Perspectives

Remember CARTOSAT-2 launched early this year ? Well, it seems to be up, flying somewhere above us and even sending back images now. ISRO seems to have released images from this commercially usable satellite.
Image courtesy :ISRO

So, how do you like vidhana soudha and Chinnaswamy cricket stadium side by side? GISindia seems to think that the real exiciting thing is the cost factor. Apparently, these imagery can be twenty times cheaper to buy than the ones at say, Yahoo India maps, which is most likely from IKONOS.

Oh, talking of satellite imagery, did you know that Yahoo India maps has added new satellite imagery for a lot of places in India, very recently? For instance, check out the the lovely Golden temple, Amritsar or maybe the Ganga,Yamuna ( and arguably), saraswati confluence at Allahabad.

I have found many applications ( couple of them from Google) doing auto-save. This is amazing and a very thoughtful move towards better usability. But, though I dont seem to remember where, I was once searching for a “save” button and did not find it. And I realised the site was auto-saving my work and I didnt need to save anything specifically.

Maybe due to legacy, many of us have gotten used to actions like “edit” , and “save”. I feel one can actually design a site (and probably an application too) without requiring these. The only concern is, will it actually confuse the users more.

Thinking on those lines, I came up with this small little text box to give the user the assurance that his work is infact saved and he doesnt need to do anything extra. Go ahead! Type in a few characters and see it for yourself. I already know that one cannot click and go back to any part of the typed text and I dont have a solution for that yet. Do you think this is too flashy? Too many things moving? Or is it good ?

Update: Original idea was to paste the javascript here. But blogger is screwing the shit out of me. I dont seem to be able to do that!

I was talking to a friend of mine a little while ago. I was telling her about the movies I had watched over this weekend. I recollect one of them, but the other, I just could not! Just goes to show what I think of the movie I guess.

Immediately, I headed over to my rusting “My Movies” section of IMDb and updated it with these two movies. But, frankly, IMDb is an archaically designed website and I wish folks at Amazon do something about it before some whizkid comes up with something more usable.

So, Conviced that “My Movies” ( Personalization features needs a little ingenuity in their naming. We got “My Yahoo” and “my Web” from Yahoo, “My Maps” from Google and this, “My movies”. ) is not what I am looking for, I hunted around to see if there is any usable Movies API out there. The closest I came to is IMDb interfaces. It is definitely a good start, but you need a ton of storage. Plus, I dont exactly understand how they (or me, if I were to use it) intend to keep it up-to-date. Do I need to keep downloading and compiling their data package ? But, if you are really eager to do something with movies, I think it is fair to begin with this.

I did not find anything else worth mentioning. I think this space is completely empty and the movie guys like Yahoo, aol, go etc should come forward and give us something to mashup with.

So, want an idea with Movies? Ofcourse. So, I need a place where I can quickly go type in a couple of words. It then gives me back a list of matching movies. I want to pick a movie out of it. (This is the movie I just watched). Now, as time progresses, You should be able to guess my favorite actor, actress, director, language, genre etc.

Hopefully, you can hook up to your database and give me suggestions on what I should be watching next! ( The puritans will have a problem with privacy, but not a problem for me). This is adding practical value ( I am looking for a term for this, any suggestions?). If you were to stop with just collecting my data, I aint giving you any!

Give me a badge that I can show off on my blog (yeah! ofcourse, I will say that)
Game to do?
Update: Oh, Forgot to tell you these two things:

Saw movie reviewr. Good start. And, found this on blogthings.

Your Movie Buff Quotient: 42%

You are well on your way to becoming a movie buff. You’ve seen many of the great films, and you have even probably developed an expertise in a few genres.

Writing a blog is more than writing. It is an art. A way of disseminating valuable information. Although blogging is a lot of fun, the little quirks involved tends to get on to my nerves sometimes. One of those overheads is finding what terms might be alien to your reader and creating link-offs, just in case the reader wants to know a bit more on what you are talking about. But, linking off is at core of the web and it must be harnessed. Web exists because of it’s hyper-links.

To create outlinks, this is what I generally do: Go search for that term in Google/Yahoo. Click on a few links and find what is appropriate. And then copy and paste the link over to the term I just blocked. In many cases, I have found the first link just works fine.

In some cases, I just create a link over to wikipedia and type out the query term hoping that the wiki entry will exist. And it does. For instance, for the above wikipedia hyperlink, I just typed “wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia” (Seems like this is the web2.0 version of your recursive shell command “man man”).

Now, what if I could do the same thing without having to go to either google or type the wiki url? So, the idea is, I block a text and then either click “make wiki url” or “I am feeling lucky” and get done with it. Altough you can write this up as a plugin quite easily for wordpress or typepad, The only way it seems possible for LJ or blogger is Greasemonkey.

What do you think? Do you have time to do this ? Let me know.

Yesterday, I bought Freakonomics from Landmark. The cover they gave me had interesting tid-bits about reading. One that caught my mind was this line “Shakespeare has used 29,000 different words in his plays”. I was wondering where I would stand compared to Shakespeare. And the closest I am to writing, is my blog.

So, this is the idea. Create a small embeddable widget that will compute the number of distinct words I have used in my blog and allow me to show it off on my blog. Either as absolute number or by a simple (number_of_my_words/29000)*100 percentage. The widget should be similar in concept to the “feedburner” widget. I already have a design in mind, but dont think have the bandwidth to do it now. If you have some spare time or if you are someone who wants to work on web technologies and dont know where and how to begin, this is a nice one. If you want to get my opinion on how to do it, leave me a comment and I will be happy to help you.

This is an inspirational and ingenious talk from Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala at a tech talk in Google. More about Dr. Jhunjhunwala and TeNet here.

Until this, I have only heard about him through my friends and colleagues from the IITs. After seeing him talk, I have become his big fan. The line that captured my mind in that talk is “The only way to bring about a change and to chase a big dream is by becoming an entrepreneur”. I couldnt agree more.

Do you know that it is absolutely easy to create the firefox (and now IE7) sidebar search plugin?

First, read a bit about opensearch.
Next, head over to this page and this page at Mozilla developer center which explains the entire process beautifully. (What we discuss here is true only for FF2 and IE7. There is no search plugin concept in IE6 and for earlier versions of firefox, those two pages will tell you what to do.)

So, you essentially have to create an XML opensearch file. But, ofcourse you dont have a search engine for yourself. So, what to do ? Here is a template that you can use to create your plugin. Save it. And then, Read on.

A few things those pages wont tell you are these:

How do I get a icon like the one Yahoo or Google’s in the search bar? You probably have a favicon.ico for your site/blog. If you dont, Use an image creator. My favorite is GIMP. Create a small, 16×16 image with whatever you want inside it. For instance, mine has “S” which is the beginning alphabet in my name. Now, you probably have a jpeg or png image. Head over to the online favicon creator by html-kit. They give you a zip file. Unzip and you will have your favicon ready.

Next, You need to create a base64 version of your .ico file. Head over to this page. Replace the text on the textbox named type: with “image/x-icon”, check base64 and then upload the favicon that you just created and click generate. You get the base64 encoded string of your image file. Now, copy that string and paste it between the Image tags in the template file.

Third, make use of the fact that Google does all the hard work in indexing your pages. And that you can ask G to search just within your site by adding “site:yourdomain.com” to the search query.

There are two Url tags in that file. The first one is used for suggesting a query (auto suggestion). Did you realise that from FF2, when you start typing in the search bar, Google or Yahoo ( or most plugins) gives you an autosuggest ?

So, in these URL tags, replace yourdomain.com with your domain. And that is it. You are all set. Publish this XML and hopefully, if someone thinks your blog has a wealth of information, they may install it. For instance, here is a mine!

How many times have you installed that same firefox extension once on your laptop, and then on your office desktop and once again on your home box ? Isint that kinda silly? If there was a way to tell firefox that it is, after all, the same “you” and that you the same things when you browse, no matter from where, wouldn’t that be cool?

Now, there are many ways to extend this fundamental idea. What if you have the same skin? what about any local bookmarks ? Or, in the extreme case, you want all the tabs you had open when in office, at home(a couple of friends’ of mine have done this part a little while ago. I am not sure if it is available for public use yet. Will update once I know) ?

When I get around having some free time, I will code it up and let you guys know about it. Hopefully, you wouldnt need to install that del.icio.us’ plugin everywhere you go.

Tech post after a really long time. And probably my first real piece of advicing in Javascript. So, take it with a pinch of salt. And tell me if I am writing something incorrect.

Ever wondered if it was possible to simulate a native event from your javascript code? Yes it is! Generally, you would probably have registered for an event and written all the logic in that callback. But sometimes, a need to do execute the same logic arises due to a completely unrelated event. To give you a real example, head over to this view of Yahoo! India maps. If you notice, clicking on any of the “local search element” on the right pane shades the element and also opens the marker. Now, clicking marker does the same thing too.

Instead of writing the code to shade the element all over again on the marker’s click callback, what you could do is to fire a click element on the corresponding search element on the right pane.

As you would expect you would have to do this differently in firefox and IE. And it will look something like this: