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

It if comforting to get certification from the source that counts.

Tuesday 21 April 2015

Seeking Enlightenment: Naked Wedding Celebrations

REBLOG=>Sophia Logica

The South China Morning Post's article dated 24 March 2015 refers to it as "naked wedding celebrations" but it is actually a social protest. Ten couples, some were married for many years, took part in the event. The couples were covered in body paint and dressed only in undergarments for the event at Hangzhou Paradise amusement park in Zhejiang province. They are rejecting modern Chinese value that placed greater value on materialism as a criteria for marriage instead of love.


Couples in body paint and dressed only their underwear hold naked weddings in Zhejiang province

Materialism makes me think of Karl Marx. Operating under a demand driven economy, China like to think of themselves as a communist state. The term has no place for economic class struggle but after decades of opening to this system, people in China would aspire to own a house or a car before they get married. A naked wedding involves a couple marrying without possessing a house or car.


My Comments

With the economic slowdown, couples will not get married if they want to wait until they own a car or a house.

Tuesday 14 April 2015

Employers Ask Illegal Questions

One out of three surveyed didn't know the following questions are illegal to ask in a job interview:

  • What is your political affiliation?
  • What is your race, color or ethnicity?
  • How old are you?
  • Are you disabled?
  • Are you married?
  • Do you have children or plan to?
  • Are you in debt?
  • Do you social drink or smoke?

The finding was based on a nationwide survey of more than 2,100 hiring and human resource managers released Thursday by CareerBuilder, which commissioned Harris Poll, the CBS News reported 10 April 2015.

Job Application

Discrimination of some form can be detected in the question asked. Not included in the list above is location. It is okay to ask if applicants are willing to relocate but not where the applicant live. This can be construed as a prejudice towards a certain residential address. Inquiring about long-term plans is acceptable but asking when interviewees plan to retire can be deems as biases to age.

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

I will keep in mind that 240 pixels width is a good size. I hope to seem other opinions on this.

Tuesday 7 April 2015

Which Diet Plans Really Pay Off?

Which weight program pay-off and which ones does not work? Researchers at Johns Hopkins had done the work for you and they published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on 6 April 2015. They reviewed clinical trials on the biggest players in the commercial weight-loss programs, including Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and Nutrisystem, Medifast and OPTIFAST, the CBS News reported.

John Hopkins researchers studied 4,200 cases and found only a handful met the requirement of reliability. Diet plans that worked are those which were reinforced by data instituting that participants on average lost more weight after one year than people who were either dieting on their own were. Medical contributor Dr. Holly Phillips told "CBS This Morning" that she is always flabbergasted when asked which plans works. With this research she can now give a scientific answer.

weight loss

This research will serve as an advice to two-third of the American population who were are obese. Before ditching out hundreds of dollars on packaged meals, nutrition shakes, or counseling sessions, they could consult this research which ones are most effective in the long run. American are expected to spend $2.5 billion on commercial diet plans and services in 2014. Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig were highlighted as those that were effective. Nutrisystem was good but lasted only 3 to 6 months. The "very-low calorie programs" namely; Health Management Resources (HMR), Medifast, and OPTIFAST showed the benefits diminished by the 6-month mark. Atkins helps but not as much as with some competing diet programs. The Ornish diet was excluded because it is primarily focused on heart health rather than weight loss.

Dr. Phillips said the most successful plans had in common: it incorporated social support and teamwork. "The only diets that work are those that you stick with, and if you have some companionship along the way, you're more likely to do it," she said. The Zone diet was not reviewed by the researchers because unlike other weight-loss plans in the study, Zone does not include any behavioral or social support.

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

Mobile surfing works for me. It is specifically helpful when I need to check equity prices. Casual surfing I usually do with laptops.

Wednesday 1 April 2015

Light and Easy Talk: Solar-powered Aircraft Lands in China

REBLOG>Light and Easy Talk: Solar-powered Aircraft Lands in China:
Veronica Glowsome's Original Blog

Setting off on 9 March from Abu Dhabi to circumnavigate the world, the Solar Impulse 2 (Si2) became the first ever single-seater solar aircraft to enter China in Chongqing airport early on Tuesday (31 March 2015) morning local time (1735 UTC). She made four stops before arriving in China. The distance of 1,468 kilometers from Muscat, Oman to Ahmedabad, India was the longest distance covered by a solar-powered flight. Another record was set for solar-powered flight with a speed of 117 knots (216 kilometers per hour) reached during the stretch from Varanasi, India to Mandalay, Myanmar.

With a width of about 72 meters, the Si2 is wider than a Boeing 747 jet. She only weighs 2.3 tons which slightly heavier than a sedan. She employed more than 17,000 solar cells on her wings to power up four electric motors. Solar Impulse 2 is expected to complete the 35,000 km journey within five months [see my previous blog]. It had charted an average speed is 70 kilometers per hour. The Si2 was created by Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg of Switzerland will take turns to pilot the plane in the round the world trip.

Solar Impulse 2 in Flight

The flight from Myanmar to Chongqing took 20-and-a-half hours. Flying above the mountainous Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan meant a steep climb at the beginning of the journey. Flying at high altitude, Piccard had to wear an oxygen mask in the 3.8 square-meter, unpressurized cockpit as temperatures dropped to minus 20 degrees celsius on the 1,375-kilometer (854-mile) route. Strong low-level winds greeted the flight as it arrived in Chongqing. It flies next to the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing before heading to Hawaii. It is due back in Abu Dhabi in August after its journey of 12 stages, the Deutshe Welle reported.


My Comments

They need to work on the speed. Twenty hours from Myanmar to China is nothing to shout about.

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

The tax man should consider losses as write off if they are thinking of taxing poker players.