Praveenpn.com

Merry Christmas everyone!

This black box is for the people who can’t see the snow effect on my blog, courtesy ‘Let It Snow!‘ plugin by Aen Tan.

Happy Holidays, Have fun!

[tags]merry, christmas, snow, wordpress, plugin, new year[/tags]

You read it right, this blog post comes straight from my yahoo! mail account. I’m using the WordPress plugin from the applications section in my mail box. Setting up the blog to write this blog post was a 1 step process.

Step 1: Give the XML-RPC url of the blog along with user credentials. Done.

There are a bunch of other applications like Family Journal, Flickr, Flixter, Xoopit and more. I’m haven’t tried them out yet. I think the time has come where I can modify the mailbox to my needs by adding/writing new apps.

A review of Yahoo! Mail applications will follow soon

I got an email from Google last night which said that my email id was whitelisted for using friend connect.  Google friend connect is the approach google has taken for solving the social networking puzzle. It allows users to add gadgets(opensocial) to their sites/blogs. More about google friend connect here.

Setting up a site

Setting up friend connect on my blog was pretty simple. Added two files to my web server, filled up a couple of forms and done.

Adding gadgets

Right now there are only few gadgets available, gadgets are categorized into member gadgets(#2) and social gadgets(#5). The member gadget looks very similar to the MyBlogLog widget.

Anyone having a Google Id, Yahoo! Id, AIM Id or OpenID can connect with a site through the member gadget.

As of now I have added two gadgets(members & wall) to my blog. Not sure if they’re gonna stay here for a long time

Other than adding gadgets, there are more options like moderate posts, members & a very basic graph showing the user activity on the site, all these options are available for site admin only.
As of now friend connect looks very simple with less features and a handful of gadgets. The quality of gadgets will tell how much of an impact friend connect can make.

[tags]google, friend, connect, opensocial, beta, social, networking[/tags]

I am not going to use any one of those funky, blurry themes for my gmail account.

But why?
Most of the first 7-8 themes I tried out are either too dull or way to bright for my eyes. None of them do a great job at differentiating old & new messages from my inbox. Everything looks the same, what’s the use of all these themes which don’t highlight the difference between unread and read mails.

Anything weird?
Oh yes, but this has nothing to do with the new themes gmail has launched (I guess so).
I noticed that gmail loads eight 8×8 pixel images on the gmail home page. I don’t see those images being used anywhere. The other possible reason I can think of is tracking.
If tracking is all what gmail wants then why not use a 0.04KB (1×1 px) image instead of using a 0.14KB (8×8px) image.

Is gmail b0rked?
Yes it is! A blog post was pending on this one for a long time now.

Try adding a contact to your contacts list in the gmail standard view (with or without chat enabled).
Go to contact’s, click on ‘New Contact’ icon on top left & done.

Here’s the best part.
Now switch to  basic HTML mode (this mode get’s enabled when a uses is on a slow connection by default).
and now try adding a contact to your contacts list.
Go to contacts, and then what? where is the option to add a new contact.
It’s really funny to see that gmail doesn’t have the most basic feature of adding a contact in basic HTML view. FAIL.

Please leave a comment if you figure out a way (or when gmail fixes this) to add contacts in gmail from the basic HTML view.

Gmail get’s away with these small but important features by sticking a ‘BETA’ sticker on it’s logo every time.

[tags]google, mail, gmail, themes, b0rked[/tags]

Yahoo! search(along with Rhapsody) launched this very cool feature where in a user can listen to a full song without navigating away from the search results page. I remember seeing this player on YDN a couple of months ago.

Very cool UI and works on safari too

Click here to checkout the player. There is a limit of 25 songs/month.

I’ll miss you songza

Got back from my friends apartment after watching ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, my twitter stream is overflowing with tweets about Chrome – the browser unleashed by Google a couple of hours ago.
It’s got the oomph factor and the browser is cool (I’m running it on Win XP using Parallels) too.

Download chrome

If you’re looking out for the feature list, you might just go read it here.  I’ll try and list some of the things which didn’t work as expected(at least for me).

Corp URL?

I hit the known product issues URL just to check for any document issues. Bling bling, two redirects and boy there you go, I hit some google corp url.

Collect statistics

Collect statistics option is turned on by default, you might just wanna turn this option off for security reasons.

JavaScript console

The JavaScript console looks neat, but only to know that it doesn’t work as I thought it would. It worked only for the first time I launched chrome.</oops!>

Google gears

Chrome has built in support for gears.

Shortcuts

Enter about:memory in the address bar to see memory used by chrome and other open browsers (if any).
about: will give built information about chrome.

There is a javascript debugger, javascript console and a task manager in the developer section.
With all said, I must say ‘It’s Nice’.

Oh! and this whole new theme change and thingy happened last evening.

It’s been almost a year since I changed my profile pic on the web. Looking back in time reminds me of the days when I had no options to change my profile pic, simply because I didn’t have a pic on the computer. A scanned copy of my snap was the closest I could get to change my profile pic.

And now, with too many options, it gets difficult to decide which one to use. After a bit of digging, I found a picture which looks very similar to the default avatar on Yahoo! messenger for Mac.

[tags]profile, avatar, messenger, mac[/tags]

We finally have a date, its 17th June 2008. All you have to do is download firefox on that day and help firefox set a Guinness world record for most downloads of a software in 24 hours. 1,226,933 people from all over the world have pledged to download firefox on the download day. I see only 22, 045 pledges from India. On the fun side, Host a party or find one nearby and enjoy on the download day. As of now there are 537 parties and 3137 party goers.
Add-ons support in firefox 3 is getting better day by day, I hope to see all my favorite add-ons in FF3 by this month end.

Go ahead and fill up the pledge form to get reminders & results of the record attempt.

[tags]mozilla, firefox, download, firefox3 [/tags]

I’ve got more time than ever before to blog now, simple reason behind it being, I’ve got Internet connection at home in Bangalore. Its an Airtel unlimited 256 Kbps plan for Rs. 799. I’m happy with the speed (net) they offer as well as their service.
Unlike others, I had no hassles in getting the connection.
* Just called up the airtel customer care number (080-41112345, for Bangalore) and placed a request.
* Technician calls up next day morning & gives information about the documents I need to submit.
* I submit the document in the evening & paid Rs. 500 (Rs. 1000 were waived off, some corporate tie up).
* Voila! Next day morning the airtel guys come and setup the connection in a couple of hours.

I’m not yet started on the goof up I did last Friday. Ok, so here we go. I use thunderbird as my default client for e-mail & calendar. I saw one small x on the left side of the thunderbird (above the folder’s section) window. Click on the close button & Boom goes my folder structure.

I spent the next 2-3 hours figuring out how to get the folder structure back. Preferences pane, options menu, config menu, I tried every possible option to restore the folder structure. Tried knocking on #thunderbird , searched thunderbird knowledge base, queried every search engine, but all went in vain.
After about an hours struggle I made up my mind that I would do something on my own rather than searching for answers on the net.
I ended up creating a new thunderbird profile and then imported my calendar data & other add-ons. As the thunderbird punch line says, I reclaimed my inbox. Everything is working as before but still I have no clue about what went wrong that day.

Today morning I was running through the list of add-ons I’m using on thunderbird, and there goes the culprit. I use this add-on called ‘maximize message pane‘ and the close (x) button is an option provided by this add-on. I am using this add-on (and others) ever since I’m using thunderbird, so this feeling is always there that its a default close button provided by thunderbird.
These are the add-ons I use on thunderbird

• Lightning – Calendar extension
• Maximize Message Pane – Read messages in larger area
• Remove Duplicate Messages – The name says it all
• Import/Export message filters – very useful while migrating the mailbox

I have listed the firefox extensions I use in a previous post. Some recent additions to the list are Colorzilla, Unplug, User Agent Switcher and Tamper Data.

[tags]mozilla, thunderbird, close, button, goofup, add-ons, firefox[/tags]

The formal explanation of what this whole glue thing is about. Well, Glue is the latest offering in the the search field by Yahoo!.

In Glue, the search results page has a classic search results section and a lot of visual information collected from various sites (not just Yahoo! sites) over the web. The results page has got information flowing in from everywhere (I am not listing the various Y! services here), player biography from cricinfo, google blog search results, lastfm music tracks, youtube videos, job results from monster, gaming information from various sites, information from howstuffworks.com, wikipedia & the list goes on and on. The more you search the more you will discover. I think they are fetching relevant information form all sources, be it cricinfo or for that matter google. The information displayed in search results page is highly relevant irrespective of its source. The complex search queries wont have a glue page, but the most common queries will have one.

I was amazed to see the content on the glue page for call of duty 4, there was a nice description along with the quick facts of the game from wikipedia, some youtube videos(which play inline), images (which link to various gaming sites), latest news about the game from gaming sites & this one surprised me the most, a set of images which link directly to the product page (not the lame search results page) on ebay. WOW! this is simply amazing.

Search results: The Classic search results are displayed on the left side of the page & all the rich information is in the right side of the page. The ‘related pages’ link on the top nav gives links to glue pages which are related to the search query. A tab on top of the page allows easy switching between the classic search results page & glue page.

After having a look at all the rich content on the page I was curious to know the yslow grade of the page. It scored  98 (Grade A) for the results page, I expected something like a ‘B’ for a page with so many images. Looks like a lot of effort has been put in improving the performance of the page.

They have a provision wherein you can request to put your website on the glue page. I have already submitted mine.

If given a chance to rename this product, I would call this ‘Open Search’

[tags]yahoo!, india, search, glue, social [/tags]