Top 10 Biggest Mafias Around the World

    Mafia refers to secretive groups involved in organized crimes spread over a lot of countries. They are usually referred to by the name of the country they originated in and the majority of members will be of this nationality. They usually aspire to have a monopoly over illegal activities like drugs, firearm trafficking, etc. This is an article about the mafia groups and their activities. They are listed in an increasing order of their influence in the world.

 

Designing Microsoft Excel 2007 Charts

Topic: UI Design Methodologies - a look at designing Executive Dashboards and Excel 2007

User interface design methodologies, whether for enterprise dashboards or software packages, should follow the same basic steps and principles. Of course, they should be user-centered to ensure that the needs of the end user are kept foremost in mind, but the design methodology should also allow for exploration of current best practices and design influences. This is especially true in software applications where being on the cutting edge is a selling point.

My typical design steps for dashboards or any other type of user interface are:

1. Understand the User Requirements
2. Survey the landscape of existing design solutions to identify best practices
3. Explore solutions with low fidelity mockups
4. Wireframe scenarios for user feedback
5. Create high fidelity interactive prototypes
6. Iterate through this cycle of envisioning before proceeding to development

Does this methodology work? Yes. Do dashboard design teams follow it? Obviously not! A recent comment by a Dashboard Spy reader rings true - After viewing the collection of executive dashboards at enterprise-dashboard.com, (no easy task - as there are 1000 dashboards there) , the reader stated his reaction bluntly - that, quite simply, the designs of current dashboards are awful.

What Twitter is good for

Twitter has been hailed as "a total waste of time" to "the next generation IM". The site allows users to easily and frequently update what they are doing, through a Web browser, IM, or text message. It's been quite the buzz among early adopters -- Hitwise has some data on Twitter's growth. Robert Scoble calls it "blogging mated with IM" and is a frequent user. I've set up an account too, but I find it darn hard to remember to Twitter (I've set it up to nudge me every 24 hours, but I usually ignore it, my bad). And Mat Balez has a great post on why he thinks Twitter will be dead before the end of the year.

Here's our take: Twitter is going to be overused, overload people, who will then get turned off. There is just simply too much noise and not enough valuable "signal" to be worthwhile. I run into a case of TMI - too much information -- in that I don't really need to know that you're heading to the bathroom, etc.

Yet, I think there is real potential for a service like Twitter in several areas: 1) for small, trusted groups to keep up to date with each other; 2) publishing information easily; and 3) as an aggregator of information. Here are some more details:

How to Sneaky Redirect

    ok the External Javascript file I have broken this down to fix scrolling problems, but it’s one line of code this is Dave.JS

Benchmarking PHP Localization — Is gettext fast enough?

    Last year, I wrote a post about using gettext to localize PHP web pages. Gettext makes it easy to maintain the translations and always provides a fallback locale. But is it fast?

    I created a simple web page to compare the performance of various localization methods for PHP. It only contains 3 localized strings and does not use advanced features of gettext (e.g. plurals). I wrote a version using the gettext PHP extension (”gettext Ext.”), one using PHP-gettext (”gettext PHP”, a gettext implementation written in pure PHP) and a version that does not use gettext at all, instead it uses an array that contains all the translations (”String ID”).

    I put all three pages on a Debian machine with the latest Apache 2.0.55 and PHP 5.1.2 and used the Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool to measure the performance of the different methods. I always made two tests - using the default locale (English) and a translation (German), because gettext does not have to use a locale file for the default language (it’s embedded in the page).

Localizing PHP web sites using gettext

    Developing multi language web sites using PHP is actually very easy. A common approach is having an include file for every supported language which contains an array that maps string ids to localized text (for example "WelcomeText" => "Welcome to our homepage." would be included using something like <?= $strings["WelcomeText"] >). However there are several problems with this approach. First of all, when the application is updated and additional strings are added, there is no way to determine which new strings were added and if they are present in every language (unless you write a script for it). What happens if a newly added string is not yet translated into a specific language?

Nofollow revisited

It’s been about four months now since Google introduced nofollow to the web. Since then it’s been adopted by every major blogging platform, as well as many other wiki, forum and CMS platforms. Now that nofollow is everywhere, it’s time to take a good hard look at whether it’s actually been effective at its stated purpose of stopping comment spam.

I will show today that Google’s nofollow initiative has not resulted in a reduction of link spam, but instead has had much more insidious effects on the Internet.