Saturday 25 April 2015

Anything Under the Sun: Google’s Mobile Friendly Test

REBLOG=>SavySeph

My Casino Gambling Tip is now a mobile friendly website. My next task would be to get XingCai Gambling Tales to be mobile friendly too. I had outlined the step involved to get it mobile friendly in my previous blog and will use the same procedure. The wave of mobile suffers had got Google to cater to them or lose page ranking. This would be a concern for webmasters until they fix the problem.


Google Mobile Friendly Certification

While Google had written to webmasters with some links to make a mobile friendly website, they provided no link to test the mobile-friendliness of the site. Using W3C tidy up could provide some additional help on the meta tags. After much surfing, I found certification from Google themselves. Visit this link and type in your website’s URL.



My Comments

W3C is a good help but most of the big guys like CNN don’t follow it.I wonder it it will help in google page ranking.

Wednesday 22 April 2015

Carpe Diem: Seize the Day: Willie Nelson's Pot

REBLOG=>Phil Andows

Willie Nelson, renowned for singing about the merits of smoking pot in country and western music, is making his own brand of marijuana. The product features "high quality strains of marijuana," and will be on the shelves as "Willie's Reserve". It will be grown and sold in Colorado and Washington where it is legal to get stoned without a doctor's note, CNN Money reported on 20 April 2015. The motivated singer said, "I am looking forward to working with the best growers in Colorado and Washington to make sure our product is the best on the market". He founded the company out of a desire to get involved in the growing market for legal pot, Elaine Schock spokeswoman for "Willie's Reserve" told CNN Money.


Willie's Reserve picture from CNN

Nelson,81, had gone a long way for pot. He has been an outspoken supporter of marijuana legalization and an advocate for industrial hemp production. Nelson will focus on the quality of the products, encouraging responsible use and pushing for legalization. "He will serve as more than a figurehead. His values and vision set the bar for everything the company does," Schock said. A new song, "It's All Going to Pot" which Nelson duets with Merle Haggard was on April 20 to coincide with his announcement. It will make 4/20 (April 20) an unofficially declared National Weed Day. In time to come the song may be the anthem for the National Weed Day but Nelson is not the first musician to lend his name to a marijuana brand. Last year, the estate of Jamaican reggae icon Bob Marley struck a deal with a private equity firm to market and sell marijuana and other products under the name "Marley Natural."



My Comments

"It's All Going to Pot" may not be the Weeds Day’s anthem as there will be too many contenders.

Wednesday 15 April 2015

Anything Under the Sun: Think Small to Design Websites for Mobile

REBLOG=>SavySeph

Deciding on picture size is my next task in getting my website to be mobile friendly. In my previous blog on this topic, I figured that reducing the size of navigation menu is a good place to start to design a website to fit mobile device. I used single word for title and double word for subtitle. This seems to work out some of the problem. I figure the next step would be to have a universal width for all pictures. Ideally the picture could be stretch or shrunk to fit across the multiple platforms without losing too much picture quality.


Given the size of webpages, stretching and shrinking a picture is not the real problem. Pictures who are magnify twice or reduce by half are never too shabby when it comes to quality. This should be enough do the trick to fit an image into a website. The bigger concern is manipulated images sometimes take a longer time to load. The 4G phones are great for speed but as the best for the current technology they are a minority user. Most people would have the lower 3G speed on their phones. The loyalist to old phone will still surf with 2G and there are still a number of these mobile surfers out there. These people will favor sites who were sufficiently fast for their devices.


I went window shopping for mobile phones using google and decided that I have 3 categories to please. Based on their minimum screen width, I simply name them mini (80 pixels), midi (321 pixels) and maxi (481). After throwing some math around, I decided that all images on my website will be 240 pixels wide. Shrinking 240 to 80 (the lower end of the mini) is one-third reduction. This will likely cause some problem in loading speed. For the higher end of the mini (320 pixels), the image is stretch less than 50% which is acceptable. For the 481 pixels width, there is no stretching of image. The image with text displayed by the side will be at least half of the screen.


Terminologies in Casino Gambling Tips

I now had all my pictures resize to 240 pixels width. Going through the pictures one by one had been a tedious exercise. Some of my image were name by their sizes. A cat image, for example, had been named cat330x250. The 330 represent the width and 250 is for the height. I still maintain the old name of the image. It would sound silly but once something is publish it is not advisable to make changes. Keeping the old name will ensure that people who link my pictures will not get a blank image. I actually have three manga pages outstanding. These three cartoons are at least 600 pixels wide. The task will be to break them down to smaller pictures who are 240 pixels wide. The main picture that will adopt the old name while new pictures will carry the old name with a sequential numbering suffix.


Going through image by image can also make you see things from a different angle. I redraw two images. I hope the people who had link the old pictures prefer the new pictures. I had also came up with 5 new pictures. These are for the pages which previously did not have a picture. The remaining task, unless new development crops up, I will drop the navigation menu for the mini users.


My Comments

This is information that is helpful for me. Thanks for doing the shopping and sharing it.

Monday 13 April 2015

Unusual Cargo Force Flight to Land

The pilot of Alaska Airline flight 448 requested an emergency for priority landing when heard screaming and banging from the cargo compartment. The flight took off at 3:15 p.m. Pacific Time in Seattle. After 14 minutes in flight the aircraft had to turn back and land in Seattle-Tacoma International.

Alaska Airline in Flight

After the plane landed a ramp agent, an employee of Menzies Aviation, was found inside the front cargo hold. According to Alaska Airlines the cargo hold is pressurized and temperature-controlled. The employee told authorities he had fallen asleep. The worker appeared OK but was taken to a hospital as a precaution the CBC News reported 13 April 2015.

This is going to cost the Airline dearly and it would certainly be investigated. It is hard to imagine that one can fall asleep without fellow workers realizing it. Did the employee actually sneaked into the cargo hold intentionally? Once he realized the compartment was pressurized and temperature-controlled he panicked and start banging away. Upon being rescued, he conveniently use sleeping-on-the-job as an excuse.

Monday 6 April 2015

POW Vivisection Display at New Kyushu Museum

A newly opened Japanese museum exposed evidence of war crime during the World War II. The museum is situated on the campus of Kyushu University in Japan. The museum, opened on April 4, features the history of medical science of the university in the past 110 years. A total of 63 items on display. The notable exhibits at the museum showed the evidence of eight US pilots vivisected by professors of the university in 1945.

The victims were eight airmen of the U.S. B-29 bomber. The aircraft was downed near the border between Kumamoto and Oita prefectures. According to the exhibit, several professors injected diluted sea water into the pilots and dissected their lungs and other organs to observe how long the victims would live after the operation, the Japan Times reported on 4 April 2015.

All eight pilots eventually died. One professor committed suicide when the war ended. The other 14 faculty members were either sentenced to life-in-prison or handed the death penalty for committing war crimes. The school treated the topic as a taboo and avoided mentioning it in public over the years. At a meeting of professors at the School of Medicine in March, the university agreed to face up to the campus' 'dark history.'

Thursday 2 April 2015

Anything Under the Sun: My Mobile-friendly Website

REBLOG>Anything Under the Sun: My Mobile-friendly Website

ss's Original Blog

Google wrote me a warning letter about 2 weeks ago asking me to make my website more mobile friendly. Google said the increase demand in mobile phone browsing had been tremendous. Well, it is not a warning for doing something that pissed google off. It was actually a concerned notification. Google anticipated that the wave of mobile surfers will get stronger with the passage of time and webmasters were advised to cater to their needs. If I were to take it as a friendly notice I don’t need to do anything. I choose to take it as a stern warning so that I will have to adapt before I get left out.


Heck! I don't have the slightest clue where to start. I hope I could just wave a magic wand with some code and bingo! Fortunately, google is a good place to start looking for those hocus pocus code. Knowing the right keyword to punch into google would help. Next comes the endless list of reading materials on the technology to make your website flexible to multiple devices. Climbing the steep learning curve was no fun. It’s just nothing but reading without having enough knowledge to start doing something.


I concluded that it was about starting small. Fit the small screen then the bigger ones and eventually the desktop. This calls for a re-engineering as my website was catered for desktop size. I have started with reducing the size of my menu. I used single word titles for the menu items to shorten it for mobile size. Sub menu items could use double or triple word titles. Whoopee, I managed nail down some of the problem. For screen smaller than 320 pixels wide, I may have to do away with the menu. I will get around to this but the next step would be resizing all my images. I am going to do a lot of experimenting to find a good size that could be stretch or shrunk to fit across the platform without losing too much picture quality.


My Mobile Size Home Page


My Comments

Surfing is leisure for me. Tablets are good. The size is not too shabby and it can be done in lazy positions like lying down on a sofa.

Wednesday 1 April 2015

Pest in Midst: Mercury was Painted Black

REBLOG>Pest in Midst: Mercury was Painted Black

XingCai Tang's Original Blog

The planet Mercury reflects much less light compared to our own moon, which is about the same size. This had scientist bewildered for a long time. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Brown University and the Planetary Sciences Institute say they may have found the solution. Megan Bruck Syal, a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore, said that it was "effectively painted black".


 Planet Mercury

Mercury is the planet that is closest to the sun. Compared to the moon, there is are much more carbon dust flung off from comets close to the sun. The researchers say Mercury is surrounded by 50 times the amount of carbon dust than our moon. For ages scientist believes that microscopic meteorites spawned from carbon-rich comets may have contributed enough dark-hued carbon to reduce the amount of reflected light.


Tests using a big NASA gun made to simulate planetary impacts on a small-scale seem to show the theory is plausible, the authors say. "We show that carbon acts like a stealth darkening agent," said Peter Schultz, a professor emeritus of geological sciences at Brown University. "From the standpoint of spectral analysis, it's like an invisible paint," the CNN reported on 31 March 2015.



My Comments

The microscopic meteorites spawned from carbon-rich comets are like blots of black ink waiting to drop on Mercury.

Anything Under the Sun: Gambling Requires Skills

REBLOG>Anything Under the Sun: Gambling Requires Skills

SavySeph's Original Blog

I tried to convince my readers that gambling requires skill. There are tons of researches that would conclude otherwise. In a recent (2012) study Professor Gerhard Meyer, of the University of Bremen's Institute of Psychology and Cognition Research, suggested that poker was chiefly a game of chance. There were 300 participants in Prof Meyer's research. They played 60 hands poker each, on tables of six. The players were classified as 'expert' and 'average' players based on their ability to make money from good, bad and average hands. The research found that 'expert' players lost less money on bad hands, but did no better than 'average' players on mediocre hands - and made slightly less on good ones. Prof Meyer concluded that 'poker players overestimate the skill factor in their play'.


A research studied 456 million hands of poker from a year's worth of online game. In just a few hands the better-performing players fared better half the time. Their success rate gradually increased until they played 1,471 hands. Given that frequency, they could do better at least 75 per cent of the time. Dr Dennie van Dolder, of the University of Nottingham's School of Economics, said the study showed 'skilled players will consistently outperform less skilled players if enough hands...are played.'




Researchers from the University of Nottingham, working with colleagues from Erasmus University Rotterdam and VU University Amsterdam, also noted that players who finished in the top one per cent in the first half of the year were 12 times more likely than others to repeat the feat in the second half. Writer and TV presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell, one of Britain's top professional players, has won more than £1.5m - including £400,000 at a single event. Dr van Dolder said, "It's up to legislators to decide whether the role of chance diminishes fast enough for poker to be considered a game of skill," the Daily Mail reported on 25 March 2015.



My Comments

There should be no doubt that a poker face is not an easy skill to master. It is amazing that people would had thought poker was a game of chance.