blog dot kam

How many people do digg at work? Do you do it? The answer to this is mostly “YES”; sometimes, the answer is “NOT OFTEN”, in order to avoid “YES”; and the most rare answer is “NO”. And only sometimes, now days in 21st century, the answer could be “WHAT THE HECK IS DIGG!?”

However 99% of people will have no difficulties with answering the question “Do you work?”. That is due to the fact that “WORK” has been defined for a way longer period of time than “DIGG”. And most of the time, unless employed by Digg, its competitors, or “ Times Magazine”, DIGG and WORK do not go together. Therefore employees do not like to be caught by their managers and supervisors while reading fresh news from the Digg’s first page.

But there is nothing wrong with spending some time reading DIGG at work. In fact it can, and most of the time will boost the productivity, if not abused, and done right - really! According to our friend Albert Einstein, there is nothing as innovative and productive as taking 10-15 minutes breaks. And Albert generally knew what he was talking about.

A wise man once told me: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” (I believe it was also Einstein) - so here is a simple way of using Digg at work without causing any suspicion.

Lynx - is the answer to creating “work and digg” balance, and can be used to read pretty much any website, not only Digg. It is available on windows, Mac, comes pre-installed with most distributions of Linux, and according to its documentation is available for other platforms as well.

Here is what reading Digg at work using Lynx web browser would look like:

Colors of the terminal could be changed to blend in better with the Desktop, and applications mostly used, which will depend on the nature of the job. Lynx is very easy to navigate - mostly just by using “up down left right” arrows, and is considered “work safe” - it is a simple text after all.

Boost your work productivity, and… happy Digging!

what else is interesting about digg: How does Digg Make Money?

There are several tools out there to create (or to infer) an XSD schema from XML document. I liked trang command line tool the most. Found it first when reading about Spring web services in Spring in Action book (very good book btw).

Here are four simple steps how to create XSD from XML* using trang:

1. Download trang.zip from here (at the moment of writing “trang-20030619.zip”)
2. Extract it
3. Make an alias to the trang.jar -> in my case (Ubuntu) edited ~/.bashrc:

you don’t have to create an alias, but it just makes it simpler to run

# execute trang.jar (create XSD from XMLs)
alias xml2xsd='java -jar ~/soft/utils/trang/trang-20030619/trang.jar'

(”~/soft/utils/trang/” is where trang.zip was extracted)

4. Create XSD from XML:

$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 357 2008-05-28 15:38 holiday-request.xml

$ cat holiday-request.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<HolidayRequest xmlns="http://mycompany.com/hr/schemas">
    <Holiday>
        <StartDate>2006-07-03</StartDate>
        <EndDate>2006-07-07</EndDate>
    </Holiday>
    <Employee>
        <Number>42</Number>
        <FirstName>Ultimate</FirstName>
        <LastName>Answer</LastName>
    </Employee>
</HolidayRequest>

$ xml2xsd holiday-request.xml hr.xsd
$ cat hr.xsd 

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<xs:schema xmlns:xs=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema” elementFormDefault=”qualified” targetNamespace=”http://mycompany.com/hr/schemas” xmlns:schemas=”http://mycompany.com/hr/schemas”>
  <xs:element name=”HolidayRequest”>
    <xs:complexType>
      <xs:sequence>
        <xs:element ref=”schemas:Holiday”/>
        <xs:element ref=”schemas:Employee”/>
      </xs:sequence>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:element>
  <xs:element name=”Holiday”>
    <xs:complexType>
      <xs:sequence>
        <xs:element ref=”schemas:StartDate”/>
        <xs:element ref=”schemas:EndDate”/>
      </xs:sequence>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:element>
  <xs:element name=”StartDate” type=”xs:NMTOKEN”/>
  <xs:element name=”EndDate” type=”xs:NMTOKEN”/>
  <xs:element name=”Employee”>
    <xs:complexType>
      <xs:sequence>
        <xs:element ref=”schemas:Number”/>
        <xs:element ref=”schemas:FirstName”/>
        <xs:element ref=”schemas:LastName”/>
      </xs:sequence>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:element>
  <xs:element name=”Number” type=”xs:integer”/>
  <xs:element name=”FirstName” type=”xs:NCName”/>
  <xs:element name=”LastName” type=”xs:NCName”/>
</xs:schema>

$

* - BTW, trang can create an XSD from multiple XML documents, not just one.

List of other tools to use as an alternative to trang:
xmlbeans: http://xmlbeans.apache.org/docs/2.0.0/guide/tools.html#inst2xsd
online tool: http://www.flame-ware.com/xml2xsd/
oxygenxml: http://www.oxygenxml.com/
(eclipse plugin: http://www.oxygenxml.com/eclipse_plugin.html)
stylus studio: http://www.stylusstudio.com/autogen_xsd.html

Ok, so I travel a lot. Sometimes to places where when you say “Internet” people believe in it and bow, but as in any other religion, they have never seen the subject of believing…

So today I finally got to my Gmail, after a long and exotic trip. Logged in, and what do I see? Instead of: “Hey Buddy, welcome back!”, it says you have 666 lucky e-mails in your inbox:

Did not really know if that is a good thing or a sign that I should not go through my mail
Well, do not worry, dear puzzled reader, this story has a Hollywoodish happy ending - I went through pretty much all my mail, fell in love with it and we lived happily ever after…

YouTube announced in November that they would be testing out encoding videos at higher resolutions (and with higher-quality audio encoding). Now it appears that a small sampling of uploaded videos can already be seen at their higher resolutions, simply by adding a little tag to the end of the video’s URL. To get a noticeable bump in resolution on some clips, add &fmt=6 to the end of the address line. The trick, according to YouTube watchers, seems to work primarily with newer videos, and bumps the resolution from 320×240 to 448×336. Add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL, and you might get an MP4-encoded version, with better audio and a 480×360 resolution. Update: Now the Better YouTube Firefox extension includes this feature.

original source - “Google Systems”
article source - “lifehacker.com”

If you have ever done web development, especially web design, you know that almost 50% of all development time goes to make CSS work for all the browsers. And, of course, Internet Explorer is the most non-complaint browser out there. Not only that, but it also lacks backward compatibility - so some features that work in IE6, would either break or what they call it “work differently” in IE7 and of course work another way in IE5.

One way around that would be to write a custom Java Script redirector that would determine what browser the client uses and redirected to the correct CSS. Another one, is to write a custom JavaScript that actually implements the functionality of all different browsers and makes sure everything is W3 compliant no matter what browser the client uses.

The problem in a second approach is that usually developers tend to write that JavaScript file only for a limited set of features that their application (web site) uses, and hence their JavaScript files are hardly reusable by others.

However, recently one of my good friends and developers discovered an open source JavaScript library - ie7-js, which is hosted on code.google.com and has an MIT License. This 70Kb library implements all the W3 features, which means it is highly reusable, and it makes web development to be a much much easier task, since developers do not need to worry about cross browser (at least from IE perspective), as this library supports ALL versions of Internet Explorer (5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0 +). Which makes it universal for any web development project.

Enjoy and reuse the cross-browser wisdom!

    Just came home today and had a random thought “How does Digg make money?”. Almost any unanswered question that I have I usually bounce against my friend Google. Even if I know the answer, I like to go there to see if there if there is any additional info. However to search information about Digg is quite hard, due to the reason that most of the Google search queries match to some Digg article that somebody posted, and not the real info about Digg. So, today, Google did not answer my question.

Try to enter How does Digg make money in Google, and all you will see is “how to make money with Digg”, “10, 40, 250… ways to make money online” from Digg, “Digg effect” links, but no real answer to my question about Digg.

So here, I am thinking on my own…

There is a definite income from Google Adsense,  but it does not seem all that much according to sources it is only $250,000.00 per month, which I am sure is cigarrette money for Digg boys. (do they smoke?)

There is another annoying source that probably brings more than Google Adsense, since that big rectangular thing in the upper left corner of digg.com is blinking pretty hard every time I am on Digg. I am not sure how much that brings, but that is a definite “plus one” source.

Now ads on Digg even talk “Congratulations, you have chance to receive … two iPods nano” - it might come from that blinking thing (flash), but also might be something totally different, so I guess it also may be counted as an independent source.

When you click “more” on a story, you’ll see a banner from (http://clk.atdmt.com)  guys, hence “another one”.

How about that “http://media.fastclick.net” colorful banner on the right hand side of all the comments? “one more”.

At the very bottom of a Digg page there is “Advertise: You can buy advertising on Digg through our advertising partner Microsoft“, hence some of the above also goes to Microsoft. (just a note)

But my question is still unanswered, I still do not see the full picture. If all Digg’s revenue comes from blinking ads, it’s just boring - it is Digg after all, there should be some other cool hidden/not as obvious way they are getting that cash flow - don’t you think?

Search freely and directly downladable music e.g. mp3, wma, wav, etc.. Give it a try!

” Musgle originates from the idea of combining words Music and Google. The idea is simple yet very powerful. To see Musgle in action just type a song title, or the artist name, or both in a search bar and hit ‘Enter’ - you will be redirected to the Google page with relevant search results. Click on one of those results, and you will have a chance to directly download the song you are searching for - very smooth!

Although Musgle is not affiliated with Google, ALL its strength comes from it When searching for any kind of music (mp3, wma, wav, etc), Musgle calls Google for help by submitting a special search query to it, which is based on Advanced Google Search Operators. After Google does its hard work, it returns results with direct links to mp3, wma, wav, etc.. music files that can be downloaded directly with no hassle!

Good Luck! “