First and fore most you need to to get Wordpress. Wait for 2.7, its awesome, with Quickiepress and customizable screens, blogging will never be the same again. If you dont own your own site, then get a wordpress subdomain. Though such a step will mean you wont be able to use most of what I write about next. Good, now lets get some plugins :

1. Akismet : I think this is shipped with wordpress by default but is seriously one plugin that you need. Its stopped nearly 50,000 spam comments.

2. Adsense- deluxe : Manage ads in your Wordpress posts by using simple shortcuts to insert different types of ads. Really useful for people displaying ads ( multiple ads ) on a post.

3. Comment-email-responder : This plugin lets the author reply to a comment via mail if the user has provided his/her mail id. Its useful as it drives the discussion forward and also is a way to bring people back for a good discussion.

4. Syntax highlighter : Syntax highlighter is an awesome plugin for developers. Most developers end up writing some code on their blogs and lets admit it, code is not so elegantly displayed on most blogging engines. Syntax highlighter make code look really pretty on you blog. It supports C++ (cpp, c, c++), C# (c#, c-sharp, csharp), CSS (css), Delphi (delphi, pascal), Java (java), Java Script (js, jscript, javascript), PHP (php) Python (py, python), Ruby (rb, ruby, rails, ror), Sql (sql),VB (vb, vb.net),XML/HTML (xml, html, xhtml, xslt). Take a look at this section of code.

 # python's functional programming support is awesome
 # you can use three functions map, reduce and filter

 # map(function, sequence) calls function(item) for each of the sequence's items
 #returns a list of the return values

  >>> map(lambda x: x*x*x, range(1, 11))
  [1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729, 1000]

 #reduce(function, sequence) returns a single value by performing tree based reduction on f(item)
 #For example, to compute the sum of the numbers 1 through 10: 

 >>> reduce(lambda x, y: x+y, range(1, 11))
  55

5. Google-Analytics plugin : This plugin lets you put your adsense code in a single place without having to edit any of the files. If you are using analytics for your blog then get this plugin, makes the job hasslefree.

6. Subscribe to comments: I subscribe to comments feed for a post when I am interested in a discussion, but for users who dont want to take the pain of managing rss, you can give them an option to follow further comments by email. Its great to drive a good discussion again.

Well thats about it, have fun blogging!!

A friend of mine along with a bunch of other contributors has started Desitech.in a blog site that covers a wide variety of upcoming technologies, events ( now thats something that I look forward to) and interesting startups. Here is their description about the site:

Desitech is a technology journal which covers events, products and technologies relevant to the Indian audience. The journal features various columns including event announcements, event coverage, interviews with personalities, startup profiles, product comparison, etc

Seems to be interesting. Prash, best of luck on the project.

These stats are for both me and my mirror, actually the place where I was born.

Posts : 322 posts
Comments: 378
Spam Comments :44,083
Pageviews: 75,289
Visitors: 32,877
Average 2.5 min/visit
Total money made redeemed = Rs 800
Total money made yet to be redeemed = Rs 1269 ( waiting for 4500, till it redeems, damn adsense)

One of my articles even made it to 25 newspapers in the US. Some have even been added to the contribute section of MSN India

Anyway, I hope I get the same response (or better) for many more years to come and hope my author can put in credible and creative content and not make do with such lame attempts at posting.

( Author : ah screw you!! )

#@!* you hippie !!

- Most Linuxes come with python interpreter, if not use a package manager to get the latest interpreter.

- Read the Python Tutorial by Guido Von Rossum. The most (100 pages) you will ever read about python, beacuse its faster to do than read about python.

- Any good editor will do, but if you are one of those IDEated individuals, use the pydev plugin for Eclipse.

- For a simpler feel, you can get the python plugins for Gedit from this location. Just install it and my favorite, GEdit becomes python wise.  My friend also suggests using Emacs for python development.

Thats about it !! Please feel free to add comments on what else you read, did, installed to become a python developer.

Also, people who are using rails 2.0, please go the 2.0 section directly. If you start using 1.0 tutorial, you may get lost after a certain time and the results wont show. Check what version of rails you have installed and then use the corresponding section. Best of luck!!

Tags: rubyon rails, ror, rails, itsmeritesh

  After a fight with my significant other who is trying really hard to improve relevance on Yahoo search results, I realized that I wasn’t doing justice to search results by ordering top results in top down fashion. I have changed the code to now show results in left-right fashion. Now the most popular results will be available on top of the screen and you don’t have to strain those precious eyeballs of yours to look all the way down to see the results. A simple change but for a goo cause.

 When I get the time, I shall also incorporate search suggestions on your toolbar, but till then make do with this.

Tags: BOSS, yahoo, search, More Y!

 If you are using a widescren display or a theatrical display with resolution sizes bigger than 1024 *768 then use More Y! . More Y! displays thirty results in three columns and looks legible on widescreen displays (no guarantees for normal displays though). Whats even more handy is that More Y! can be integrated into your favorite browser (Firefox 2+ or Internet Explorer 7+ ) by following the instruction provided on the More Y! page. Its a cinch.

 Have fun with More Yahoo! and do reply back with comments and feedback.

Tags: boss, search, More Y!, yahoo, itsmeritesh

BOSS is simple. Really really simple and can do wonders if you are planning to build a search engine with your own flavor. Unlike other searches, BOSS gives you XML/JSON, meaning you can re-order results and present them in any way you like. Add flash, css, javascript, canvas elements whatever to build that unique search experience. After the cuil ripoff Yuil, which got taken down and was relaunched again as 4Hoursearch (why did they call it that ? figure it out Einstein !!), I was sure BOSS would be easy, but didn’t know it would be this easy.

Its only recently that I started learning Python, and I suck at it, so I picked my old favorite PHP as the language of choice ( I suck at PHP too, but suck less compared to Python). Got myself an Application ID to use BOSS. Used PHP SimpleXML parser to get a URL of choice and Voila, I had my results in an array. Wrote some really rudimentary CSS to match the aesthetics of my site and my site search was done .

Check out my Yahoo BOSS powered site search here !!

If it wasn’t for my crappy PHP skill level, Im sure I could have wrapped up the entire thing, right from “Duh, what is BOSS ?” to the implementation, in under an hour. If I do find more time to kill whilst I wait for dinner, I shall experiment with different displays for search results from BOSS. Y! BOSS is truly open and in keeping with the Open Source spirit, I have shared my rudimentary site search code. You wont believe it but the code , with proper convention, HTML and CSS comes up to 65 lines . Isn’t it awesome ??

Get the code for site search here.

Another wonderful manifestation of this concept is that you can now build custom search engines that will search only the sites that you catalog for information you need. Check out Y! BOSS.

Tags: yahoo, BOSS, sitesearch, search

 Lets take the example of facebook. The apps killed the facebook profile page. There were days when a single page would take 15 minutes to load thanks to the 50 odd apps that people had added to their profiles. Facebook’s new design rocks coz they have removed the clutter. Facebook’s usp, the newfeed, is what is shown as the profile , which is nice considering you get to see what the person you are seeing is upto recently. The apps have moved to a completely new page which means, no clutter Also the profile information, which people hardly change is gone into another page. Another cool addition I saw is the “What are you doing now ?” is highlighted and big. Given the run twitter is having with its fans, Im sure facebook realizes that micotexting about yourself is the rage right now and integrates that at the head of your homepage. Pretty ingenious if you think about it. Not all redesigns work , for ex , I hated the analytics redesign for the first few days and so was the redesign of wordpress but regular usage and some groking made me very comfortable with the interface. When you are redesigning interfaces especially for sites like flickr, facebook then it becomes essential that you get a value add and Facebook certainly nailed this one.

 Now lets go back to del.icio.us. Firstly the dots are off and you can access it as delicious.com, which saves me the trouble of explaining people the position of the dots in the url. I like the old del.icio.us and its UI. It was very basic, no frill, plain text based UI. The reason was probably the speed which it would work. But one thing that annoyed me was the clutter.The URL, Description, tags, other taggers, edit  and remove links etc were fit into a really small space; the new UI had to break this clutter.  The other problem was the tag cloud on the right. The older version would buch up tags and it would be difficult to spot the tags if you had more than say 200 which is common for most delicious uses. The new UI does a wonderful job of reducing the clutter. All the above mentioned items of the URL are still present in the same space and look darling. The tag cloud has also become more navigable and the social aspect of the site is utilized superbly if you see your networks page.

 I am now looking at some of the properties that I have built that can possibly be redesigned for better usage.

Tags: interfaces, redesign, facebook, delicious

The problem with open source software is its lack of quality. And how is this lack of quality downgraded even more ? its due to the lack of proper documentation and support. Its pitiable looking at the so called open source enthusiasts who advocate open source like they live and breathe it, but when it comes time to get the basics of software engineering in place, you see them stepping back from the limelight. The problem can be attributed to the fact that institutes teach programming but doesn’t teach quality standards. Its gives you a very good idea why there are probably 300 projects that do the exact same thing on sourceforge and its so because the people who actually want to use one software don’t get enough help, documentation on it.

  Have you ever tried looking at code that you wrote a year ago ? I have code that I wrote sometime in 2003 and trust me , I cannot understand a line in it. Why ? you cannot remember ever function that you wrote in life. Is it so hard to understand? Im sure most of you guys have taken classes in software engineering, its impossible to have a good software system without support and documentation. I shall take the example of a project that I am planning release soon.

 Thanks to about a dozen people who contributed to the code, there is a lot of redundant code and almost half of the code, is not being used. What do we do now ? do we release it in the shape that it is ?  Im sure the download size will probably double. Also, a lot of segments of code are not documented. How will it look when people see their names flashing at the top of a code file next to the @Author with lines and lines of spaghetti code with no documentation or explanation of their intent.

 Even with the valiant attempts by a professor, our testing strategy has largely been designed not to test, but to con people into thinking its a testing strategy. Is it that hard to test ? No , it isn’t ; its just uncool work. Our project also contains a multitude of technologies like jsp’s , java, javascript and there is absolutely no architecture diagram or a data / control flow diagram. Most of the JSP’s and Javascript is still undocumented let alone being tested.

 The last bit is that usage. Its not as simple as gcc project -> ./a.out . There are a lot of things that need to be configured and specific data formats, size restrictions and tons of other configuration information that needs to go into the system. But there isn’t a single document or a written account of how to go about setting up this project and executing it. Im sure even Donald Knuth wont be able to properly configure and run our project (No offense to Knuth, just used him as a figurehead) . Who will do the job of documenting it so that people who will actually want to use the project, get the documentation that they require ?

 Its strange, the same people that commend Apache projects for their wonderful documentation and support forums do not put in a similar effort for their projects. I am not even talking about the technically inept people, I am talking about people who can do technology well. If the future patriarch’s of technology do not follow the basics of getting a project right then how can the next generation of programmers survive with such unkempt software. If you cannot contribute to making open source better, then please stop advocating it. Its better naive people pay for software which gives them support and service.

In our effort to program the cool, we have forgotten the basics of engineering. Its a shame they call us engineers !!

Tags: Opensource, software engineering, documentation, testing

 - Scaffolding : the rails feature makes it dead simple and mandatory to make the MVC architecture. Just run the rake and rails command to create all the MVC functionality. Add some jazz to the front end and you can make a standard database application in under 10 minutes.

- .NET web services : during my struggle with web services in Java, I never realized that most of the programming I was doing with Axis could actually be automated and thats what Visual studio did. define a web service and say generate functions for it and you wont believe the functionality that it implements. VS then goes to wrap the service with a class and all its calls and exceptions. Imagine my surprise when I saw a 1000 line program generated by just a click of a button.

- Chaining : imagine doing  banner.generate().show().navigate().hide().unload()  - ruby, jQuery and to a little extent python does it.

- reflections :  going through an entire package structure (jars) or through assemblies (dlls) to figure out what class you want to instantiate and then creating an object of the same during run time. Tons of design patterns are becoming obsolete thanks to reflections.

- AOP : using aop is a fad from a long time but a current technique made me think twice about the power of aop. Imagine a tool that uses deep reflections and figures out where you access the database and then automatically adds aspects that are relevant to the module. The programmer doesn’t even need to know what aspects are essential to the module he/she is developing. The tool automatically adds the functionality. Ex : you are writing into the database - tool figures database entries should be 1024 bit encrypted and adds the required encryption functionality. Now isnt that cool ?

- Program the cloud : write programs without knowing the hardware behind it ; just know that your program will scale like no other using the underlying cluster of hardware that makes the cloud.

 These are the ones that I can remember while writing this post. Do add more programming innovations that you come across in the comments.

Tags: code, programming, cloud, reflections, scaffolding

 The reminder service is awesome. Firstly it integrates to my Google as well as my outlook calendar. Next, there is a firefox addon that lets you see your task schedule in gmail. And to top it off I can post events from twitter and also my messenger. Its just truly awesome.
 
The service also understand common sentences and converts it to a date time equivalent. If I write say ” do this day after tomorrow”, it adds do this to two days later. I haven’t yet seen the complete capability of the service, but almost all the english sentences I have typed have ended up in dates. Its pretty clever when you think of it. If you are like me and want to get organized use rtmilk.

Others tools that I use for organizing information around me
1. Outlook and Google Calendar
2. Tagging files in Vista ( not in xp )
3. Personal site search ( which helps me more than it helps others )
4. Post its
5. Reminders on my phone

Tags: rememberthemilk, rtm, organizing, calendar, schedule

 What can ror do ? It makes developing web applications really, and I mean really simple. You give it a table structure and rails automatically builds a table, forms for insert, delete and display for the fields and also build MVC architecture by default. Controllers and views are built and all you have to do as a web developer is to add CSS to the generated files so that they look awesome. There is demo which shows how you can build a blogging engine using rails in under 15 minutes. Now isnt that cool !! Its a really cool hack that has made the job of writing everyday web applications really easy. Well two of my favorite applications online have been built using ror. Check them out .
 
          
 

Well for starters ruby is a programming language - older than java, very english like and mostly interpreted I guess. Rails is this wonderful platform like hack which does a lot of cool things and ruby sits on top of rails and you can build applications using them.

  Installation : I found many places which listed installation instructions but this one worked best.
                    http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntu

 
  This brings me to another wonderful piece of software that runs under 400kb, Gems. A apt styled package manager built to get ruby related software.
Once you are setup, I guess its time to learn the language and to learn ruby, I would definitely suggest why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby. Nothing beats this online book … sorry online masterpiece in explaining the aspects of the ruby language. Im still not done with this but I cant wait to read more of it.

 Since ror is for web development, its obvious you need a webserver, so you can use the prepackaged WEBrick server ( good for small dev). For more serious programming use Mongrel, Apache or lighttpd. Instructions to configure Apache and Lighttpd for ror can be found here. Get MySql for the database and you will be done.

 Lastly you need a very good article to get you started and this is the one that got me started out. Its not perfect considering its almost 2 years old but the errors that show up will help you learn much better. And thats it , we are done. Best of luck learning ror.
 

Tags: ruby, rails , ruby on rails, getting started, tutorials

  Then I read about upcoming getting a better interface - a random search on Bangalore and lo, tons of results on upcoming events. I really like the variety of events that are listed. I am not sure about the community that upcoming has in Bangalore or its popularity but looking at the events listed there, I think they are doing pretty well. Also if any of you are looking for public events in Bangalore, this is the place to look. Please do comment with other sites that list public events in Bangalore. Meanwhile

 http://upcoming.yahoo.com

and here is the link to the events in Bangalore.
   
 http://upcoming.yahoo.com/search/?type=events&rt=1&q=&loc=bangalore

Tags: Bangalore, events, public events, upcoming, yahoo

 In fact, for any third party application, there must be some scalability requirements enforced and only when they meet such requirements should they be allowed to publish. An alternative would be for the mother app to build its own cloud and make sure that the 3rd party application uses that cloud so that its highly available ( Case in point Google’s App Engine - Use for widgets). Or, there must be some load test designed when the 3rd party app registers with the mother app ( ex : Automated load tests on sites like TopCoder ). An even more elegant way of figuring out scalability problems would be to statically analyze the submitted code to check for bottlenecks and other possible leaky parts of the code and then reach a decision whether to allow for the code to run or not. Until such rigorous checks and constraints are not enforced, third party apps will keep ruining our experience.

Tags: cloud, facebook appliation, third party applications, static analysis

  After that started the GCraze. Almost any entity that had a G before it was sought out to be the most watched property on the web. This craze still holds; the only difference is that the craze has moved from web developers to general public. Most G properties are running only because of the G in front, sort of like the Y! of the late 90s. Call it fate or just too much popularity, I think a lot of people are coming full circle.

 Over the recent few days I have seen a lot of discontent among all the G users. I shall list most of the ones I remember, but you will get the idea

 - Mail : probably the most sought after mail service in the recent past has its own share of problems. The first being slow connections. You must see Gmail running at our university, when 250 people share a 16Mbps connection, Gmail takes on a life of its own. Mails dont open, conversations are not updated and the chat feature is a pure disaster. The biggest problem I have with Gmail are the intrusive ads next to my mails.
 - Orkut and Google Talk: Orkut was the social network for India, so claim many people. But if it wasn’t for the G tag, I would have liked to see how far Orkut would have gone. I know this having competed with Orkut for a year. The problem with social networks with no personal value add to it ( unlike del.icio.us or flickr) tends to grow boring and spam and other marketing material get the better of the network , you have no choice but to opt out. I consider Gtalk as a piece of art , a wonderful piece of software who got the design and the user experience part just right. But Orkut integration did one very awful thing, it increased my contacts on Gtalk from a mere 10 to about 200, which I really didnt want. Some say I missed a warning to the same, but now there is no undoing it. Lot of my friends are shifting back to Ymsgr and Windows messenger because they see more peaceful days there.

 So thanks to these problems and more, there is a reverse migration to older properties who over time have become better and people are rediscovering their long lost loved ones. Google is doing all the right things with other properties though. I love the reader and just cant do without it and thanks to the sharing and the friends aspect of it, its almost like a new paradigm of use of RSS. Docs also is really cool, though I still like using Zoho, coz its home made and is just purely awesome. Thats about it I guess.

ps : Inspiration for this post comes from my valiant struggle for almost 2 whole hours to get Gmail to work only to see a “Your Account is experiencing Errors” or something. And then I try Yahoo Mail and its so wonderfully fast and awesome and guess what, hotmail works like a charm too. Also, my adsense account has served almost 100,000 ads and yet I haven’t made enough money to buy a decent meal Come on. 100,000 is six digits and they account for something, then why not pay me.

Tags: google, gmail, google talk, gtalk, orkut

Read this wonderful article and I realized, we are hooked to the internet!! Not a day goes by without us plugging in. The tools you work with clearly alter the way you do things and not necessarily in the right way. To give you an example, an electrician came to my place and couldn’t put a hole in a switch board because his drill bit was broken; an electrician from the pre-drill age would heat a sack needle to do the same. Did modern day tools spoil the electrician ? I would say, yes!

The same is the case with everyday programmers and web workers. I remember programming without search engines, an age where I peered through command lines and man pages to figure out why in gods name was the screen showing segmentation fault. Debugging was a very involved process, no modern day debuggers or code analyzers, just the program and console outputs. Though it sounds really painstaking ( and trust me, it was), it did make me a better programmer. I knew where not to screw up and also where things could fail. I see people start programming using IDE’s like Eclipse and Visual Studio and I really wonder whether they will ever have all the learnings that I had. Search engines and effective ones at that have paralyzed out ability to think, read and find information. Its affected us in adverse ways, so not comprehend able.

To become humans again, not impaled by search technology, I second the concept of a web sabbath. A day or two in a week, where we do not use modern day amenities like the mobile phone, Television , Internet or search. Such a day will help us to think, read, scour for knowledge the way we would have done ten years ago and hopefully that extra effort will make us think beyond technology and its limitations. I would like to hear from people who agree with me.

Tags: google, web, sabbath, nosearch, websearch, technology

•  Follow yearly maintenance schedules to ensure that your furnace and air conditioner run efficiently.
• Unplug rarely used appliances such as a TV located in the spare bedroom.
• Dry your clothes on a laundry line instead of using a clothes dryer
• Replace all incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (CFL). CFL’s last up to 10 to 15 times longer and are 75 percent more efficient than incandescent bulbs.
• Turn off lights when leaving a room.
• Switch off your monitor or close the lid of your laptop when not in use. Remember always to shut down the PC before going home from Office.
• Set up your monitor to go to sleep when idle for more than 10 minutes.
• Reduce the brightness in your monitor.
  
• Do not unnecessarily leave electrical items like your phone, camera on continuous charging.
• Ventilate your room and use fans and Air conditioners sparingly.
• Always check the emission of your vehicle, remember to tune your engine optimallyto cut emission levels.
  
• Share a carpool or drive with a friend to work or college.
  
• Don’t waste paper, use a computer wherever necessary.
  

I also found out that I emit 3.056 Tonnes of Carbon dioxide every year :-(  This is my environment day post