Hillary Clinton made a very ‘correct’ move regarding the matter of recent “cyber intrusions” against Google. Those instrusions came with a purpose and that was to access the information of specific individuals involved in human rights activity. Clinton asked for “China to probe” the attack which is simply a public friendly way of asking the Chinese goverment to stop these attacks. She mentioned other countries with a history of censorship and asked that companies like Google should not support “politically motivated censorship” specifically.

The Chinese have tried to seperate the matter from relations between them and the US. I believe this indicates that China has made very little progress in human rights and are simply doing things differently. Possibly a lot more technology and internet specifically instead of getting physical. Mrs Clinton herself said that the world wide internet has been a “source of tremendous progress” in China which only supports my belief that the Chinese goverment is now cyber motivated.

Ironically the more I think about the idea the more it sounds like America or any democratic country in the West. I’ve recently been watching espisode after episode of Prison Break so I need to watch not get carried away but it is a fact todays socieity is heavily monitored via the internet. Maybe this event is just another Chinese step towards realising they must make changes. I can’t say I think that attacks on Google are right but is the problem that they got caught or is it that they are the only ones doing it? How would the US or UK get the same information China wanted to access, that’s what I find myself asking even if I do feel the whole thing is wrong. Human rights activists aren’t exactly terrorist but then again, what do we know about the exact individuals!

Whatever you or my beliefs, the Chinese authorities have been asked to investigate the matter if “cyber intrustions” by Hillary Clinton. Hopefully the Chinese people will realise that companies such as Google are a connection between us all. They must realise that they risk doing what Mrs Clinton called “walling themselves off” from a fast progressing world which relies on the internet.

I have to wonder if those involved and the clearance received to carry out the intrusions, came with understand on how serious this matter is. The fact that the Chinese did play it down tells me that they feel it is not a matter that tells a lot about their overall ambitions or the way they intend to carry them out. Infact it does tell us a lot and requires reaction from the World with penalty to not just China but any country who prevents the flow of data and information of the internet.

Right now a possible four out of five people believe that access to the internet is ‘a fundamental right’ as discussed on the BBC News site here. If the Chinese people are to ensure their strong development continues, they must realise that off or online; international laws, expectations, human rights and retalition for breaking them will be the same. Countries such as Cuba, Iran and Sudan are all part of a restricted part of the cyber world but not for long. If there are further intrusions against companies such as Google like they has been recently, then China will put itself into a place it cannot get out off for a long time or undo without some serious changes over many years.

I believe that alienation online has serious effects on any civilisation and America is right to make such a strong call against it. It sounds serious, but if Google and other companies become forced too pull out of countries that are so relaxed about civil rights it will be. Question now is will China really carry out these probes as they have said or will it be some sort of cover-up?

Sources

BBC News

I dreamt of good voice recognition when I played games like Earth Seige and Mech Warriors over 10 years ago. It was also highly sought for in flight sims. Today it is nothing new and its popularity growing but personally I’ve never played a game that needs voice commands using speech recognition as much as Star Trek Online does. Every command will give you an edge over players not using it. Players can focus on enemy movement and their actions a lot more. In STO some battles will take every bit of quick thinking you have and every advantage gives you that little bit more chance of being the last ship standing. I decided to write a tutorial and help others get to grips with Vista speech recognition on STO so that you too could be calling commands like “Evasive Monouvirs” and watching your ship respond as if your bridge crew really were listening!

Download Vista Speech Recognition Macro Plugin

If you don’t have Microsofts speech recognition macro for Vista installed don’t worry. It’s easy, free and quick to download. Installing is simple and setting it up just takes a little time but it’s well worth it. To get the macro now please go here.

Once you have installed the macro and started it up you will see the macro icon in your icon taskbar. That is where my tutorial starts.

Step One – Create Signing Certificate

You will need to create a signing certificate which will allow you to properly digitally sign each new macro created. Not doing this can lead to an error that prevents you saving your macro sometimes. To do this you must right click on the icon in your icon tray, hovering over security then select “Create Signing Certificate”. It’s straight forward from there but I should mention that I opted for medium security.

Step Two – New Speech Macro

When you double click on the “Windows Speech Recognition Macros” icon in your task bar, it will open the “New Speech Macro” window as shown below. We will be using the “Send Keystrokes” function so open that now.

Step Three – Create Send Keystrokes Macro

The next window has two text boxes. One is used for entering the phrase that you will say to trigger recognition response and the other is the emulated key structure for that phrase. The example below shows “Evasive Monouvers” is being added as a phrase and the keys are ALT+1. In short this will mean that the ability in the number 1 slot on the STO Personal tray three will be activated. If you ever change what ability is in ALT+1 you will need to update the macro also. See my personal tray from the game further down.

Step Four – Test It

Its probably a good idea to get in the game and test your first macro. If you want you can make things even simplier by making the phrases actual numbers i.e. “one” or “two” and the keys “1″ or “2″. That is actually what I have done so that I can move my tray items around until I real Admiral and there won’t be so many changes. Either way you should be ready to call commands on your mic and fire weapons, increase shields and increase speed with far more effeciancy. Now you have officers on your bridge!

HUD Layout

Right now my player name is Athlon and today I wondered how others use their highly customisable HUD. This was brought on when I realised, I don’t need to see the faces of my crew and I couln’t see ships below me quickly while watching the direction I’m actually going. Also I moved my shield monitor close to the chat box where my eyes are 50% of the game, I just never shut up! Having it there helps me avoid that sudden shield drop then hull drop then…BOOM!

On the right bottom corner I opened up 3 panes. Pane 1 (bottom) has my crew ability and items on the right. Pane 2 has my ships weapons and the top one has controls for shields and movement controls such as Alpha Pattern or Evasive. What is your opinion on this layout and what is your layout like? Here is why I like my layout now that I’m used to the game…

1. I know the icons and there are lots of them at my disposal. I can click them all with the mouse but I also know the shortcuts to them all now. Activating my entire array of weapons and defenses became easy after a day of playing on this layout.
2. I’ve hidden crew faces, useless. They take up space and do nothing, each one only holds a single ability. A serious player needs as many tools at their disposal as possible. You could do that with a single pane hidden however as your weapons change etc it could be hard to remember exactly what each shortcut will activate.
3. Nothing below my ship, before the entire bottom area of my screen was filled and most players will be I assume. Problem with that is we fly over exploding enemy ships without realising how close we are. OK this is not exact science but it does feel good when your playing, your suddenly a little more in space rather than riding along ontop of a HUD

TIP 1 – You can move or remove items from the item panes by right clicking and drag. Drag to space and drop their to remove, don’t worry it doesnt delete or anything like that.

TIP 2 – Right click on weapons to activate a green box around them, this is auto-fire. There is also a setting to change the way auto-fire works. Using “Maintain” is my optionand my ship basically fires when it wants, using phasers. Torpedoes are best controlled by you when enemy shields drop. When your ship becomes more advanced auto-fire is the only option if you want to compete in fleet action.

Lady Justice

Did you notice the score in the top of the board on this screenshot? 11318 scored by that ship and what a big ship it was too, a little insight whats to come but Cryptic will need to deliver much more content aimed at stronger ships, plus encourage them to actually go to those missions because these big ships are stealing the game away from Commanders.

This is me parked under Lady Justice. The fire power from this ship was impressive but the player seemed to use all phasers, a bit boring. I would think a torpedo from a ship at that level would be cool. However I watched her take out 5 battleships in about 2 minutes, time it take me to take out 2-3 Bird of Prey right now.

Custom CSV Import Plugin
Hire WTG to create a very custom csv import plugin that suits your exact needs. I can provide more than 20 minutes of detailed video tutorials also.
Price: £149.99

Terms: the plugin provided will be a product of WebTechGlobal. You will not be provided with the copyrights to resell or distribute copies of the plugin. You may use it on as many of your own blogs as you wish providing others do not have access to the plugin files. Please protect my copyright.

Example Specifications

You might wonder what I can actually make the plugin do and there is no quick way to answer that because if you need your custom plugin to do something complicated I’ll make it happen. Using the best of PHP and Wordpress built in functions I can deliver an effeciant import tool that will auto blog for you, using data in your csv files. Here are some of the most common things requested:

• Import affiliate data feed files such as Commission Junction, Trade Doubler or Google Affiliate Network
• Import products slowly over a long period of time using cron scheduling and with randomised or custom date
• WYSIWYG to easily create a highly detailed template for all your new posts or pages
• Ability to upload new csv files and they are imported without the need to do anything after uploading
• Full tags, customer permalink, post excerpt and SEO requirements met to high standard.
• Ability to update old posts when the data changes, this way you don’t need to pay for expensive API services.

Free Edition

The free edition will be aimed at trialing what is to become the best Customer Management tool on Wordpress. It will not hav all the functions planned for the premium edition which will grow to be a professional tool. The main functions it will not have is intigration with other plugins such as carts or will it allow you to upload a Paypal history csv file like the premium version will. You will be able to download a copy of the BETA very soon from Wordpress so please do a search on their for Wordpress Customer Manager until I can put the link here.

Premium Edition

I plan to sell the premium edition for just £19.99 however if you pre-order it now you can get it half-price. Please send payment to paypal@webtechglobal.co.uk and you will be kept updated. Here is a full list of the features being planned right now and work has already started.

• Admin only pages
• Customer only pages
• Chat room for orgnised discussion
• Points and rewards system for returning customers. The ability to reward them for doing things such as  testing BETA software or leaving comments on product pages will be included. The points will then be able to trade in for goods as partial payment.
• Ticket system making use of the WYSIWYG editor Wordpress post system but with a custom interface
• FAQ manager for quickly adding correspondance to the FAQ while managing customers contact with you
• Ability to quickly and easily create a public FAQ page for your blog however this is not required the FAQ can be for logged in users only
• Invoicing that requests users to login and make payments through the customer manager, all payment information is recorded
• Product management that lets you assign products to customers and keep track of the services, goods or downloads they are entitled to access.
• Customer account will list digital downloads that the customer has purchased so they can easily return and download again without having to contact you
• Intigration with many other plugins so much of the administration is automated
• Newsletter and scheduled emails

These are only some of the features I’ve planned out and coding right now. Each area of the Customer Manager will improve over time to become a highly important part of your e-commerce activities. The plugin does not need to be used for e-commerce blogs only however and can be used as a general support service.

Planned Released

I’ll be providing an un-finished copy on the Wordpress plugins directory by 8th February 2010. I’ll update this page later with links and please contact me if this plugin sounds like something you need. I’m creating it to support WebTechGlobal’s customers with more effeciancy and in a way that makes it such an enjoyable experiance they want to come back. That means that the plugin will continue to always grow and premium buyers will have unlimited access to the new versions which will be released for a long time to come.

USED - UNUSED

Received 8th February 2010

1. FEZ7-45L7-W6KL-XK2F-5VN – £75.00 – Ends 28th February 2010

Received 29th Janurary 2010

1. M9XU-KVHS-F2M4-GJNV-JY6 – £75.00 – Ends 28th February 2010
   
2. M9XV-6FHL-LDGW-BAYQ-NKN – £75.00 – Ends 28th February 2010

Received December 2009

1. M9XU-KVHS-F2M4-GJNV-JY6 – USED
   
2. MGF4-6YNJ-FGNM-3EDC-6YY – USED
   
3. IIO7-NMKL-LDGW-5H67-AZXD – USED
   
4. FG56-H654-SDC3-BAYQ-GF4 – USED
   
5. A4F4-2DG4-LDGW-MKLL-5HL – USED

I’ll start adding prices to the new ones as they come in so you know what to expect. £75.00 is enough to get a new product off the ground with sales leads so I hope you use it well. If you use a code and received one in future but cannot use it please send it and I’ll list it here with your site address.

You will see that I added a new button for my RomanCart customisation. That was the easy and fun part. In order to make this work I had to create new form objects on the New Product page. RomanCart requires a product ID to be submitted that matches the product stored on the RomanCart store, every time a product is submitted for purchase. This still has to happen and so this modification renders a RomanCart shopping cart plugin for Wordpress in a way because the user will always see the RomanCart basket appear. I won’t go into how it is all done but does leave a degree of flexability because RomanCart provides all the major payment methods. The difference here is simply that the user can select Paypal straight away and many users will not realise RomanCart will even allow them to use Paypal, which might turn them away instantly. So now a user will see both Paypal and RomanCart in the “Payment Method” menu.

Sales Increase

This setup has increase sales by around 15% on the side in question. That is a steady increase over around a week and it happened straight after these modifications. Very impressive. If you use eStore or RomanCart and want to increase your sales then we should talk. If your current site is not Wordpress you can get a brand new website with full content management, product management, customer management and much more. I charge around £500 for such an e-commerce site. This does not include eStore, that must be purchased seperate from the authors website and I will charge only £49.99 to make the modifications required.

Tech

The “Tech” part is maybe not so obvious because it can apply to a lot of things. It could be short for technology or technician, in this case it is Technician. I decided on this when I realised that I would essential be a Web Technician on graduating from University. No one fresh out of University can truly call themselves a Web Designer or Developer because the job is immense and requires some years of experiance. A graduate would not enter a job and instantly take to creating full scale projects at least not on their own. Sure some people are gifted but even those people don’t instantly get the salary of a true Web Designer. Now, I’m not saying I want to be a Web Technician all my life thats not the idea behind this. My ambition includes bringing some of the best Web Technicians together from around the world to create teams those teams with genuine projects that are supported by real developers via the internet. Only the most ethical people would get access to this unique organisation with strict interviews and tests. Through a well planned structure successful candidates could get gauranteed work, every day and excel faster than they ever would.

Global

Global is obviously world wide but the way in which WTG spreads around the world is what is important. Todays world lacks ethics and the internet lacks standards. My goal is to create a company of highly ethical developers. Each developer managing multiple web projects and clients of their own but under the Umberella of WebTechGlobal. The idea is to attempt to build a team with people in every major country and eventually every major city. WTG aims to be the Web Design business that can meet with a client anywhere in the world.

Realistic

To me my goals are very realistic and I’m not sure how well I have explained them but in short I want to create a company involved in different areas of the internet with people all over the world. Pulling resources, skills and clients into the mix from different parts of the world will allow WebTechGlobal to build a brand name. Success will come when WebTechGlobal proves its ethical standing by being transparent in everything it does. I also hope to provide much support to charity organisations for free by utalizing a network of Web Technicians in an effeciant manner. All of these things will be done using an online community network that I design and create just for this. It will be done in a way that makes project development highly dynamic with reckognition being giving to graduates for every bit of work.

My job is not only to put good ideas to the test for myself, but it is to the same for you also! You can invest money by hiring myself to initiate an idea you have come up with or pay me to use an idea of my own but you still get the legal ownership. I can do this because I have so many great ideas I could not possibly complete them all within a year. It doesn’t even take a massive budget to create an internet enterprise. Take my Wordpress plugin “CSV 2 POST Pro” for example. It started as less than 500 lines of code. I wrote the code within a week andI put online for free. It now sells for £99.99 to professional Wordpress users and gets upgrades daily.

If you have money to invest or a lot of time on your hands and a great idea then feel free to contact ryan@webtechglobal.co.uk.

Creating a blog using existing data can be fun, rewarding, profitable but not always easy. Even the most basic ideas on how to use your data can complicate things. Thats where I come in. For a reasonable fee I can import your data for you using a collection of expensive software, that way you don’t need to buy it yourself. To help you under stand exactly what this service is, here is a list of common requests I receive with estimated prices…

• Import a small data file of around 5,000 records and use it to make new Wordpress posts or pages – £129.99
• Import 100,000 affiliate products from Commission Junction and use them to create 100,000 new posts – £199.99
• Import 1000 products to a shopping cart plugin such as eStore or WP e-commerce – £299.99
• Import 5000 products to a shopping cart plugin plus put each product on its own product page – £399.99

Prices are estimates only please contact me for an accurate quote

With this service you will obtain premium software and get the normal support that comes with it from the software author. Licenses are purchased by WebTechGlobal on your behalf and we do not distribute copies of premium plugins without compensating the creator of such plugins.

Blog Types

There are many types of blogs you can create if you have a lot of quality data especially if that data is rare. WebTechGlobal can customise Wordpress themes to help your blog stand out from other similiar types of blog or even help you create a whole new idea. Here are some types of blogs that can not only be created quickly but can become popular very quickly when using mass data:

• Ads Classified: You can initially populate your new ads classified blogs with free ads using any data. This will help build up traffic and obviously get away from looking empty which won’t attract paying customers.
• Portal/Directory: With enough data you can create good websites that help people find what they are looking for elsewhere on the internet. We can do this by listing the imported data in an attractive format that makes sense and using url’s within the data for buttons or links.
• e-Commerce: Drop shippers can import thousands of products and instantly start selling them without having to touch the product themselves. If you have other ways to get revenue from your website you can lower the price of your products and be highly competitive, bringing even more traffic.

WebTechGlobal can create any of these types of websites for you using Wordpress and importing mass amounts of data. On average the cost of building the website and importing the data so that it is 100% ready, will cost around £849.99 however prices can be lower or higher depending on your exact needs.