Blog of Jaap A. Haitsma

There is a lot of noise lately about web tablets, because of the upcoming web tablet of Apple the iSlate.

The web tablet is something in between your laptop and your mobile phone, just like a netbook. So you can see web tablet as a netbook without a physical keyboard. I believe that the tablet and the netbook will merge into one device. Basically a “Super Phone” with or without a physical keyboard with a screen size somewhere between 6 and 11 inch.

Because of its size the “Super Phone” would also be ideal for reading e-books. And who wants to carry around yet another device. However current LCD screens are not  nice to read from and consume a lot of power. However there are some promising display technologies coming up. One of them is Pixel Qi. They are working on improving the display technology developed by the OLPC project to make LCDs readable in sunlight and improve their power consumption. They are now shipping 10.1″ screens. See video below.

Notion Ink showed a prototype of a “Super Phone” with Pixel Qi screen at the CES. See video below

It seems that the touch screen causes some extra glare which does not help for readability. But if they can improve that or use Wacom technology with a stylus instead (The wacom touch technology goes below the screen instead of on top of the screen like fingertouch technologies) I think it could be a serious E-Book killer.

Also exciting is that this “Super Phone” is running Android so it will have instantly many applications available.

A slight disadvantage of Pixel Qi is that you need to switch the screen between e-book (monochrome) mode and full LCD color mode.

However there are display technologies in the works that can deliver the wholy grail: video in color with the readability of paper. Liquavista is developing such technology but its not that mature yet according to their website they will productize it in 2010/2011 but it looks very promising. See video below.

I’m curious to see what kind of display technology the Apple iSlate will have.

For one of my websites I wanted to have a page as the homepage for my wordpress install instead of the blog. Hence I did a google search on “wordpress have page as homepage”. I clicked on the 3rd result called WordPress Tutorial – How to Make a Static Page Your Home Page because I thought that would give me what I was looking for. It sure did but I needed to watch a 10 minute video for it . I should have picked the subpage of the second result Creating a Static Front Page « WordPress Codex that just had text explaining what I needed to do at it would cost me just 20 seconds. In this case there was still a text tutorial but I’ve googled in the past for other stuff and the only thing that came up were video tutorials.

So why o why do more and more people do video tutorials. Just because it’s hip to put videos on youtube? Some people claim that video tutorials are better for beginners. However if I had to watch for every setting of a program a 10 minute video I would get really frustrated as a beginner.

What’s your take on these video tutorials?

When I bought the haitsma.org domain in 2003 I decided to do this with bhosted.nl because back then it was the cheapest hosting provider in the Netherlands. I haven’t had many issues with them but recently discovered that their bandwidth and storage limits are pretty limited: 2 euro (+19% VAT) per month for 200MB storage and 4GB monthly traffic. I was getting close to the 200MB limit and would need to go to their 400MB package for 4 euro (+19% VAT)

As I said in my blog about CheapRiver.com I bought that domain at GoDaddy.com. I bought it there because google referred to GoDaddy to buy a domain. This was much cheaper than at bhosted.nl: 8.99$ per year vs 15 euro per year and a 10 euro setup fee (It also helps that the dollar is low compared to the euro). As I bought the domain on GoDaddy I also got an offer for hosting. 5.99$ a month + taxes for 100GB storage and 1.5TB of monthly traffic. I was planning on moving all my sites there but got frustrated on how slow the GoDaddy website and website admin sites are. Furthermore the websites are very user unfriendly.

Hence I did some web searching and discovered justhost.com. It’s consistently ranked as one of the top hosting providers in most of the rankings I found on the web and it’s very cheap

I now have:

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Storage
• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• Free domain name

And that for just $2.95 per month (taxes included) with a contract of 24 months. So for just 70$ I’m set for the next 2 years.

There is a slight trick to it to get this rate. You go to justhost.com. Be sure to select United States instead of Europe otherwise you pay the same amount euros as in dollars. Select the plan of 24 months. Fill in some of your contact details. When you have done that don’t order but load another web page by selecting a bookmark or so. At that moment you’ll get a popup with an offer for a 50% discount. If you accept that offer you’ll get to the $2.95 per month rate for 24 months.

Sofar I’m happy with justhost.com. They are very responsive to questions. Usually within 30 minutes you have a reply and there is also live chat help.

They use the popular cpanel interface which is a way more user friendly than the cluttered interface of GoDaddy. Only lame thing is that you cannot manage CNAME DNS entries yourself at justhost.com. You need to send them an email and then they change it. They did that within 30 minutes so that works for me.

I discovered a few days a ago that I made an error in making the Search Plugins of the GNOME Amazon Store. I put an extra dash into the affiliate id: gnome-searchplugin vs gnomesearchplugin. Hence all the items you bought via the search plugin did not result in affiliate fees for the GNOME foundation .

As the affiliate center of Amazon by default shows an aggregate of all affiliate ids of the GNOME foundation I didn’t notice it until a few days ago. Because I was surprised about that the affiliate fees were not going up I decided to look into it and discovered that the search plugins did not register any clicks or sales. I’ve now updated the plugins and these register the clicks. So please remove the ones you have currently installed and install the new ones listed below or on http://www.gnome.org/friends/amazon. Sorry about the mistake but the good news is that the GNOME Foundation can probably get much more value out of the affiliate fees in 2010.

Please drop me a line when you bought something with the plugin. That way I can make sure that they work correctly now

NOTE the links below might not work if you read this post in an RSS reader, because it needs a javascript command to install the search plugin. Just install the search plugin by going to this post directly.

• Install GNOME Amazon.com Plugin
• Install GNOME Amazon.co.uk Plugin
• Install GNOME Amazon.ca Plugin
• Install GNOME Amazon.de Plugin
• Install GNOME Amazon.fr Plugin
• Install GNOME Amazon.co.jp Search Plugin

Bruce Schneier the well known security specialist has an interesting opinion piece on security at CNN. He basically argues that all the extra measures don’t give any fundamental extra security but just gives the general audience a feeling of safety

For my English Book price comparison site CheapRiver.com I wanted to use similar status popup panels as Google is using for it’s web applications. For example the small yellowish block which says “Loading…” in the middle at the top of your browser window when you use gmail.

The GWT widget PopupPanel can be used for this. Hence I made my own StatusPopupPanel class which inherits from PopupPanel. I thought I just put a cell of a table in there with the background color I want and center it at the top of the page.

Not being an expert in CSS the difficulty I had is getting it positioned at the top of the page in the middle.
I asked how to do this on the GWT mailing list, but did not get the answer I was looking for. Hence I asked a colleague at work how to do it (Thanks Roy) and he came up with the solution for the CSS. The trick is that you have to put the table in a <div> container of which you set the width to 100%. So now CheapRiver has nice status popups. I only use them for errors so I hope you never see them. Here’s a screen shot. (Click to enlarge)

And here is the code
StatusPopupPanel.java

import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.Grid;
import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.PopupPanel;

public class StatusPopupPanel extends PopupPanel {
 private Grid grid = new Grid(1, 1);
 public StatusPopupPanel() {
 super(false);
 grid.getRowFormatter().setStyleName(0, "statusPopupPanelText");
 grid.setStyleName("statusPopupPanel");
 setWidget(grid);
 setStyleName("statusPopupPanelContainer");
 }

 public void setText(String str) {
 grid.setText(0, 0, str);
 }
}

The CSS for StatusPopupPanel.java

.statusPopupPanelContainer {
 position: fixed !important;
 top: 0px;
 width: 100%;
}

.statusPopupPanel {
 background-color: #ff3535;
 margin: 0 auto;
 padding: 0 5px;
 -moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 5px;
 -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 5px;
 -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 5px;
 -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 5px;
}

.statusPopupPanelText {
 font-weight: bold;
 font-color: #333;
}