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Fixing Facebook’s NewsFeed

prashu — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:44:33 +0000

If you, like me, have had troubles with your Facebook newsfeed, with it showing the items out of order, or sometimes not refreshing the timeline correctly, then you have come to the right place. For example, I know a friend has posted a new item, but it just doesn’t show up in my timeline. What is ever more irritating is that when I view the timeline on my mobile device, it shows up differently than when I view it online on a browser.

By sheer luck today I happened to find the reason why this was happening and I was able to rectify it. What has been reported by the users time and again is actually not a bug, but it is actually a feature of Facebook. However, like all great social applications (think about Buzz) set certain options as default thinking that it is the best for the user without giving the users any chance to decide that they want.

The chronologically messed up timeline in FB is one such option. If you see the first image, you will notice that the latest feeds are over 15 hours old and have come in some random order and not chronologically. If you now see at the top right of your timeline, you will see the two options “Top News” and “Most Recent”. This is the culprit. By default, at least in my case, the “Top News” is selected. Using some complex calculations it seems to show the most popular news items in my news feed and in that order.

However, should you wish to see the timeline reverse chronologically like is the norm, then you just have to click the “Most Recent” option and you will see that the latest and most recent news appears at the top and the rest in the correct chronological order.

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Unconventional Earning through Google Android Market

prashu — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:12:15 +0000

If you are a Google Android phone user, you would have noticed that most of the apps available are free apps. The percentage of unpaid apps on the Android Market dwarfs in comparison to the number of paid apps on the iPhone App Store.

What this means, simply, is that more developers are making money off the Apple mobile platform, or at least think they have a better chance to monetize their talents through the iPhone than through Android.

Interestingly, Android is positioned as the Open Source Mobile OS and is being portrayed as run on Linux and so on and this sort of gives the feeling that the entire platform is cheap with respect to ownership costs. Again, most of the developers seem to be developing apps just for the fun of it and for the sake of solving certain problems rather than creating apps solely for the purpose of selling it. There seem to be more of software developers on the Android platform than software vendors.

What this could possibly mean is that slowly lesser and lesser good content will come to the Android platform as the ones that are interested in solely writing software for the money will leave for greener(yes, think green, think money) pastures. However in reality that doesn’t seem to be the case. What I see happening is that most of the apps are now ad supported.

Google is a known name in the advertising market and there are a lot many claimed millionaires who say they have made their big bucks through Google’s adsense online advertising service. Google has introduced ads on the mobile as well. It is not just ads on the mobile web pages, but ads on the Apps running on the Android mobile. What this means is that developers can now develop free apps, but support it with ad revenue. I am unaware of the ad revenue payouts of these android ads, but if it anything like the web based ads, then developers can rest assured that good apps will rake in tons of money even though they are published free. After all, consumption is the king and free ads increase consumption and user base like nothing else, considering that the ads do not affect usability.

A small section of the screen is used when the app is run to hold the container to display the Google ads. However, many a times these ads areas are irritating especially when you have to scroll and you end up tapping the ad. Also they do intrude into the screen real estate and with what Google showcasing its wide variety of ad formats during the recent Google IO conference, it seems that we are all set for an Android Ad Market.

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Eco-Urinal Concept

prashu — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:43:28 +0000

A very cool idea courtesy YANKO DESIGN. The basic concept is that the wash is fitted right on top of the urinal. Of course you do wash your hand after taking a pee (in case you don’t please let me know the next time you decide to shake hands with me) and this system lets you wash you hand immediately after peeing, without having to walk down to the wash basins.

The coolness factor here is that you washing your hands, also simultaneously flushes the urinal that you just used. It is quite an innovative concept and I am really impressed by this idea which is the reason I posted it on this blog. If you look at it, it is a technology that could become part of our daily life.

The down side to this however is that these days many urinals make use of recycled water to flush. Of course, I wouldn’t appreciate the fact that I am using recycled water to wash my hands considering that recycled water, in these usages, is just removal of particular matter and odor and coloration. So, one really has to evaluate the trade off or the weight in the pros and cons of using this system as opposed to using a recycling system to flush.

A few interesting posts

From Takeover To Over

prashu — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:13:27 +0000

The recession seems to have given a lot of companies the power to takeover other companies, thanks to declining sales and falling stock prices. Most of the larger companies acquire smaller companies that already have some product in the niche that the larger company is thinking of entering.

However, saying smaller company might be an understatement as some of the companies that have been taken over are giants in their own right and have some products that are really doing well. In such cases it is disheartening to see their owners and caretakers selling off the company to someone who obviously has a lot more money.

It is one thing to acquire a company as you have an interest to enter their primary market with little effort on your own side, but it is a completely different thing when you quash the taken over company to position your company brand name more dominantly. This erodes the trust of the users of the product that has been doing so well until now.

As case in point is the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Among its other products, Sun was a great promoter of Open Source and one product that it promoted in the open source domain was the operating system OpenSolaris. In fact I had was just preparing my system to install OpenSolaris, when I heard the news that Oracle has stopped the further development and production of OpenSolaris. This has angered many a open source fans and users of OpenSolaris who can no more expect any support from the corporate giant – Oracle.

A similar story I heard today is that AMD (manufacturer of Processors) which acquired ATI (manufacturer of Graphics Processors) a while ago has quashed the ATI name and henceforth all ATI branded products will be sold under the AMD name. ATI is a well known name in the graphics card industry and this news for sure will not be taken to very kindly. This particular takeover was a landmark of sorts since now we would have had processors being co-developed with graphics cards and thus help bring in high compatibility between the two and great performance in gaming and graphics intensive applications. But the death of the ATI brand name is sure to sow some seeds of distrust and move some brand loyalty back to NVIDIA’s stables. It seems to me like the phase when 3dfx branded Voodoo cards which had acquired a cult status went bankrupt and was taken over by NVIDIA.

A few interesting posts

Perils of Multitasking

prashu — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 04:42:49 +0000

I own an Android phone and many of the in-your-face remarks to iPhone users, that I’ve heard, revolve around the fact that Android devices can multitask while iPhone users cannot.

Yes, its cool that the OS can support multitasking and so on, but really, why does a phone need multitasking? In fact of late, multitasking has irritated me so much that I just want a way to turn it off.

Mobile phones are devices limited in many ways – they have low processing power, they have limited memory, and they have limited electrical power supply. I am sure mobile phone users don’t want to keep charging up their phones twice daily.

Multitasking bring these problems of the mobile device to the forefront. Running apps in the background means reducing available memory, straining the processor and draining the battery far quicker than if it didn’t have multi-tasking. On my Android device, there are some apps that want to run in the background – such as Sync. Yet other apps don’t really close, but continue to run in the background like maps and browser. Over long periods of inactivity, the Android OS pushes the apps to standby mode, where their state is saved, but the apps themselves are not running.

However, due to bad design, there are some apps that don’t adhere to the rules set by the OS. Unlike Apple, Google doesn’t control the apps that are released in the market. This gives freedom to the publishers, while at the same time publishers have the freedom to misuse the freedom given to them. A notable example is the Facebook app. For some reason, the facebook app tries to keep on connecting to their servers all through the day. Even when I have turned off sync and disabled background data transfer.

I have checked the battery and network usage stats and almost 50% of the battery drain is on account of this misbehaving app. The twitter clients behave correctly and do not keep trying to sync once I have disabled sync. So it is definitely the problem with the Facebook app. The app tries to run while the phone is in sleep mode, while other apps are running, and so on, and this would not be the case if the phone didn’t have multitasking.

Google should have a master switch, through the implementation of certain hooks, where the background transfers of all apps could be disabled from just one menu option. Also they could provide an option to allow only selected apps to run in the background.

In all, thanks to the the current implementation of Android, and thanks to certain misbehaving apps, my battery life has taken a very bad hit and I am unable to do much about it. This being the case, I do find myself longing for an iPhone so that I am less dependent on a power outlet,

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Is Linux really the Answer to Windows on Older Machines?

prashu — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:12:13 +0000

From time immemorial the answer to Windows has always been Linux. Or so it seems. Mind you, I don’t have any animosity against Linux, I really really do want it to work and I have a lot of plans for my usage of Linux. But I have just not got it to happen. Windows, of course, is my primary OS, for various official, personal, and family reasons, but I have an entire 80GB HDD dedicated entirely to fooling around with Linux.

Each time I have had the need to re-install windows due to various problems including malware and viruses, I decide that Linux will be my primary OS. Each time I spend 2-3 days installing, updating, and configuring Linux and render the system unusable to most of the others at home since I wouldn’t have had the time to set up the bootloader, or would have messed up something on the Windows partition. Each time, I end up removing Linux and switching back to Windows.

Among all the plus points of Linux (other than the fact that it is free), is that it can run on the oldest of hardware. Whereas, we all do know that Windows XP needs at least 512MB RAM, and Windows 7 needs at least 1GB RAM to run smoothly. Linux can run on even the most basic system. However that is definitely not to be.

For one, they mentioned old system and slow hardware, but I don’t think they mention anywhere about *all* old hardware. Chances are that you have some common architecture running on your machine and that Linux is running very well on that. However, if you have some uncommon hardware, then you would have a really interesting time trying to get Linux to work. Of course, since the hardware is outdated, you will obviously not find any support out there from the Linux community in the form of driver development. But in all probability, when the hardware manufacturer released that piece of hardware, they released a windows driver for it. Can’t blame Linux for that, but that is the way the ball rolls and that is the way you lose your user base.

And then it comes to the fact that Linux can run on even slow machines. Here I tend to disagree a little bit. If you know what you are doing, then you can get Windows to run on very slow machines too. In fact it is easier to get Windows XP to run on older machines than to get the newer Linux distributions to run on them. Newer Linux distributions come with a whole lot of ‘weight’ in the form of desktops such as a KDE, desktops effects such as Compiz and so on. On the other hand, if you have Windows XP, just disable the over 50% unnecessary services that always run on Windows, including and importantly – themes, and you system will run quite fast. In fact you don’t have to do this manually too. You can find a lot of scripts on the internet that will do this for you.

Oh, and I am fed up with the argument where they say that you want to run Linux on really slow machines, then don’t use the graphical mode, but instead use command line. Alright, this takes care of the slow hardware issue, but then if you want to take the argument down this road, then I would like to ask you a question.

Have you heard of MS-DOS?

Note: The author is a disgruntled Linux enthusiast whose hopes of every using Linux as his primary OS have come crashing down each time he gives it a sincere try. For all productive purposes, he believes that nothing can replace Windows in terms of simplicity and straightforwardness. Of course Mac OS doesn’t picture anywhere into this discussion, as you are tied to the hardware that Apple sells, and that is a restriction on freedom of choice. The author wonders why there are so many antitrust lawsuits on Microsoft (for bundling software together), but none on this aspect of Apple and Mac (for bundling hardware and software and possibly everything else).

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Google makes Android non-Scalable

prashu — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 12:16:19 +0000

Google is the one of the largest software IT companies in the world right now and is the leader in email and search. There are a thousand new Gmail IDs being registered each day and about a million websites being indexed each day. This being the case Google’s working code has to be extremely scalable to handle this daily increase in capacity.

One would definitely assume that Google would have a lot of knowledge in building scalable applications and when they come out with a new product, they would use all their learning and put it into the new product so that it too is scalable and resilient like Google Search and GMail.

Seems Google’s engineer weren’t thinking straight when they created Android.

Android with all its hype about being built on a Linux kernel, and openness, and other things, has a very silly architectural constraint. It seems the engineers were not thinking when they introduced this architectural constraint into the Android system.

The problem is that the Android system stores all the applications on the phone’s internal memory. Forget about the SD Card, even if the phone has an internal memory for storage that is not designated as a ROM, then too this is not used to store the applications. We know that RAM or ROM is quite expensive as compared to flash storage, and hence manufacturer do not provide much of it.

However is a serious limitation in terms of installing apps from the market onto the phone. The moment you install 10+ apps, the phones becomes very slow and starts complaining of shortage of memory. On a device with around 512mb memory, only about 150mb is available for installing apps. Some of the apps such as Google Maps, Google Browser, Shapewriter(a soft-keyboard app), Facebook etc., take about 5-10MB of space each. This being the case, one can only install about 15-20 apps on the phone. At least 10MB is required by the phone for swap, else it starts complaining.

It is very hard to understand why Google did such a thing. V2.2 of their OS seems to address this limitation by allowing the users to push the apps on to the SD card. Until this, the usage of the Android market is severely limited as the market has over 50000 apps, but only 0.04% of this can really run on an Android phone at a given point of time.

The other insane option of course is to keep on installing apps that you currently want to use and uninstall them afterward. Warning: Data charges incurred in doing such a thing is not payable by Google.

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Google’s tribute to Pac-man

prashu — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:41:36 +0000

If you are a gamer, or have heard of the term Pac-man, or are just plain bored, then you have to, have to, have to go and check out the new playable doodle on the Google homepage.

Just wait on Google’s homepage (google.com, but even the country sites seem to show the doodle) for a few seconds, or click the insert coin button, and the doodle comes to life giving you a fully playable pac-man game.

The game is awesome fun and brings back all the old memories, especially that of arcade games. It is Pac-man’s 30th birthday, and what better tribute than to be featured on the homepage of Google.

Take a deeper look and you will find that you are playing on and around the Google logo itself. Hit the ‘Insert Coin’ button a second time and you will get to play with Mrs. Pac-man too – awesome for two player gaming. Now its two of you versus the colored ghosts.

Don’t miss!!!

PS: Anyone knows if this is HTML5? If so, its a perfect conclusion to the Google I/O event where HTML5 was the star feature.

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Awesome search filters on Google Image Search

prashu — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:41:44 +0000

So I was trying to find a nice picture of the Android logo for my new blog Android is Here. I was trying to use Google Image Search to find the picture that I could use. The problem on this is that the search results for android is huge and most of the images are that of phone running Android, rather than the Android logo itself which is what I was looking for. I kept trying tens of combinations of search terms to find what I wanted, but nothing was coming forth. It was then that I realized that the new look Google search has some search filters at the left side.

So I looked up the search filter and I saw the option for filtering by color. It suddenly struck me that the logo that I wanted was actually green in color. So I could use this option to filter my results better. I clicked on the green swatch and my search results were immediately filtered into something so much more relevant, and in fact all image results on the front page was that of the Android logo. This was so pleasing and is one of the reasons why Google is doing so well in the market. They understand the people’s needs.

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Detect missing attachments in Gmail

prashu — Sun, 02 May 2010 16:14:53 +0000

Interesting new feature on Gmail. It scans the text in your mail to see if you had intended to attach anything to the email, and gives you a popup, if you inadvertently clicked on send without actually attaching the document. I have done this quite a few times and I know tens of mails that I have received without attachments and had to remind the sender to attach the file that they wished to send.

This surely is a life-saving or at least face-saving feature and only Google could really have come up with this idea.

However, I think this feature is a little new and probably not yet perfect. If you see the attached image, there is the text ‘find the attached’ in the mail, but there was no attachment. Hence the popup was thrown so that I could double check the contents of the mail and its enclosures.

The problem here was that the text it found was not in my mail, but in the body of the mail chain to which I was replying. Google with its advanced word and text pattern matching algorithms should be able fix this quite easily, provided they take the effort to listen to their users and find out about such problems. Surprisingly they don’t have any sort of complaints/feedback/bugzilla area on any of their sites/services. It is surprising companies don’t leverage the biggest tester base out there – its internet users.