Since October 1st, 2009, this website is hosted on a new and hopefully faster and more reliable server. Hostmonster is providing the hardware, and since their computing centre is located in the USA, the website should be faster when being accessed from the United States. Moreover, I got a new domain multimolti.com and all traffic to multimolti.de is redirected to the new domain.
If you find any links still pointing to the old .de-domain, please notify me so I can change it. Thank you!
For some time, the developers at Google were working at a solution to make their search engine faster. Now you can test the new search architecture called “Caffeine” yourself.
Obviously, they reached their goal of increasing the search speed, but didn’t change the search behavior. When searching for normal terms, you can feel a speed increase of up to 75% in my tests, but when using more complex searches with quotes, there is almost no difference.
You can test the new Caffeine search here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/
| Search term | Old engine | Caffeine | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| multimolti | 0.39 sec | 0.22 sec | 21% |
| install windows 7 on asus eee pc | 1.01 sec | 0.25 sec | 75% |
| “install windows 7 on asus eee pc” | 1.07 sec | 0.84 sec | 21% |
As you can see, when using quotes, the difference is not that big.
UPDATE: With Chrome 4.0, there are official extensions and a better ad-blocking plugin available! Please check out the AdThwart extension to block advertisements in Google Chrome!
Adblock scripts for Firefox, Opera and even Internet Explorer have been around for a while, but until now, there was no easy-to-install extension for Google Chrome with a similar  functionality. The latest release of Google Chrome, version 3, has added easy support for extensions, and a nice guy called gg3po has developed an extension to disable advertisements on websites.
Here is how to activate that extension:
This is how a website looked before and after enabling the AdSweep extension:
There are so many websites out there who can calculate Currency Exchange Rates for you, e.g. Google Search, Bing Search or Yahoo Currency Converter. But what if you just want to have the exchange rate to use in your Desktop or Web Application? It would be kinda troublesome to extract the rate from one of the websites above, especially when they decide to change the layout of their HTML code.
That’s why I decided to create a very simple Currency Exchange Rates API. This API allows you to either get the conversion rate from US Dollar to your desired currency or can directly convert an entered value. The output is plain text, without HTML or XML attributes for easy access from all sources.
Just call the URL of the API with your desired exchange rate as parameter, e.g.
for Euro. This will return the exchange rate from USD to EUR:
All in all, 126 different currencies are supported. See a list of all supported currencies on the index page.
The API updates itself once an hour, so the values you’re getting may be up to 1h old. This should be good enough since these values are for information purposes only.
This example shows how to use the API to display 100$ in € (please replace the & stuff in the URL with a normal &, can’t display it correctly here):
$oricurr = "USD" // iso code for your original currency
$newcurr = "EUR" // iso code for your new currency
$url = "http://www.multimolti.com/apps/currencyapi/calculator.php?original=".$oricurr."&target=".$newcurr."&value=".$amount;
$result = file_get_contents($url);
echo $result." ".$newcurr;
The calculator works almost the same way as the API itself. Call calculator.php with three parameters: original, target and value. original and target are ISO codes of the currency, and value is the amount of orignal currency to convert. The output is the corresponding amout of target currency.
The acuracy of the exchange rates can’t be guaranteed. All values are for informational purposes only. See the footer of the index page for more information.
Please use multimolti.com or sann-gmbh.com since they’re the most stable ones!
If there are any questions about the API, bug reports or feature requests, please feel free to comment!
On May 15, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha (sometimes just called WolframAlpha) went online. Wolfram|Alpha (in the following just refered to as “WA”) is an answer engine, meaning it can handle complete sentences and questions as search queries.
The special thing about WA is that it doesn’t just display a filtered collection of links to other websites matching your search query, it rather “compiles” all available information on the internet into a overview page showing all interesting facts about the term you searched for.
Currently, the website is mainly focussed on natural sciences (mathematics, physics, engineering), geographical data, stocks and unit conversion, but I’m sure more topics will follow soon. Currently, searching for “The Beatles” returns nothing, but searching for a some mathematical equations gives you a hell lot of information: Plots, Limits, the Derivative, Series representations, Integrals, … It can even show you the way it computed the Derivative with explanations about the methods used.
When entering cities or countries, you will get a map and information about the population, weather, flag, languages, currency and so on. Wolfram|Alpha can also compare data, e.g. the GDP of China and the USA.
Whole sentences are fragmented into different parts, e.g. “Where was Bill Gates born” is structured into “Bill Gates” and “place of birth”, resulting in “Seattle, Washington” and the geographical information about Seattle. Wolfram|Alpha answers some questions in a humorous way, e.g. when asking for the meaning of life, it returns “42″ (quote from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”).
All in all, Wolfram|Alpha seems to be a very good alternative to Google when searching for information in one of the topics mentioned above and wanting to have a quick overview over the most important data.
Just a few weeks ago Futuremark, a company known for creating benchmark programs for Windows computers (3DMark and PCMark), released a new benchmark called “Peacekeeper“. Peacekeeper tests various browser functions such as JavaScript arrays, DOM functionality, rendering and other things often used by today’s modern websites like YouTube, Facebook and GMail.
Why would you need a browser benchmark? The better a browser performs on your system, the faster websites are shown and can interactively been used. This is especially needed when browsing Web 2.0 websites, and on low-end PCs such as netbooks the difference can really be a barrier. I experienced this using my favourite browser Firefox 3.0 on my Asus Eee PC 900: When typing and address into the address bar, the “intelligent search” feature needs so much computing power that the whole browser is stuck. Also using GMail or Facebook doesn’t make fun when you have to wait for a second before you can click, scroll, type, etc… That’s why I switched to Google Chrome. Jukka Mäkinen, Head of PC Products and Services at Futuremark, said:
“People have more choice now in how they experience the internet than ever before. But they may not realize that performance between browsers can vary dramatically, especially on lower-end PCs. With Peacekeeper, it’s simple to compare different browsers and see which one offers the best performance on your PC.”
I compared all the major browsers on my computer (Pentium 4 3.2GHz with Hyper-Threading, onboard S3 graphics) and got quite interesting results:
[poll id="6"]
While the work on the next version of Firefox, Firefox 3.5 is still going on, some developers are already showing some features of the following version, Firefox 3.6 codenamed “Namoroka”. You can download the nightly build at Mozilla’s website, but please be reminded that it’s a pre-alpha version and should be used only for testing purposes:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/
Do you know TinyURL? It is a service that allows you to create a short URL from a long one, when somebody accesses the short one, it will redirect him to the original website.
Well, okay, that may be quite useful, e.g. for Twitter where your message size is restricted to 140 characters. Still, there are times when making things convenient for people just won’t do. In those cases, you need to make the URL bigger, whether for a light jab in the ribs, or a test of how dedicated someone is to checking out your link, even if it means re-pasting truncated email text by hand. If someone complains about having to copy and paste such a huge URL, you really can’t expect them to be the kind of team player who logs the necessary hours for the next big thing, right?
In this case FreakingHugeURL will do the job for you.
This freaking website made the nice, short URL of my blog to a monster with 1475 characters!
On April 1st, YouTube decided to flip their complete website including videos, text and icons and to name it the “new layout for better watching experience”.
A click on “tips for viewing the new layout” revealed that
“modern computer monitors give a higher quality picture when flipped upside down—kind of like how it’s best to rotate your mattress every six months. You might find that YouTube videos look better this way.”
They also offer other helpful tips like turning your head to the side or moving to Australia.
Anyway, if you want to see the flipped design still after the April joke was over, you can just add “&flip=1″ as parameter to your video URL, meaning:
Original Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuRiW6iGgu4
Flipped Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuRiW6iGgu4&flip=1
Now you will be able to see the whole website upside down! Have fun turning your head!
Google is currently working at a newer version of Google Chrome. Chrome 2.0 is still in the pre-beta phase, but you can already download and try it.
There are some major changes that make it worth to be used instead of the old version:
How to get the latest version:
Now you have the latest version of Google Chrome installed! Have fun!
