When I built the ‘Twitter Trending Topics‘ application, one of the things I had in mind was to see how quickly an application can be built in the most economical way.
While the application is working like a charm, a day into the launch, I already see a few issues with the hosting solution that I chose, the Google AppEngine.
I got this idea of building an application which pulls all the pages mentioned in the trending topics on Twitter. Why would that be useful? Well, it’s the simplest replacement for Google News, but more real time and no tweet noise.
Here are the steps I followed to build this application:
The initial setup of the application was done in less than 2 hours time!
You can access the application here: Twitter Trending Topics.
There are a few known bugs, but the overall results are impressive.
Once in a while, I look at my Delicious bookmarks to get an idea of what I have been upto in recent time. The ‘Current Interests‘ tool was written with exactly that in mind.
I began to wonder if my bookmarks can give me an idea of trends in technology and my interest in them. So I quickly wrote a Python script to give me the top tags in each year and here are the results.
Cameras allow you to adjust the white balance setting in your images, but, I prefer to have an original version with me just in case I want to experiment with the original image.
Now let’s say you want to add warmth to your images. In cameras, you would set the white-balance setting to cloudy or overcast to get this effect.
Now how do we do the same in GIMP?
Original image:
Warmed up image:
So as part of the weekend photoshoot series, I visited Lalbagh today.
Over the past several weeks I realized the importance of aperture in the photos and I felt that a full manual mode gives me a lot of control over my images when compared to any other modes. So my intention this time was to try the full manual mode.
If you want to change that:
to that:
you need to understand something called Color Levels. The original image is overly underexposed, and the edited image has the brightness and shadows better than in the unedited image. This tutorial teaches you how to rescue such underexposed images and also how to optimize the shadows and highlights in your image.
The Color Level tool in GIMP allows you to adjust how bright or how dark you want your image to be. Many a times, we face this problem of over exposure of whole or portions of an image and we just can’t get it right with a camera (unless you are a pro)! So GIMP to the rescue.
You just downloaded a file from the Internet, for ex, a PDF, a word document from Google Docs, or a video from TED or a talk from Google Videos. You downloaded this file some days back and now, when you viewed it and wanted to know what the world is talking about it, you don’t remember where you downloaded it from and end up searching for the filename or something related to it in Google.
How many times has this happened to you? How nice would it be if it was possible to associate the file with the URL from where you downloaded it or the page associated with it?
I felt the need for this when I downloaded a lot of TED videos recently and wanted a way to go to the TED page describing the video.
I started searching for the quickest way to do it and I found out a quick way to create context menus in Gnome using Nautilus Actions. So all I had to do was to create 2 commands – one for associating the URL and the other to launch the URL. Did you know it is very simple to create contextual commands in Ubuntu Gnome?
As planned, I had been to Startup City 2009 today.
I reached at 9am sharp and was surprised to see the place filled with people. I found it hard to find a parking spot and there were quite a few cars lined up because the parking was full.
I didn’t have any problems with registration as they had a separate registration counter for bloggers, press and exhibitors.
I would estimate the turn-up to be more than 3000. More than 100 startups had put up stalls in the event.
The event started with a keynote from Naukri.com founder, Sanjeev Bikhchandani.
SiliconIndia, India’s largest professional network, is hosting an event called Startup City on June 6th, 2009 in Bangalore NIMHANS Convention Center.
Over 100 startups and more than 40 investors plan to attend this event and showcase their products. There will be sessions from the CEO’s of Naukri, Rediff and Tejas Networks and from companies like Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Nokia etc.
As part of this event, there will be, Live product demonstrations, Visionary Keynotes, In-depth Panel Discussions etc.
This is an excellent opportunity for everyone to meet and interact with people working in or being part of interesting startups in and around the city, getting to learn from their success stories and their mistakes alike. SiliconIndia expects more than 5000 event attendees.
You can learn more about this event and register here.
Hope to see you there!
Since the time I have hosted this blog on WordPress, I am looking for patterns and tweaks to optimize my bandwidth consumption. Most hosting providers charge you for your bandwidth, so it is always a good idea to see where you can cut down on bandwidth consumption.
When I say optimize I don’t mean reducing size unnecessarily. A good theme with good content in it is definitely going to add to the user experience of visitors to your site and that shouldn’t come in the way of bandwidth optimization. A lot of these points are closely related to the SEO of your site.
So here are some things you can do to optimize the bandwidth.