This is the question which was recently asked by few guys who happen
to follow me here. All of them asked, why my blog is so dead now? no
updates, nothing! I just thought to write something about current
activities.
It might surprise you that it's not my new marital status which keeps me busy here and there. Neither I have become bloggingly infertile
that I don't find new things in pocket to discuss. It's all about
change in priorities. I have been trying get back to same world which I
belong to, the tech world.
Someone might call me an insane that how come I am getting more into
this thing rather than enjoying new life? So my friends! Alhamdolillah
I have been enjoying this new relationship and things around it hence
it's been helping me to keep my brain focused on things which are very
near to me and more important for myself(My veteran married friends
might not agree with me by saying,"yeah yeah enjoying" :-> ). I had already mentioned here that as soon as soon as I got engaged in something then I would not be able to spend much time in blogging stuff.
I am a wannabe entrepreneur *** software engineer and for past 2
months I have been trying to work on fewer ideas which have been in
pending since ages. By default I am a kind of lazy who just don't
finish something up on time plus I have to take care of new entry in my
life too,wife. Usually she does not complain when I don't give her much
time after getting back to home or on holidays but I can feel what she
feels at that time and I try my best to convince her for what I am
doing or try to reschedule my stuff just to make sure that I don't hurt
her. Note for all women: Being a husband is not so easy as they think about it! :-)
Luckily I found few friends around me who think like me, who wants
to do something which they can't do in their own respective companies
due to various reasons. So it's like we have been discussing things(aka
brainstorming) about different ideas I have or they have. Apart from
that I have been trying to work on things which should have been done
by now. For that purpose I have got a hosting service along with a
domain which would be used as a platform where I can do various
experiments. I might not reveal the name right now as there's nothing
over there to show off. So, in short I have following things in my life
which keeps me engaged most of the time.
1) My Wife and home offcourse.
2)Job
3)My very own experimental lab and things related to it
4 )Formation of a team to work on newer idea(prolly a startup? Not sure though..)
I was supposed to write a post about the role of a husband in which
I wanted to share things I learnt in past 3 months or..a husband can
learn due to a relationship with wife. That post was supposed to go
live after 1st month of my wedding but I could not start it, then I
thought to write about it after 3 months and yet It could not be done.
The only thing I have done so far that I have drafted a post only with
a title and introductory lines. My wife is staying at her mom's place.
I thought I would be able to give time for that pending blog post but
against I rejected my own idea and thought to work on stuff I mentioned
above. I don't know when will I be able to complete that post. Things
around me keeps me busy most of the time. Wish me luck for new ventures
and remember us in prayers.
Note: For all those techies who are willing to work on their own ideas, I would recommend them to read Founders at work. Simply an amazing book about famous companies/people who faced issues in their early days.
Cross post from my other blog
As I shared here that I really liked the concept of Blind Search tool as it's quite helpful to compare three well-known and big search engines; Google,Bing and Yahoo. This tool could be quite helpful to find out hidden features of other search engines which usually I don't pay attention because of Google.
I really liked the concept of showing comparison of different data sets(Search Engine results here) and let the user pick which 1 is good. It's quite a Web 2.0/3.0 idea to find the better results based on user choices.Since I myself is a developer so I wanted to know how does it work. So I loaded up the site in firefox and started inspecting it via Firebug. I inspected button element and this is what I found. Click the image for clear vision.
Yes! I found a hidden div with an image element which was telling me before hitting VOTE button that the middle column contains the search results from Google Search Engine(Image name Goo.png is visible in pic). For a moment it does not matter at all but if the developer of the system is recording users' feedback some where then the questions could arise about the authenticity of search results because if i am a google fan and I already know that middle column is showing results from Google then I will click it anyway. Hence I cheated here and selected Google regardless of the quality of result. In this way many like me could rate up their favorite search engine. But..should I take results seriously because the creator of the tool says himself:
This site is built as a fun experiment by Michael Kordahi,
When I found out about the site and the association of the developer with Microsoft, I thought that some day the developer would show up the user stats and I did not get surprise when I found a blog post on Michael's blog in which he has shared the stats.
Therefore I won't consider it a serious tool anymore. The idea is simply great but I don't understand why did Michael implemented it like that someone else could "manipulate" ratings easily. I believe there are better ways to accomplish same task without giving any hint to the users(specially those who are in same field) because i did try to implement the same concept for a task which will not let developers to figure out the main source unless they submit their vote and it's pretty simple to do in PHP(if I am not wrong Blind Search was also developed in PHP :-) )
Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group(WHATWG)'s twitter account seems taken over by some spammer. Few mins back when I was going thru new tweets, I found some weird(read vulgar) entries in WHATWG account. It was surprising. I checked few more messages and found out that someone has been spamming the account. As you can see in the following pic, you will find some abusive tweets posted by the spammer.
Everyone knows Google heavily relies browser based front end and has given us some classic web applications which pretty much behave like Desktop apps. Google had reasons to launch a separate browser and today we all read the reason behind it.
Google was not happy with current browsers who opens different web pages in a single process, that's why they came up with a browser which opens every page in a separate process space which makes efficient usage of browser. Google is addicted to browser and wants to progress further by using same technology which depends on common development technologies like Javascript,HTML and AJAX. rather than on stuff like C++.
Google already has softwares like Web based Office Suit and Email client in form of Gmail. Almost all Google Service provides a way to create 3rd party applications via APIs. Google already made a successful attempt of offline data storage by using Gears. Gears is not all about Data storage, it's more than that; from RDBMS system for stuff like Registry Settings to things like Worker pool for multithreaded web based applications. Google has really dropped a bomb on head of Microsoft.
I recently re-installed Windows XP. I had a long list of bookmarks and history which I never erased for sake of easiness. Before going to format my partition, I was worried enough to backup my Firefox settings so that I could restore them upon fresh installation. Fortunately I came across a tool called
MozBackup which makes your life happier. I made a copy of my Firefox profile which is stored in SQLite Database shipped with Firefox > 2 and recovered it back in new firefox copy. It saved my time to create all those bookmarks again and storing password etc. Use this utility as it's quite handy.
I just found a helpful utility to retrieve the existing CD key of the windows product already installed on a pc.IT could be helpful if you dont have cd key stored and you need it again. Download it from here:
http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/
You will be aware of terms like Blind Love or Blind Faith but did you ever hear thing like
Blind Search? Yes there it is and it's a utility made by a
Microsoft Employee which let you pick the best search result based on your choice. It's interesting fun game. I am not so familiar with Microsoft's Bing but surprisingly few results return from query were better than results by Google. Not sure it's due to usability (Most of the Bing results appear in the middle column) or something else. Anyway it's quite a kewl tool.
As OPERA
say itself. Further from
The Register.
Google provides another feature to customize your search results in Tabular form. Google Square does it. For instance the square of Larry Page or of Bill gates. For details visit:
Google now has come up with a
P2P type tool which provides
online collaboration and spelling suggestion tool by using
NLP techniques. I don't know how it's gonna make difference in the presence of facebook and LinkedIn but it does sound interesting. Read further about it on
Wave's blog.
Google is now going to
support RDFa and microformat to represent structured data. You can learn further about their implementation
here.
Amazing effort which makes things a lot easier
via AJAXIAN.
I read in papers that PTCL has doubled the speed for broadband users. Now you can have a 2MB line @Rs.2000. Currently I am paying Rs.2000 for 1MB line. It sounds interesting. Naturally I tried to verify but current Speed test which shows the following result:
Once spoken can't be taken back. This is so true but not in Emailing world anymore. Gmail Labs has come up with a feature which allows you to undo your mail. It's pretty useful feature and could you save your from embarrassment.Thanks Salman for pointing it out. You may enable this feature from Labs tab in Settings option. Different stages of this feature are given below.
