Facebook Reaches 150 Million Users Worldwide

Wow. Since they just reached the 140 Million mark back on Dec 18th (or around) means that Facebook is growing at 500,000 new users per day. I am amazed at that rate of growth.

Some fascinating stats:

• 500,000 new users per day
• 13 Million users update their profiles once a day
• 700 Million photos uploaded per month
• 52,000 application using the Facebook platform
• 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
  

Want more stats? Then check out the Facebook Demographic Statistics where you can generate your own growth chart.

Read more about their growth:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_growth_explodes.php

Looking for logos?

Logo Instant is a collection of logos you can use and hack-up for your own needs. The collection isn't huge but its a good start and the logos they do have are of good quality.

Link:
http://www.logoinstant.com/

Joomla Developer’s Toolbox

Joomla is a popular free and open-source content management system (CMS) that can be used to power all kinds of websites. After we published developer’s toolboxes for a variety of other CMS’, many readers requested a collection of resources for Joomla users and developers, so here it is. Joomla grew out of the Mambo CMS and has since built a large and loyal group of users, much like the other popular open-source options. What this means for users and developers is that there is a wealth of information and resources available, and in this post we’ll take a look at many of the best.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...

How I found Hulu

Looking around for some complete movie and TV episodes on video hosting websites I stumbled across Hulu. Glad I did as they have an HD quality The Office episode that I had missed and even more important, they have past It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episodes. If you haven't heard or watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia check it out on Hulu. Watching in Full Screen works well and the videos stay buffered nicely so there is very little, if any, delays.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/2768/...

The Office in HD:
http://www.hulu.com/hd/45918

Find something good on Hulu? Leave a comment.

Free Computer Science Classes from Stanford

For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection are all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.

SEE programming includes one of Stanford’s most popular sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.

Also, if you didn't know MIT opened up over 1800 of their courses through a program called OpenCourseWare

Link:
http://see.stanford.edu/

Welcome 2009

Happy New Year to all!

Open source programming languages for kids

The past couple of years have seen an explosion of open source programming languages and utilities that are geared toward children. Many of these efforts are based around the idea that, since the days of BASIC, programming environments have become far too complex for untrained minds to wrap themselves around. Some toolkits aim to create entirely new ways of envisioning and creating projects that appeal to younger minds, such as games and animations, while others aim to recreate the "basic"-ness of BASIC in a modern language and environment.

Link:
http://www.linux.com/feature/155203

Java game in under 4K - Left 4K Dead

Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb. The game is inspired by Left 4 Dead by Valve Software.

The game was written for a contest where developers submit applications written in under 4K using Java. Pretty amazing what people can come with to fit in 4K.

Link:
http://www.mojang.com/notch/j4k/l4kd/

Google Desktop fills harddrive

Get message that Google Desktop has stopped working and searching the Temp folder I find Gigs of Zip files that are being left behind (in C:\ Users/[username]\AppData\Local\Temp) by some GD function (indexing not working?)

See others discussing:
http://groups.google.com/group/...

Video: Sick driving - this guy is scary good

Extract video and audio from FLV files

Extracts video and audio from FLV files without decompressing or recompressing. The video is saved as AVI (H.263/FLV1 and VP6/VP6F) or raw elementary stream (H.264/AVC). The audio is saved as MP3, AAC (with ADTS headers), or WAV (PCM).

Link:
http://moitah.net/#FLVExtract

Check out the snow on Veign.com

A little something for the Holiday season:
http://www.veign.com/

Google Earth adds Photorealism to New York

Link:
http://earth.google.com/

2,000 year old computer boots up

A dictionary-size assemblage of 37 interlocking dials crafted with the precision and complexity of a 19th-century Swiss clock, the Antikythera mechanism was used for modeling and predicting the movements of the heavenly bodies as well as the dates and locations of upcoming Olympic games.

Link:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/...

Patch, Patch , Patch

Make sure you run Windows Update today and patch the security exploit found in IE.

The update should be coming anytime now and I will update this post when its been released.

Windows Update:
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/

Official Security Bulletin with patch:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/

Transform Ubuntu into a Media Center with XBMC

Linux has come a long way in support for multimedia and graphics. Today we will see how to transform Ubuntu 8.10 into a media center platform. You can achieve this using various software like MythTV and Boxee, but we’re going to use XBMC Media Center (formerly XBox Media Center).

XBMC is an award winning media center application for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and XBox. The ultimate hub for all your media, XBMC is easy to use, looks slick, and has a large helpful community.

Link:
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/12/09/...

Microsoft confirms that all versions of IE have critical new bug

Microsoft said research confirmed that the bug is within all its browsers, including those it currently supports -- IE5.01, IE6 and IE7 -- as well as IE8 Beta 2, a preview version that the company doesn't support through normal channels.

Users running any of those browsers on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 or Server 2008 are at risk, Microsoft said.

It adds IE6 and IE8 Beta 2 to the list, recommends disabling .dll to stay safe

Link:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...

Google Book Search searches magazines

Over the past couple of years, we've made an effort to bring specialized content like Patents, News Archives and the LIFE Photo Archive online. Today, that effort continues--we're beginning to add magazines to the Google Book Search index, so that when you search on Google Book Search, you'll be searching across the full text of both books and an ever-growing number of magazines, which will appear tagged with the keyword "Magazine" in search results.

Not the newest magazines around but it a step the direction of everything indexed by Google.

Link:
http://books.google.com/

Video Shows Every Flight on Earth in 72 Seconds

Notable software releases

WordPress 2.7 "Coltrane":
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/

Google Chrome 1.0:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/google-chrome-beta.html

Looking for cheap cables, check out My Cable Mart

Get cheap cables for almost anything:
http://mycablemart.com/

Songbird, an open source music player

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that's under active development.

I still use Winamp as my music player but and getting closer to dropping it. It used to be a very good, low resource music player but has gotten bloated over the years. Songbird might be a good option, trying it now.

Link:
http://getsongbird.com/

emEditor releases version 8

EmEditor Text Editor is a lightweight, yet extendable, easy-to-use text editor for Windows. EmEditor is very customizable, and it supports Unicode and powerful macros. EmEditor now supports very large files - up to 248 GB or 2.1 billion lines! EmEditor is certified for Windows Vista! The x64 Edition is also available! The portable version is also available for USB drive setup!

In this version (8.0) there are many new features including a Large File Controller, Vertical Selection Editing, Binary Editing, Optimized Search and Replace, improved Projects Plug-in, and many more!

emEditor has got to be one of the best text editors I have come across. So much so that it is my main application for writing web development code (HTML, CSS and PHP).

Link:
http://www.emeditor.com/

The Matrix on Windows

7 Free Tools to Identify A Font

So you’re browsing through your favorite website and found a site that uses a font you love. You want that font too, (and must be as quickly as possible!)… so how do we go about finding out what that font is called? Sounds familiar? Yes… we’ve all been there before!

I have used What the Font many times and its a really neat tool that has saved me from lost fonts before. The only one in the list that does the work for you is What The Font. You can upload an image of the font and it attempts to identify it automatically - worked great for Veign's logo.

Link:
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2008/12/...