I had been to Sankey Tank today to experience the sunset and also click a few pictures.
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Sankey tank – sunset
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Google Reader finally has search!
This was one feature that I was missing in Google Reader. So, while I tried the Google Custom Search when I really missed it, I was not quite happy with it, since it was showing up really old posts and there was no obvious way of viewing only 'relevant' posts or 'new' posts.
I have also tried a couple of GreaseMonkey scripts. But I was not happy with the user-interface integration.
So finally today, I open Google reader and see a tiny box on the top and wonder for a moment if it was some GreaseMonkey script running. Then I make a search and am convinced it is not! I also make a search in Google News to make sure it is true. And yeah, here is the confirmation. This is perhaps the most long awaited feature ever with regard to Google's applications.
The integration is just too good. Plus there is option to search only within specific tags or subscriptions. There is suggest in the drop down of tags and subscriptions. And guess what, there is also a way to reach the result page directly. Just create a keyword bookmark for: http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/%s/ and give it a keyword like grs (Google Reader Search) and then use your browser address bar to perform a search directly in Google Reader, for example, 'grs eclipse'.
Suits me perfectly! Finally I feel like I am playing with an ATOM store rather than a simple feed reader.
The IPv6 specification has been around for about 9 years now. People understand the problems with IPv4. Yet the world is struggling to move to IPv6.
Ruby has been around for about 14 years now. It had enough time to evolve before it was widely adopted.
Java has been around for about 12 years. The adoption was quite fast. Now although newer versions of Java are being released, it is slowly losing its charm. There are some known problems, which would rather have not been there in the first place, but now it is too late or difficult to correct.
Browsers were meant to be used to browse documents containing hypertext. HTTP is a request/response application level protocol. People are now using both of these for things that they are not designed to do; browsers as application platforms (mashups from multiple sites) and HTTP for pushing data from the server aka Comet.
I can go on. But, do you see a pattern here? Or are these just random bits from history?
The point I am trying to make is that it is very difficult for technology to evolve once it has been widely adopted. In such cases, it is considered okay to bypass the working of the technology without breaking it by identifying loopholes!
So do we blame adoption before a technology matures? Or should there be a way that technology can mature and evolve without carrying its sins forward? Is it possible to mandate a 'big-bang' when specifications can move from one version to another or when there can be radical changes in technology without backward compatibility? How can this be achieved by ensuring that there is minimal side-effect? Does the answer lie in The Tipping Point?!
Seems like an interesting problem to solve.
Ever thought you are so addicted to Java that although the world is talking about moving to functional languages, you just cannot see yourself leaving the JVM?
Well, as Jerry put it, Groovy could be your solution. You can still use the JVM, but instead of Java, use Groovy as your programming language.
Are there any compelling reasons to move to Groovy or even away from Java to any of the scripting languages on the JVM?
Well, I wouldn't consider myself to be an expert in Java, or any programming language, but from the little experience that I have, I should say, there are some reasons I can think of.
Some time back, we had this requirement. We were doing some project on Eclipse and we had to make changes to a basic Eclipse object because an assumption made by the Eclipse architecture was not true for us. Were we trying to break the architecture of Eclipse? May be. Why were we trying to do it? Well, technological coolness!
Anyway, the point is, this is not possible without actually downloading the source and then making the modification and asking users to replace the original JAR containing that object with ours. Or we need to ask the Eclipse community to accept our change and it might not be a compelling reason for the community. Is there a simpler solution?
How would it be if it was possible to modify this object during runtime and not require anyone to replace the JARs?
Well, although I have not tried it, I am sure it is quite easy to do this with a functional language. I have done some similar changes to Dojo using the 'prototype' property.
There are simpler reasons than that. Java sometimes can get really painful. Remember how painful it is to simply replace backslashes in Java? Remember how painful it is to obtain a substring from the 2nd character at the beginning to the last but one character at the end? Remember how painful it is to write a string of HTML to the response from a servlet? Can setters/getters be simpler? Can XML document creation be simpler?
With the world talking about byte-code modification, metaprogramming and scripting languages on the JVM, Java is becoming more of a platform language than a core programming language. It is more like what C/C++ was about 10 years back and what assembly was before that.
So back to my question on why Groovy.
The Groovy guys have answered it elegantly. Here are the reasons that I found to be the most compelling:
1. It has functional aspects.
2. The syntax is neat and consistent.
3. It is Java based. It is easy to move back to Java if I ever need to. Groovy is completely interoperable with Java and reuses a lot of the Java semantics. If you really need to get this, you should see this tutorial.
So go ahead and give it a try! Who knows, you may soon start to wonder why you were doing Java programming all these days!
Just realized that my paper on User annotations to facilitate collaborative web crawling and indexing has finally been published.
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A very productive weekend
With 5 movies and a solo trip on my bike around Bangalore on the ring road, clearly, this is one of the most productive weekends ever! 🙂
Movies I watched:
- Cast Away
- Forrest Gump
- Road to Perdition
- Insomnia
- Whole Nine Yards
And now about the trip:
I was bored. That is when this thought came to me that I could go round the city on the ring-road. I had planned a similar trip around the Mysore Ring road during Engineering, however the road was not yet complete.
So I started off at 3:25 pm from Indiranagar. I reached the Marathalli junction at around 3:45. My plan was to return to this exact same location and then return home.
Just to give you an idea of the route I took, here are some places I came across during my trip:
Marathalli, Sarjapur road, BTM ring road, Bannerghatta road, Deve Gowda petrol bunk, Kathriguppe, Pantar Palya, Bangalore University, RVCE, Kengeri, Papareddy Palya, Peenya, Tata tea, BEL circle, Hebbal fly-over, Devanahalli (had lost my way), back to Hebbal fly-over, Banasvadi junction, back to Marathalli.
I lost my way thrice during the trip. On one occasion I was on my way to Hyderabad. Little did I realize that I had taken the wrong way from Hebbal. It was only after I reached Devanahalli a good 25 km from Hebbal fly-over that I realized I had hopelessly lost my way!
After having travelled for about 150 km, for about 4 hours 15 minutes, I returned home safe and tired. Wow, that was a memorable journey!
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Two down; still going strong
I just completed two years in IBM! It has been an interesting, challenging and rewarding journey so far. It has been my pleasure to work with some of the industry leaders and some of the most unique people here.
I see a blend of skills, knowledge and passion in the people. I have been involved in a variety of projects, which have helped me understand IBM's business and the role of technology better. There is still a lot more to learn and contribute.
So here is a collection of hacks that I have made in my Firefox browser to optimize the usage of real estate and still have control over my browser
- Install the TinyMenu extension to replace your menu with a single menu item.
- Now that you have space in your main menu-bar, move all your navigation toolbar items to the main menu-bar and then hide the navigation bar. Also hide the toolbar. You can do this by right-clicking on one of the toolbars and unchecking all of them!
- Right click the Main menu bar, choose Customize. Remove the Home and other icons that you hardly use.
- Remove the 'Go' button next to the address bar, remove the magnifying glass, remove Back/Forward/Reload/Stop buttons when disabled as shown here.
- Install the Searchbar Autosizer extension to make your search bar extremely small and then to expand when you type characters in the search box.
- Auto-hide the tab bar.
- Use Fuller screen to remove the menu-bar and status bar when not required!
- Preview your tabs and search for one using Firefox Showcase extension.
- Clean up your menu's using Menu editor extension.
- Keyboar shortcuts are extremely important to increase your productivity. Reconfigure your shortcuts using Keyconfig extension.
- Also you can add these new key combinations in Keyconfig to cycle through your tabs:
Move one tab left (Ctrl+Left)
if(gBrowser.mTabContainer.selectedIndex == 0)
gBrowser.mTabContainer.selectedIndex = gBrowser.mTabContainer.childNodes.length - 1;
else
gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(-1);
Move one tab right (Ctrl+Right)
if(gBrowser.mTabContainer.selectedIndex == gBrowser.mTabContainer.childNodes.length - 1)
gBrowser.mTabContainer.selectedIndex = 0;
else
gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(1);
And once you do this, you will definitely want to take backup of your profile. Use FEBE and you are done!
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Have I stopped blogging?
“Have you stopped blogging?”, people ask me. I don't have a definite answer. True, it has been a long time since I blogged. Although I have been quite active in my online activity as is apparent here I somehow couldn't blog about anything for the last 3 months!
During the course of the 3 months since my last blog entry, I came across quite a lot of things, which I found interesting and would have normally blogged about. However, I got into this vicious circle where I thought that it is not worth blogging about it, after such a long gap and that added to the time, and now it became more and more difficult to blog about something.
Ok, so what's keeping me interested?
- Lotus connections, specially the idea of Activities. This has been an eye-opener regarding the way I organize information in my system/s.
- The emergence of a new web pattern of “server pushing information” to the browser, commonly referred to as Comet.
- ProjectZero, which is IBM's answer to rapid and 'Zero' obstacle development of Web oriented applications.
- TiddlyWiki – I wonder why I did not come across this before! It is absolutely fabulous and the idea of a single page self-contained wiki is just too good to believe and sometimes scary. 🙂
Also, of late, I started getting interested in analysis of web activities.
A day of effort, and some hacking of the Firefox history and a tool called RapidMiner helped me get some insights into my browsing habits, which I had never thought about before. I noticed a pattern in the way I come across new topics. Also I learnt about the way I get to certain frequently accessed sites and what I can do to get to certain information quicker than ever before. Finally, I realized that the new del.icio.us Firefox extension has helped me improve my browsing habits and made my bookmarks more valuable.
It is really interesting to see what other 'inferences' are possible with the data that is already available! Considering the fact that data today is available in a wide-variety of open-formats and the data also being openly available, it is possible to fetch all this data, feed it to some analyzer and get some interesting insights and use that to make your web journey more fruitful. The Flickr Cluster experiments are just tip of the iceberg!
Some projects/tools related to this are APML, ManyEyes.
Ok, I have written about a wide variety of topics that I am currently finding interesting.
So, finally, back to the question I started off with. Have I stopped blogging? The answer definitely has got to be a 'No'!
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Search results and relevancy
Search engines suggest alternative keywords when you mistype keywords.
I was looking for a Wikipedia article on Liskov substitution principle. I came across this when I was reading about Design By Contract elsewhere and the article had 'mistyped' the phrase as Lyskov substitution principle.
I first entered it in my Firefox Wikipedia search engine plugin and got no results. My next target was Google and this is what I got:
Not knowing that I had mistyped the phrase, I did not click on the suggestion. I was in fact surprised that Wikipedia does not have an article on this!
Then I searched in Yahoo and this is what I got:
Wow! I had indeed mistyped the phrase and Yahoo turned out to be intelligent in guessing what I was interested in.
Google's approach is like: 'I guess you have made a mistake, but I am not sure, here is the result for what you typed. However, I think you are looking for this.' Yahoo's approach is: 'I guess you have made a mistake and this is what I think you are looking for, if you are interested in search results for only what you typed, click here.'
I am not sure which approach is better, but I definitely like Yahoo's approach because it saves me a page load and a click.