Archive for category Tech
Happy Diwali!
Happy Diwali!
This is the message I saw when I logged into orkut today :). This inadvertently brought a smile on my face.
The message appears in the header on the top where you have the site nav and is fairly ignorable. Apparently, the message also has some action associated with it which I was unable to test on the slow GPRS connection on my iPhone :(.
Things like these mean a lot to tech nerds like me. It shows that the big giants are paying attention to the vast traffic that hits their servers from India. India (read Indians) is undoubtedly a major consumer of web services trolling around the web. And its high time that the service providers support customization for India. Google started with support for Hindi across all its services and the state of the art Google indic translator revolutionized the way people type in Hindi. Yahoo followed with Yahoo India maps (http://in.maps.yahoo.com -copy & paste as there is no insert hyper link feature in WordPress’ iPhone version).
Now Google is gearing up with Android which I am sure will support i18n. There are rumors for an Indian version of Amazon as well!
This will bring a new paradigm in Internet awareness in India. I can foresee more and more homes signing up for broadband connections.
With customized content for the most dynamic market in the world, the opportunities are endless.
A very Happy Diwali to all of you !
[UPDATE] Clicking on the “Happy Diwali” link on the top changes the CSS! The specially designed CSS for Diwali looks great on orkut ! Thank you Google !
I love my iPhone (&Airtel)
This is getting more exciting. iPhone and Airtel work great in India. I am right now sitting in 2004 Lucknow Shatabdi express and accessing the internet on my iPhone using Airtel’s seamless GPRS network.
There is one thing that I love about the Airtel’s network in India – coverage. You just go anywhere (except J&K) and you find Airtel there. Also, it offers all its value added services like EDGE etc. everywhere.
I am using meebo to chat with my friends and using the Google reader’s customized iPhone interface to catch up on my subscribed feeds.
More upon reaching the city of nawabs…
Its kinda cool
This wphone plugin (http://www.wphoneplugin.org) is kinda cool. I have an iphone type interface for the wordpress admin console from where I can do almost anything (including posting).
This is the first of the many blogs that I am gonna write from here :).
It does have bugs though. Although I am hopeful that they will be fixed in the next release.
Stay tuned…
After a long time…
I am posting this after a long time.
Some of the things that have been keeping me busy were:
1/ The all new look n feel of http://ocw.mit.edu
2/ Yet to be launched HFH
3/ My short US trip – http://www.setugarg.com/simpleviewer/castleIsland
4/ My new iPhone 🙂
Those of you who have been following the breaking news in the gadget world, would know that iPhone has been soft unlocked and is working fine with the majority of carriers in countries around the world. Well atleast its working for sure with T-mobile in the US and Airtel and Vodafone in India as per my little experiment :).
I believe in “Vidya Dadati Vinayam” and hence would soon be sharing the details of my little experiment here. Those getting impatient and geeky can go to http://iphone.unlock.no for the time being. You should get everything you need there.
I would like to thank the folks at iPhone Dev Community for making this possible and engadget.com for bringing this into my notice.
I think all this was destined to happen :). My trip got extended just for the right amount of time (well ofcourse there was a business reason attached with the same :D). Engadget released the confirmation that the hack works in India 1 day before my return flight and to top it all, Apple opened a new store with lots of 4GB iPhones in stock in Natick near my home in Shrewsbury.
Stay tuned… More to come soon.
P.S – I am writing this from my iPhone :). So please do not mind the spelling mistakes.
It just doesn’t work
I recently installed Windows Vista Home Premium on my PC.
First, I want you to read this to get some context.
Ever since the installation, I have been facing incompatibility issues. I do not know why ? Aren’t we supposed to get Wowed (!) after installing it ?
My current critical task -> Get the (supposedly updated and better) Media Center to play a DVD movie.
There is a strange thing I noticed about Windows Vista. It has some kind of enmity with Nero. Basically, whenever I search for a solution to my problem, people just ask “Do you have Nero installed ?” They suggest to uninstall it to solve the problem. Sounds kinda weird, but, probably its true. I had the explorer crashing every time i opened a folder containing video files (DivX primarily). Basically it was facing some issues with thumbnail generation. After I removed nero, the problem got solved ! Now here is something to think. What does a disc burning software got to do with DivX files thumbnails ?
Also, the in house disc burning application sucks. On its first run, it (mis) configured itself and hid the previous sessions written on one of my multi session discs.
Basically its a piece of crap produced by M$ as an answer to Apple’s Mac OS X (which is now gaining popularity everywhere). There are only UI enhancements (that too useless) and no UE enhancements (except search).
Welcome to the new world of Windows. Where you have to trouble shoot every software you install on it. Just stay away from it.
Expect more bhadaas on this one …
SimpleViewer Gallery.xml Generator
SimpleViewer is a great tool to create your own image galleries. The interface is smooth, intuitive and user friendly.
I have been using SimpleViewer for a while. I used to generate its gallery.xml file manually. There are ways to generate the xml using Picasa and other tools, but then you need to have the images on your desktop. I have my photos on photobucket . The best part with photobucket is that it offers static URLs for all your images. So, you can download your images in full size from anywhere. Also, there is a handy Windows XP publisher plugin available to easily upload your photos in your account 🙂
The problem was to automatically create Simpleviewer’s gallery.xml from photobucket static links. I could not find any tool available on the internet which could help me in doing so. Hence, I decided to write a tool myself :).
Being a Java programmer, I built the tool as a Java class. The tool worked smoothly. Then I thought of making it available for everyone through the internet. I created a HTML form to call a JSP which used this class to generate the xml and print it on screen. I tried uploading these in my account on myjavaserver.com but they did not work. I then merged the JSP code and the JAVA code into a servlet and thne tried to deploy it on myjavaserver.com. But all efforts went in gutter. Actually, I think its fair. The procedure to get a myjavaserver.com account is not easy. How can we expect the deployment procedure to be easy ?
So, I shifted to the server side scripting language of the heaven: PHP. I referred to w3schools.com and php.net just to learn the required stuff. And yes, I have the tool up and running at http://www.setugarg.in/SimpleViewerXMLGenerator.
Please use it to create your own image galleries. Feel free to pass this URL to your frinds and family. Its the basic thing (kind of beta) right now. I will be enhancing its functionality as and when I get time. People who are wandering over the internet for such a tool, please accept it as my chritmas gift to you :).
And yes, please mails your comments/suggestions/bugs to SimpleViewerXMLGenerator [at] setugarg [dot] com
Ahmedabad trip
Just checking base from Ahmedabad.
I am still awake at this off hour. I came to Ahmedabad for the first time. Infact I am visting Gujarat for the first time in my life !
I have come here to attend Jashan’s sister’s marriage. Yes, the same Jashan Parikh who has contributed a lot on this site’s Photos section :D.
We (all bhatara guys from JIIT) are staying in an awesome room in an apartment on the 9th floor in a posh area in Ahmedabad. And I must say that I am feeling nostalgic. This is the way we used to live in our hostel :).
We have 2 laptops with bluetooth and my state of the art Reliance Mobile with RConnect facility. Since 4 other guys have gone to have tea at 2 am in the morning (god knows why), and the other 3 are sleeping, I am blogging ! What a great way to kill time.
I like Ahmedabad. More than the place, I like the people here. Basically, after living in Delhi, you will find that you like people from anywhere else in the country. Last time I went to Punjab for the first time and fell in love with the place and the people there :).
Gujarati food is marvellous. I have had a lot of dishes since I came in here. I am in love with their “kadhi“. Also, their marriages are a lot better than marriages in the north. No ho halla, no DJ. Just plain classical instrumental (mostly Santoor) in the background and the marriage ceremony is performed with grace. Also, I haven’t seen the complete family getting involved in such functions anywhere else. Basically, what they show in “Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi” about Gujaratis is all true. Although that soap sucks.
I love technology. Right now I am sitting near the balcony, wirelessly connected to the internet over a bluetooth connection to my phone which is getting charged simultaneously and is lying around 10 meters away on a bed.
Anshuman Johri is trying to call me. Even after telling him that I am connected through a weak and low speed connection to the internet, he is insisting that we atleast give it a try. Hence, I have to sign off.
Some more content with pics from the marriage later…
Ojax
So, finally Google did it. We have AJAX based orkut.
The Profile tabs (social, professional and personal), the scrapbook etc. in orkut are now AJAX based. This means that it would be more fast, more interactive and **probably** we will get more “No donut for you” messages.
Well, lets drop the last part and we have a new web2.0 contender! orkut is undoubtly Google’s biggest success after {ofcourse} its search engine and the Gmail.
Everybody is found orkutting now-a-days. Be it office, school or college. similar to “Google”, the noun “orkut” has also graduated to be a verb. God knows how many grammatical mistakes Google is gonna make! But I guess the world can live with some of these mistakes 😉
With scrap becoming the *in* thing, we see people excited to exchange scraps even if they sit next in the office! They find it more exciting to scrap than to call or IM or email. Despite the fact that the scraps are visible to everyone, people like to use them for conversations. Now this is what I call **social networking**.
All in all, orkut has come out to be a clear winner in this social networking thing.
Looking forward to more such grammatical mistakes…
Microsoft sucks
Recently I started working on a .Net project. I had heard a lot about Visual Studio and had seen most of its ads. The difference is obvious. Let me tell you how the difference is obvious.
Previously I had worked on Java projects. So Eclipse is what I used. Being a Microsoft product, my expectations out of Visual Studio were a bit stretched out. I was thinking that it would provide me with options that would let me have dinner with Aditi at 8 and what not ;).
But when I started using it, the word that came to my mind was “nightmare”. Yes, I understand that for a new person, it takes time to get used to an IDE. But I could master Eclipse in 2 days flat. And here, its over a month and it still is a bad dream.
Small and pretty useful things like Organizing imports, Search results tree, adding try catch automatically, generating getters and setters etc. are missing! ! ! ! ! ! WTF? When I started using it, a single word came to my mind for its developers: “maniacs”. I do not think its at all a developer friendly IDE. Most of my time is spent in doing some configuration to get it working instead of coding the business logic of my application. If you keep it open for 3 – 4 days continuously, it behaves as if one has sprayed pepper in its eyes. Hangs, misbehaves and what not!
Recenltly, I noticed another stupid thing. There was a circular dependency in 2 of my projects in a solution. So, it was not building them (despite configuring the build order). So, I commented out the dependee lines in one of the projects. And then it happened. Something that can be expected from only a M$ product. It was showing errors in the commented lines!
CAUTION: Java developers, stick to Eclipse. Its undoubtedly the best IDE in the world. .Net developers, try Eclipse and M$, yes, the difference is obvious!
Experimenting with AJAX
Finally I dirty my hands with AJAX. It was long due. Ever since I saw Gmail and other web 2.0 apps, I had this thing to make something using the upcoming technologies in the WWW. Since last week, I was experimenting and reading about AJAX after coming back from office.
I am glad that I suceeded in my first attmpt. Although I added a very small feature in an app I am developing at my workplace, using the most basic things in the architechture, it did boost up my confidence. Also, it made me come out of that office mode to the college mode where I used to play with such things more often :D.
Now I am gonnna try some advanced concepts of the architechture. But this next step might take some time as I would be busy reading about this cool thing :).
Maybe some day I develop something which comes here.