Perspectives

After huge successes a couple of times at the Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, California and Yahoo, London, Hackday comes over to Bangalore. Hack Days in Yahoo are always a single day love affair with your computer. So, this one happens between October 5th 2007 from about 5 PM to October 6th 5 PM at Taj Residency.

So, If you are one of them who has registered and have an invite, Kindle the hacker head in you and come and show us your genius. You wont be disappointed. Ofcourse, we have lots of stuff happening all through the day to keep you all awake. Food is going to be yum. So are the games and talks. And we also should have some serious music from a sexy band at the end of the day. You should spot me somewhere there with an orange shirt. Pull me over and I will be glad to help you. I will also give a short talk on hacking with, well ofcourse, maps. I may just have a surprise in store for you.

And for those who did not register or did not get an invite..well, hang on here for more updates. You can always hack and post it at Yahoo! Gallery. If it is brilliant enough, someone will take notice.

Someone also managed to make a huge banner (60ft x 20ft) and put it outside our office in inner ring road, Bangalore. Unfortunately, the Wind Gods didnt like it and tore it into pieces in less than 12 hours. I managed to get some bad pics of them here:

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.

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.