15K to 20K of feelings per day. The interface of the applet requires Java to run (I am assuming because of the sheer size of the database) and the graphical interface is organised into a particle system which allows for a ‘scattered data layer’ approach to viewing and searching feelings from around the world. Each particle on the applet can be clicked and the feeling – including text and photos, or a combination of both – is displayed on the screen.

It really is an amazing use of technology and a great insight into how people are feeling at any one time. People often regard Twitter as one of the greatest sources of human expressionism in that it allows everyday people to communicate their thoughts in small passages of text commonly known as ‘status updates’. Thousands of other websites have since incorporated this small feature in someway or another (although I really think that the 140 restriction helps to keep status posts on point). Of course, feelings may be harder to decipher in the twitter system because people often just post status updates merely because they are bored or want to let people know what they are doing. While it’s possible to argue that real human emotions probably don’t feed into a twitter stream because people don’t want to let others really know how they are feeling (and because many followers on the twitter system are friends or business colleagues) – I would still contend that across the entire site feelings could be extracted.

In some respects this is what makes the twitter a fantastic, open and asynchronous system and on the other – what makes it really stop true human emotions from being published in a stream. My issue is that there is no way to select only a small group of people to see your posts without closing off the interface entirely – and this means that most people will limit posts relating to human feelings and focus on other points of interest in their lives such as interesting articles, reviews or opinion. Of course, you may be thinking at this very moment that if you want to publish your emotions on twitter you can easily – and you would be completely correct in thinking this – but I doubt you would actually post them to strangers you don’t know (or work mates that you do). Although it’s fair to say that the we feel fine system indexes blog posts and this is no better than twitter – I would argue that there is more text, you don’t have to compact your feelings with SMS style punctuation and you can publish it so just your friends can see. 

But I digress, this is not a post on the twitter system (well, it sort of is :D) and rather a look into the we feel fine website. Check it out and you will begin to see what is in peoples blogs, hearts and minds around the world and perhaps understand that the feelings you have can often are felt by other people too.

It’s big picture stuff . Enjoy :)

In the spirit of my current video posts, I thought I would post an article about the “Tenth Dimension” – a fascinating video about a look at Rob Bryanton’s exploration into the ten dimensions. It’s a really amazing video which explores some  string theory - a developing branch of theoretical physics that combines quantum mechanics and general relativity into a quantum theory of gravity. Rob purports to explore in this video that subatomic particles which make up our universe are actually created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an eleventh dimension of “time”) by the vibrations of exquisitely small “superstrings”. If you watch the full video, you can really see that the argument which is created is a truly fascinating one and really provides some food for thought regarding the number of dimensions that exist in our universe.