There is a thin line between design and development, and as we move into a new decade, this line is becoming extremely blurry. Is it enough to draw beautiful mock ups in Photoshop? Maybe 5 years ago.

These days, the average internet user requires more. All beauty, with no substance, gets boring after a while. If your only goal is to impress a community of fellow designers with your flashy designs, you’ll find yourself quickly beneath the tide. 2011 is not about beauty, it’s about function. The trends for this new year and emerging decade are responsive design, constant connection and virtual reality.

The ultimate goal of a designer is not to dazzle but to entangle. The supreme designer is able to create an environment which charms and captivates the user to the point where he does not want to find the ‘Back’ button.

Several elements come together to forge such a wonderland: harmonious color scheme, intuitive design, easily accessible information and fast response.

Additionally, one can never under-estimate the power of simplicity. Now, your design must contend with smart phones, netbooks, tablets and the like. Are you ready?

1. More CSS3 + HTML5
2. Simple Color Schemes
3. Mobile Ready
4. Parallax Scrolling
5. Designing for Touch Screens, Not Mice
6. Depth Perception in Web Design
7. Large Photographic Backgrounds
8. Adventurous Domain Names & Integration
9. QR: Quick Response
10. Thumbnail Design
11. Constant Connection/ Life Stream

We will design your website for it is easy to navigate and looks good. As well as working hard for your business identity and representing it perfectly. We will also optimize the structure of your website for the search engines as part of the design process. We can provide you with the latest technology in web site design (HTML, PHP, CSS, Web 2.0, Flash, DHTML, Java, MySQL). We can design with 2D or 3D images, with static or animated graphics (or both) etc., all according to your requirement.

This summer I found out that my working enviroment just got too many computers and generated too much heat too (of course the electricity bill is a bit too high). This is the time to talk about Green Power and Save the enviroment hah

I will be getting rid of my current server which is

• AMD Sempron (just because it’s cheap)
• nVidia C51 Motherboard (for 3D testing)
• 1GB DDR533 Memory (RAM is expensive when I built this)
• Total of 1.2TB storage (4 HDD with different size)
• 400W PSU (just too much)
• Running on Centos 5 with XEN (I love YUM)

The current server mainly is for NAS Storage, PHP/MySQL Development server and to practice more on SSH + UNIX

OK, let’s talk about new thing now.

I am going to build my new tiny Green Powered Server which I will name it as usual – CORE Server (maybe I should call it 2nd generations?)

The aim for this new CORE server is mainly because

• I will be bringing it along for my long term travel from UK to Malaysia and back
• Small in size (to comply with the above) which can fit in my bag
• I want a less power consuming server (to save the bills)
• I want to try out the new Intel Atom Duo Core (Virtualizations with XEN and VMWare)
• I want to build a beautiful server with facilities such like NAS, LAMP, Media Streaming, Media Player, FTP, SSH + etc (of course, this is a SERVER)

Here are the specs of my CORE Server

Hardware

Software

Now I am waiting for my Intel Little Falls 2 to come on Wednesday and will continue this post

12/June/2009

Finally the Intel Little Falls 2 arrived!!!

It really a headache when trying to put this motherboard into the tiny casing. I have to remove the HDD racks and power supply in order to fit the board in. I even have to take off the bottom part of the casing (No wonder this tiny casing so expensive, the design is really user friendly )

The second problem is the cables after fit in the board and every other parts. SInce the space will be super compact, I have to squeeze all the power and data cables into the sides. The CPU Fan only remains about 3cm height of space just under the 5.25″ HDD rack on top.

Just after completing the assembles, the first thjing I need to check will be the temperature of the CPU. It shows around 40 celsius in the BIOS with the CPU fan running at about 2800rpm and the casing big fan which draws out hot air running at around 4500rpm.

Since the server will not be fit with any optical drives, so I have to temporary plug in the DVD-RW drive to install the CentOS 5.3 Final. The installation went off smoothly and then after around 30 minutes I have the OS up and running!!! It takes long for installing because I want to customised all the installations. I only choose the Server-GUI version with customized packages to keep the overall system file size below 2GB.

If you are interested in the system process details, please leave me a comment so I can tell more. At the moment let me test the server first and moving all my data files into it.

updated: by using “smartctl” command, 3 HDDs detected running at around 30 to 36 celcius, not bad huh!!!

The solution is very simple, let say your drop down menu #menu is within #header part, you just need to set the #header with z-index:2;

then your next part maybe #contents, this should be set to z-index:1;

Hope you got it

Check it out at www.MotorZon.com

A new utility that let you turn on the 3D Cube Desktop mode in Vista or XP!!

I am still downloading and installing to try it out…it works like the 3D Virtual Desktop in Linux

Check it out yourself

browse to the http://chsalmon.club.fr/index.php

I signed up the Yahoo! Pipes for quite some while but never got time to really experience it. Today I just come across it again fater yesterday my visit to Internet World 2007 exhibition in Earls Court Centre, London, UK. In the exhibition I met with a guy in a stand selling his piece of software which works like that Yahoo! Pipes but he is going to sell it for €50,000.00!!! So I just politely tell him that his should do so to sell at that price because it’s new technology (I remember it called MASHUP SERVER technology).

Back to the topic here, I just try to make a TEST pipe here (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/person.info?eyuid=lSogDpswo2uqNu9J6AYp), and then the result is cool I can combine two RSS feeds together. If you have good imagination and cretiave mind, maybe you can create some cool pipes???

Try it out mate, it’s worth a try. Great tools for researching….

Today I am installing the RoundCube Webmail for my client. I choose this webmail because it provides the AJAX and very very clean and simple interface.

I just wonder the developer stop the developing stage at beta 1? This webmail is really really cool. I suggest you should give it a try

http://www.roundcube.net/