Category: World Wide Web

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World Wide Web

CSI Web 2.0 conference

I delivered a talk today on 'Enterprise application of Web 2.0' in the National level CSI Web 2.0 conference.

The conference saw participation from companies like IBM, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Oracle etc. There were 4 tracks, each with about 4 talks and the speakers were primarily from Yahoo and IBM. There was a wonderful panel discussion on 'Dark side of Web 2.0' and I should say, it was the best part of the event.

I was also part of the program committee and having done Event management while in college (as part of CSI-SJCE), I should say that it was not quite different from the way we used to do it in college, except that it was far more easier to get contacts now, because the enterprises were driving it.

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World Wide Web

Wanna reduce email spam?

I was curious about how much a 'abc-at-xyz-dot-com' way of displaying email addresses, helps in reducing spam. So I did this search: * at * dot * and the results did not surprise me. 🙂

I then searched for different ways to hide email addresses and came across this wonderful blog entry.

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World Wide Web

The death of browsers

About a year back in one of the internal 'prediction' wikis of IBM, I had predicted that 'folders' and 'browsers' are going to be a thing of the past in about 2 years' time. I in fact blogged about the folders prediction here.

Now after a year, I am still confident about the latter. However, it might take a couple of years for the concept of browsers to change.

I read a blog post today, which convinced me about it. Alex said in his blog,

“Detecting information in Web pages and handing that information off to other applications changes the role of the Web browser from being solely a HTML renderer to being an information broker.”

There is more about it here and looks like an interesting post.

This is radically different from our current usage of browsers. Browsers would be more like information harvesters rather than a medium to 'browse' information.

This is already true to some extent. Compare the browsers of today with the browsers of the past. If you look at the features of Firefox 2, you will notice features like Live titles, Live bookmarks, not to forget the widgets of Opera.

However, it seems obvious that end users will notice a drastic change. It is going to be a gradual change from the current to the future. And when the time comes, you will have browsers as standard Operating System applications (why were people criticizing Microsoft for making IE part of Windows?!) and a platform to connect and use the web. (Remember, usage of the web is going to be quite different from the present).

And now regarding the folders stuff. Well, that is not the point of this blog entry, however, I would like to conclude by saying that 'folders' in their present form have limitations, but there seem to be better ways of doing away with these limitations than doing away with this approach altogether. By the way, I am still looking for the day when my system is going to boot up and take me to secondlife and I work from there.

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World Wide Web

Here it comes

Here comes the press release. IBM released an EPCglobal standards compliant product called WebSphere RFID Information Center.

Here are some more links:

Categories
World Wide Web

Orkut microsummaries

I wrote some simple micro-summary generators for Orkut. Here is what each one does:

Last visitor: If profile visit is enabled, this micro-summary will tell you who visited your profile last.
Karma: This indicates your 3 karma values.
Next birthday: This indicates whose birthday is next.
Fans: This indicates the number of fans you have.

Here are the micro-summary generators.

In order to learn more about microsummaries click here. I will describe the steps below for using my orkut microsummary generators.

1. Install all the generators from the link given above.
2. Go to Orkut home.
3. Click on Bookmarks -> Bookmark this page.
4. In the Name option, click on the drop down menu. You should see the microsummaries in action. Select one and click OK.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each of the microsummaries.
6. For the karma microsummary, go to your profile page and repeat steps 3 and 4.

(Please note: Some values have been deliberately removed.)

The fun is it is live, which means any changes are almost instantaneously reflected.

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World Wide Web

Firefox 2 experiments

Previous related entries:
Firefox extensions – my picks
Firefox extensions – my picks II (a web developer's heaven)
Microsummaries – a new feature in Firefox 2

Firefox 2 was released recently. This week I got a chance to dabble with it. Integrated spell-check is a new feature that I liked.

I cannot stop talking about Microsummaries. So I continued my experiments and I found some useful extensions.

Here they are:
Microsummary Generator Builder
XPath Checker

Also for Web developers, here are some more useful extensions (other than the ones that I have mentioned in my previous blogs)

UrlParams
Execute JS

Also I found these extensions very useful:
All-in-One Sidebar

So here's how it looks now:

Categories
Education World Wide Web

An attempt to catch up with the world around us

The last 2-3 months has been very busy and I have almost lost touch of what's going on in my interest fields.

My reader is filled up and I will surely not be able to catch up with the load.

As a co-incidence, I came across this site, Knowledge Web. I listened to a podcast on knowledge where James Burke, who's the brain behind this idea was interviewed. It's a very interesting idea and let me try to describe it below.

The amount of information/knowledge in the world has increased so much that this is creating new kinds of problems. While on one side are problems like Continuous Partial Attention, on the other end are other humanitarian problems.

This is the line that caught me most:

“People tend to become experts in highly specialized fields, learning more and more about less and less.”

Wow! People say, “I consider myself an expert in component A of product B on platform Z”. Everyone is an expert if we think about it.

The problem with this is people become ignorant of the progress in other branches. Re-invention of the wheel is inevitable. It's always a good idea to know as much about diverse fields as possible. James encourages people to look at other fields (totally unrelated to your present field) and learn that the knowledge of the whole world is connected. In fact, in the podcast he describes how people (who form the vertices of a graph) are connected with events (as edges) and you can move from any event to any event by traveling in this graph, which he calls the Knowledge Web.

Now think about what that means. You have a way of connecting the incident that Gandhiji was killed with the invention of the computer, or any thing like that.

James then describes how the present education system is outdated and what needs to be done to revive it.

So do this. Read/Learn about something that is totally unrelated to what you do for a living and see what that has in store for you. Learn about arts, history, philosophy, chemistry or whatever you can think of and see what is the hot thing in their field and soon you will see how the world is all related!

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World Wide Web

Heard of Mr. Frank Abagnale Jr?

Bruce Schneier said, “In order to become a cryptographer, you need to be a cryptanalyst.[1]”

Now is there a person better than Frank Abagnale to prove this? I watched the movie, Catch me if you can and was quite impressed by this person. It was hard to believe that this is a true story. A web search convinced me.

While browsing through the Wikipedia external links, I hit upon this article in BBC about Frank and this reminded me of the blog entry that I had made related to identity management and privacy issues.

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World Wide Web

How server side validation using AJAX may be better than client side validation

Let's say you are filling up a form and suddenly you get a popup which says that certain characters are not allowed in a field. Or an alert, which says that the number of characters entered is more than some defined limit.

Now using some fundoo plugin, you just edit that Javascript and ensure that the invalid characters are accepted silently. What will happen in this case?

The fact is, this might create problems in the system and may be a playground for hackers.

There are several solutions to this. Code obfuscation is one of them. However, to be on the safer side, it is advisable to perform server side validation before the data is processed further.

If the server side validation is not done, hell may break loose. If the server side code takes care of validation, then there are no problems. But this would mean that we are replicating the validation function in two different places. So how about combining the two and just providing server side validation using AJAX? The client will see the validation happen prior to submit (may-be a bit slow), and at the same time no code is written in Javascript to perform the validation.

Although people criticize AJAX about attacks, I feel it is an elegant solution if used appropriately.

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World Wide Web

Public bookmarks, Private tags

Has anyone come across a bookmarking site that allows us to make bookmarks public, but attach private tags to them?

Here's the use-case:
Tags in my opinion are small bits of information that we attach to the entity under consideration. Now the entity itself may be public, but not the information that I attach to it.

To be more specific, let me tell you where I felt the need for this. When chatting with , I came across several books in Amazon. I started bookmarking these in delicious and attaching the tag bibliophile to them.

Then came a thought. How about storing information like whether I have read this book or not, what the number of this book is (I number all my books) and other information which might not be worthwhile to make public or for some reason does not seem appropriate.

In terms of implementation, I guess it is quite simple. You need to now track each tag and see if it is private or not (an extra field in the database) and then display them accordingly in the UI.