From your normal users to your power users, just about everyone knows what a cookie is. These days web surfers have become more aware about how sites use and store these small files within your web browser and especially with the amount of privacy talks you read about over the web one ought to understand their rights as a web surfer. We have all types of cookies, session cookies, performance cookies, tracking cookies and so on and so forth.

Handpicked links that caught my eye.

Zynga Stock Dives on Loss: Down 40% from last years frenzy and IPO hype…

PHP – The Right Way: There’s a lot of outdated information on the Web that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and bad code. This must stop. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP best practices, accepted coding standards, and links to authoritative tutorials around the Web.

I’d like IE to die, rather I’d like IE6 to die. Only because it’s a pain to design and develop for the worlds most hated browser—any developer will tell you that they curse IE6 at least a couple of times a month.

Can I not have a well structured CSS document without adequately supporting this browser as well? Meh, might I add we all love to write well structured code. Of course there are ways to get around the bugs and shortcomings of IE6 and IE7.

Yet it won’t:

As of May 2011, 10.9 percent of Internet users around the world were still using the outdated browser. Many of these users are in Asian and Arab countries. China has the the biggest user base with roughly 33% of Internet users accessing the Internet using IE6, and South Korea in second place with about 22%.

Here I am fiddling with my blog again, it’s been a while blog and I’ve missed tinkering around with you . While looking for some inspiration I thought I’d add a page for my personal quote favorites.

Actually it all started out while I was scanning Good Reads the other day (I totally endorse this site). As a beginning listing a few quotes that made sense to me wasn’t a bad idea at all—hopefully it will get the creative juices running….

“My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition. ” – Indhira Ghandi

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” – Socrates

I love political cartoons and their burlesque depictions of world leaders and events. I spent a couple of minutes laughing at some paradoxical funnies today and thought I would share a couple that really struck me as satire too funny not to pass on.

The Weak Dollar

Surging Oil Prices and Alternative Energies

With all do respect Sir [President Obama], I do like you at least you pronounce the names of people and countries properly, which means you make an effort to understand culture and people. It was just funny..

Egypt is free, Mubarak steps down—the nation rejoices and celebrates while this makes history as the first Egyptian president steps down from office. Other nations with questionable regimes and leadership can learn a thing or two from the protests of the tenacious Egyptians; mainly that there is always hope and it’s the people collectively that have to stand up to the government and leaders.

Bravo, “Finally he’s out!” – shouts the crowd!

Cellucor are great products, I recommend M5 and N0 but waiting to try C4 Extreme Pre Workout.

Supplements are a great way to enhance or cut your growth, repair, recover and refuel your body and muscles before your next workout. They give you an edge, especially if you don’t have the time to compliment your body with the proper nutritional intake. One brand of supplement that I have used which is very effective is Cellucor, and I am perplexed why this amazing brand of supplement isn’t stocked in most of our popular stores. Sure you can get it online easy enough, but I would like to see the whole range of products being sold at physical locations as well.

Mind Technologies is entering the mobile applications market with a new world of innovative technologies on the horizon for Android Apps—as a Droid lover I hope these “thought-controlled” apps come to Google’s Mobile OS first.

Android which is heavily sold in the U.S. lacks quality third-party applications and these emerging technologies could very well create new innovation and quality driven apps for the titan platform. Judging from mobile apps statistics, wouldn’t you want a piece of the pie too?

The Influence of Fleeting Attraction
This experiment suggests that fleeting attraction can be remarkably powerful in changing ‘no’ into ‘yes’. We process relatively small requests in an automatic way, using simple rules-of-thumb. When asked for a small favour by a stranger, we make a snap judgement on how much we like them based on trivial information, and this can have a huge influence on our response.
Source: Psy Blog

Experience Has Nothing To Do With Your Social Media Status
Being great at getting people to follow you on Twitter or read your Blog does not make you an experienced Marketer—We can’t really quantify professional experience in Social Media.
Source: Twist Image Blog

As of July 31st, 2010 there are approximately 1,966,514,816 (billions) internet users worldwide, an astounding number if you compare to the 360,000,000 (millions) a decade ago in 2000.  Out of those nearly 2 billion users, the continent of Asia stands on top of the world with the most internet users in the globally, surpassing Europe and North America combined.

Asia is also the most populated continent in the world, so it should come to no surprise that the breadth of internet users reside in the following countries (with China being on top of course):

The estimated amount of users in Asia is currently 800,000,000 (millions) which is about whopping 42% of the internet users in the entire world and is one of the main reasons large companies such as Google and Apple target the vast majority of users in China, whose internet usage is up from 22,500,000 in 2000 to 420,000,000 in 2010.

On Muslims and American Bigotry:

Associating minorities with crime is irrational, unjust, and completely normal, says slate today in an article i found extremely relevant to the times today:

Muslims are only the latest victim of illusory correlations in the United States. African-Americans have long suffered the same bias when it comes to crime. In every country on earth, you can find minority groups that get tagged with various pathologies for no better reason than that the pathologies are unusual and the minorities are minorities.

Having said that, the article was just a build up to a comment i most treasured. Do you folks read comments? I do, and many times i find comments more thought provoking than the articles themselves. After all the essence of blogging is (a) social (b) engage and let your audience discuss.

As i read over the “We Are All Juan Williams” article on Slate today I liked this man’s comment so much i couldn’t help but share it on my blog:

Twitter is most definitely one of the best forms of online marketing, and we all know it. It offers a way to mingle with your fans in short and sweet messages, as well as promote your sites content, your companies promotional deals or something completely different! For this reason, it is generally a good idea to have an account. But is Twitter for designers really a helpful resource that we need, or is it just another way to get distracted and find excuses to not do work?

How it is helpful…

Twitter is a big thing in the design and development community, with hundreds and thousands of graphic and web designers, developers, illustrators and photographers tweeting away on a day-to-day basis. Why? Because in reality it’s there to help us. There are several main reasons why we can’t get off of Twitter, all of which are summarised below.

Have you ever been to a website with one browser, and then later with another only to realize that the contents displayed were different? Or have you been to a site without favorite browser only to read the note that your browser was not supported by it?

The websites in question are likely using techniques to detect the user agent, which contains information about the web browser and operating system used by the user.

A basic example is the Google search website. It detects the web browser to enable or disable the new Google Instant Search feature. Opera users for instance are not able to use the feature because Google uses browser sniffing to disable the feature for user’s of that browser.

The Google Chrome extension is a basic extension which can detect if a page uses user agent detection. If it is enabled, it displays an icon in the Chrome address form, if not then nothing is displayed. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how it works.

google user agent detection

User agent detection is not only used on sites to offer different contents to different browsers. Many advertising scripts are also using those techniques. That’s why you for instance see the icon on ghacks as well, even though it is used by third parties and not by us.

The extension is probably nothing that users want to have installed all the time in the browser. It is however interesting to see which websites use user agent detection.

Evil Meter can be downloaded from the Chrome extensions gallery. This site is also an example of a site that detects the browser in a different way, considering that it displays an active install button if the page is accessed with the Google browser, and an inactive button if another browser is used.

Though they have demonstrated that they have the capability, tech companies have shied away from deployments of mobile facial recognition, mostly out of privacy concerns. Now Apple may be willing to be first to cross that line with its purchase of Swedish startup Polar Rose.

Thinking back on immigrating to the States from Pakistan a third world country recently devastated by floods. A country where the poor walk around naked looking for scraps to eat. Mind you, the worst part isn’t the devastation of crops and people’s homes, it’s the famine and disease that follow. This will take years and years, a government and leaders which aren’t corrupt to fix.

Here in the States we take way too much for granted. Our cars, our food, “Burger King” and “Mc’Donalds” for breakfast—I’m loving it allright. I’m not saying that there aren’t people in developed countries who don’t feel the pain and suffering, but on the overall most people have no clue what’s happening around the world—especially Americans.

Let’s take a couple of minutes and thank the Lord for all our blessings and pray for all the unfortunate people around the world.  Let’s reflect.  Imagine you could have been born in a situation much, much worse.  What if you could do nothing about it?

Parallels Desktop 6 recently launched, and we were all over that with a review. Today, Parallels Mobile is live for the iPad/ iPhone/ iPod touch. Parallels Mobile lets you access any virtual machine running on your Mac with Parallels Desktop 6 over Wi-Fi or 3G. The app is free for the taking, but you need the desktop program for it to be of any use. The Parallels Mobile connection takes place using the Parallels server, with login required using the credentials used to register Parallels Desktop 6.

Whether by design or accident, Ping's lack of integration with other social networks, or even with the web itself, is now its most compelling feature — at least from a strategic perspective. It's essentially an e-commerce platform for music disguised as a social network.

Apple found a way to cram a large number of iPhone 4 features in the new iPod touch: retina display, two cameras with FaceTime support, and the A4 chip. So it's just like a contract-free iPhone 4 without voice right? Wrong on at least three counts.

Google Android 2.2 on a Samsung Tablet (Screen size only 7.2″ vs 9+ on the iPad).  Will this be an iPad killer?
Source: Telegraph News

Russell Moore On Glenn Beck.  Msnbc quoted Beck to be the “White Man’s Burden”.  Perhaps he isn’t all that conservative…
Source: A League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Lance Armstrong on his speech to the American public, where he murmurs something or the other about staying ahead of the competition.  That can only mean one thing (the competitive edge) If you did it Lance, don’t tell anyone.
Source: The Onion