Posts Tagged ‘geek talk’

Cashflow Online Games for Your Personal Finance Literacy

August 31st, 2010

Feeling bored and dull? Wanted to play something challenging? Worried about your personal finance?

Why don’t you try to play Cashflow Online Games created by the best-selling author of Rich Dad and Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki? I guess while we are in the mood of independence and freedom, playing a financial games like this might free you from the burden of the financial illiteracy as well:

If you ever read any of the Rich Dad Poor Dad series, you know that one of Robert Kiyosaki business is the educational program that he called Cashflow, where people learned about personal finance by playing a board game. Ever since I read that book last five years or so, I’ve been itching to play the games and I pray that the game will be available online for free. praying

It is now available, and yes, it is FREE. dancing

All you need to do is register with the website: Cashflow Online Games, verified your email address and boom! Play the game. Your objective is to exit the rat-race as soon as possible and jump into the fast-lane to richness; whoever that reach the goal first will win. You can play this game by yourself, or versus the computer, or versus the other online player as well.

Warning: This game is a Flash-based game and it consumes quite a high volume of bandwidth. Ensure that your network is stable and fast enough. Dial-up users are not recommended to play this game. Broadband users can still play this game, but I’m not recommending you to play with other player (since your side will be too slow to load other person’s action).

Playing this game will not make you rich overnight, but if you’re looking for a fun way to learn all those dreaded financial statements, or personal financial issues, or how to be rich and stay rich the capitalist way; this is the game for you. It teaches you about income versus expenses, assets versus liabilities, good deals, bad deals, real estates deals, business deals, as well as the stock market.

It has two version: Casflow 101 for beginner and Cashflow 202 for intermediate to advance level. I always play the 101 (since the 202 has some major bugs e.g when the stock market rises, your game can hang WTF! laughing) and I always play by myself or versus the computer due to the slow network that I have at home. I am now a level #9 Employee trying to break into the Self-Employed level. Heh heh heh hee hee

Have fun playing and happy holiday!

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Idiot Guide To PageRank (PR)

August 30th, 2010

Me and my other half was talking on the phone about blogs and bloggers when the issue of pagerank comes out. Me being techy and she being normal, of course the first question from her was: What is a pagerank?

Alamak.. *bertukar kepada tutor mode*

Definition and Explanation:

Pagerank is a ranking given by Google to all websites that is being indexed in Google. The more important a website is, then a higher ranking (out of 10)  will be given. E.g Facebook – the largest social networking websites that is being indexed in Google as #1 sites with the most users: have a pagerank (PR) of 10.

The exact way Google determined whether a page is important or not is unknown. It is believed that the algorithm calculated the pagerank based on 500 millions variable and 2 million terms and the algorithm changed over time – quote from Wikipedia.

So, since this is Google’s way of determining the importance of your page, usually PR is used to determine whether a site is a hoax, a scam, or not. That’s one of the use. Also, it gives an indication whether that sites (and it’s owner) is popular or not.

So, the simple way of understanding it is..

  1. The higher the pagerank, the easier Google put the page in it’s search engine result.
  2. The more search engine result given, the more users visiting the page.
  3. The way to increase your pagerank is to publish something useful for your keyword that you wanted to target, so that many links will share your sites and make it popular plus useful — maybe this is the easiest concept in increasing your pageranks.

Having said that, usually it is hard for a niche blog / personal blog to achieve more than 5 or 6 pageranks nowadays. It is hard but it is not impossible. Seth Godin blog has a PR7. Mine? I got 2. Obefiend’s and Redmummy got 3.

How to check my pagerank?

Two ways:

  1. Go to this web service that offers you to check the pagerank of any sites: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
  2. Install Google Toolbar and enable the Pagerank features. See video below.

Google has already put a short video explaining how to enable the pagerank feature from the Google Toolbar. Personally, I use this since it is integrated into Firefox directly:

So, was that helpful?

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Unix Millenium Bug: Y2K38

August 25th, 2010

Picture courtesy to this blog.

I’m going technical today.

Remember the Y2K bug? The one where the date of 1st January 2000 appears to be translated by the computer as 1-1-1900? It happened because of the memory limitation where computer programmers previously only specify the range of date to be up until year 1999. They don’t expect their system to be available until year 2000.

Or so they thought.

Now, this problem might repeat itself on the year 2038. While not jumping into the calculation (you can read more of it on Wikipedia), basically it happened due to the memory limitation of 32-bit. The 32-bit memory calculated the time up until 19th January 2038, then it will reset the value to be a negative number. Picture below explains how it goes (courtesy of Wikipedia – click the picture to see the picture animation):

Solution? Upgrade your system to use 64-bit so that this kind of data can be calculated correctly. That’s the way to do it. This will effect quite a whole lot of applications that is date-sensitive; INCLUDING blogs, forums, and Web 2.0.

If you’re running your own self-hosted WordPress or any websites that capitalize PHP technology, try to run this piece of codes to see if your system is affected. Although most of web hosting is now using 64-bit Linux, well — you’ll never know. I am not sure if this will affect the Windows 32-bit system as well or not (maybe not, since the bug itself is called Unix Millenium Bug).

<?php
$date = ’2040-02-01′;
$format = ‘l d F Y H:i’;
$mydate1 = strtotime($date);
echo ‘<p>’, date($format, $mydate1), ‘</p>’;
?>

Code is courtesy of Tech Times newsletter from Sitepoint.com. Cool stuff. I’ve been reading their newsletters and webpages for so long now, and I’ve learned so much about web programming and other stuffs as well when visiting their sites.

So, are you affected? I’m not, luckily winking

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