I simply love creative educational videos like this. It makes things so much easier to understand by the use of animation to explain complex and brain-torturing concepts.

This video brings you back trough the history of the INTERNET itself… how it all began. I think I can understand more about the origin of the Internet now better compared to when I went to the networking class back in college for a whole semester! Ain’t technology just great?

This video is uploaded on Vimeo with the title “History of the Internet“:

Thanks (AGAIN!) to Funky.Karaoke for finding and sharing this useful video. Keep up the good work bro!

And one more thing (though I should’ve done this earlier)… HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009 to all you loyal readers! I bet most of you have “Growing my startup venture” as the major thing in your 2009 resolution

Let me allow the CommonCraft guys do the talking … using ice-creams as the analogy. Cool~

The iPhone is probably the coolest and the most useful gadget I have ever owned. I have been playing around with the iPhone for several months now and mark my words when I say this, “by the end of 2009, everyone will have ditched their existing phones and convert to the iPhone”. Yeah, so that means you too, dear reader!

I initially wanted to get an HTC phone, but after comparing the price and functionalities between these two “touch-technology” gadgets, I came to the conclusion that the iPhone is the better choice. And I was right. It’s wayyyyyy better.

Why iPhone? Well first of all, we all already know how cool the iPhone’s multi-touch technology works. The ability to enlarge pictures by stretching apart your two fingers on the screen, moving things around here and there, zooming in and out, flipping pages and stuffs, all by using the gestures of your fingers on the screen… plus the iPhone’s ability of knowing whether you’re holding the phone vertically or horizontally… these things has never failed to awe anyone who’s new to it. It is just unbelievably advanced and “intelligent” - and soooo cool…. again - that you’ll feel like you got hold of a device from the future. That’s right folks, The Future is Now.

Okay, enough of the sales talk. Three reasons why the iPhone is going to dominate the Web 2.0 world:

1. Browsing websites in the iPhone is exactly the same as like browsing websites on your PC/laptop

Yes! Thanks to the multi-touch technology, the Safari browser inside the iPhone will render webpages just as it normally would in a normal computer! No more impractical WAP-based pages and phones - they are so dead. I hate seeing broken pages and minimalist sites on a slow GPRS connection anyway. The iPhone connects to the Internet via WiFi (now even 3G!), so iPhone users can actually sit at Starbucks and browse the Internet without even needing to carry that heavy laptop. And remember, it renders the actual page! AJAX, Javascript, all will be working correctly. So that means Web 2.0 apps are going to be used for a long, long time ahead!

2. Affordable price

Priced at only USD199 for the new Version 2 iPhone, anyone can afford one these days. I am pretty convinced that the iPhone is going to be the next Windows PC of this era. Everyone is going to get themselves an iPhone, and once everyone starts using it, more and more web apps will be exposed to those people who previously was never really Internet-savvy users before.

3. iPhone apps can be developed

Lots and lots of ever-increasing number of apps can be freely downloaded from the net and installed in the iPhone. If you’re a Web 2.0 developer, it doesn’t hurt to build an iPhone app for your web app as well. More and more iPhone apps are being developed as we speak. The iPhone apps will help boost the functionalities and practicalities of your web app. Take it to your full advantage!

The iPhone is just too awesome that I’m warning other mobile providers like Nokia, Samsung and LG…… YOU GUYS BETTER START WORRYING!

This is a HUGE compilation of questions-and-answers related to Startup with wide range of topics from the Hacker News (Ask YC Archive) categorized by subjects. This page should be bookmarked by anyone who’s into the Web 2.0 business because it contain experiences and tips for almost about anything related to starting up or managing a Web 2.0 company.

The page I’m talking about is this:

• http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Now go ahead and Bookmark it! A very useful resource you don’t want to miss

This one is quite a lengthy video (could be “old” too) but is rich of interesting insights about the Web 2.0 industry. In this video, Michael Arrington (for those who don’t know, he’s the TechCrunch guy) interviewed 13 well-known startup CEOs including one from JotSpot, Browster (dead), ye olde Technorati, RapLeaf, Rojo, Socializr, Bolt, Piczo, VideoEgg, Eurekster and Simply Hired.

Topics range from the basic fundamentals of Web 2.0 to the deep inner workings of startup companies, including the limitations, challenges and tips of managing a serious Web 2.0 startup company. So if you have 25 minutes to kill, sit back, relax, and enjoy this video

Hope you learnt something interesting & useful today.

… because the big players did it and it worked better than the other smaller players who built complicated bulky apps …

Thanks to StuffThatHappens for the illustration and to FunkyKaraoke for sharing it!

Well, I’m no fan of local politics, but a post in Profy today caught my eye.

Seems like this 89-years-old gradma turned to the Internet to reach voters in her political campaign as a free candidate for the coming election day (oh wait… it’s tommorrow ). Not only does she has her own campaign blog, she also makes use of Youtube channels, Picasa photo album, and even created a Facebook group to reach out for supporters.

Telling by her age (and the way she gives that “blank stare” into the LCD ), I’m sure someone else is maintaining those online campaign stuffs for her. But I don’t care if she’s gonna nail the election or not (considering her age and background, and what was the name of her party again?), she’s definitely one step ahead than most other candidates out there who still relies solely on traditional street-side posters and a few talks to attract voters. This grandma records herself and posts her videos into Youtube. She pose for pictures and uploaded them to Picasa. She fully utilizes Web 2.0 to do her viral marketing campaign.

You rock grandma!

A few years ago when Ajax started to get really famous as an alternative solution for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIA), a lot of people started bashing Flash, saying that Flash is bad considering its implementation - its loading time, its scalability issues, and especially the part when Flash contents can’t be easily indexed by search engines or be bookmarked. As a huge Flash user back then, I get pretty frustrated over this new development. As I remembered correctly, a few years before Ajax, Flash used to be the king of all. People praised it for delivering the only proven cross-platform solution over the net and putting Java Applets to shame. People were magnified by Flash’s ability to create stunningly eye-catching effects and interactivity that no one has ever thought possible to be done inside a web browser before. Websites like 2advanced.com got very well respected within the Web community of that era.

A few years later, things started to change. Topics like SEO and “friendly URLs” get tossed here and there. Online bookmark applications like del.icio.us and BlinkList started to get into the mainstream lane. All these new adoptions has revealed Flash’s weaknesses in Internet’s content indexing.

However, there were a crowd of people who still believed in Flash and injected it into the Web2.0-sphere. Suddenly web apps like Geni, Scribd and SlideShare sprung up into the Web 2.0 scene introducing Flash as their core technology and proving the true power of Flash in interactivity. People started to realize that with the right application, the strength of Flash can actually be put to good use. This is for the people who keeps bashing Flash out there

“A 100% Flash website” may be somewhat impractical at this age, but Flash itself, is not. It is still playing a huge role in the Web 2.0 scene for its flexibility and cross-platform adaptability. Think about it… there wouldn’t be YouTube if not because of Flash.

One of the most basic security practice in the web application world is to hide your web server’s software version number. It doesn’t matter if you use Apache 1.3.37 or lighttpd 1.4.10 on a Linux machine or IIS-5.0 on Windows, hiding the version number is crucial if you want to mitigate the risk of your server being attacked by troublemakers.

BEFORE TREATMENT:

AFTER TREATMENT:

Version numbers are the first thing a typical hacker will look for if they want to attack your server. This is because once they know what version your web server is running on, they can easily look for what kind of vulnerabilities are associated with that version, and then simply run the related exploit to hack your server. Attackers can easily know the type and version of your webserver by looking at the HTTP response headers received after they send requests to your application through a Telnet program, or by using Firefox addons/extensions like ServerSpy and Live HTTP Headers in order to see your web server’s version the moment they visit your site.

So hide your Apache and PHP version!

In order to do this, you need to do some sys admin job. I am going to specifically focus on Apache and PHP because I am more of a LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) user. If you use ASP on Microsoft IIS, I can’t help you much with all these version-hiding thingy (but hey, Google is there to save your day! )

So here goes..

Hide Apache version number:

• Open your Apache’s httpd.conf file (in my case, # vi /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf), and look for the line that says: “ServerSignature On“
• Change it to “ServerSignature Off” (this will hide the Apache version normally seen at the bottom of your 404 error pages)
• Then add “ServerTokens Prod” below that line (to hide the version in HTTP response headers)
• Restart your HTTP service (# /etc/init.d/httpd restart)
• Done! No more Apache version numbers

Hide PHP version number:

• Find your php.ini file (in my case, # vi /usr/local/lib/php.ini), and look for the line that says: “expose_php On“
• Change it to: “expose_php Off“
• Restart your HTTP service if necessary
• Done! No more PHP version number in your HTTP response header

Wasn’t that hard now, was it? Just a few tweaks can save you a great deal of security risk, and may save you your business too! Bear in mind that this does not in any way protect from real vulnerabilities that may be associated with your version. Patches or upgrades should still be applied. However, hiding the version numbers will at least make the hackers life harder

Ok… after weeks of hardcore coding, I think it’s time for some entertainment 2.0. I’m not sure if you guys have seen this video yet, but you really should if you haven’t. I find everything about the song to be funny, and kind of true, which what makes it even funnier. The coolness and “geeky-ness” of it just makes me feel like dancing. Enjoy!

Cool ain’t it? Go ahead and re-play it for another round…. I know you want to.

PS: Notice the remark “Won’t you blog about this song”…. ? Aha… I just did…

Credits to the video creator - Richter Scales