Then I read about upcoming getting a better interface – a random search on Bangalore and lo, tons of results on upcoming events. I really like the variety of events that are listed. I am not sure about the community that upcoming has in Bangalore or its popularity but looking at the events listed there, I think they are doing pretty well. Also if any of you are looking for public events in Bangalore, this is the place to look. Please do comment with other sites that list public events in Bangalore. Meanwhile

 http://upcoming.yahoo.com

and here is the link to the events in Bangalore.
   
 http://upcoming.yahoo.com/search/?type=events&rt=1&q=&loc=bangalore

Tags: Bangalore, events, public events, upcoming, yahoo

   I was lucky enough to snag cool mail id is ritesh @ you know the rest

I can integrate gmail or yahoo mail and send pages, links, images are email to people with just a single right click button. The web clipboard which is also a godsend is wonderful when you are puling images, links and other paraphernalia from the net for your blog. For me the flock experience is perfect as it takes browsing to a whole new level. For all firefox users, try flock, you wont be dissapointed.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

http://in.search.yahoo.com

try these example searches

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A8pWBjyekyJIoDUA2Qy6HAx.?p=shaurya&ei=UTF-8&iscqry=&fr=sfp&rd=r1

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?p=Mysore&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?p=IPL&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1

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.

A recent trip to the Yahoo Developer network portal also showed some glaringly visible tributes to the field of performance. First , there is YSlow, a plugin which works along with firebug and tells you why a website is slow based on certain pre defined parameters. How about an entire section of a site dedicated to performance. Blogs, presentations, talks, podcasts, videos on performance and its related fields. Do you want to know the thirteen rules to speed up your website, then do read this. You are likely to find one of the reasons in this showing up in YSlow.

Also feel free to join the exceptional performance group to discuss more on high performance websites.

People are moving to more open source technologies and are beginning to discard enterprise software. Take for example a migration in my company, people moved from Weblogic to Tomcat, Oracle to MySql and other host of open source technologies. Problem – open source software isn’t usually made with a lot of scalability in mind, unlike enterprise software that is meant to be scaled. So , when this bunch of non scalable software sits on an enterprise bus, you need performance to match if not better the enterprise counterpart. This is where performance tuning comes into play and as more and more open source finds ground in the enterprise, more such challenges with regards to performance have to be addressed.

Comet is essentially an design principle which aims at achieving true push technology using http. Comet is not a technology in itself,  cometd is an implementation effort to make such a paradigm possible, but comet itself isnt a technology. For real time systems and other applications like stock tickers you don’t need an entire page refresh, its enough if you can get the updated values in your respective places. Ajax seemed to be the answer for sometime with browsers asynchronously requesting for changes and then updating the same in DOM. The problem with  Ajax was the polling, since the job was asynchronous, there was a interative pattern of asynchronous requests and replies. Even though there wasn’t any change in the server values, the client would request repeatedly to check if the values changed, which led to the server being overloaded. The solution was to push the updates to a client without the client requesting for it. Sorta like the good old days of socket programming.

There are many solutions to this problem, each one with its own set of advantages and disadvantages but I shall explain a single implementation that I worked on. Its called the Long Looping method.

 Long Looping Method :

This method involves making a request to the server which in itself will reply only when there was a change. Your browser will keep showing you the loading icon coz the server hasn’t replied as yet. The server end can achieve the desired result by either suspending a request to a thread that will wait till notified or a putting the request through an infinite loop. Once there is a change of state on the server the loop ends and the reply sent. The client receives the reply and immediately sends another request for further changes and so on.

In this way you can see that, there is always a low latency http connection between the client browser and the server. The delay in state changes to the server is very low and will definitely be ten orders better than the regular ajax looping method.

There are innumerable number of apps that are being created on the facebook platform. Existing applications like wordpress are taking heed and porting their apps into the platform. Some of the initial apps have been taken over and VC’s are announcing seed fund for apps built on the facebook platform. Its like everyone wants a part of the 26 Million uniques visiting the site and want to cash in on the phenomenon. So what did facebook do right ?

As I had written earlier in my barcamp post, it makes more sense for applications to be launched as a part of a larger community rather than brave the web alone. Social networks have proved time and again to be good source for informing people or attracting traffic to your site, essentially great place for marketing. Facebooks plans of monetizing the network had to make the site open to public , which they did by opening up to public signups. The next step was to innovate inside the network. Knowing very well that cramming features into facebook will not result in anything but chaos, facebook needed a serious shake up in terms of the features offered to the users. Rather than putting in the effort themselves, they put efforts into making a platform that allowed for people to build apps on top of the facebook community. This ensured a plentitude of apps and also increased pageviews because of these apps. Its a killer strategy.

The popularity of the platform speaks for itself with tons of apps being built on facebook and the increase in activity on the network. Does this mean we will see more social sites opening up to inorganic growth ? There’s no doubt sites like myspace and digg bring in large number of uniques to their site, but will they provide a way for external sites to tap into the community, if it guarantees them more pageviews and more uniques. This has an implication of spinning off into a business of its own in which you sell a community to a service provider. I call it community as a service.  Or will they risk deterioration in quality and increase of spam due opening up of their services and continue to stay organic. Its pretty obvious that the wealth of resources the platform got facebook was plenty but it was facebooks inherent security and privacy features that made sure that there was minimal exploitation.

Do you think your app can provide Community as a service ?

I had written about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and how it used the power of collaboration combined with automated project management to get arduous work done from people. Taking and extending on the same paradigm are newer applications that try and achieve some good from these collaborative applications. Its like the Seti project which uses your computational resource when idle, these applications use the power of human intelligence to contribute to a greater cause.

Take GalaxyZoo for example.  A project from Oxford, the site aims at using the power of collective human intelligence to aid in pattern recognition. Users are given images of spirals and ellipses to recognise and defragment. The images in essence are images from deep space and the project aims at mapping a virtual universe using GalaxyZoo.

Similarly you have clickWorkers from NASA, a project that aims at identifying craters on Mars. Another useful outcome from these breed of apps is the ability to help in digitizing scanned text or old books. Distributed Proofreaders and ReCaptcha both provide simple to read captchas that form parts of old books that were garbled up by OCR’s while being digitized. Users help in recognizing these garbled , machine unreadable  text in the form of captcha’s and the user input is then given back to the system.

Another interesting collaborative app is the Google Image Labeler. This attempts to solve a problem of tagging images , a usually boring task is made interesting by allowing users to pair up and brainstorm over words that they can come up with for images. Points are given as an added bonus and to keep the game interesting.

There are many other projects that are currently incubating in research labs which are toying with concepts that use this form of collective human intelligence. The challenge will be to streamline these apps into everyday applications and make them more inherent and not be looked at as an overhead. Take for example digg, they ask for captcha auths on submitting a new story. Rather than projects like recaptcha, why not have these captcha’s fit into sites like digg .  That way, the the number of captcha’s served up and translated will be more and will seem more useful to do.

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!!

Ten years back you couldn’t imagine IM in enterprise software;today most of the enterprise vendors supply their own chat service for support and maintenance. The recent acquisition of Tribe.net by Cisco and the more recent IBM including a social network in the recently revamped Lotus suite are just indicators of how big this phenomenon is. The general know how is somehow concocted to a statement “regular productivity apps like email will be ditched“, is not all there is to enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 will see penetration of tools like blogs, RSS, wikis , Instant messaging and collaboration, which can be defined as the aorta of web2.0 enter enterprise space. The benefits are tremendous in terms of productivity. A social network as a base for all applications makes the software more friendly , collaborative and builds better communication capabilities.  Instant messaging can replace those single sentence emails, wikis can replace knowledge bases. Community portals can represent newletters and bulletin boards. Discussion forums can help solve and analyse problems better. Mindmaps makes brainstorming more productive. RSS and its enterprise filtering can make information management and overload a little less cumbersome to deal with ( see newsgator and Knownow ).

Take Basecamp for example, it encompasses a true project management tool with 2.0 capabilities. Updates through RSS. Blog like memos, easy to use resource and task management interface all this with a very social feel to it. If you look at Zoho and their productivity 2.0 suite, its got everything that any business needs. Online Office automation, wiki tools, mail and chat , their newly released meetings and project all are excellent examples of how 2.0 can be introduced into everyday enterprise applications and not compromise on quality.

The race is on and more and more enterprises will compete to cover as many 2.0 technologies as possible. Not all of them will prove useful but they will be an asset anyway , if not that at least for the sake of competition, the 2.0 radar will be covered. If you are an  enterprise customer and is jittery about trying 2.0 , don’t fret, it may be too late when you do. You wouldn’t something as unimportant as new technology let your competitor get the better of you .

– Information : People come to your blog for information. Its very depressing if you cannot find what you came looking for. Its also more likely that if they do find what they were looking for, they will stay a little longer on your blog and may even acknowledge your effort with a nice comment. So what should you do ? make sure your content is well placed and is of good typographical quality. Avoid typewriter like fonts, they are old school. Use more rounded fonts that don’t need any anti aliasing. The position of the content is also extremely important. The content must always occupy the majority of the real estate on your blog.

– Load time : Its easy to get carried away with themes that are very glossy looking and also have dynamic refreshes and complex javascript. People!! readers don’t come to your blog for your template, they come there for the information. If I have to wait for 20 seconds to get 4 lines of information , which comes enveloped in about half an MB of images and javascript, then I will be might pissed. Take a subtle theme that is posh to look at and uses as less images as possible. The other problem is that the image based themes look extremely bad if the images don’t load; most of bloggers themes have this problem that none of the images load and you are left with a very ugly looking page which does zilch to visual appeal. Selecting CSS based layouts ensures that page degrades gracefully even if your images give way.

– Delivery : yes this is extremely crucial,which is why I went for a revamp. All things said, I come to your blog for content, so make sure I see it first, the widgets and other sidebar junk can come later. Its easy to get carried away with all the widget goodies available now for blogs, with those flash based embeds and scripts. But these only add to the overhead of your blogs load time. My previous theme had all the widgets on the left and the content on the right, as a result, only after all my content was loaded, my content would appear. A typical reader would have to wait for over half a minute to get a glimpse of what he actually came to read, that too, considering he had a good broadband connection. There were dependencies too- if one of those widgets were to fail , then your content would never load, which is bad. Always make sure your content is the first to load. A simple way to ensure this would be to keep the widgets and other junk on the right hand side of the content, when pages get rendered left to right, the content will appear first.

– Credentials : People like to know the credentials of a blogger while reading. I definitely would trust techcrunch against TechNayak, so its that essential to establish your blogs credentials. Solutions include a map of all your readers, mybloglog widget, stats from your blog and also brief abstract of your blog and you. Most of the times, a future employer will be reading your blog, make sure you get his/her attention. A simple description about you and your blog should just about do the trick.

– More reading material : If people like your writing and want to read more, give them some more material to read. In addition to your article that is already being read, make sure there are some click able links that point to more of your work. Internal links in your post could be a good starting point. Even better would be a related posts section that many blog providers offer, its more likely that people will be interested in reading more about the current subject.

– Feeds and syndication : feeds are growing in popularity and people are busy bookmarking and burning your feeds into their online world. Exemplify your feed URL, make it easy to access and use. There are some themes that don’t even provide RSS urls in the main page, don’t use them. Always make your feed url stand out in the clutter.

– Customize if you can : No theme is perfect , there is always something or the other that will be missing. It could be something as simple as the way your theme addresses people, instead of saying ” Leave a comment ” you may want to say ” Say a word or two ” . Make these customizations where necessary.

In the midst of all this don’t forget to have fun and blogroll. There is nothing sweeter than sharing link love.

For non webmasters : try coRank and its recently released make your own digg site. You just sign up and can create an exact clone of digg, suited to your categories or your interests. You could probably start a digg for music review, movie review, latest news articles or even software hacks. Whatever the  category , you can have your digg up and running in no time.

For webmasters : Try pligg, its a deploy ready framework that can be deployed on your apache and mysql. Its essentially the same, but you take care of the hosting and the space. Its a cinch.

So you diggin yet ?

Its not so bad in the real world. There are techniques being thought of to reduce the memory footprint of these mamoth js bootstraps. First step would definitely be to use the right library , if you use dojo make sure you use the right flavor of dojo like dojo for ajax or dojo for UI etc. There is no point in having functions bloating if they arent used at all. Next step would be use some brains and filter out unwanted functions in your bootstrap files. Its not that hard I guess, get your self Venkman or the recent firebug and you can be on and reducing in no time.

Now for the real deal:

1. use Dojo Shrink safe to reduce, compress and pack all your js files together. Most of the times your file reduces by almost a third using this. This utility doesnt obfuscate so you can call the same methods and not worry about changing function names.

2. Use Dean Edwards packer to further reduce the size by removing linebreaks and other unwanted characters. This usually reduces the file by another 20%

But make sure you always have a backup of the files. As most of these things are unreversible. These are just performance optimizers, they dont help your programming.

In the worst case, if you still a Kb or two short of your SLA then go ahead and obfuscate your code. Packer does a little bit but there are some really neat ones out there that can do a wonderful job. whats the advantage you ask ? a function OnWindowFocusAndDoubleClick() will get replaced by say g() , now thats improvement.

I found this utility which does reduction, try it out :  jsjuicer 

Link: PlayMyGame

Text makes the web. Those characters that are 1s and 0s in their stripped down version form the basis of what we call information. Right from websites to search, feeds to news, wikis to chat they are all text. Its unquestionable that people consume a lot of text on an everyday basis and a simple look at your bandwidth bills will show you just how much. Why am I ranting on about these things ? Well, it so happens that the textual information that we consume actually help in realizing a very big dream, the dream of personalization.

Personalization, the word is one of the hardest to define and yet very simple to perceive. Its the need of the hour, no matter where you go, there are people craving personalization. As developers, our view of personalization is very limited. We tend to be more involved in the visual aspect of things like the color, the theme or at best the layout. These are akin to having balloons and glow bugs on your workplace , nothing more than visual appeal. What we must strive is the personalization of information and not its presentation.

Thats really hard : no it isnt. Take a look at my RSS reader and you will be able to judge what kind of information I am interested in. Why restrict it to only blogs. Take a look at my mails, my socionet profile, my friends data , my search results. All these have some details of the data that I consume everyday.

Why do we need that : Its a time saver, in terms of finding the information that I need. My search results can be more inclined towards the information that I am interested in. My social network can show me more like minded people rather than an arbitrary selection. Why even the ads can be targeted more towards things that I buy. I find the biggest ROI in terms of advertising. Let me explain with an example: Supposing i bought an Ipod , I download the itunes software, read abotu the instruction manual, next search for some popular tricks, themes, games etc. Now supposing I were to go to ebay and click a button “Show me things to buy” , based on my previous surfing trends its not hard to predict that I would want but accessories and other iPod related stuff. Now isn’t that what personalization should be about.

How do we do it: Its not practical to expect a Google or a Yahoo to do all the personalization, of course Google is taking serious strides towards personalization in its truest sense. The system has to be decentralized, it should be ip based, even if multiple users use a system, there is more likely a chance that their geographical location has a pivotal role to play in their surfing habits( take a hostel for example, more often that not you find people with similar necessities on the web) I think an OpenId like implementation of a personalization filter would definitely help a lot. You have distributed servers that keep relaying information about a certain persons information consumption habits and then when you ascertain certain patterns, you writeback to the server the pattern. Upon querying or any other action, you get a collated version of your pattern and then make decisions based on your content vs the required content. Aint it a cinch ?

Truly 2.0 has been about You but 3.0 will be about me….. everything me.

Click here to view the slideshow.

If you really want to use these libraries, then I suggest Dojo and YUI, both are well documented and have really cool features. You can find the Dojo Documentation here and YUI docs here.

  The video handling capabilities of SilverLight are impressive. During MIX, there were several demos showing multiple video streams being shown in one application, many of which were in motion and had various types of masks. The demos looked great at MIX, but what surprised me most is that they looked just as good on my 3 year old desktop at home and the applications were surprisingly easy to build. This is one area where SilverLight is definitely going to be the top dog.

The other great feature about SilverLight is the CLR integration. The in-browser CLR extension allows access to almost the entire .NET framework, from a client side app. It also uses XAML, the same presentation markup as WPF for the desktop. It’s nice because Microsoft isn’t trying to force developers into a new language. It’s also nice because it makes for a much more robust development experience than working with AJAX or even Flash.

 Ian Muir – SitePoint Blogs

My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight. There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers and it is up against Flash which is deeply entrenched – but the barrier to delivering a new plugin to browsers is nowhere near as high as most users will trust Microsoft as the publisher of the plugin and will install it. I also expect that Silverlight will get distribution through Windows Update and Microsoft’s own applications (hotmail?).

Nik from TechCrunch

I’m glad we waited to write. Nik (a long-time developer) was most impressed by how small Silverlight is (4 MB) and how fast it is (it blows away native Javascript routines – without exaggeration, Ajax looks like a bicycle next to a Ferrari when compared to Silverlight).

The news today about Silverlight is significantly more thoughtful. Microsoft-hater Steve Gillmor gives it a thumbs up and says “the engineering behind this is stunning.” Robert Scoble, who’s angry at Microsoft for not giving him a free pass to the Mix event, says “Microsoft “rebooted the Web” yesterday.” The list goes on

Mike Arrington – TechCrunch

what more could I possibly say. Yes , I did write about Silverlight before MIX, thats something I guess.

The biggies themselves are toying with these start pages as they see it as a personalized version of their already popular portals like my.yahoo or the Infamous Google search page. The idea is that there are already millions flocking to these pages, why not make it more viral and add to it personalization and provide a dashboard so that people just don’t have to go to another website. Though it has worked well for homegrown services, I don’t really know how other services that bank for users , whose revenues depend on users visiting their sites and generating pageviews, will reach to such an offering.

Its just evolution I suppose that the concept is dying a premature death, primarily due to the growing popularity of desktop widgets, thanks to the efforts of mac, google desktop and of course , Windows Vista. But still discovery of these widgets will remain online and technologies like Apollo and Silverlight, are making this process of discovery and done more easier. Using Apollo technology, YourMinis , another flash based startpage service will allow for drag and drop of their web widgets onto the desktop. Now how about that, you like a widget on your start page and so you decide to give it some attention by dragging it to your desktop. The concept is more fact than fiction with a lot more services working to achieve the similar desktop-web experience.

I guess my job of ranting on start pages is done, here are some popular start pages to start of with. You can even read about some start page reviews here.

Some start pages to get you started