Miralinks 31-05-09

Time for this badboy to make a comeback. Its fitting because of the new design launch, which takes the good stuff from the last design and adds more functionality and consistency.I really like it anyway, and my jQuery knowledge is tested . Anyways I’ve decided to get my Links straight from my Google Reader Shared List, so if you want to see what links will I’ve featured in this post every week, I suggest you look there first

• Free textures – This is an excellent set of cracks and grungy textures by chorando. Excellent for distinctive backgrounds
• Are you tired of Captcha? – Swedish Fika gives a great tutorial as to how to combat spam instead of turning to those ever annoying Captcha images. And its fairly simple to integrate into Wordpress
• Speaking of which, Wordpress 2.8 Beta 2 is out! One of the best features in this build is the ability to download themes straight into the server. Also now when you press Ctrl(Cmd) + S, it saves a draft of the post.
• Tutorial 9 has a great article, outlining the steps in the creation of a very Stylish Mail Icon, you could use for just about anything
• I find it extremely hard to find people on Twitter, now that @replies is gone. NaldzGraphics has an excellent list of 300+ web designers on Twitter.
• This week, Engadget gave me two very exciting news articles. First of all, SkyTV is coming to the Xbox 360. And Windows 7 (which I’m using right now),  might be able to connect to multiple WiFi networks at once to get a faster speed. Schweet.
• Alan Foran, has a great review of Green Day’s – 21st Century Breakdown. I have one on the way, but not sure if its post-worthy yet.

Finally heres a bit of awesomeness from NIN:

Wolfram Alpha

For the past decade, Google has firmly dominated the seach engine market, with a current majority of about 66%. Yahoo is tripping over itself, Microsft has to assure users thats their search engine isnt an innacurate, feeble excuse of searching on the web, and the others are so miniscule that they arent even worth a mention in this post.

In May 2009, we got glimplse at what might be the most important tool on the interent, something that could trump Wikipedia and Google. WolframAlpha is a computational search engine, which means instead of giving you links for the information you want, it gives you results. There isn’t the problem where you might be searching for Google for hours to ifind what you’re looking for ,because Wolfram Alpha either has the information or it doesnt.

Its an advanced calculator, an accoutant, shows the population of any country in the world. You might think that it is less personal than Google because Google can find you, but you can input your height and weight and it will give you your BMI. It can organise a traning schedule for you, advise you on good eating habits.

It can be used by anyone because it knows what your saying. Lets say you want to find the capital of Andorra. You can either type in “capital andorra” or you can type “what is capital of andorra?” It finds the keywords in your query and gives you the same result.

Wolfram Alpha may be in the early stages of development (even though the engine used to make this, Mathematica,  was developed in 1993), there is still alot of information it doesnt have yet so it can only get smarter.

It’s been a while

So its been about 10 days since the last post, mainly due to the occasional outburst of anxiety about the summer exams of first year. They concluded on Tuesday with Social Media. Overall I’m pretty happy with them, even though I probably shouldn’t be. So lets catch up shall we?

Music

I had written a post about the upcoming single by Green Day – Know Your Enemy – and while I like it, I think it cant be appreciated fully until you hear it along with the rest of the album. They have previewed 7 tracks on their website and they’re all quite amazing. It’s sounds like such an ambitious record, with some of the most complex and diverse pieces of music. Some Lennon, some Queen, and (for some reason) a little Linkin Park. All this coming from a band whose name stems from a day of smoking weed. Huh. So I got a ticket for their show in October.

Sport

As a person from Limerick, I was devastated to see Munster not so graciously fall to pieces in the Heineken Cup Semi-Final. Leinster were the better team though, and as much as I’ll hate to admit this I will support them in the Final. Also its going to tear me apart to see Barcelona and Manchester United play in the final. My childhood team, versus the team I’ve secretly supported for 3-4 years… Oh well, at least it wont be disappointing for me at the end of May 24th.

Coding

Now with the exams over, I can focus om designing some good sites. I have a couple clients already, mixed in with a site I have a few ideas for. For designers.. thats all I’m saying. Also learning a bucket load of jQuery and PHP at the moment. If you have any good sites for me to expand my knowledge, please leave a link in the comments

Now I must go. My splitting headache is calling for sleep, and I don’t want to disappoint.