Dropbox Clone Copy Launches with free 5GB Promotion

Yeah i know this could be seen as a infomercial so you guys will click on my Copy.com referral link (and we both will get 5GB for free), but i am very interested in cloud hosting and i do try a lot of them, i use it daily for my backups, for business and for sharing (i'll make another post later on with more details), so testing new cloud storage is important to me, since i do have some issues with the ones i use currently.

My Cloud Providers

Dropbox (Free 20GB) for syncing of work material, its absolutely flawless, but it tends to bog down from time to time (burst of CPU) and also although secure its not encrypted and i know i could do it myself and in some ways i do, but with encryption on my side there is a risk of corruption and data loss, so i avoid putting there anything that is really private, mostly work files, stuff i need on the run or that im currently working on! (Update a day or so after posting this, Dropbox decided to cut a chunk of my referrals, wtf is with that after years! they go back on referrals! thats fucked up, ill probably make a post about it tomorrow, but for today they lose their link on this post and worse, my trust).

Box (Free 50GB), i always liked Box, their web interface is really good, but the best is that my account has like 5 years and all my files are still there, i should like delete some, but the combination of 50GB and never deleting a file ever, makes it perfect for small backups and old webfiles, their sync app is pretty bad, so i dont use it (tried it twice).

Mega (Free 50GB), what? MEGA!!! yep, as it seems the fact that your files are encripted and they dont delete files and they have backups and they dont have file size limits, makes mega awesome for website backups, sometimes if its a database heavy site its pretty small, but if its a media heavy website, its gonna get huge, so mega is awesome for that and yes i do encript all files myself, so no security issues there! and super fast upload and download!

I do have a owncloud instance but i only use that to sync my music, maybe if i encript it and make automatic backups, ill use it more ^_^'

Cloud Providers i Tried and Quit!

Cubby, pretty good cloud hosting, with local sync and web sync, but with their change to a paid service  they basically cripled every free user to a less than useful service, before it had some interesting features now its way less usefull, that and a touchy sync (sometimes it syncs, sometimes it doesnt and says everything is synced...)

Rapidshare, this one is going down the drain, i dont know what they are thinking, i was still barely using them, but the last files i had there died a couple of weeks ago for no reason, no point using them for anything.

Mediafire, good for sharing, horrible for backups, your files dont stay if they are too popular or not popular enough, im not sure why they keep saying they are a dropbox clone, they are a basic filehost.

Skydrive, searching your files for images or whatever is beyond me, i dont care if its automatic, any host that searches your files is not a host that i will ever use.

Google Drive, im slowly moving away from Google services, but i did try it and it worked ok, i didnt liked they changed their pricing at the time, but i dont care cause i dont want to use, that and their terms of service that give them a lifetime license to your stuff, again shit beyond me.

So how about Copy?

Well I've only tried for a few days, but its very similar to dropbox (thats a good thing), lightweight and i like their android app, worked great for now, quick syncing, i did wished they did something diferent, instead of a pure clone, still if i get more than what i have in dropbox you never know hehehe.

So yeah i put in this post my copy and my dropbox referral use it if you are interested in signing up youll get extra space, ohh and here is my Copy referral https://copy.com?r=ROh9ws (If you sign up you will get an extra 5GB!)

Google and Reader Demise

What can i say that hasn't been said, Google decided to drop and kill Google Reader a not so mainstream Google product that was loved by pretty much every geek, developer and tech journalist, and for good reason even if RSS never went mainstream (its mainstream just by other means, apps like Flipboard use RSS) its still a very important part of the structure of the web, however the points i want to focus on is Google's latest attempts at streamlining their product line and how that is putting Google's of alienating the very people that support Google.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me

This isn't the first time Google has dropped a popular or semi popular product, but on doing so its neglecting all the users that invested their time on that product, it created distrust and in this case by going after Google Reader it really doesn't matter if they back-down, I've and most are moving on to greener pastures, the broken promises of Google App Engine and basically pushing everyone that had a free account to paid and overcharging on top of that, Google+ forced real name policy basically blocked me and most of my friends (that aren't really tech savvy) and a large segment of the tech community to dismiss Google+ pretty much forever and now with the death of Google Reader I'm starting to move from distrusting Google (mostly for privacy concerns) to one of not trusting Google to keep their promises and doubting the longevity of their entire product line, why should i care about Google products if they can randomly be cut down? I wont be fooled again...

Google is a new social/media company

This new Google has good things, but they are starting to get too few and far between, i used to trust Google, now i get excited with stuff that moves me away from anything Google related, Firefox OS, secure chat and new search engines that give me privacy and protect my rights, i dream about a fully encrypted webmail to ditch gmail for good (the last Google product that i use daily, yep i rarely use Google search anymore... sorry Firefox >_< ), Google as changed from a product oriented company to one more interested in gaining users and providing media, they want to be Yahoo (and look how that turned out), by pissing users they go to competing products, why use blogger? when you can use better and more innovative services like Tumblr or Wordpress that care for your privacy and rights that you can contact support and talk with real people when you have an issue, why risk with Google they already killed Picnik so Picasa in on the way, in a couple of years Google will be just Google+ but by that time the "influencers" have moved on and with them everyone else, sure there will be People that same way there are still people in Flickr or use Yahoo searc... coof coof Bing, but most wont be and wont care!

Readers Demise is Google's Demise

Google Reader to me is pretty much the last drop, I'm tired of it really, so i will be slowly moving away from Google products, not because of Reader, but the accumulation of clear signals from Google, their moto "dont be evil" has already been distorted to the point of being meaningless, the safe bet nowadays is to hedge your bets and avoid Google's Products you are probably using too many of them already and opening yourself to more problems and issues, the love affair with Google is over, i want a divorce! Sure this isn't the end far from it, hell this blog is still written on blogger, but its for sure another step and i for one am glad i wont be so dependent on Google.

As a side-note and to not make this just a rant I've been trying some alternatives to Google Reader, ill probably post a more detailed review when i find something good, ohh and the new Dig team is making a feed reader hehehe yeah that was the best joke i got from this idiotic move from Google.

1kpl.us > still pulling feeds, interesting layout, pretty quick, i like the sparsness
netvibes.com > oldie but still good, the problem is that its just good enough, the layout/speed/features are meh
theoldreader.com > looks reasonable, but still pulling feeds, slow and i cant judge it yet (still they are overloaded, so its understandable)
newsblur.com > looks pretty good/speedy/original, but i dont like their fremium model, slow updates and low feeds (used to be 64 now its 12? make up your mind) if you dont pay up its a bellow any rss reader average, naaa ill give this one a skip, i prefer a fremium model where you get something sweet extra for paying not a crippled basic account

Siglas - Sigla Database, Acrónimos, Abreviatura e Símbolos

New site, Siglas (means Acronym in Portuguese) this one is a portuguese database for acronyms and abbreviations and other kind of small information, its quick and easy and simple to use!

Nulo Simple Weather

A quick 2day hackathon later! and here is Nulo Weather! Its a simple weather site, i know i know its nothing new, but i thought i could make something a bit better, a mix between overly simple (does it rain or not) and the abundance of overly complicated weather sites out there.

Its simple and plain, it shows the weather now, today and tomorrow, it uses geolocation to try and give you your weather right away but you can search any city anywhere to check its weather.

• The good... humm it runs pretty quickly and looks if i say so myself pretty spanky good!
• The bad... its unfortunately not perfect, with the lack of a decent weather API's im using Yahoo Weather API (probably with time ill have to change), although good its still a bit wanky and not 100% responsive, also the geolocation isnt perfect and if no city is presented you are greeted with a random city, but if its a strange city Yahoo Weather API might just fail and you are greeted with a empty page... oh well ^_^'

So yeah go check it out and see if you like it! ^_^

Incult - Search Scientific Books and Documents

New site! Yay! Welcome to Incult yep snazy domain, its a pretty cool and simple science search engine, the cool thing is that it caches copies of the works so you can always find the books and documents you need, for now we are focusing on public domain works, but in the future we will add also free documents and everything in between.

Other cool features is that if it doesn't find any book on the database it will use google search (focused on the best book and documents sites) to give you some good alternatives, so win+win.

As of now the database is still being worked on, we have just a basic web scraper working, so its still gonna get more improvements, but for now like the death star... it is fully operational! ^_^

Review LibreOffice 3.6 Vs OpenOffice 3.4 Vs MsOffice Vs iWorks (on Win/Mac/Linux)

So there was a lot of confusion and some complaints about my previous faceoff OpenOffice vs LibreOffice, some stuff was deserved (not providing the test files was silly, but i did use office documents so i couldn't without messing with them), making a strange graph with strange values, not including the other operating systems even though the results were close, so I'm fixing all of this on this review, it will be simple and similar in point (comparison of performance for a small business office), because im doing this review as much for me as anyone else, in an office setting, were performance is the most important thing followed by a responsive layout and good formatting (stuff like compatibility or features are not as important since all of the software here has the features we want and used for years!).

This is the setup i will be using (and yes i wont be using my ssd powered hardware, because i dont have any at the office):

• Windows 7 - Intel T3200 2Ghz (2 Cores) - 3GB - HD 7200RPM.
• Ubuntu 12.04 - (with gnome classic of course, unity?... please...) Same specs as Win7, its dual boot.
• Mac OSX 10.6.8 - Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz (2 Cores) - 4GB - HD 7200RPM.

The files i will be using are (you can get them here):

• Small Excel File - 44KB
• Large Excel File - 3.3MB
• Small Doc File - 80KB
• Large Doc File - 22MB

Why no OpenDocument (.odf or .od) or Office Open XML (.docx or .xlsx)? Well cause 90% of our files are .xls or .doc and normally when we receive in any other format, we convert it to .xls or .doc (Office 2003 format), as well as LibreOffice 3.5 (what we are using now) can pretty much open any file-type, so i'm aiming to what we normally use.

For the software, all operating systems are up to date, i've disabled as much software as i can from all of them prior to the tests (that means, anti-virus, dropbox, etc), also on windows 7 im using Ms Office 2003 and on Mac im using Office 2008 and iWork 09, the reason being these are the only ones i own and its mostly for comparison purposes, all installations were on the typical settings and on Mac i did close the software every-time, so hot start was with the program fully closed.

Libreoffice and Openoffice need to do some tweaks on first run, so i did first runs with no files just to finish that, also for each cold start, the measurement is the time of the first run of the file (this time around, no averages!), time is as follows 1:15:30.45 (1 hour, 15 minutes, 30 seconds and 45 centiseconds), also only added the CPU on the large .doc because that was the only one that freaked out the Office's, on all the other files CPU dropped to 0 or very near it after loading.

Windows 7

Small .xls

Large .xls

Small .doc

Large .doc

cold

hot

mem

cold

hot

mem

cold

hot

mem

cold

hot

mem

CPU%

LibreOffice 3.6

21.0

5.12

46.3MB

7.38

6.30

50.7MB

6.67

3.85

44.6MB

1:18.88

1:18.71

124.7MB

50

OpenOffice 3.4

9.64

4.60

36.7MB

5.57

4.89

39.2MB

5.99

3.53

32.5MB

2:13.42

2:14.91

114.3MB

20/30

MsOffice 2003

1.83

0.72

3MB

1.71

1.05

8.6MB

2.40

0.79

9.9MB

6.36

5.45

25.2MB

15

Clear winner here is MsOffice 2003 blazes past LibreOffice 3.6 and OpenOffice 3.4, still its kinda weird that altough nitpicking, its OpenOffice that still nudges past LibreOffice and takes second place, and even on the large .doc where it took almost 1 more minute to load than LibreOffice it still was way more responsive after loading, while LibreOffice was hanging and lagging hard (using a full core) and it also crashed on shutting down.

Mac OSX 10.6.8

	Small .xls			Large .xls			Small .doc			Large .doc
	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	CPU%
LibreOffice 3.6	14.11	10.94	124	11.94	11.58	133	12.71	10.83	131	39.71	39.44	222	100
OpenOffice 3.4	15.40	11.96	125	12.81	12.55	133	12.81	11.56	125	3:03.75	3:04.01	204	2
MsOffice 2008	40.60	15.38	151	19.55	18.80	171	19.90	17.31	177	18.57	17.76	183	6
iWork 09	1:55.53	10.1	199	15.61	15.63	188	8.66	6.21	171	4:31.28	3:28.0	479	45

First things first, the winner here is pretty much LibreOffice 3.6, still it seems to struggle hard on the large .doc, it hangs hard and has a hard time with it (although it opened the file surprisingly fast) the biggest loser here is iWork, since not only does it struggle to open files but between all the Office's it was the only one that had bad formatting, MsOffice 2008 was good enough on everything.

Ubuntu 12.04

	Small .xls			Large .xls			Small .doc			Large .doc
	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	cold	hot	mem	CPU%
LibreOffice 3.5.6.2	5.16	2.82	36	5.03	4.04	42	5.06	3.11	30	1:13.32	1:14.02	46	6
LibreOffice 3.6	6.86	4.13	38	6.47	5.43	43	5.28	4.06	34	41.89	41.73	90	108
OpenOffice 3.4	10.19	4.37	35	6.11	5.82	44	5.16	4.29	27	2:58.73	2:53.53	80	110

WTF! All 3 Offices performed really great, the winner here is LibreOffice 3.5, but not by a wide margin, and on the large .doc all of them suffered on one thing or another, LibreOffice 3.5 had bad formatting on the large .doc, but was pretty responsive after loading, LibreOffice 3.6 and OpenOffice 3.4 were both lagging hard and made it almost impossible to view or edit the large .doc.

Conclusion

Here is a quick chart of best performance (with whatever operating system works best) for the small .xls and .doc, what we get here is that if you want best performance it depends a lot on the operating system, for Windows 7, MsOffice 2003 blows past the competition, its by far the best, i actually even enjoy the "lazy loading" that it does with the large .doc where it doesn't load it all at once but opens pretty fast, besides that OpenOffice 3.4 kinda still works best than LibreOffice 3.6.

For Mac your choice is LibreOffice 3.6, it works like a charm, next up would probably be MSOffice 2008 just cause it has good compatibility and kinda treats all files equaly, but overall Mac OSX 10.6 is pretty disappointing for Office Performance with nothing loading faster than 10 seconds.

For Linux (Ubuntu 12.04), apparently LibreOffice 3.5 is freaking king, still OpenOffice 3.4 and LibreOffice 3.6 run pretty good too, they feel native and run almost like MSOffice 2003 on Windows 7, super fast and slick i barely see the annoying splash screen (ie any application that has a splash screen just means its going to be slow)!!!, i also like to point out that I'm using the same computer for Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04, so yeah great performance for all.

As a side note, in my office its all Win7 machines, mostly cause some of the software, like accounting software is windows only and there are no alternatives, so using another operating system would be troublesome even if doable (virtual machines and such), but this performance on Linux does give me pause, especially with how Linux nowadays does play fairly well with windows networks and windows computers, and with LibreOffice and OpenOffice seem to fairly stagnated in performance on Windows, going for Linux might just do the trick.

Should You Use Hotlink Protection?

This is a quick post about something that has troubled and intrigued me over the years, should you use hotlink protection?

What is a Hotlink?

First of all if you don't know what im talking about, its pretty simple, when someone visits your site, their browser downloads all the pictures, text, code to make the page show up, but what happens if someone copies the url of one of your images and puts it on their page? then when someone goes to their page, it will show up your image on their site, so effectively you are giving away bandwidth to someone else.

Sounds bad, right? That is when hotlink protection comes up, there are different ways of doing it, but its basically just a couple of tweaks to the software/code/server to block anyone besides your site from using your content...

The Rise of Social and CDN's

There was a time when bandwidth and hosting was expensive (like in Australia heheheh), where hosting a image or video was costly, but nowadays we live with a different set of rules, hosting and bandwidth is pretty cheap, not only that but a lot of the social websites depend and interconnect with the content on the web (facebook, twitter, pinterest, etc... are very popular because they provide a platform for sharing content, and sometimes that content is in your site).

I kinda think that whats important now is to have good content and popular content, so things like someone hot-linking are no longer a issue of cost, but one of opportunity, its also a type of problem that nowadays can be easily fixed with the use of CDN's or cheap hosting.

Hotlink protection is also another form of a walled garden, and although suitable for some types of sites, most would gain more from being open and easily accessible, search engines will appreciate and users even more, so... should you use hotlink protection, im kinda inclined to say no! not anymore ^_^.