Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Monday, March 24, 2008

STMicro touts bird flu-detecting VereFlu "lab-on-a-chip"

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/257240583/

We've already seen a couple of devices designed to detect and prevent bird flu (among other viruses), but STMicro says it's got 'em all beat with its new VereFlu "lab-on-a-chip," which it developed in partnership with Veredus Laboratories. That system, the company says, will let you (or the appropriate flu-detecting folks) identify and differentiate human strains of Influenza A and B, including bird flu, in a single test within two hours, as opposed to other systems that can apparently only identify one strain at time and can take days or weeks to deliver a result. The device hasn't seen any service just yet, however, although STMicro says it has received some "very promising" sales orders from hospitals and other customers, adding that it also sees potential for the device to be used to screen travelers at airports and border checkpoints.

[Via PC World]

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How to Completely Test Your Website

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/design/completely-test-website-errors-html-standards/2673/

You may have developed your website using an expensive “what you see is what you get” editor but there’s no guarantee that site visitors “will get the website as you see it“.

You will need to extensively test the website to ensure that visitors have a comfortable stay and don’t leave your site in a jiffy. And here are some useful tools to help you completely check your website:

Browsershots is an online service that automatically captures full page screenshot images of your website in various browsers across all different OS platforms. You also have the option to preview the website design in browsers with or without Flash, Java and JavaScript.

browser-screenshots Browsershots is extremely popular and you may therefore have to wait a few minutes for this service to render screenshots of your website.

IE NetRenderer is another service that’s much faster than Browsershots but it can check the rendering only for different versions of Internet Explorer. Mac oriented websites can try BrowsrCamp which is like Browsershots but for the Mac OS browsers only.

To see how your website appears on the small screens of mobile phones like the BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, check out BrowserCam. Another good option is the Opera Simulator that lets you experience a mobile version of Opera from the desktop.

Some people are still using slow dial-up connections and their population in not insignificant especially in the developing world. You therefore need to make sure that the average loading time of your HTML web pages, along with all the Javascript Ads, Images, CSS, Flash animations, etc., is within reasonable limits.

Pingdom is a free online service that mimics the way a page is loaded in the web browser. It shows statistics (size, loading time) for every object on the web page so you know about the culprits who may slow down the website.

firebug-pingdom

Alternatively, you could use Firebug in Firefox to detect elements on your web page that are increasing the load time of your web pages (press F12, Goto All -> Net).

For website and blogs that syndicate content via RSS feeds, load the website in IE or Firefox and look for that orange XML icon near the browser address bar. This ensures that other online services can successfully auto-discover RSS feeds give your site address.

If you have added email forms to your website (like Contact Us, or Suggest a friend) - try some combinations in the form address field. For instance, is the email message delivered successfully if visitors add a semicolon instead of a comma to separate two or more email addresses.

You may also want to print some of your web pages to the local printer or save them as PDF to ensure that the Print CSS of your site is stripping the non-essential stuff like the sidebars and the ads.

For accessibility, load the website inside html2txt to ensure that screen readers can interpret your website. This is an online Lynx simulator (text-only browser) and will also help you understand how your website appears to Google spiders and other search engine bots.

And finally, validate your web pages against online HTML validation and clean-up service like the W3C HTML Validator and HTML Tidy. The former service help you check the website for conformance to W3C HTML standards while the latter is for cleaning up HTML source files that contain lot of nested tags.

How to Completely Test Your Website - Digital Inspiration | FAQ | RSS

Amazing Tidal Waves Photos

http://cubeme.com/blog/2008/03/17/amazing-tidal-waves-photos/#more-4447

March 17th, 2008 by Phil

Some people claim that these are pictures of water that instantly froze when it came in contact with the air. Well, I know it's cold in Antartica but the day a tidal wave or a tsunami wave will instantly freeze while breaking has not come yet. You can rest assured Armageddon is not for tomorrow.

These photos are nonetheless fantastic. You'll notice that there is blue ice, which is created as the ice is compressed and trapped air bubbles are squeezed out. The ice looks blue because, when light passes through thick ice, blue light is transmitted back out but red light is absorbed. I didn't figure that out by myself of course, but I did some research. Now enjoy the pictures and thank the mighty internet for providing more info about those so-called "frozen waves"!

CarLoft Designs Apartments with Car Parkings on Balcony

Source: http://cubeme.com/blog/2008/03/18/carloft-designs-apartments-with-car-parkings-on-balcony/

Why park you car in the underground or in a garage when you can park it on the balcony of your high-rise condo? That’s exactly what German company Car Loft thought, as they are building a residential project in Berlin that will allow its residents to park their cars on the balcony of their apartments. I’m not kidding: each resident will be able to use his garden as a car-parking space, which will be called CarLoggia. To access their condo, the lucky owners will use the CarLift, which will bring them and their car right on their floor. The prices of the luxury flats start at 450,600 euros. You better be quick if you want one, because the penthouse, the fifth floor and the ground-floor are already sold.

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Sun aims to speed up data by swapping wires for frickin' laser beams

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/257096037/

Filed under: Desktops, Misc. Gadgets, Laptops

It's far from the first time we've seen lasers touted as a means of boosting data speeds exponentially, but Sun seems to think it has a better chance than most of making it a reality, thanks in no small part to $44 million in funding from DARPA. As The New York Times reports, that cash haul will be put to use to "explore the high-risk idea of replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams," which would not only allow for computers to be smaller, but as much as a thousand times faster as well. Needless to say, however, there's quite a few significant hurdles to overcome before that happens, and even Sun itself admits that there's a "50 percent chance of failure." They also say, of course, that the potential benefits are worth the risks, with them even going so far as to boast that the technology would be a way of "breaking Moore's Law."

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