Free phone calls with Gmail

Gmail voice and video chat  makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.

Then you will ask me that how to make free phone calls to Chinese mainland?It’s easy.

The first condition is you must load your Gtalk and Gmail voice and video chat plugin  in Gmail,then login Gmail with a U.S. or Canada ip.The second condition is you must have a Google Voice account of U.S. phone numbers.

Then, you can use Gmail make calls for free,

1.Call your own Google Voice number (E.g. 174 065-11118)

2.Hear the voice “You do not have a new message, press 2 to make a call”,press 2.

3.Press the Chinese number such as 0118613999999999#  or 011862166666666#,after that you will hear the voice”It’s a free call.”

Go and enjoy free phone calls from Gmail!

A Gmail Theme: Ever-changing Like the Weather

Today,I find a interesting theme in  gmail——Bus Stop.Have you apply your Gmail Theme before? If yes, you will find an interesting feature in some of their theme. One of them is Bus Stop theme. This theme show you several people are waiting for their bus and sometimes the weather will be changed. That is interesting about it.How to set it?Login Gmail-Settings-Themes-Bus Stop.

Sunny day at the bus stop

The first version of the Bus Stop Gmail Theme features a sunny day at the bus stop. In this version, you will see that the sun is up and the sky is blue. There are only two characters in this version: the little girl in pigtails who is balancing a tower of assorted-flavored ice cream and the young man in business suit who is experiencing a bad hair day with a scoop of ice cream on his head.

Cloudy day at the bus stop

Although it is still blue, the sky is evidently adorned with fluffy clouds that are pushing the sun farther away into the background. The two characters from the sunny version are still at the bus stop: the young man is impatiently staring at his watch while the little girl is happily riding a giraffe. An old man sitting on the green bench, a young jock wearing red sweatpants, and an old lady holding a black purse joins them in the scene.

Rainy day at the bus stop

It’s not always sunny at the bus stop. Sometimes, the rain pours down too. The five characters are not only waiting for the bus to arrive, but also trying their best to deal with the rain: the young man is covering his head with newspapers, the old man and the old lady are using parasols, the young jock is wearing a scuba suit, and the little girl is balancing a tower of umbrellas. A new character is added to this scene: a jacket-wearing black man with a pet bulldog.

Recommend a film:Buried

Yesterday is the third national  mourning day of  China. I was sad for the victims compatriots,however I had to ask a question whether they could not be dead?I found the answer from a film —— <Buried>.

Wang Libo’s film <Buried> was one of the prizewinners of the 2009 Beijing Documentary Film Festival. This probing documentary was made in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that shook Sichuan province . Instead of focusing directly at the Sichuan earthquake, Wang’s film looks back at controversies surrounding the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake that killed over 200,000 people. Using a range of expert testimonies, Wang builds a provocative argument that Chinese officials had significant information forewarning of an imminent earthquake, but did not take sufficient action to help prevent the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.

The implications of the film’s conclusions bear heavily on the GOV’s handling of both the Tangshan and the Sichuan earthquake. <Buried> leaves disturbing questions about the power and responsibility of government in disaster management.

I recommed every Chinese people to see this film.

Recommendation 20 jQuery plugin

1. Dynamic tooltip
Very cool tooltip! It’s very well made because it consists of cool transition effects and it also has a transparency and a drop shadow effect.

2. Popup Bubble
Brilliant tooltip! It looks so simple but it has awesome transition effects. This tooltip could be very useful for clean and simple websites.

3. jQuery Horizontal Tooltips Menu Tutorials
Beautifully made tooltip! This tooltip never disappears but follows when you hover over other links. Such a simple looking tooltip but its animation is brilliant.

4. Prototip
A lot of various very good looking tooltips which look awesome and have beautiful effects. Brilliant peace of work!

5. Coda Popup Bubble
Very nice tooltip with cool transition effect and it also has a drop shadow.

6. Awesomeness
Cool tooltip with nice transition effect and cool transparent border around it.

7. TipTip
Beautifully made tooltip with fade in / out transition effects, transparency and drop shadow effect.

8. (mb)Tooltip
Beautifully made tooltip with nice transition for input fields.

9. vTip
Simple but well made tooltip with a fade in transition effect. It has a cool looking border around it and when this tooltip appears, it also follows your mouse.

10. jGrowl
Cool tooltip which appears when you click on the link and then it sticks on the right-top corner of your window, and disappears after some time or when you close it manually by clicking on the close button. It also has fade in / out transition effects.

11. jQuery Ajax Tooltip
Interesting tooltip which can handle image and text together like a mini page. It has a drop shadow effect.

12. Digg-style post sharing tool with jQuery
Cool digg-style post sharing tool. This tooltip could be very useful for social networking website.

13. Input Floating Hint Box
Interesting tooltip with rounded corners for input fields. Tooltip fades in when you click on the input field and fades out when you click somewhere else.

14. Simpletip
Beautifully made tooltip with fade transitions. When you hover over a link, a tooltip fades in just above or below the link.

15. qTip
Very simple but good looking tooltip. This tooltip is available with rounded corners and also as a speech bubble tip.

16. Orbital Tooltip
Interesting tooltip plugin where you can set manually where your tooltip will show up.

17. Inline HTML Tooltip
Cool tooltip with nice transition effects.

18. tipsy
Interesting good looking tooltip which appears above, below, on the right or left side of the link.

19. Easiest jQuery Tooltip Ever
Simple tooltip but it could be useful to display an image when you hover over a link.

20. BsTip
Various simple tooltips with fade in and fade out transition effects and border around them.

Goodbye,my DHU

A month ago, I said goodbye to my alma mater——DHU of China.

A month later, I began to recall my college life.

Compared to ordinary people, my college life is more wonderful.In four years, I have made many new friends from different schools and different organizations.In addition, I also went to many places, such as Sichuan, Yunnan, Guangxi, Hainan, Jiangxi  etc.In the professional field, I also produced three short drama,<Always Be>,<Mikado Legend>,<5021>.In other areas, I also have a lot of progress.

Oh,I almost forgot my four bedroom brothers,they are Zheng Lee, Hongzhu Wang and Qi Tan,our friendship will continue.Once there, I also met the most important person——Sezame.Meeting you was my greatest honor!

Unfortunately, I had not a failing course during the college,Aha~

Now, I miss the  dining hall, classrooms, dormitories, and some bits and pieces of DHU,that I would even miss.Fortunately, I can always go back to my alma mater.

Not goodbye,my DHU.

Page Speed:a web performance testing tool

These days, I had some research on the web performance testing tools and found a very useful and very convenient tool to recommend to you today, it is developed by the google: Page Speed.

What is Page Speed?

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on(you can add it only after you add Firefox 3.0.4  above and Firebug 1.3.3 above). Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

How to use Page Speed?

After installed,click the icon at the bottom right corner of Firebug to start it, then you can click the Page Speed tab.Note that, when you want to do a  performance analysis by Page Speed, you must load the page first, then click the “Analyze Performance” button, and  Page Speed will rate each item based on the web performance best practices.Finally, it will array the all items according to importance(as shown above).

Here’s how to interpret the color-code scores:

RED:High priority. These suggestions represent the largest potential performance wins for relatively little development effort. You should address these items first.
YELLOW:Medium priority. These suggestions may represent smaller wins or much more work to implement. You should address these items next.
GREEN: Working fine or low priority. If suggestions are displayed, as indicated with a + sign, they probably represent minor wins. You should only be concerned with these items after you’ve handled the higher-priority ones.
BLUEInformational messages only. Either these items don’t apply to this page or there was a problem in running the test.

ps:the web performance best practices:

1、    Avoid CSS expressions
2、    Combine external CSS
3、    Combine external JavaScript
4、    Defer loading of JavaScript
5、    Enable compression
6、    Leverage browser caching
7、    Leverage proxy caching
8、    Minify JavaScript
9、    Minimize request size
10、    Minimize DNS lookups
11、    Minimize redirects
12、    Optimize images
13、    Optimize the order of styles and scripts
14、    Parallelize downloads across hostnames
15、    Put CSS in the document head
16、    Remove unused CSS
17、    Serve resources from a consistent URL
18、    Serve static content from a cookieless domain
19、    Specify image dimensions
20、    Use efficient CSS selectors
21、    Minify HTML
22、    Minify CSS
23、    Serve scaled images
24、    Avoid bad requests
25、    Specify a character set early

What is the standard?

I’m sorry, there is no official standard.But I am now doing such a thing to share with you:

1, Page Speed Score total score must be 80 or above
2, Serious error not more than three, general error not more than 5
3,The error is not allowed : Avoid CSS expressions, Combine external CSS, Combine external JavaScript, Enable compression, Minify CSS, Minify HTML
4, Allowed error, but must be promptly corrected: Leverage browser caching, Leverage proxy caching, Minify JavaScript, Minimize request size, Optimize images
5, Allowed error, and have time to correct: Minimize DNS lookups, Minimize redirects, Optimize the order of styles and scripts, Parallelize downloads across hostnames, Put CSS in the document head, Remove unused CSS