And I was still confused on what route to take as I have seen other people with a lot of proficiency in Joomla and still making their websites rank high for SEO purposes like the works of Jun Macarambon and Dennis Agulo.

But I received the task of doing some research at work to compare various CMS’, Drupal emerged as the winner. The research was a long and detailed process, which I do not even want to repeat in this blog post. And after my own research, Drupal was my winner and after I have done my research, I was happy to find other websites starting to come out that reinforces my decision. Here are a few things I found on the net which may want you to choose Drupal also over other CMS’.

The IBM Development Team thinks Drupal is the best for them

IMB Software Engineers: Louis Weitzman, Alister Lewis-Bowen and Stephen Evanchik did their study and posted the results here.

Drupal Wins Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award

Wow, Drupal won the best CMS, after always being second from Joomla, this year, Joomla is second.

A lot of popular and probably high traffic sites use Drupal

JumpTV, MTV UK, The New York Observer, Ozzy Osbourne, Playboy Germany, The World (by BBC World Service) and Us Weekly Online, a longer list of notable sites using Drupal can be found here.

I myself am sold by the power of Drupal, now the next step is actually learning it. Learning Drupal is not that hard and there are several mini Drupal tutorials here and here. And one of the best teachers of Drupal is the community. Learn from other Drupal users in in the official Drupal forum. And in the learning process you can play both roles as Drupal student or Drupal teacher depending on your current Drupal knowledge. You can always be a Drupal pupil to Drupal experts better than you. And you can play Drupal instructor to followers with less Drupal knowledge.

Now if the forum is not enough, You can always buy Drupal books, I 3 books I recommend are: Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress, Pro Drupal Development and Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites. One thing I like about books compared to online forums is, I could easily bring a book to the restroom when needed since being in the restroom is always a waste of time. Might as well learn Drupal in the process.

• .docx
• .xlsx
• .pptx

This simply means you are not yet running Microsoft Office 2007 and is probably still running MS Office 2003 or lower. And isn’t in frustrating knowing that your old Office cannot open these files and you think you have to buy the new Office 2007 package?

Actually you can still open MS Office 2007 files with these file extension in Office 2003 using the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. If you need a copy, you will need some update packs and simply download the compatibility pack here. No more problems in opening .docx, .xlsx and .pptx anymore.

Through the widespread banner ads and pay-per-click ads, GoToMyPC has become popular and I decided to search for an open source alternative for me not to spend money.

I searched for “gotomypc opensource alternative” in Google and the first result was an entry from Wikipedia shown on the screenshot below:

Click thumb to view larger image

As you notice, it indicates an open source alternative:

[edit] External Links. GoToMyPC Web site for software installation and computer access. TightVNC An open source alternative …

I checked out the page but I no longer found the opensource alternative in Wikipedia.

Click thumb to view larger image

So I checked the cache from the search result hoping that the old text is still there and I was right…

Click thumb to view larger image

Then I found out about TightVNC and decided to use that link instead. http://www.tightvnc.com/download.html

After what I encountered regarding my search on an opensource alternative for GoToMyPC, it occurred to me that maybe GoToMyPC themselves have been editing their own Wikipedia entry or they may have hired bloggers to edit GoToMyPC entries found in Wikipedia just like Microsoft who allegedly paid bloggers to look for Microsoft entries in Wikipedia and edit them for Microsoft’s advantage.

Do you think that GoTOMyPC will really make such a move to protect their own product?

Sure, its hard to take an app that uses a roadkill cat as a logo very seriously. But believe you me - it’s one app that can prove very useful.

If you read below, you will find out just what you are missing.

It is primarily a freeware viewer much like a free ACDSee, but can be used as an image converter, image resizer, and picture rotater. You can do gamma correction, brightness, contrast and tint to name a few. There are also filters available for it to make those special effects. You can even do these image manipulations by batch.

What sets IrfanView apart from the same software in its genre (like Microsoft PhotoEditor, ACDSee,  etc) is the wide range of files and devices that it is able to manipulate. It can open and edit pictures from the scanner, camera, JPG/JPEG, GIF, 8BF, etc. This author uses it to create ICO files for sofware logos and markings - all coming from JPG files. One can even make a screensaver from the pictures you select (with optional background music) which you can give away to your friends without IrfanView, therefore making it a lightweight screensaver compiler.

It’s speed and ease of use is also of note.

Of course no software is perfect: IrfanView cannot be used to open CYMK files properly because it is primarily an RGB file editor because it does not allow for color-managed viewing.

Then again, it packs all this punch in a 1.37 Mb executable. Oh and did I mention that it is free? Get your copy at http://www.irfanview.com/

As I just came in work, I receive an email from Michael Weisfeld with an attached file of Microsoft Excel Keyboard Shortcuts from BNET. And in his email he asks…

Check this out… Benj are there any not on there

So here I go and I check it out. And I can say this spreadsheet is really like almost complete. A lot of things listed on it I am not even aware of. So I really appreciated the almost complete MS Excel keyboard shortcut cheat sheet. But as I looked through it, although the list is quite impressive, there were still a lot of keyboard shortcuts I personally do on Microsoft Excel that were not there.

I guess I find these shortcut keys way faster than pointing the mouse somewhere, I got used to these and they are just dialed-in to my system, and I love playing the piano as well so I like my fingers playing on the keyboard more than me playing the guitar. Before I used MS Excel, I was also a Lotus 123 user running on MS DOS during don’t ask me when. And during those days it was really a keyboard shortcut workout on spreadsheets.

The keyboard shortcuts I use frequently were really designed to have no shortcut, but in MS Windows, generally, the Alt key activates the menu bar of your open application and you can press the underlined letters to navigate through the menu using your keyboard.

I did notice that MS Excel 2007 totally has a different menu bar that my navigation shortcuts are visually not on the menu. But they still allowed it to be available and they still work. Actually if you are really an old school Lotus 123 DOS mode user, all commands you can get to by pressing the slash key. And I noticd even up to today, MS Excel 2007 still supports it. (Probably MS Word will still support many WordPerfect keyboard shortcuts.)

More Microsoft Excel Keyboard Shortcuts

The shortcuts below are keyboard sequences or keys and are not keys press simultaneously. They are keyboard sequences that navigate through the old Microsoft Excel 2003 menu bar that is still supported on MS Excel 2007. Note again, not simultaneous, these are key sequences.

• Delete a Column Shortcut
  Alt, E, D, C
• Delete a Row Shortcut
  Alt, E, D, R
• Insert a Column Shortcut
  Alt, I, C
• Insert a Row Shortcut
  Alt, I, R
• Adjust width of Column to Auto-Fit highlighted cell(s) contents Shortcut
  Alt, O, C, A
• Adjust height of Row to Auto-Fit highlighted cell(s) contents Shortcut
  Alt, O, R, A
• Adjust width of Column Shortcut
  Alt, O, C, w
• Adjust height of Row Shortcut
  Alt, O, R, E
• Hide a Column Shortcut
  Alt, O, C, H
• Hide a Row Shortcut
  Alt, O, R, H
• Unhide a Column Shortcut
  Alt, O, C, U
• Unhide a Row Shortcut
  Alt, O, R, U
• Paste Special - Values Shortcut
  Keyboard Right Click Button, S, V, Enter

Is there any other keyboard shortcut you use often that is not here? Add a comment below to list more.

Special mention to a few people: Terence Spencer D. Teves a former partner of mine in a small business that while working we used to try to out do each other on who knows the most keyboard shortcuts. And to Reginald Philip Alto and Ed Gacho used to talk about the same thing when I used to work with them teaching as a college undergrad chemistry lecturer at the DLSU Chemistry Department. I guess this also helped in knowing more keyboard shortcuts.

In my point of view, if US government computers have really been hacked, it is not necessarily China who has done the hacking. Why is this so? It’s because when you hack into a computer, you will leave tracks and authorities can trace these tracks and will lead them to the hacker. In the US, the systems are so interconnected and if anyone does a cybercrime, the crook can be easily traced. As many of us know, all computers in the world basically use the same system, software and servers, whether Linux or Windows, Apache or IIS and all have the same security problems. Thus, it is of high probability that an unsecure server of China may have been hacked and was used to hack into the US government computers therefore hiding tracks to the real culprits. Who knows, the crooks may have actually come from England?

I would also like to voice out my opinion regarding this issue. Lately, I’ve noticed that China has been the center of controversy for various issues like Mattel products from China recalled, some food containing formalin, Hong Kong residents being hesitant to buy poultry from China and recently, this alleged hacking activity. For me, the “Sleeping Giant” is slowly becoming a powerful and influential country that could rock the whole world with its tremendous power. Do you think that these events are some of the means of stopping China in becoming a superpower? Are Chinese people really hacking into US government computers? Or are there just lame people (not necessarily Chinese or from China) who want to destroy China’s credibility?

I haven’t used it for a long time now but I was surprised on the video that I found showing how you can paint the most popular work of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Mona Lisa. It was simply awesome! I never thought one could make such a beautiful painting using the old-school MS Paint. I couldn’t help it but be impressed!

I was wondering though if this could really be possible. Do you think that an ordinary program like MS Paint can do such an amazing output? I think that he is really good on what he did with the Mona Lisa, so how would you rate it? Or does it cross your mind that this is only a video trick?

Cross-OS users will like this, people that use the Mac and loves Safari but still needs to use Microsoft Windows from time to time will like this. Aside from the nice simple design Apple has always pleased people aesthetically with it’s trademark simple designs, the Safari web browser is also popular among RSS feed readers as the reader is integrated pretty well in this browser which is now available for Microsoft Windows! Aside from that, Apple is highlighting 3 areas where the browser performs better than Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

Safari runs faster in it’s HTML performance

Safari 3 took 2.14 seconds in loading an HTML page where this same page as showed by graphs posted on Apple’s website, Mozilla Firefox loaded the page in 3.67 seconds, Microsoft Internet Explorer took 4.63 seconds with Opera loading last with 6.22 seconds.

Safari runs faster Javascript

Again Apple shows that Safari 3 wins loading Javascript in 0.88 with Opera no longer a loser in this area loads second with 0.98 seconds. Firefox is next with 1.72 seconds and MS Internet Explorer with 2.48 seconds.

Safari loads faster than the others

Apple Safari 3, the application opens in 1.74 seconds while Opera opened in 1.82 seconds. Firefox makes it in 2.22 seconds while MSIE loads at 2.34 seconds.

Ok, all these numbers and graphs are on the Apple website, I did not check who did the test and if there is any third party who did them. But true or not, Microsoft Windows-based web designers and web developers will also love this for better testing of cross-browser compatibility. Download your copy of Safari.

DivX has great video compression that it is widely used on the Internet for faster downloading and this makes DivX pretty popular. To run DivX videos you need the DIvX Codec and that is free. So no problem with that. But if you want to use this great technology, DivX Pro for Windows and Mac is not free. It’s $19.99. But only for today, DivX is giving away free licenses! Both for Mac and Windows. So download your copy now and save $20 bucks. Get your free DivX Pro for Mac here. Free DivX Pro for Windows here. Offer ends today, in a few more hours.

It seems that the online maps arena is so competitive. Mapquest used to be the everyday word when you did not know your way around the neighborhood and Yahoo Maps was the next best competitor. And just as AJAX was starting to be used among modern web designers and developers, Google Maps was one of the first to capitalize on it making Google Maps popular right away and quickly followed up their market positioning move with satellite photography. Since then it has push all the others a step further. Here is what everyone else has been trying to do:

• Yahoo Maps, tried AJAX and there was a time that is had the old maps and the AJAX version in beta. Today, Yahoo Maps uses Macromedia Flash instead. As an advertiser, Yahoo Maps seems to be favorable as brand logos could be placed below maps where business establishments are present.
• Mapquest, although a pioneer in this business, they were one of the late ones to implement AJAX maps. One notable thing I noticed in Mapquest even in the past, for your wrong addresses, it still seems to come up with the address you were really looking for. I guess once nice feature it has right now is the clear distinct lines of boundaries of areas.
• Ask Maps has topography maps. I guess if you are interested in these matters, meteorologist, geologist, volcanologist might be interested in this and get turned on by looking at them. I think it is a cool feature as well. Their AJAX programming looks really tight. They even go into the small details of the fade-in image loading.
• MSN/Live Search Maps was one where I first saw photos of spots taken at street level for certain selected spots. They were basically simply a photo of a selected location. One feature I like about MSN right now is their areal photography view is not directly on top and comes in at an angle. And unlike all other maps, that are oriented to have North on top, in Live Search maps, you can spin it all around, and guess what? The angle of the perspective view in the areal view changes as well.

Now with all the others pushing hard to do this, what did Google Maps just recently do again?

Google Maps Street View

Watch the video on how it works:

Just a few months back, they had the traffic data, and now they have street view, a 3D 360 view where you can turn around and zoom in and out. I tested it out and gave it a spin. My neighborhood does not have it yet, so I tried bigger cities first starting with San Diego, downtown did not have it yet. So I tried Los Angeles, none also. I typed in New York, and there I saw it. I also saw it working in San Francisco. Looks really cool, and I guess we just have to wait and see it unfold everywhere else as even some of the basic features are just starting to unfold in other countries like in my home country the Philippines. I just tried out if they are aware of some of the cities already, and tried it on Quezon City. And it lands right on top of Iglesia ni Cristo near University of the Philippines Diliman. *LOL* The 3D 360 spin will help greatly I believe in getting a better picture of the environment so you won’t get lost at all. Checking how things look like before actually going to them.