vTip is designed to quickly provide very lightweight (1.11KB js, 272b CSS) tooltips to users of jQuery. The zip includes everything you need (including an example page), as well as jQuery for the examples to work.

They look great and are extremely easy to use, try them out.

I’m going to go ahead and assume majority of the blog readers have played Promisance (aka Prom) at some time; if you haven’t you can google it. It’s always fun to play once in a long while and when one pops up everyone seems to get in to it but there is a new, more graphical and more in depth online (once a day style) game called Travian.

It’s by no means brand new, but its new to me and I’ve been enjoying it for more than a week now (on Server 7).

When you start out you get a section of land, covered in resources and a city centre with hundreds of options of where to go from there mainly focussed around either being a military force or a market leader. There are thousands of players online at any given stage, and if you want to join them have a look! [and its free of course]

Not for the first time, a privacy bug has been found on Facebook and has been reported by TechCrunch

Earlier this evening we came across a privacy flaw on Facebook that allowed users to gain access to portions of their friends’ profiles that they should not have been able to see. We contacted Facebook about the issue over an hour ago (it remains unresolved), and they have asked us to refrain from going into too much detail as to how to reproduce it until it is fixed.

I can only imagine what their privacy options code looks like, as you can change the privacy setting on pretty much everything in your Facebook profile. With all the changes that have been made to the site recently, it’s no wonder that something like this could have slipped in.

It’s just unfortunate that these kinds of bugs that could potentially get people in trouble making it past their Q/A and into their production servers for all to exploit. Naturally the average person may not know how or even be interested in exploiting bugs in websites, but there are those that use it badly and those are the people you have to be careful of when designing any kind of application.

Recently, I’ve watched a couple that are redonkulous and thought you might want to check them out.

Charlie The Unicorn
Probably one of the most pointless videos I’ve ever seen, but hilarious none the less. Charlie The Unicorn follows Charlie, who is a unicorn, on random adventures he is dragged into by 2 other unicorns. Shun the non-believer, shunnnnn, shuuuunnnnn.

There are 2 more videos in the series so far, so be sure to check them out too.

Excessive Ping Pong Celebration
If there is one person I know that would be most likely to do this kind of thing, it would be fx. This clip shows the insanely awesome celebration of a ping pong player as he wins a lucky point.

No JUSTICE-NO PEACE; Mr. Chi-City GETS MILITANT OVER A TICKET
I’ve watched a couple of Mr. Chi-City’s videos, but this has to be my favourite. In this video Mr. Chi-City gets a parking ticket for allegedly parking in handicap parking. He doesn’t agree though. Lol

There are plenty others out there, let us know which ones you have enjoyed.

Facebook has updated their Terms of Service and has the entire internet in a fuss – the question is: what does this mean for me? Essentially the change people are worried about is that this chunk of text has dissapeared:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

What this means for you is that you can no longer really have any control over uploaded content, and specifically that you should make sure anything you enter or upload on to facebook is something you don’t mind having public for ever.

Is this a serious problem? Personally I don’t think so as people already know that content on facebook is public, however, it is a bad policy to put forward as they are taking all forms of control away from the user which doesn’t really benefit them, but does irritate the average user.

What are your feelings?

A lot is being said about IE8 and how it will change the history of IE and how it is seen in the eyes of developers. Anyone who has ever tried to design a website using standards defined by W3C is sure to have found that while the site looks great in FireFox for example, it looks terrible in IE.

Fixes have been around for ages now with it just being accepted that you design the site in FireFox and fix it for IE. A quick search on Google will show you just how many of these fixes exist. Most of them have become quite well known and are pretty much put in during the initial design of the layout. There is even a javascript tool that will automatically fix as many of the problems as it can allowing you to design a standards compliant site.

In comes IE8 with the promise of being standards compliant and the hope that the days of fixing perfect code for an imperfect rending engine are gone.

In the wake of a record European Commission fine for failure to comply with interoperability standards, Microsoft on Monday reversed course and announced that it will make Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) compliant with Web standards interoperability. [source]

IE8 has been said to pass the Acid2 test, a tool used to test the rendering engine of a browser.

Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to identify web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. It was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading Style Sheets 1.0 (CSS1) standard, and was released on April 13, 2005. Like Acid1, a web browser passes the test if the way it renders the test page matches a reference rendering. [source]

At work we do a lot of work on the GUI of the product and making sure that it works just as well in IE as it does in FireFox etc. has always been a headache. So, I went ahead and got myself the recommended update from Vista to install IE8 to see what the browser was going to change.

We were working on a new menu system that was based on an unordered list and would be styled with CSS and crafted with Javascript to bring the menu to life (pop ups etc.). The menu worked 100% in FireFox as expected and the design followed already tried and tested methods of achieving the end result in terms of CSS.

In comes IE8 and smashes it to the ground in a pile of sad little CSS dust.

We spent quite a while changing things such as display:none to visibility:hidden and have had to add an entire block of Javascript code to literally fix the style issues we had for IE8.

The funny part of this? The menu worked 100% in FireFox initially and continued to work 100% while we were making all the CSS changes. It just worked as it should have in IE8.

I understand that all browsers will have differences no matter how standard compliant they all claim to be, that’s just life for a developer but generally the differences between FireFox and Opera for example are minimal and the design is still acceptable.

Something else that crept up was to do with the Javascript engine. I will admit first that it was a bug in the code that caused the problem, but FireFox didn’t lock up, eat all the memory and literally hang my computer when I pressed the “Alt” key on my keyboard. When you press Alt in IE8 (if you use it as is out the box), it brings down the “File Edit” menu which changes the size of the window the site is shown in. The problem came in because we had an event listening for this change in window size to re-position the menu and IE8 just crapped itself on this event. As I said it was a bug in the code, but still, it could be quite easy for someone to maliciously exploit the handling of this problem and it has already been done in the past.

To sum it up, I’m disappointed with IE8. I thought it was going to change my views on developing for IE, but so far it hasn’t and I hope the final release will change all this.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft’s IE loses more share, slides to new low (infoworld.com)
• Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 RC1: Promises Faster and Safer Browsing (readwriteweb.com)
• IE’s Loss is Firefox, Safari, Chrome’s Gain (appscout.com)
• Microsoft’s IE loses more share, slides to new low (infoworld.com)

The full list includes the following providers (currently):

Africa

Emtel (Mauritius)
Vodacom (South Africa)
MTN (South Africa)

Asia/Australia

BPL Mobile (Mumbai, India)
Airtel (Karnataka, India)
Mero Mobile (Nepal)
Mobitel (Sri Lanka)

Europe

T-Mobile (Austria)
Orange Polska (Poland)
Meteor (Ireland)
Plus GSM (Poland)
T-Mobile (UK)
BigRedGiant Mobile Solutions
YCC

North America

Alltel
AT&T (formerly Cingular)
Boost Mobile
Nextel (now Sprint Nextel)
Sprint PCS (now Sprint Nextel)
T-Mobile
US Cellular
Verizon
Virgin Mobile USA
7-11 Speakout (USA GSM)
Airtel Wireless (Montana, USA)
Alaska Communications Systems
Bell Mobility & Solo Mobile (Canada)
Fido (Canada)
Illinois Valley Cellular
Koodo Mobile (Canada)
Longlines (USA-Midwest)
MTS (Canada)
Nextel (United States)
Presidents Choice (Canada)
Rogers (Canada)
Sasktel (Canada)
Telus Mobility (Canada)
Virgin Mobile (Canada)
MobiPCS (Hawaii only)
MetroPCS
Qwest
Cellular One (Dobson)
AT&T Enterprise Paging
Cingular (Postpaid)
Helio
Centennial (USA)

South/Central America

Claro (Brasil)
Claro (Nicaragua)
Movistar (Colombia)
Nextel (Argentina)
Personal (Argentina)
Setar Mobile email (Aruba)

Other

Globalstar (satellite)
Iridium (satellite)

Naturally we are using the providers servers, which means they can impose limits (often 10 sms’s per day per user) and we are at the mercy of their servers working – but this can make it a lot easier for you to send SMS’s free of charge to overseas and local phones.

Let us know if anything doesn’t work, or if we are missing anything – and yes ZA users, Vodacom’s is currently down it appears. Check it out.

It’s great to see companies coming to the party and using a South African ad service to display their ads. More often than not I find local ads being displayed through Double Click, and now that there is a local option I don’t see why it should not be used to it’s fullest.

There are a few things that I’d like to see change on the site, such as the Calculator and maybe a login button on the front page, but the service is up and running and that’s what we signed up for.

Well done Adgator / Afrigator.

This time my suggestion is for the earnings calculator. It’s a tool provided by Adgator to get an estimate on your potential earnings. It’s a simple javascript function that takes an input of impressions and times it by 0.12 (12 cents per impression). This could give skewed figures though and here’s proof. (I have checked through the Adgator legal stuff, and it doesn’t say you are not allowed to publish earnings etc. like Adsense).

Our impressions so far today on this domain are 179

Impressions Today

According to their calculator 179 impressions should translate into R21.48 (179 * 0.12).

Calculated Earnings

When viewing actual earnings for the day, the figure is significantly smaller – about 30 times.

Actual Reported Earnings

So my suggestion is this; why not use the actual data that is logged to work out a more realistic earning ratio? Currently for us the earning ratio is about R0.004 per impression, this is a lot less than the fixed 12c used by the calculator. This will prevent unrealistically high expectations being set for bloggers and what their earnings should be.

I have seen and read the fine print on the calculator page and it’s pretty much saying this is the potential in a best case scenario, but I would prefer a more accurate calculation based on the stats they have available to them in their database.

In November last year IEC chief information officer, Libisi Maphanga, said that the organisation planned to spend R3 million to fix the website which was inaccessible to computer users not using Microsoft Windows or Internet Explorer.

Maphanga said that the organisation, which oversees elections in the country, would spend R3 million to make its website accessible to all Internet users.
Today the IEC website is available to all users and the error message that previously infuriated users has been removed

[myBroadband]

This frustrates me endlessly. R3,000,000 for that? First of all, it fails the W3C Validation Service horribly. Why is this such a big thing to mention? There is actual legislation for 1st world countries whereby websites designed for government must meet certain standards. The fact that the new election site fails the validator so badly means people with screen readers and the like won’t actually be able to use the website. This is huge when they are trying to market the site as a resource for the upcoming elections.

Think the election website is bad? Have a look at some of his personal work – http://southafrica2010.co.za/. At a time when a presence on the internet is crucial, how can things like this get by? I don’t care much for the soccer site, that’s not an official site of any kind, but what was the selection process about?

Surely they had a myriad of proposals to go through, and if they did and this is the best, they need to start looking elsewhere for design. South Africa is not short of amazing web designers such as Damien du Toit and Stonewall.

All I want to know, is how did this happen? Can anyone shed some light on this?