Kris Khaira

Here’s a list of impressive Drupal sites which I’ve found on the net. There are a few existing lists out there, some of which are at the bottom of this post, but I’m curating my own based on my own taste. If you know of any sites I’ve missed out that should be here, please write a comment below. On a lighter note, I’d like to add that these sites are impressive in their own context—I’m not a big fan of Britney Spears.

Social Change & Politics

• Adbusters
• iCitizenForum
• VDAY
• EcoAlign
• UN World Food Programme
• openDemocracy
• NPA France
• Wellstone Action!
• Human Rights Watch
• Comic Relief
• Stand Up Against Poverty
• Oxfam
• Greenpeace UK
• Amnesty International
• European Resistance Archive
• Relay For Life
• SUARAM

Government

• New York State Senate
• French Ministry for Health Youth & Sports
• Dutch State Service for Cultural Heritage
• Data.gov
• Recovery.gov
• NATO Partnership For Peace (irony aside)

Education

• Harvard Science and Engineering
• Stanford Center for Internet & Society
• Launch CS, University of Albert
• Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• MIT Media Lab

Publications (News, Magazines, etc)

• In-Fisherman
• NowPublic
• Horse & Country TV
• Fast Company
• Popular Science
• New York Observer
• France24
• The Onion
• InfoWorld
• Boston’s Weekly Dig
• Crooks and Liars
• Team Sugar
• MotoGP
• Florida Times-Union
• Straight
• US Magazine
• The World
• SNOWBOARD MAGAZINE
• Love And Sprockets
• myLifetime
• 24heures

Music

• MTV UK
• Beyonce
• Francesca Battistelli
• John Legend
• Kelly Music
• The Fray
• Ozzy Osbourne
• Avril Lavigne
• Michael Jackson
• Jennifer Lopez
• Moby
• Pearl Jam
• Bob Dylan
• Led Zeppelin
• Universal Music
• Virgin Radio
• Pink
• REM Tour 2008
• Warner Bros Records
• Britney Spears
• Mission: Metallica
• Artist House Music
• Project OPUS

Corporate and Retail

• Sony Ericsson Labs
• Sanyo Australia
• FedEx Global Newsroom
• AOL Corporate
• Mike Bloomberg
• Nokia Research Center
• Linden Lab
• BlankStyle
• SparkleShelf
• Transformetrics
• Blend Apparel
• Brooklynski

Tech and Design-Related

• Open Atrium
• Twit.TV
• Konigi
• Songbird
• Spread Firefox
• Linux Foundation
• Gallery Menalto Forum
• Typophile Forums
• Linux Journal

Other lists of sites built with Drupal

• Drupal Top Sites
• The Most Incomplete List of Drupal SItes
• Dries Buytaert’s blog
• MyDrupal.com Showcase

A friend of mine asked me how to download videos from YouTube so I might as well write it and send her the link. After all, I couldn’t find a guide that could easily explain the steps in a simple manner.

1. There are a few websites that will let you download YouTube videos. One of them is KeepVid.
2. In KeepVid, paste in the link of the YouTube video.
3. Click Download and save the mp4 version.
4. You should be able to play mp4 files in Windows Media Player. If not, download and install VLC Media Player which is a free and popular program for playing DVDs and video files.

Phishing emails are bloody annoying — they’re the type that imitate authentic emails from banks and try to convince you to put in your email and password into a fake page. The best way to avoid falling for scams like these is to look at the URL and check that it’s your bank’s real website.

Most browsers including Firefox 3 warn you when you try to visit a phishing site, but some of the latest phishing sites are not blocked. Do the responsible thing and forward them to this list of organisations below to make sure it’s added to the blacklists of these browsers and other people. The more people that do this, the more pain it causes phishers:

• Anti-Phishing Working Group: reportphishing@antiphishing.org
• US-Cert: phishing-report@us-cert.gov
• OnGuard Online: spam@uce.gov

In a nutshell, forward all phishing emails with this in the recipient list:

reportphishing@antiphishing.org, phishing-report@us-cert.gov, spam@uce.gov

Create a group in your address book with these 3 emails so it’s easier — you can then just forward phishing emails to that contact group.

I just forwarded a site that wasn’t blocked by Firefox to the above emails today; and it was blocked 15 minutes later. Was it because of my reports? No way to tell, but it doesn’t hurt to help make the Web a safer and more fun place especially if it only takes a few seconds of your time.

It’s been a while since I wrote about anything on this blog, mostly because of Twitter, so I thought I’d start using my blog more to share articles with the world.

Here are some articles regarding the gentrification of shoplot communities in George Town, Penang:

• A City Without A Soul, Gwynn Jenkins, 21 Dec 2008, Aliran
• Never Forget the Heritage Lost, Himanshu Bhatt, Penang Heritage Trust Newsletter, Issue 94, 2008
• The Repeal of Rent Control, Khoo Boo Teik, 2000, Aliran

Every release of FFmpeg is a step closer towards creating alternative video networks to YouTube and having people avoid putting all of their eggs in one basket. So it’s good news then that FFmpeg 0.5 has just been released. Major changes include more support for Real, AAC and WMV9. Centralization of video sharing over the Web faces problems when countries only have to block a few video sharing sites to prevent access to human rights related videos, YouTube being the most popular, of course. In fact, YouTube themselves have been involved in the censorship of politically critical videos.

What I like about LinkedIn is you can just reply to LinkedIn messages from your email client. Takes away the hassle of logging in.

Apple has a page where you can listen to samples of the normal sounds your DVD drive makes, so you can find out if your drive is making that extra burp or hiccup. Quite smart. Icons next to the list of sounds would make it easier to read. How else would you design it?