Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Yahoo Kickstart

A brand new service from yahoo, named Yahoo! Kickstart has been launched. I tried registering my college, and was quite surprised with a very intuitive approach it takes. It actually does not you to register you college up front , but it asks what's your college name and then returns the matching result. This actually reduces the chance of duplication a lot. Yahoo! Kickstart is following the same approach for every search within Kickstart. Very intuitive indeed.
The service is very much targeted towards professional networking keeping in mind the alumni network. I would recommend whoever still doesn't have active alumni network for their college should join Kickstart.



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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

MockupScreens

I found a very nice application to design mockup screens or wireframes.
MockupScreens helps you to sketch screen mockups of your application and organize them in scenarios. With MockupScreens you can experiment interactively with your clients, and quickly visualize scenarios of your application, even before the coding has started.
Seems to be very good application seeing at the feature list. Yes Visio is the best bet, but tats expensive ...and Gliffy is reasonably good, but it's web based, which not always the best solution.

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Sunday, October 28, 2007

Expense Tracker

There are quite a few Expense Tracker solutions on internet. Expensr , Mint are among popular expense trackers. They are really good, but was overkill for my requirement. So I decided to go for a Excel sheet solution and I am using the sheet for past 3 months and am very satisfied. The main reason being it's fast on data entry part :)
I am sharing the document with you all, hopefully some of you also will find it useful.

Here is the Google Doc link to see a preview. And here is the Excel File.




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Firebug Tutorial - Part 1

Those who don’t know what firebug is, let me tell you, it’s a firefox extension. It can not run standalone; you need firefox installed in it. To know what firebug can do visit http://www.getfirebug.com/.

Now let’s come to the point. Here I am going to show you only how to debug HTML and CSS.
Let’s take a small HTML file to make the session easier.

<html>
<body>
<p>This is a text</p>
</body>
</html>

Now open this file in Firefox. Once the page is loaded, press F12, the Firebug console with open.
Other ways to open firebug are:

1. Tools > Firebug > Open Firebug
2. Click on the small green tick icon on the bottom-right corner of firefox.

If you are using firebug for the first time then once the firebug consol is open click on “Enable Firebug for local files”
After you click on “Enable Firebug for local files” you will see something like the image below.



Click on the small + sign beside <html> and and you will see the page tags being unfolded one by one.
Hover you mouse on <p>This is a text </p> and see how the page element being highlighted on the page, as shown in the image bellow



Now click on “This is a text” and notice that it becomes editable.
Change the text to “This is another text”. See how the text in the page also changes. This is one area where Firebug rocks. Real time editing, forget going back and forth to editor and browser, when you can edit directly on page. Only this is these are all temporary changes, and if you refresh the page all changes will be gone.




Now let’s add some HTML real time.
Right click on <body> and choose “Edit HTML …” from the popup menu. Once you are in the edit mode type

<p>another line</p>

after the first line. See the page changes real-time. After you add the line, click on Edit button beside “Inspect” button to exit the Edit mode.



That’s all for today, please let me know how is it going. The tutorial series will not be for advanced user, but novice. I will try to be clear and explanatory as much s possible. Please let me know which places you need more clarification or I need to improve.

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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Where is "make noise" button

Yesterday my mom asked me to put her phone to ringing mode, which has accidentally went to silence mode. I casually picked up the phone to finish the job ASAP. Well guess what I spend almost 20 minutes to figure out how to switch off the silence mode !!!

She has a Samsung N361 phone, pretty decent one. But somehow it went to silence mode, she herself is not aware of how. SO naturally as a tech savvy person, to rescue her form the problem I went to sound settings &gt; ringing volume ... well guess what , I could not enter there !!! I completely freaked out ... what the hell, I want to change my ringing volume and I am presented with a warning message ..." Please switch off the silent mode" come on, I want to do exactly that, and as a sensible guy I came to this place. After doodling pointlessly though the menu structure , I was completely exhausted. I even tried pressing here and there on the phone body to find out if there is any button or not :( but no success.

Suddenly I found a small vibrating mobile icon printed on top of "#" button. I pressed that and viola ...it worked. Now let me tell you I was not at all happy finding this easter egg. I cursed Samsung on top of my voice ... anyway. And also think of the situation this phone has Hindi characters printed on top of every button making it more difficult to identify those tiny icons. I don't personally think I am a dumb ass but this made me feel like I don't know anything about mobile phone ...duh!!!

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Thursday, February 08, 2007

Be passionate about your job first, not anything else!!!

You should not fall in love with your company or your product/ project or your co-worker as a matter of fact ... you WILL feel stressed. Fall in love with the work you do, be honest to it. You will never feel stressed out even if you work overtime. - thats what i believe.



Working whole night does not always mean that you are a very dedicated person ... working hard is not important, working smart is important, I think.

For example, if you write a code of 1000 line that does a job where as another person write another code that does the same job , in 200/300 line..who is smarter?

Similarly if I work 8 hours and deliver the same compared to the other person who stay at night and pretend to work, I would rather say the later person is harmful to the company. Even if you are bachelor, common there are many things in life except java, firefox, linux.



If you do your job properly it's definitely going to be good for its cause.



"I am doing this bcos corporate want me to do this" is pretty lame excuse.



"I am doing this bcos I know that this is going to beneficial" is what I think better, for you for your job. That shows the confidence in you, not arrogance.



My way is not SO CALLED SMART WAY ...it is smarter way what I believe. Love your job more , work quality will increase , love anything else more than your job, volume will increase ...but I am afraid not the quality. One should be more passionate about your work, before anything else.



And again if one is passionate about ones team, or company or product / project then what will happen when he/she change any one of these.

But if you are passionate about your job. believe me you might not be known as a guy who say "YES" to everything imposed and defined as a true team member, but yes definitely you are going to get acknowledged of one fact that this guy KNOW his job.





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Saturday, February 03, 2007

Don't pay your employee, invest on them

A very though provoking statement from Paul Graham

the company has some money, and they pay it to the employee in the hope that he'll make something worth more than they paid him. Well, there are other ways to arrange that relationship. Instead of paying the guy money as a salary, why not give it to him as investment?



Quite interesting, specially for product companies. Not sure how much this is applicable for Indian Service companies, but might be a modified version of this approach will work.



You can read the full article here.





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Friday, January 19, 2007

Microsoft Firefox 2007

I don't understand what does this mean. I am also not sure it's from microsoft or not :(

I was shocked whats written in the Fast Fun Tab. Can't believe Microsoft is marketing this way. Kinda wired to me.



But anyway I haven't downloaded the software, as I like FF's look and I don't even have IE 7 installed in my system, as I never use IE except testing webpage rendering.

If you are interested, please check it out at http://www.msfirefox.com/









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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

First Look at Adobe Photoshop CS3

Well, with no second thought I clearly shows Macromedia people are inside Adobe now. The user interface clearly reflects the tightness, ease of use and elegance of Macromedia Product line up. The floating pallets are too annoying to manage. Now they are elegantly docked. It will be very much help full to people who use single monitor. Not many people have the luxury to use dual monitor right !!!
Well the installation is smoother than ever before. And this time Photoshop comes with Host of other packages line new Bridge, Device Central, 70MB Fonts are few among others.

Installation looks very cute.



The first time PS3 launches, the first thing that will come to your mind is wow!!! it looks so organized. No floating palettes now, all docked nicely ... but a big change that will strike u instantly is single column toolbar. Well for me it's now a big issue, but I think few didn't like the change. But anyway you can always get back and it's only a click away.



There are host of new features, just switch your workspace to What's new in CS3 and PS will highlight all new menu items. One very interesting addition is Edit &gt; Preference &gt; Performance.



Need more workspace but don't want to hide all your palettes ??? CS3 is here to rescue. You can actually collapse the palettes to icons and the result is u get more workspace without moving the palettes out of sight. Pretty Cool :)



Well after all these if you don't like the new interface you can always get back to the legacy interface. And it's just a click away. Workspace &gt; Legacy and you are back to good old Photoshop User interface. But well it's almost the old but still it retains the new look a bit.



So ... I am eagerly waiting for the launch date and I think upgrade is highly recommended if you want a better product than it's predecessor.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Hellgate London : It's coming

So finally it's comming. the most anticipated game of year , undoubtedly Hellgate London from EA.
Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) and NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. today announced a summer 2007 worldwide ship window for the highly-anticipated online action RPG Hellgate: London
It's the first original PC Title from premier developer Flagship Studio.

We are all committed to making Hellgate: London absolutely the best game possible, said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. The anticipation surrounding the game is immense and we are looking forward to its launch being a truly worldwide event.

Hellgate: London combines the depth of role-playing games and the action of first-person shooter titles, while offering infinite playability with dynamically generated levels, items, enemies and events. The player creates a heroic character, completes quests, and battles through innumerable hordes of demons to advance through experience levels and branching skill paths. A robust, flexible skill and spell system, highly customizable appearances, and a massive variety of randomly generated equipment allow players to create their own unique hero.


Hmmm sounds interesting. Sure it is ... check out http://www.hellgatelondon.com/

Don't forget to take a look at the screenshots.


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Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Happy New Year 2007

Wishing all of you a happy and prosperous new year. Well for us(workers) it's a year with least number of working days and maximum Sunday's and Saturday's ... so ppl enjoy the least working year in your life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007 a year with a difference.





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