Shutter is an open source alternative to Skitch, which is a mac only advanced Screenshot utility. This tool will help you capture screenshots  in sections, full screen or multi-monitor mode. You can then do some minor modifications such as adding annotations, highlighting specific regions, adding small icons , free form drawing , cropping etc. It’s a great utility especially on Ubuntu and will save you the time learning other advanced tools like Gimp. It is also well maintained and is a fairly small install with all its dependencies. I use it intensively especially my work involves a lot of Prototyping, User Experience Design and WireFraming. Great find indeed!

Functionality : I want to capture the twitter handle of a user on a form. Most users will enthusiastically enter the entire URL like http://twitter.com/itsmeritesh, some will leave out the http:// and enter the rest. I wanted to validate that the username was a single word, didn’t contain parts of a URL (mainly slashes) and didn’t mind it being empty.

 // HTML Code
// <form name="myform"> 
// <input type="text" id="twitterUrl"> <label for="twitterUrl" />
 
function isEmpty(Val)
	{
	    if(Val.length==0) return true;
	      for(var i=0; i< Val.length; i++)
	      {
	            if( " \t\n".indexOf( Val.charAt(i)) == -1 ) 
	            return false;
	      }
	       return true;
	}
 
 jQuery.validator.addMethod("handleOnly", function(value) {
		 if(isEmpty(value)) return true;
 
		 if ((value.split(" ").length == 1) && (value.search('/')==-1))
			  return true;
		 else
			 return false;	  
	}, "Please specify only one word");
 
$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#myform").validate({
    	rules: {		
    		twitterUrl : {  handleOnly: true }
                 }
      messages: {
		twitterUrl: { handleOnly : "Only your twitter handle " }
               }
         }); 
  });

handleOnly is a new extension written by using the jQuery.validator.addMethod() method. The rule then specifies whether the return from the function must be true or false, in my case its true. The message is displayed when the condition is not met by the value.

Lets see some specifics and understand what I am really talking about. You will say the first thing a web based venture needs are servers and collocation centres, WRONG!! You have EC2 for computing, or EDGE grids, S3 or other similar services for storage and even if you do require the pleasures of your own server, try one of the virtualization technologies of the web hosts. That should just about cover your hardware part of things, except if you are trying to break the record for calculating largest number of decimals found in Pi ( which stands frighteningly close to a trillion digits when I last checked).

Now comes the software part of things. Most web businesses thrive on prebuilt, read to deploy open source software. Be it blogs, wikis, forums, bug tracking tools, there is always an open source software for whatever that is that you want to do. What’s even better, is that some of these software’s are self hosted and all you need is to include some paths and you are up and running with the latest and most stable version of the software. The advantage with this scheme is that you don’t need to manually upgrade your installations; they are done by the provider.

Supposing you do require the luxury of your own server, then invest in one of the upcoming virtualization technologies provided by many top hosts. They give you shell access and the comforts of your own server complete with install privileges and best of all, you don’t maintain it.

So since the hardware and software parts of the company are done, all you have to do is think of an innovative idea and get the ball rolling.

Google Gears is designed ingeniously. Gears is an activex plugin on IE and an XPI on firefox(installables) . Gears then works in your browser for any applications designed to use the gears technology. The foremost application that uses gears is Google Reader, which can store and retrieve almost 2000 articles. The transition between online and offline web is supposed to be seamless, as in one taking over when the connectivity is out and the other when its back. In reader, you have to explicitly make the shift from online to offline, something like the work offline option in IE.

The core essentially consists of three modules :

• Local Server Module : Creates a local server like emulator in which you can cache urls javascript, image etc. The ResourceStore module is used to capture resources that have to be accesed using a URL. ie supposing you were visiting my homepage, the resources like my resume or my portfolio , that need to be accessed via URL’s can be cached. The other variant is the ManagedResourceStore which automatically updates the cached information. In each case the URL’s and the cache in general has to be specified in a manifest file. The LocalServer intercepts HTTP/HTTPS requests and serves them from the cache if URL is cached in a ResourceStore or ManagedResourceStore (which is enabled) and the cookie of that information is present. This happens irrespective of the network connection.
• Local Database : This module is taken as an enhancement to SQLite , the micro database in C that can be configured and run in under 250Kb of memory. The gears javascript library provides method to create a new local database and also allows from complete SQLite SQL operations.
• Worker Pool : Almost every web developer has come across the long running script -> continue or break dialog. This usually happens due to an infinite loop in javascript or sometimes a very intensive calculation. The downside to this is that UI becomes non responsive and no action can happen on the front end of the app. The worker pool helps the cause by running these operations in the background. People familiar with thick app programming can relate this to threading, but at the javascript level. But unlike threads the workers do not share state information. The workers can communicate with each other by passing message strings or use JSON.

This advancement not only makes offline web possible but also allows for a new breed of applications to be born. Applications that need a server only to sync and not to compute or perform functionality. Think of a MyBlogLog offline for example, you visit a blog where you have a MyBlogLog reader that you have already encountered before the system tells you about your past encounters and on what pages. A distributed social network of sorts!!

The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that encourages people to share their creativity and make it available for others to legally build upon and share.

I found this great Podcast from Indian Podguru Kiruba Shankar ( podcasts from the realm of technology to business and entrepreneurial experiences) about Creative Commons India initiative. Speaking to Lawrence Liang, the head of the CCI initiative, Kiruba dwells into the specifics of CC and other topics. Lend me your ear

Click here to listen to the Podcast.

For quite sometime I have been contemplating going open with my OS. Though I have legitimate copy of XP, I was tired of all the malware and spyware, plus there was the costs involved in buying other software required for the same. So I made a check list of the things that I used on an everyday basis, heres the list

Internet Connection, Browsers , media players ( audio, video), Office , Eclipse, Resin, Adobe Photoshop and acrobat, messengers, skype. I had heard of ubuntu a lot and wanted to try it out – I had heard it was really good with the system hardware. I got Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn release.

Booted with the CD and the first attraction was awaiting me. The OS boots from the CD and gives u a choice between installing the OS or exploring it. This was really nice considering that you can get a glimpse of the OS without actually installing it. I chose to install and trust me linux installations are a pain considering you need to diskpart and stuff, but ubuntu gave a nifty little utility which selects the install drive by itself. Within 20 mins my basic installation was done and I was on. My first criteria for survival was an Internet Connection, coz without it , there is no point to Linux on your desktop. Gave it my network settings and I was on . Plus my settings from XP had been imported – the users, bookmarks, pictures, documents etc which is very nifty considering you have to run mount commands to make your windows drive visible. Ubuntu went on to auto mount my drives and showed it on my desktop…now how cool is that ?

Next in the agenda was to tick my checklist of things that I needed :

• Internet Connection :done
• Browsers: Firefox 2 was by default shipped – but I also installed Flock just in case.
• Media players (audio, video): Now this was the funny part. Almost all the times I wanted to go Open , I was forced to come back due to the different media types m4a, aac, avi, divx etc etc. Windows codecs were life savers. My last experience with three flavors of Linux namely Red Hat 8, Fedora Core 3 and Suse has proven to be painstaking experiences. So I fire up Totem Music player and try an MP3, it doesn’t play but wait, there is a message saying we can look for things that could help you play this and I click yes. The utility searches through the user maintained repositories and gives me three plugins to install, I do so in like 20 seconds and what do you know all my songs and videos play. Hooray – one of the most important hurdles passed.
• Office: Open Office 2.2 packaged with Ubuntu comes with spreadsheets, presentations and also database (access). There is also Evolution mail client to substitute your outlook or you can use Thunderbird from mozilla.
• Eclipse : download the linux distros from here 
•  Resin /Tomcat – MySql – all have linux origins so that shouldnt be a problem
•  Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat : the Adobe pdf reader comes packaged  and for photoshop functionalities you have Gimp the Gnome equivalent, again packaged with ubuntu
• Messengers : now there is the packaged Gaim which can connect to almost all known messenger servers including MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk through Jabber, ICQ etc. Even if you dont have this then you can use pidgin client which essentially does the same.
• Skype : download the debian installer from here. 

So what more do you want. Go open and get Ubuntu. If you need my copy of Ubuntu then be sure to contact me.