Siddharth Uppal's Weblog

Consume some creativity

2006-04-03T22:43:00.000-07:00

I now blog on http://blog.somecreativity.com

Does Money Grow on Trees?

2006-03-31T15:56:00.000-08:00

Look ma it does! :)

I took this picture at a Chinese Restaurant named Kung-Ho near my office. The food is great but if you’re pure-vegetarian, you better be careful while eating.

Some Recent Pictures

2006-03-29T21:15:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures that I took recently. Excuse the poor quality because I took them from my mobile phone.

Transferred them from my Nokia 6101 over IR to my laptop (Dell d810) - which wasn't that much of a pain once I installed Nokia PC Suite. Interestingly the most time consuming part was figuring out where the IR sensor on my mobile-phone was :)

TagyuLib - Tagyu .NET Client Library

2006-03-25T02:13:00.000-08:00

I have finished writing a .NET client library for Tagyu's REST Web-Service. Tagyu is a hosted service that uses human intelligence to suggest tags and categories relevant to a block of text.

TagyuLib (that’s my creative name for the .NET API) supports everything that the REST API of Tagyu allows you to do as of now. So it supports both classification queries and related-tags queries. It also allows you to pass your username/password to Tagyu through HTTP basic authentication scheme. If you're wondering what am I talking about here, you should really be reading Tagyu REST web service documentation first.

I have created a project at GotDotNet CodeGallery to share the source code of TagyuLib and it would be great to see people participate.

I hope some people would find TagyuLib useful and I would love to hear from them. But right now it is 2:15 AM and I need to get some sleep.

Update on March 25, 2006

Here is the class diagram and some sample code to get you started.

Class Diagram

Sample Code

Determining tags and category

You need to instantiate a new TagyuService object and simply call its GetClassification method passing-in your text. GetClassification will return you a ClassificationSuggestion object and you can loop through the items in its Tags property to do whatever you want. You can also get the category for your text from the Category property of the ClassificationSuggestion object that you got back.


  string inputText = Console.ReadLine();

  TagyuService ts = new TagyuService();

  ClassificationSuggestion s = ts.GetClassification(inputText);

  Console.WriteLine("Suggested Tags are: ");

  foreach (Tag tg in s.Tags) {
      Console.WriteLine(tg.Value);
  }

  Console.WriteLine("Suggested Category is: {0}", s.Category);

Determing related tags

That's equally simple. All you need to do is instantiate a new TagyuService object and call its GetRelatedTags method passing in the tag for which you wish to see related tags. GetRelatedTags returns a RelatedSuggestion object and you can loop through the items in its Tags property.


  Console.WriteLine("Enter a Tag");

  string inputTag = Console.ReadLine();

  TagyuService ts = new TagyuService();

  RelatedSuggestion r = ts.GetRelatedTags(inputTag);

  Console.WriteLine("Related tags are: ");

  foreach (Tag tg in r.Tags) {
      Console.WriteLine(tg.Value);
  }

Using your Tagyu username and password

As of now, unregistered users can make one request per minute from a single IP address to Tagyu and requests beyond this limit result in an error. So if this bothers you, you should create an account at Tagyu. You can pass your username and password to Tagyu through TagyuLib simply by setting these properties on the TagyuService object before invoking GetClassification and GetRelatedTags methods. Here's how:


  string inputText = Console.ReadLine();

  TagyuService ts = new TagyuService();

  ts.Username = "[YOUR-USERNAME]";
  ts.Password = "[YOUR-PASSWORD]";

  ClassificationSuggestion s = ts.GetClassification(inputText);

  Console.WriteLine("Suggested Tags are: ");

  foreach (Tag tg in s.Tags) {
      Console.WriteLine(tg.Value);
  }

  Console.WriteLine("Suggested Category is: {0}", s.Category);

Download

This way please!

Requirements

Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0.50727 redistributable
Visual Studio 2005 (if you wish to build the source-code on your machine without any tinkering)

Bugs/Issues/Feedback

I'd love to hear from people who've used TagyuLib. Please share your feedback, issues and any bugs you encounter here.

Contributing

Join the project and get started.

Changelog

March 25, 2006
- Initial version
April 02, 2006
- Merged SuggestedTag and RelatedTag classes into one.
- Renamed Suggestions to ClassificationSuggestion.
- Renamed Related to RelatedSuggestion.
- Added an overload for GetRelatedTags that takes a Tag object as argument.

New Cartoon

2006-03-19T13:50:00.000-08:00

Alright, I just made a new cartoon and posted it to CarryOnCoding.com. Now is everybody happy? :)

Multimon Quake3

2006-03-18T16:20:00.000-08:00

OK imagine this: You have 24 monitors in front of you - covering every inch of your field of view, and a 12 node Linux cluster. And you are using this setup to play Quake3 with a gyro-mouse (basically a mouse that you can move in air). Add surround sound to the setting, and you’ll have the most awesome gaming experience of your life. They’re doing this at Virginia Tech.

Here's a video from YouTube:

I like playing Quake3 and this blew my mind!

Via

So you <3 Sudoku?

2006-03-16T20:02:00.000-08:00

Sudoku (Japanese: 数独, sūdoku), also known as Number Place, is a logic-based placement puzzle. The aim of the canonical puzzle is to enter a numerical digit from 1 through 9 in each cell of a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 subgrids (called "regions"), starting with various digits given in some cells (the "givens"). Each row, column, and region must contain only one instance of each numeral. Completing the puzzle requires patience and logical ability.

Though Sudoku is fun even when played alone, it's actually a lot more enjoyable if you're competing with someone. IronSudoku.com is an online version of the game with a social flavor to it. The website basically allows people to chat with each other while playing. A new puzzle is posted at the website every day so you have 24 hours to solve it. I'm surely looking forward to solving some.

The interface of the game at IronSudoku is very clean and user-friendly and if you know the rules of the game, you can get started right away.

I would really like it if there was a way, let's say, for me to invite some friends of mine to IronSudoku for a competition online. I (organizer) should be able to pick the difficulty level of the puzzle for the event. At the start of the event, the system should start a timer ticking and pick a puzzle of the specified difficulty randomly. Every participant would receive the same Sudoku to solve from the system. And the Chatterbox should allow chatting only between the players in that competition. A visual indication should be given by the system as soon as somebody solves the puzzle. I'm sure this would be a lot of fun!

BTW as of now you have to be a Pro member to add other IronSudoku members as friends.

My first car

2006-03-13T21:59:00.000-08:00

Mitsubishi Eclipse 2000 GS

Ajax at Wallmart

2006-03-12T13:45:00.000-08:00

Windows Media Encoder

2006-03-01T12:30:00.000-08:00

You can use Windows Media Encoder to create screencasts, i.e. videos of your interactions with software running on your computer with some narration. From a developer’s perspective, it’s a nice tool to quickly demo what you’ve been working on to someone else. The tool is free and very easy to use, but anyway here’s a quick tutorial by Dominic.

Catching up on Channel9 Videos

2006-02-20T22:56:00.000-08:00

Monday being President’s Day, it was a three-day weekend here. So I thought of catching up on some videos at Channel9 which is something I wanted to do from Hyderabad but couldn’t because my Reliance internet connection at home couldn’t handle it. Here are the best three videos from the ones I saw:

Life and Times of Anders Hejlsberg

Anders, as you probably know, is the chief designer of the C# programming language. I think the video is worth watching and inspiring. The show is mostly non-geeky but fun to watch. Anders even draws his favorite data-structure at the end of the show and autographs the sheet.
Jeffrey Richter – Working with Microsoft technologies

Nice video with lots of information. He touches upon anonymous method support in C# 2.0; when it’s useful when its not. Array classes have a ForEach method which can take an anonymous method as an argument. By far the most informative video.
Anders Hejlsberd – LINQ

Anders shows what LINQ is and what it can do. Breathtaking!

SMS based payments

2006-02-20T01:10:00.000-08:00

TextPayMe is a website that allows you to use your mobile phone to pay other people by sending text messages. I think that’s very cool and I remember discussing the exact same thing with Alpha0 back in November last year. Sadly we never got past doing anything more than merely talking about it but then there was lots of stuff happening at that time and there was hardly any time.

Seattle - Month 1

2006-02-12T18:50:00.000-08:00

Well I hadn’t updated this blog for quite some time and a lot has been happening so here’s an update.

Seattle is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places I have seen in my life so far. It is not crowded with people and there’s lots of greenery. The city has breathtaking views of the beautiful lakes, the sea and the mountains. On a clear day one can enjoy the view of the snow-covered peeks of Mount Rainier. The downtown looks great too. I keep hearing that Seattle is the best during summer and I have absolutely no doubts about that.

The only bad thing is that it rains a lot here. So you have very little mobility if you don’t have a car of your own. After discussing with friends and reading up online articles I decided that my first car has to be a used car (vs. buying a new car, or leasing a new/used car). Microsoft is in the same city and a lot people you meet work for them. So the most preferable way to find good cars is to use the same website that those guys use to put up ads – www.micronewsads.com. However on any given day more ads are posted on Craigslist that on MicroNews.

It’s funny how people take pictures of their cars. Here are the pictures from an ad for Ford Bronco at Craigslist.

Call me paranoid, but after seeing pictures like these I become sure that there’s something wrong with the front of the car. Though I chose to show the pictures of a used Bronco, I have been strongly advised to not go for a Ford because they say it means Found On the Road Dead, or something like that.

I’m taking a bus to work and back these days. The bus ride is surprisingly easy. Based on my experiences with public transport in India, my expectations were honestly quite different. One of the advantages of traveling in a bus is that you get to meet new people. One day I met an old person around 55-60 years old who was originally from TN and had been in the US for 25 years. And guess what, he asked me about the Simputer and said that he had heard about it from someone. He had said that he had an engineering background and was working as a technician so the question wasn’t exactly surprising. I told him that the Simputer is costlier than the other hand-held computers available in India and is still not easily available to the people in villages which disappointed him. He asked me where I was from. I said Himachal and he said that he had been in Delhi for five years at which point I could see his voice cracking and some moisture in his eyes. I guess everybody has their story.

Anyways I am living in a two bed room apartment with a guy from Lebanon who’s working at Microsoft. He tells me how his country is in a state of total mess (not reusing his choice of words because this blog is for family viewing). He said that people didn’t exactly have addresses in most areas of his country so the addresses on the letters read something like this:

Mr. X
Y’s House
The One With Blue Windows
Located On The Z Mountain

(Where X, Y and Z are names; Y is typically a surname)

Mountains don’t generally have signs identifying them so if you’re a foreigner in that country, you’re basically lost.

As for food, I am living off of microwaving frozen-food but I’m happy because I actually find it tastier than what I had in the restaurants in Hyderabad.

Birthday Meme

2006-01-29T20:18:00.000-08:00

Your Birthdate: August 22

You tend to be understated and under appreciated.
You have a hidden force to do amazing things, doing them your own way.
People may see you as strange and shy, but they know little.
Your unconventional ways have more power than they (and even you) know.

Your strength: Standing up for what you know is true

Your weakness: You tend to be picky and rigid

Your power color: Silver

Your power symbol: Square

Your power month: April

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

Chopsticks

2006-01-27T23:25:00.000-08:00

So I have learnt to properly eat food using chopsticks without having to poke a chopstick right through the food item to pick it up. Follow the directions here, if you want to learn it yourself. Why would you wanna do it? Well, I guess some food items are supposed to taste better when eaten with a chopstick but I am still collecting evidence to reach any conclusion in this regard :)

Free Community Powered WiFi

2006-01-26T22:27:00.000-08:00

Offer free WiFi access to others and get free access in other WiFi networks for free. That’s what the basic premise of Wibiki is. They have a piece of software that you need to run on your wireless router to secure it, and another piece of software that you would need to install on your computer to access internet on outside Wibiki WiFi networks. I am not absolutely sure how the company behind Wibiki is making money out of it though but they surely have an interesting and an immensely useful idea.

Return of the nerds

2006-01-25T10:14:00.000-08:00

You have to see this clip entitled "Return of the nerds" from YouTube. Its definitly one of the funniest clips I have ever seen.

The questions...

2006-01-18T18:52:00.000-08:00

So what did you say your name is?
Where are you from?
What's your educational background?
What's your total work experience and where do you work currently?

No these are not the questions from a job interview but the questions I have been answering lately while looking for an apartment and a roommate in Bellevue.

Well what do you know, someone might even say - "Hey I have a puzzle for you, let's see how you solve it" :)

Coding@Seattle

2006-01-13T10:51:00.000-08:00

So I finally reached Seattle on the 9'th after flying for around 18 hours I guess. I flew from Hyderabad to Amsterdam on KLM airlines and from Amsterdam to Seattle on NorthWest airlines. In both these airlines I had an Economy/Coach seat, and had specified Asian Veg for the food.

KLM served me a veg-roll which tasted pretty ok but the journey was mostly boring. Their inflight entertainment system had common monitors where they showed stuff like Mr. Bean and later on the Bollywood movie – Parineeta.

On the other hand, NorthWest airlines served me something that smelled nothing like anything I had ever had before in my life and I am fortunate to not have died (so far) after eating it. However the journey in NorthWest was more comfortable because they had an inflight entertainment system wherein each passenger had a separate display so I watched three movies back to back until I dozed off.

I reported to work on the next day. I am jet-lagged but I am trying to fight it by working. It is embarrassing sometimes when I fall asleep while someone is explaining me something at work. Fortunately people understand my jetlag problem, or so I hope :)

People I've met at work are all very friendly. It has been raining here since the past 20-25 days and people expect the rain to break some past records. Obviously the weather is cold but it doesn't affect much because the insides of houses are warm and commuting is mostly in cars.

The summer is supposed to be the best time of the year and most people have convertible cars. The traffic is not crazy like in India with blaring horns of vehicles, and everyone over-taking each other at the slightest opportunity. I need to buy a car soon, and so far the Hummer is my favorite. It’s like a huge beast on the road!

I am working at a small-sized software company. There's loads of interesting work waiting for me so I guess I am going to be pretty busy for the next 5-6 months at least.

I am currently looking for an apartment so if you happen to know anyone in Bellevue area looking for a room-mate, do let me know.

Considering my work and everything else put together, I guess I am going to love being here!

technorati tags: seattle, hummer, job, jetlag, cars

Woof-Woof!

2005-12-13T09:04:00.000-08:00

I happened to hit upon NDTV Profit, while checking out the channels as dictated by the random number generator in my mind. They had the program “One Life to Love” running and this week they had it on “Retaining Top Talent”. I was unsure of the connection between the name of the program and the topic, but I had to know what they had to say, so I watched.

It was an interesting program and they made some valid points, but for some odd reason they showed dogs running around happily (yes, you can tell that with practice) in the background when describing the top-5 things that employees look for in the company they work at.

Of all the creatures that exist on the planet, why did they choose dogs? I was flabbergasted. Were they trying to compare happy dogs to happy employees and dog owners to the management? Oh I love dogs BTW, and perhaps those of the robotic kind are better. I have nothing against dogs. But that’s beside the point.

So coming back to the program, they ranked “money and perks” third. They placed “exciting and challenging work” and “exciting work culture” as the top-2 things. I have to say, I agree with that ordering.

Well, I don’t remember what they mentioned as the last 2 in their top-5 things because frankly I was too distracted by them showing dogs in the background and can’t recall anything else now.

Perhaps they started from the saying “I work like a dog” and thought it was a good idea to use dogs that were playing in the background. That inspired me to draw the following cartoon.

New Cartoon - Noisy Coworkers

2005-12-10T01:54:00.000-08:00

OK, I have put up a new cartoon over at www.carryoncoding.com and this time it is about noisy coworkers. I hope that gives them a clue as to how it is in their own best interest that they be quieter. As usual the cartoon isn’t meant to resemble anyone in real life.

One of the things that I find happening quite often is that people get a bolt from the blue when they realize that I draw these cartoons on my own using a mouse -- no drawing on a paper, scanning and coloring-on-computer business.

Well that was only true so far and is about to change because my good friends: Alpha0, Laks and Abhi gifted me an iPen – that thingy that has an electromagnetic sensor base with a cordless pen.

I am still getting myself familiarized to using it extensively but for a start, I drew the girl you see in today’s comic using the iPen. Big thanks for the fabulous gift guys!

Tagyu::Search v0.03

2005-12-09T11:40:00.000-08:00

I have incorporated support for two new features in my Tagyu::Search module and learnt a lot about HTTP in the process.

1. Support for HTTP Basic Authentication

With this in place, it is now possible for Perl code using my module to break the one request per IP barrier imposed on anonymous users by Tagyu. So register yourself at Tagyu right now!

This is what you need to do in your code:


# Instantiate a new Tagyu::Search object.
my $tagyu = Tagyu::Search->new(
 username => "[YOUR-USERNAME]",
 password => "[YOUR-PASSWORD]"
);

# Invoke the SuggesTags method on the Tagyu::Search object.
my @tags = $tagyu->SuggestTags("[YOUR-TEXT]");

However anonymous searches through Tagyu::Search package are still supported.

2. Introduced two new methods SuggestTagsText and SuggestTagsURL.

SuggestTagsText encodes all the special characters like '=', '+', '&', etc. before passing on the text to the Tagyu Web Service, while SuggestTagsURL considers its argument as a URL and uses the Tagyu Web Service to suggest tags for the text at the specified URL.

Download Tagyu-Search-0.03 and let me know how it works for you. As always, feedback is welcome!

Why is open-source good for learners?

2005-12-09T05:29:00.000-08:00

It is widely agreed that the best way to learn about something is to teach it.

By opening up the source of a project, you're actually teaching the people who'd read your code, how you solved the problems that you encountered in your project.

Everybody understands that there’s a lot to learn about programming by reading other people's code, but in fact you would also learn a lot by starting an open-source project, in the same way as you'd learn about a topic by teaching it to someone.

So start hacking an open-source project today even though you might not have attained God status yet in the technologies required for its implementation. Don’t worry about the mistakes you’d make as your ascent towards God status would continue with your hacking.

Scott Adams' Humor Formula

2005-12-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

So nice of Scott Adams to share his 2-of-6 rule which basically says that in order for something to be funny, you need at least two of the following elements:

Cute (as in kids and animals)
Naughty
Bizarre
Clever
Recognizable (You’ve been there)
Cruel

OK to confess the truth, my cartoons have only been humorous by accident so far, if at all :) But I think I did manage to get four of the elements right (excluding Cute and Naughty) in atleast the comic entitled "Why Code Reviews?" and going by the comments I think it was liked by quite a few people.

BTW in case you haven't noticed yet, I post a new cartoon at www.carryoncoding.com approximately every weekend.

Recent enhancements to Tagyu REST API

2005-12-06T00:28:00.000-08:00

Tagyu is a service that suggests relevant tags for content. Given a URL or some text, it gives you some suggestions for tags based on how other people have tagged similar things. They have a REST API available and I had written a simple Perl wrapper over it some time ago. That Perl package would hopefully save some developers from writing the necessary plumbing code required to utilize Tagyu in their Perl code.

Well the REST API of Tagyu has been extended recently so I need to make code changes in my Tagyu::Search Perl module to allow the Perl code using that module to take full advantage of Tagyu's REST API. So here is a list of TODOs for me:

Support passing of data to the Tagyu Web Service through HTTP POST.
Tagyu Web Service can either be passed plain text or a URL. If plain text is passed by the user, it should reach Tagyu in a URL encoded manner.
Incorporate support for authentication in the Perl module.

I look forward to working on these tasks because I would get to know HTTP somewhat better than before.

More information about about Tagyu.com's REST API can be found here.

Interesting Links

2005-12-04T20:44:00.000-08:00

Evhead, co-founder of Blogger.com and Odeo.com, shares ten rules for building successful web startups. Go read.

MakeMyTrip.com does not seem to include some airlines like AirDeccan, Kingfisher etc. when finding out the minimum fare between two specified locations. Zimbabao suggested me to have a look at FlightOrder.com and well that site is quite cool. They even include the recently introduced Go and Paramount airlines in their search. Check that site out!

Visited foss.in/2005

2005-11-30T20:35:00.000-08:00

I attended the first two days of foss.in conference held at Bangalore. It was held in the Bangalore palace grounds with the magnificent palace in the backdrop.

There were five halls and a ball-room which had sessions running in parallel. Each of the halls was named after a famous open-source personality – Torvalds hall, Stallman hall, Cox hall, etc.

I enjoyed being there and it was very inspiring to know about the work of the speakers.

I attended Rasmus’ talk on cross-site scripting detection and prevention. His talk on deploying large-scale PHP was very useful too because there were some useful general points in it. Starting from an example of writing a simple and scalable webpage hit monitor, he went on to discuss various configurations for setting up replication in MySQL which are highly scalable.

I found the talk by Gopalarathnam Venkatesan on programming the Mozilla platform using XUL very interesting. After attending the half-hour talk, I felt confident enough to dig my hands into XUL.

The talk by Gopal Vijayaraghavan on DotGNU was very informative too. I am very interested in .NET and Gopal was in the news for having ported DotGNU to Simputer within 72 hours and hence my interest in his talk. He mentioned the problems he had faced as a developer and how you end up doing everything that nobody wants to do when you are a lead developer. It was an informative talk.

Glancer is a real cool app which anyone attending foss.in can use to plan his schedules and find people who have similar interests as him. Nirav Mehta talked about the process of building Glancer using OpenLaszlo, the technical issues they faced, etc.

Premshree introduced the audience to Ruby in his presentation while Avik Sengupta wrote a cookbook application from scratch in his presentation by using Ruby on Rails.

I met (in no particular order) Rajaram, Swaroop, Sumeet, Philip, Premshree, Gopal, Suhas and Pradeep. It was quite exciting to meet the people behind the blogs that I had been reading. Often a mere mention of CarryOnCoding.com was enough to help them recognize me instantly. Swaroop even gave me a sneak peek on his yet-to-be-launched website running on TurboGears, a web development framework for Python.

I am strong believer in the merits of open-source and it was truly inspiring to see people dedicate an enormous amount of energy and time into building interesting and often challenging stuff and then sharing the code with everyone by making it open-source.

Visit my moblog for more pictures that I took at the conference.

Monday's Don't Suck

2005-11-27T23:57:00.000-08:00

And start out great if you happen to have an invite for a groovy application that you feel is the next big thing waiting in your inbox. I received an invite to try out Riya photo-search (alpha) and I am really looking forward to playing with it after work. Hmmm... need to collect all of my digital photos at one place first.

Code Baba is Back!

2005-11-26T00:07:00.000-08:00

Code-Baba is back in my latest comic, and this time he touches upon open-source. If you want Code-Baba to answer your question, send a mail to him at codebaba@carryoncoding.com.

Ten Essential Development Practices

2005-11-24T23:39:00.000-08:00

Following is a list of good development practices from an article by Damian Conway. I am reproducing them here after slightly modifying them so as to make them applicable to programming in languages other than Perl too.

Design the Module's Interface First
Write the Test Cases Before the Code
Create Standard Code Documentation Templates for Modules and Applications
Use a Revision Control System
Create Consistent User Interfaces
Agree Upon a Coherent Layout Style and Automate it
Code in Commented Paragraphs
Throw Exceptions Instead of Returning Special Values or Setting Flags
Add New Test Cases Before you Start Debugging
Don't Optimize Code--Benchmark It

I guess most of these are obvious to many of us - developers but still only a few of us can honestly admit to following all of them stringently everytime. So I believe the real challenge lies in how religiously can you follow them even in the face of deadline pressures, unclear specs, and the other pain producing things that indirectly affect what you do when you write code using your favorite editor.

Read the original article by Damian Conway.

Extreme Learning

2005-11-24T05:20:00.000-08:00

In software where things change incessantly at a high pace it is very important to know how to go about learning stuff that matters.

The natural sciences have a reputation for posing special challenges to the way we think and learn: they are a form of "extreme thinking". In this essay physicist Michael A. Nielsen discusses some of the challenges facing researchers in the natural sciences, and how those challenges shed light on other tough learning situations.

Read the essay to absorb some general principles of learning.

Tagyu Perl API version 0.02

2005-11-22T22:46:00.000-08:00

I have incorporated support in the SuggestTags method of my Tagyu::Search Perl module to allow specifying options to modify its behavior when it contacts Tagyu.com servers. Thanks to Nathan McFarl for his comment.

So download Tagyu::Search v0.02 and do let me know how it works for you!

News Updates

2005-11-21T18:46:00.000-08:00

Alright, so I finally got a Reliance broadband connection at my home. Hmm I can finally check the item off from my 43Things.com list. This took a little longer than I expected because the data-cable for my LG mobile-phone handset wasn't available on the shops that I enquired. Well the speed is good and I think the deal seems to be good enough for recommending to friends and family.

In EtherYatri.NET related news: I think I should be able to put out a new release of the mobile-agent toolkit before the end of this year. Abhas is working on making a logo for EtherYatri.NET. He is quite an enthusiastic person, and I was quite impressed with his skills at Photoshop and stuff. Hmmm only a month to go till the next release!

And yes, I also posted a new comic dedicated to the greatest pain in the a**es of all developers worldwide - Bugs! Bugs! Bugs!

Interesting Links

2005-11-18T06:16:00.000-08:00

Paul Graham's essay entitled "Writing, briefly". Need to read it again to absorb his points completely.
Om Malik mentions about rumors that Google is trying to buy Riya. On Sept 29, 2005, I had said: if the software is really as good as it appears to be from Munjal's blog, I am willing to bet they'd be acquired by a Google or Yahoo! as soon as they're at 1.0, if not earlier..
How to survive when you are flooded with email? Here are some suggestions.

Attending FOSS.IN/2005

2005-11-17T23:35:00.000-08:00

I wanted to attend Linux Bangalore conference last year but couldn't. Well the conference has now been rechristened FOSS.IN and will cover all FOSS topics which is pretty exciting. Fortunately this year it seems I will be able to attend the conference and I am all excited about it. I will keep posting pictures to my moblog from there so if you wanna watch all the fun from the comfort of your $comfortable_place you know where to go.

Not only would I be able to attend some of the talks from this interesting list and learn about some stuff, this would hopefully also be an opportunity for me to meetup with some of the geeks in Bangalore whose blogs I have been reading regularly.

If you wanna meet up with me during the conference, just look for the guy with a halo on his head (no I am not bald) ;)

Creative Commons Cartoons

2005-11-17T02:39:00.000-08:00

So I have decided to apply Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 (info) to all the cartoons that I release at CarryOnCoding.com. They've made choosing a license very simple which is really cool!

Oh I wish the process of choosing a license for software projects at SourceForge was similar but then stuff like this is helpful while making a choice.

Microsoft and Web 2.0

2005-11-16T04:21:00.000-08:00

Robert Scoble recently posted 12 reasons he's heard why we don't find the recent Web 2.0 companies using Microsoft's web development technologies, but using Ruby on Rails, MySQL and Linux instead. (Via)

Got Ubuntu!

2005-11-15T22:57:00.000-08:00

I received five Ubuntu Linux (version 5.10) CDs in mail today. If you happen to be in Hyderabad and need one, do let me know.

The CDs are free and you can order yours here. However you can also download a CD image on your own, provided your internet connection can handle it.

I would now be able to hopefully initiate the non-geeks (= human-beings?) in my family towards Linux.

New Comic - Why Code Reviews?

2005-11-13T21:38:00.000-08:00

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live - Martin Golding

Check out the latest comic!

Air Deccan

2005-11-13T21:15:00.000-08:00

I realized something when I visited home during Diwali. I had wanted to share it sooner but it somehow slipped my mind. Nonetheless:

Plan your travel such that you do not have to take two Air Deccan flights back-to-back even with a margin of 3-4 hours. Air Deccan flights are often delayed.
When buying Air Deccan tickets through Reliance Webworld outlets, pay in cash and not through a card. If you have paid through a card and cancel your flight ticket later on, or miss it for some reason, it might take more than a week for them to transfer the money to your card.

Visited Solan for Diwali

2005-11-07T20:47:00.000-08:00

As promised yesterday, I just posted two new cartoons at CarryOnCoding. Go give 'em a look!

And yeah, I have also uploaded some pictures from my trip to Solan last week to celebrate Diwali with my parents. Now that’s something I hadn’t done ever since I started Bachelor’s mainly because:

0. It took around 30 hours to go home by train
1. The Diwali vacation at college never exceeded a couple of days
2. I was too sincere a student to bunk lectures, and
3. I used to spend my parents’ money too miserly to even think of taking a flight to travel home

Anyways, the trip home was fun. No food comes even close to home-food and it wouldn't be an under-statement if I said that I ate like a pig. One of my favorite past-times in hills is trekking, but I couldn’t do much of it this time. The other is driving and well I managed to do that a lot. Driving in hills is fun at any time of the day. The roads are mostly empty which allows you to drive at high speeds, and the views in mountains are simply beautiful.

I leave you with my favorite picture from my Diwali Photo set.

That was the view of the hill in front of my house on the evening of Diwali.

Click here to see my Diwali photoset.

Inactivity during last week

2005-11-06T21:57:00.000-08:00

I was on vacation last week and visiting my home town Solan (H.P.), to celebrate Diwali with my family (something I hadn't done since the past 5-6 years). You can expect me to post some pictures from my trip tomorrow.

And yes, I'll also be releasing two new cartoons tomorrow on www.carryoncoding.com as I wasn't able to release any during the past two weekends.

My apologies to all those who were expecting email replies from me -- the dialup connection at my home really sucks you see :)

Happy Birthday Dear CPAN!

2005-10-25T04:47:00.000-07:00

The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, or CPAN, has been online since Oct 26'th, 1995. CPAN would be turning 10 years old tomorrow (that many computing years are like 200 years in real life), so I wish CPAN Happy Birthday in advance, and good health for many more years to come ;)

Kids and Search Engines

2005-10-21T07:11:00.000-07:00

A Swedish couple named their new born baby Google, after the famous search engine.

Folks behind Ojos named their image search engine Riya after the name of the daughter of one of the founders.

New Comic - Telemarketers

2005-10-21T04:38:00.000-07:00

One of the most irksome things at the workplace are the recurring calls you get from telemarketers offering to sell you credit-cards, club-memberships, investment plans, and what-not. And that's what my cartoon this week is about. Check it out!

Tagyu Perl API

2005-10-19T04:01:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Tagyu is a service that can suggest you tags relevant to your content. They have a REST interface available so I quickly rolled up a simple Perl wrapper over it.

Simple to use

Using Tagyu Web Service from Perl is now very simple and all you need to do is:


use Tagyu::Search;

my @tags = Tagyu::Search->SuggestTags("[PUT YOUR TEXT HERE]");

SuggestTags method returns an array of strings containing the tags received from Tagyu for the specified text using its REST API.

Passing options

You can also specify options to the SuggestTags method of Tagyu::Search module as key-value pairs to modify its behavior when it dispatches requests to the Tagyu.com servers. Here's an example that sets the timeout parameter.

my @tags = Tagyu::Search->SuggestTags("[PUT YOUR TEXT HERE]",
   (timeout => 600)
);

Tagyu::Search uses LWP::UserAgent behind the scenes. So for details of all supported options and their default values, please check the documentation of LWP::UserAgent's constructor.

Supports HTTP Basic Authentication

Tagyu imposes a limit of one request per minute from a single IP address and requests beyond this limit result in an error. However registered users have a soft cap of 1000 requests per day. Tagyu::Search package allows you to pass your username/password to Tagyu in the following manner:


# Instantiate a new Tagyu::Search object.
my $tagyu = Tagyu::Search->new(
 username => "[YOUR-USERNAME]",
 password => "[YOUR-PASSWORD]"
);

# Invoke the SuggestTags method on the Tagyu::Search object.
my @tags = $tagyu->SuggestTags("[YOUR-TEXT]");

You can register at Tagyu here.

Downloads

Need Ideas?

For some ideas on what you can do with Tagyu::Search, have a look here.

Comments and suggestions are welcome

Before posting my module to CPAN I have sent an RFC for my Perl module on comp.lang.perl.modules USENET group. So download the latest relase of Tagyu::Search and give it a try. Please share your feedback! Thanks.

New Comic - Introducing Code Baba

2005-10-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

I just added a new comic to my Comic blog and introduced Code Baba. There'll be a new comic every week, and you don't want to miss checking the comics next week because I'll be introducing a developer you wouldn't forget!

I am also setting up URL forwarding for www.carryoncoding.com to www.upsterzcomics.blogspot.com. Fun!

IIPM Humiliation

2005-10-14T02:49:00.000-07:00

Gaurav Sabnis, an IBM (now Lenovo) employee and a popular Indian blogger, linked to an article in a local magazine that IIPM didn't quite like, on his personal weblog. IIPM threatened to sue Gaurav and also called up a senior IBM executive and threatened to burn IBM laptops. To save his freedom of speech, and for IBM's well-being, Gaurav voluntarily resigned from IBM. Kiruba made this t-shirt in response:

Check out Gaurav's post and the article in the local magazine that Gaurav linked to.

Upster's Comics

2005-10-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

I had been contemplating starting my own comic focussing on software development in Indian software companies. And guess what, I just made my first comic!

Some people tend to worship anything that they consider powerful and do not completely understand the behavior of. Since ancient times men and women have worshiped everything from snakes to tigers. So it is no surprise that some people even worship computers today and my first comic is my take on that.

Some of my comics would be on the things I see in my real life, but presented in a very highly distorted, exaggerated and twisted form. So it is better that you assume that these web comics are a work of fiction (from the mind of a geek – mind you), and bear little or no resemblance to anyone living or dead (like other stuff that grows in the minds of geeks).

Click here to view Upster's Comics.

New Groovy Header Image

2005-10-08T04:35:00.000-07:00

I changed the blog header image yet again. I had posted a detailed account of making the previous header image on this blog.

Well, the header image now has a lot of blue to indicate that time of the day when most of the ingenious hacking happens - night-time. The brownish stains are meant to indicate the second most important ingredient for making good software - Caffeine; the first one being enthusiasm.

Here's the evolution of the blog header image, in reverse chronological order:

Now

Now - T1

Now - T2

Now - T3

(Where T1 < T2 < T3)

And oh yes, I did this in Gimp. How is it?

Choosing a software license

2005-10-07T04:11:00.000-07:00

Justin Frankel, original developer of Winamp and a bunch of other stuff, shares his views on choosing the license for a software product.

Am I imagining stuff?

2005-10-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

I happened to revisit PG's YCombinator.com today and, well, it is a bit weird, but I think the laptop that the seated young guy had was an Apple Powerbook the last time around I saw it.

Am I imagining stuff, and need to go on a vacation (perhaps also buy a Powerbook before going) to the Himalayas, or do any of you have similar memories too?

Out of the fish tank

2005-10-05T02:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I had posted a couple of pictures of my old desk in the office to my moblog. My desk was located inside a glass cabin which many people referred to as a fish-tank but I quite liked it. I shared the cabin with my boss and the fish-tank was our little world where we could freely discuss ideas without disturbing anyone with our noise.

The company has been expanding and today it has a lot more people than it did when I had joined. I knew the move was inevitable and it actually happened this Monday. I took some pictures of my new desk from my mobile and posted them to my moblog.

Close-up	From the left (Alpha0 solving rubik)
From the right	Ahem

Now my desk is adjacent to those of the other people in my team. So it is great to be able to just give a shout out to the person I need to ask something. And since the people I need to place calls to generally happen to have their desks close to mine, if I am feeling a little lazy to walk down to their desk, or feeling like being nice and not disturbing others, I can just call a person, stand up, and use hand gestures to explain him stuff!

New Crispy Header Image

2005-10-03T22:54:00.000-07:00

Based on some valuable feedback from the readers of this blog, I spent some time on Sunday afternoon for improving the blog header image. I wanted a more cartoony look and could do it very easily with Gimp.

Now - T2:

Now - T1:

Now:

(Where T2 > T1)

As a result CarryOnCoding.com is now more crispier, tastier, and with more energy! :) So feed yourself and enjoy!

More Ojos Screenshots

2005-10-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

Munjal Shah posted a couple of screenshots of Ojos on his blog recently. I just discovered that Tara Hunt has a lot more screenshots of the software on her blog.

Did you also check out the responses to my question on how Danny Yang's Sexer program worked? :) Danny is one of the people working on Ojos.

Email your voice

2005-10-02T07:21:00.000-07:00

That's what Slawesome lets you do. Check it out, and let me know if you also get a feeling that the web-application was implemented using Rails. I guess that would only happen if you have used 43things.com and backpackit.com in the past.

How to be a hacker

2005-09-29T07:05:00.000-07:00

Nat Friedman, founder of Ximian that was acquired by Novell, explains how. Apparently he has been asked this question by numerous people, and interestingly there's no mention of Linux or Gnome in his answer. Good :)

Ojos - Screenshots

2005-09-29T00:30:00.000-07:00

Munjal Shah has posted some screenshots of Ojos.

What is Ojos, you ask?

I am co-founding a company because I found I had 31,246 photos all named DSC0009.jpg.

said Munjal here. And that company is Ojos.

Ojos plans to offer free unlimited hosting of photos, with software to upload photos to the service. That might sound a lot like what Flickr or many other photo-hosting services offer. So what's cool about their service is that Ojos use image-recognition techniques for matching different photos of the same people.

They're in limited alpha yet and I haven't had an opportunity to use their software to see how good it actually is. But if the software is really as good as it appears to be from Munjal's blog, I am willing to bet they'd be acquired by a Google or Yahoo! as soon as they're at 1.0, if not earlier.

BTW, going by the Upload from My Hard Drive option in photo#2, I guess the image-recognition would happen at the server.

This is scary!

2005-09-28T05:02:00.000-07:00

A computer nerd was arrested in London because the police got suspicious of his activities. He gives an account of his entire day which might appear a little funny at first, but it actually is quite scary if you come to think of it. Read story (Via).

Emulate Linux inside Windows

2005-09-28T03:34:00.000-07:00

Linux Inside Windows (LIW) is an application based on the QEMU project, which is an open source processor emulator that can be used to run a virtual Linux machine. LIW has taken the QEMU project and added a Debian GNU/Linux system to it, along with Tomcat and PostgreSQL. Definitly one of the coolest products I have seen lately.

MS/AWS Developer Contest

2005-09-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

Build an innovative and entrepreneurial application using Visual Studio 2005 with Amazon Web Services and you can win the grand prize: $5,000!

And the eligibility section in the contest rules says:

This Contest is open to software development enthusiasts who are 21 years of age or older at the time of entry and reside in one of the following countries: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, or Japan.

Why-o-why not India? Hmmm outsourcing, anyone?! ;)

Understanding Engineers

2005-09-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed reading this essay. Here is a snippet:

It is totally unfair to suggest -- as many have -- that engineers are socially inept. Engineers simply have different objectives when it comes to social interaction.

"Normal" people expect to accomplish several unrealistic things from social interaction:

Stimulating and thought provocating conversation
Important social contacts
A feeling of connectedness with other humans

These goals are irrational and stupid. Experience shows that most conversations degenerate into discussions about weather patterns, the equally unpredictable indian cricket team , classmates and harsh comments about our beloved HOD . These topics hardly qualify as stimulating or thought provoking, nor are they useful in anyway.

Engineers realize that making personal contacts is not valuable in their occupation. For most, it's not what "whom you know " but "what you know" that counts. To be more precise " who knows less than you do" that matters.

In contrast programmers have a set of rational objectives for social interactions

Get it over with as soon as possible.
Avoid getting invited to something unpleasant.
Demonstrate mental superiority and mastery of all subjects

These are sensible and practical goals and often a source of great joy as well. Social skills of a true engineer should be scaled by these 3 parameters rather than any nonsensical societal standards.

Making the new blog header image

2005-09-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

The previous header image on this blog showed a person deeply involved in writing code on his computer unmindful of the fact that the clock showed 3am.

(Click to zoom)
However I wanted the header image on my blog to be clearer in conveying the happiness and blissfulness a hacker derives out of finishing his software.

I have found that I can better follow my thoughts, if I express them on a paper using a pen first. So I took a black sketch pen and drew the various possiblities I had in my head:

(Click to zoom)
The first possiblity was to have a person who appears to be excited looking at the monitor. The second one was a person who has his eyes closed and is laughing, while the third possibility was to use an emotion of anger or fear.

I realized that I wanted to use the second one and drew it in Gimp using a mouse. I discovered that the convolve effect is quite useful to give the lines a smooth appearence. The result as you can see is the new header image.

(Click to zoom)
I have been watching the late night screenings of Mr. Bean - the animated series on Pogo since the past couple of days. I quite like their style of animation and got inspired to use darker lines for outer edges and thinner lines for inner edges.

Do let me know what you think about the new header image! Suggestions are welcome too.

Meebo - Web based IM

2005-09-23T04:16:00.000-07:00

Check out Meebo, a Web based cross-protocol IM. It works with Jabber, AIM, Yahoo! and MSN.

Programmable Web

2005-09-22T03:42:00.000-07:00

There is a list of Web APIs provided by various websites here. Nice!

1960 Chevy

2005-09-20T02:22:00.000-07:00

Here you can see me posing with a Chevrolet 1960 model that has caused me to part with all my savings till date. How is it?

View bigger picture at my moblog.

Update (Just for laughs): This was just meant to tease some of my friends, who are vintage car fans. Buying a vintage car is still on my list of things to do.

Yahoo Collage Generator

2005-09-16T08:02:00.000-07:00

My Yahoo! Image Search collage generator Perl script got a mention in Beta Hack 85 of Oreilly's Yahoo! Hacks which would come out around October 2005.

I am definitly going to buy that book now! :)

Sexer Program

2005-09-16T06:19:00.000-07:00

No, that's not what you think it is. Apparently that's a program that Danny Yang has developed which given a picture, tries to determine whether the person in that is a male or a female.

Well, if we can do that, so should the programs be able to do that, right. Now how do you think such a program would work? Any ideas?

Danny's program does it with 85% accuracy BTW. The following Perl does it with 50% accuracy (on a sample with equal number of photos of males and females) ;)

perl -e 'print "Male\n";'

Geek Gyan - A language for semantic web

2005-09-15T00:28:00.000-07:00

Fabl is a native programming language for the Semantic Web.

ASCII Star Wars

2005-09-14T07:36:00.000-07:00

Telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl to see Star Wars in ASCII. Ultimate!

Via.

Sutta Song

2005-09-14T03:08:00.000-07:00

Have you checked the song entitled "Sutta" from Zeest? It is a nice fun song that all kinds of smokers - active, or passive ones like me - can enjoy. I don't know who Zeest are, but they seem to have done an incredible job and I wish they'd get together again and use their creative juices to compose some Geeksta/Nerdcore-style desi rap :)

Download WMA or Torrent.

Safari Dicor Ad

2005-09-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

I just love the Tata Safari Dicor ad' being aired these days.

I don't know why.

Anyways, go check the ad' here if you haven't seen it yet.

Alpha0's B'day Bash

2005-09-13T05:14:00.000-07:00

Alpha0, the local PJ-King, gives an account of his birthday party. He threw the party at his apartment where we made great noise.

Of course, the party was great fun, and ignoring the other people in the building, I think everybody had a great time!

Sign in to Orkut using your Google account

2005-09-13T01:08:00.000-07:00

You can now sign-in to Orkut.com, Google's popular online social networking service, using your Google account.

I think that's great! What's next? I hope an API for Orkut.com to make stuff like my popular books/movies mining hack more acceptable :)

atlas shrugged catch 22 catcher in the rye da vinci code doctors five point someone fountain head freedom at midnight god of small things gone with the wind harry potter series inscrutable americans kane and abel lord of the rings lotr love story made in japan midnight's children siddhartha the alchemist the class the godfather to kill a mocking bird

(Thanks Alpha0)

What's your favorite blogging service?

2005-09-13T00:38:00.000-07:00

LiveJournal is at 90.1% and Blogger is at a measly 6.0%. Don't click around, go vote for Blogger :)

Via

iPod Nano

2005-09-09T00:10:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's iPod Nano yesterday. Save me some typing and go read about its features here :)

Added "Buy an iPod Nano" to my things on 43things.com. I'll probabaly go for a black colored one.

Me wants!

NITW Campus Placements

2005-09-05T00:49:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, I went to my alma mater - NIT Warangal to conduct campus interviews for my employer. I went with seven other people that included two people from HR.

We started at 6am in the morning in an air-conditioned mini Swaraj Mazda. Had the number of people been around five, we would have probably gone in a Qualis. The 250 km journey was quite eventless and we reached the university by 9:30am. We were greeted by the Training and Placement officer - Prof. I.A.K Reddy. We were supposed to start the pre-placement talk by 9:45am, so we had around 15 minutes to relax a bit.

Prof. Reddy hadn't recognized me when we shook hands, and it was only when he was reading out the names of the interview panel to all the students that he actually did. When he read Siddharth Uppal, Senior Member Technical at the dais, he looked up at the students, and then backwards towards me. He expressed surprise on how much I have changed since my days at the college. It was a pleasant feeling.

Well, the pre-placement talk was followed by a written test on the basis of which we short-listed 10 students. We divided ourselves into two panels of 4 each and decided to interview 5 students via each panel. We broke for lunch after interviewing one candidate as it was already 12:30pm by then. We continued interviewing after lunch and were done with all the interviews by 5:45pm in the evening.

We finally made offers to three students, one of whom was Anubhav Kaushal. I knew him when I was still in college and know for a fact that he always mentioned my employer as his dream company. It is good to know that he has been able to achieve that.

Interviewing fresh graduates was an interesting experience, but due to my lack of experience, I felt a little exhausted by the time my panel finished interviewing the third candidate. Many students were quite nervous because it was the first interview for them so we had to often put in some extra effort to make the candidate comfortable before we grilled him with questions.

Prof. Reddy met me around 3-4 times during the entire day, and kept saying how much I had changed from being a studious-looking and thin boy in those days. Well, I am not sure but this could all be because of the enormous quantity of coke I drink at office each day, and due to the fact that I never liked the mess food at college much!

Speeding up Firefox

2005-08-29T22:46:00.000-07:00

Here is how you can tweak the configuration of your Firefox to make it run faster on your broadband connection.

EtherYatri.NET Blog

2005-08-29T05:48:00.000-07:00

I had created a blog for EtherYatri.NET project quite a while ago, but due to the fact that I spend most of my time writing Perl for earning my ~~bread and butter~~ idli and sambhar, it had been devoid of any activity (Don't be mistaken, I don't have anything against Perl that makes me dislike it or anything like that; I think Perl is wonderful in its own unique way!).

Since I have a bunch of features in my head that I want to implement for EtherYatri.NET, well I thought a great way to build some momentum would be to respond to questions from the users at the blog. So to start, I picked some questions from Florian. Feel free to contribute your own views, suggestions, comments and questions!

Reliance Mobloging Security

2005-08-29T02:06:00.000-07:00

There was a security issue with how I described you could post pictures and text from Reliance mobile-phones in my earlier post.

Well the problem is that it is easy to find out the mobile-phone number, and the blog2 Flickr address that you had used to upload the picture and text to your blog. That's because Reliance inserts a link to a page on their website that contains the phone-number of the sender, and the email address of the recipient. And, Flickr stores the body of the email message as the description of the picture attached to the email message.

The simplest solution is to simply change the default privacy level of your photos in Flickr to private, and disable the posting of the body of email to your blog post. That's it! Have fun!

New photos on my moblog

2005-08-26T00:18:00.000-07:00

Just for the heck of doing it, I posted some pictures from iMax to my moblog yesterday using my phone. Go see!

BTW the movie was Virudh and the story line seemed to have a little influence of the infamous Jessica Lal murder case to me. I liked the movie mostly because of Amitabh Bachchan's excellent performance in the movie.

Mobile Blogging from Reliance phones

2005-08-25T03:26:00.000-07:00

I have a Reliance mobile phone and I wanted to moblog, i.e. send pictures and text from my mobile phone to my blog. But Blogger Mobile is currently available only to the US customers of Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Well, I figured a way how even I can moblog which should probabaly work for anyone who has an MMS enabled mobile phone.

For posting to my moblog from my phone, all I need to do is -- click a picture from my mobile-phone (LG RD 6130), write some description, and send these as an MMS to a particular email address. In a few moments the picture and text appear on my moblog - http://www.upsterzmoblog.blogspot.com.

Here is how you can also do it. Don't worry it is quite simple! :)

Setting up...

Create an account at Blogger, if you don't already have one.

Create an account at Flickr, if you don't already have one.

Set the default privacy level of your Flickr photos to private. (Why?) (Do it now)

Enable uploading of photos to your Flickr account through email (Do it now).

Enable automatic posting of photos from your Flickr account to your Blogger blog (Do it now).

Flickr will provide you can an email address that you should send your pictures to for them to be posted directly to the blog that you have specified.

Disable posting of email body to blog posts. (Why?) (Do it now)

Now to moblog, simply send the pictures by MMS from your mobile phone to the email address you are given in Step-4 above. However, if the length of that email address exceeds the maximum allowable length of an email address on your mobile phone, repeat Step-4 till you get an email address that fits.

Note: If you're not a Reliance subscriber, you may skip Steps 3 and 6 provided your service provider doesn't have the same problem as Reliance. On second thoughts though, Flickr could perhaps incorporate the feature of disabling the storage of email body as the description of the attached picture(s).

I hope you find this little write-up useful! Enjoy!

Update on 08/26/2005:

Flickr documentation describes the same procedure! Though it wasn't complex, it certainly was fun for me to set this up on my own.
Though I forgot to mention in the original post, in case you're interested, the maximum length an email address can have on my phone is 31.

Update on 08/29/2005:

Included the note on setting the default privacy level of Flickr photos to private.

Blogger Word Addin

2005-08-18T02:07:00.000-07:00

Blogger now has an add-in for MS-Word that allows for posting from inside Word. So here I am making this post from MS-Word!

Work/Life Balance

2005-08-12T03:17:00.000-07:00

Brad Feld gives some useful suggestions for work-life balance.

Mangal Pandey's Blog

2005-08-11T01:02:00.000-07:00

Aamir Khan is blogging at MSN Spaces about his latest movie Mangal Pandey, scheduled to be released tomorrow.

Swaroop says he can't believe it. Well, neither can I! That guy is undoubtedly one of Indian Cinema's best acting talents.

Copilot

2005-08-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

Copilot version 1.0 was released on August 8th.

The Fog Creek Copilot(SM) service allows people to help their friends, relatives, and customers fix their computer problems by connecting to their computers via the Internet.

While it certainly is remarkable that the software was developed by four interns at Fog Creek: Ben, Tyler, Yaron, and Michael, I have been more interested in the movie - Heroes or Zeroes from the beginning!

2005-08-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

Which Revenge of the Sith Character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Cisco

2005-08-05T04:41:00.000-07:00

On Thursday 28th July 2005 at 08:25 GMT: Cisco, ISS file suit against rogue researcher

Networking giant Cisco and security company Internet Security Systems filed on Wednesday a restraining order against the management of the Black Hat Conference and a security expert who told conference attendees that attackers can broadly compromise Cisco routers.

The legal action followed a presentation by security researcher Michael Lynn, a former ISS employee, who brushed off threats of legal action and a broad effort to delete his presentation from conference materials to warn attendees that malicious programs could be run on Cisco routers.

On Wednesday 3rd August 2005 at 18:39 GMT: Cisco security flap leaves millions scrambling for help

The aftermath of a security breach involving Cisco's customer portal has left customers scrambling to get new passwords. Cisco reset passwords to Cisco Connection Online as a precaution following the discovery of a security bug in a Cisco.com search tool that could expose log-ins of registered users.

Link the two stories and you have a theory. Maan, some theories are just so emm.. interesting!

Adbok

2005-08-03T04:11:00.000-07:00

Adidas buys Reebok for $3.8 billion.

Orcas

2005-08-03T01:11:00.000-07:00

That's the codename for the next version of Visual Studio designed to take advantage of the new features introduced in Longhorn. More info.

The Orca (plural Orcas), also known as the Killer Whale is the largest member of the oceanic dolphin family.

Also have a look at this list of Microsoft codenames.

Rating open-source software

2005-08-02T02:26:00.000-07:00

The ultimate goal of BRR is to give companies a trusted, unbiased source for determining whether the open source software they are considering is mature enough to adopt. It will help adopters assess which open source software is best suited to their needs and enable them to share findings with the community. It promotes use and adoption of open source software and may assist developers in creating and delivering software geared to enterprise use. Via.

Hardware hacking

2005-08-01T02:50:00.000-07:00

Tanveer (my boss@work) has a spare motherboard with built-in graphics and sound card, an AMD Athlon 2400 processor, and some enthusiasm. So he is seeking suggestions on how he can utilize all this stuff to build something useful. I suggested him to build a home automation system or a Skype pay-phone clone. Check out Tanveer da Blog!

Measuring performance in organizations

2005-07-31T23:39:00.000-07:00

Software organizations tend to reward programmers who (a) write lots of code and (b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place. When you try to fix this problem by penalizing programmers for creating bugs, you create a perverse incentive for them to hide their bugs or not tell the testers about new code they wrote in hopes that fewer bugs will be found. You can't win.
-- says Joel Spolsky

So there is an uncertainty principle of sorts at play here. You cannot measure both the source lines of code (SLOC) and code-quality simultaneously with absolute accuracy. A focus on SLOC is bound to disturb the quality of code and vice-versa.

Can we really not win?

Fogcreek Open House

2005-07-29T00:24:00.000-07:00

JD attended Fogcreek Open House on July 14 and got to meet Joel Spolsky in person.

Wow! That’s the word which came out of my mouth when I saw Fogcreek office full of geeks! [Normally, I give this 'Wow!' reaction only when I see hot chicks in clubs! ]

He has uploaded some pictures from the meet too.

Windows Vista

2005-07-28T08:03:00.000-07:00

That's what they are calling the next version of Windows that had been code-named "Longhorn" till now. Check it out.

Yummy Kapsules!

2005-07-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I was unable to install Konfabulator on my machine. Today, I played a little with Kapsules and had some fun while getting my hands dirty by modifying an existing Widget. Here I describe the changes that I made to a Widget named Bobs LaunchList in the hope that it would benefit other developers who are new to Kapsules.

OK, let's start off with a screenshot of the finished Widget:

While browsing the list of Widgets through Widget Forge, I stumbled upon Bobs LaunchList.

Bobs LaunchList is a simple launcher that allows you to launch files from a specific folder. You can filter any number of document types (i.e., .exe, .doc, .txt), limit the number of files displayed, display a custom icon for the folder, and more.

Well, people often share files through network shares on LANs, and I had heard a friend mention that he would like to monitor the contents of a directory on a network share without having to visit the directory at periodic intervals of time. Well, one of the solutions could be to point Bobs LaunchList to the directory of interest on the networks share and modify the Widget to refresh the list of files displayed in it at fixed intervals of time that can be configured by the user.

I had done some Javascript before (most recently in Search4Code) so I could implement the change in under an hour. See screenshot above.

What I did

Each Kapsules Widget (foo) stores its configuration information in a .config file (foo.config) and the Javascript code in a .kap file (foo.kap).

I introduced a settings node in BobsLaunchList.config file called dirListReloadTime:


<dirListReloadTime>
      <type>text</type>
      <size>10</size>
      <name>Directory Listing Reload Time</name>
      <path>reloadTime</path>
      <nodetype>node</nodetype>
      <description>Sets the delay between automatic reloads of the directory
                         listing    (Default: 10 minutes).</description>
</dirListReloadTime>

The default-value of this element is set by the following in the config file:

<reloadTime>10</reloadTime>

Now onto writing the Javascript code. In BobsLaunchList.kap I declared a variable to store the time in milliseconds between two successive reloads of the directory listing.

var reloadTime;

BobsLaunchList encapsulates all directory listing code in a method called "Init". All the settings of the Widget are also obtained in Init. So I introduced the following additional code there:


reloadTime = 60 * 1000 
                * Settings.GetSettingNode(
                      "widgetroot/reloadTime"
                  );

Here I basically get the value of "reloadTime" attribute from the config file and convert it to milliseconds.

I initialize the timer with the value of reloadTime when the Widget is activated.

function Widget_Activate()
{
  Init();
  Widget.AddTimer("reloadTimer", reloadTime);
  Widget_Paint();
}

Next, I introduced a handler for the timer.

function reloadTimer_Tick()
{
    Widget.StopTimer("reloadTimer");

    Init();

    Widget_Paint();

    Widget.ResetTimer("reloadTimer", reloadTime);
}

At each tick of the timer, Init() gets the value of "reloadTime" element from the settings of the Widget, stores it in the variable named reloadTime, and redraws the file listing of the directory being monitored. Before terminating this event handler I set the timer to tick again reloadTime milliseconds later.

Additionaly, I deleted the timer in the Widget_Deactivate method.

function Widget_Deactivate()
{
    // delete timers
    Widget.DeleteTimer("reloadTimer");
}

That's it!

Thanks to Robert Lausevic who wrote the original Bobs LaunchList Widget.

Downloads

Konfabulator, Kapsules and Dashboard

2005-07-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

In the news: Yahoo! buys Konfabulator.

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

I checked out their widgets which reminded me of MacOSX Dashboard. However, I was unable to install Konfabulator on my machine as the setup failed due to the fact that I do not have admin privileges on it (the setup insists on installing Konfabulator for all users on the machine).

Anyways, I stumbled upon Kapsules (I don't remember how). Kapsules is like Konfabulator, but since it uses the Microsoft Active Scripting Engine, which is a part of Windows, one can write widgets in a lot of scripting languages.

I think Dashboard, Konfabulator and Kapsules simply rock, and the idea that they embody (XML based GUI markup) would do to desktop application development what happened to web application development by allowing people who are graphic artists (PhotoShop hackers) to play a greater role in determining the look and feel of an application than ever before, leading to applications with fantastic GUIs.

On a white-board near my desk

2005-07-26T05:01:00.000-07:00

Hope is the dream of the waking man
Dream is the hope of the sleeping man
Sleep is the dream of the working man

Each of the above statements was written by a different person who happened to pass-by the white-board.

Free as in beer

2005-07-26T01:42:00.000-07:00

Dane Rasmus Nielsen made an open-source beer. Someone called MadCow commented:

Great, now all the toilets will be plugged up with copies of the GPL... which has to be distributed with said derivative works.

I like slashdot for the user comments.

Jonathan Ive

2005-07-25T23:53:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Ive is the senior vice-president of design at Apple whose innovations include the iPod and iMac.

(Also see the related Wikipedia article)