Ask your computer to help you in household chores

2
2 years ago
by Sai Prasad in

Does this title come as a surprise to you? But, yes ! computer can help you with some additional things too (apart from computing).

With a small program, you can make the cradle (baby rocker) of your baby swing, without your presence. Shocked? Well, do you recognize you PC has a CDROM and also a program can also open & close a CDROM drive? Continuous opening & closing of CDROM can help in your baby rocker’s harmonic motion.

Check this link for similar innovative ideas: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/linux_baby_rocker.html

Doing things the HTML way

0
2 years ago
by Sai Prasad in

Hi,

Some points that come into handy while developing in HTML:

  • Always use XHTML tags. meaning that, your HTML should be well-formed XML (closing  & ending tags should be present). Like, for example, use <br/> instead of <br>
  • Try to use XHTML 1.0 strict as much as possible. But, this mode doesn’t support target attribute on anchor (<a>) links. If you need to specify ‘target’ on links, they you should be using XHTML 1.0 transitional doctype.
  • Always specify the doctype of your HTML page. Also just run the validator test available at w3c.org to know where are deviating from the standards specified. And fix as much as possible to make it closer to standards.
  • IE doesn’t support *.ico [Icons] files as Images in tags. So, make sure that your images are NOT ico types.
  • Are you developing site in non-English language? Then, knowing about Dynamic Fonts is a must before implementation. Try to find more about it from Google ( I have no experience with them to tell you :-( )
  • A common bad practice among beginners: Uploading a large image to the server (like, 1024 * 768) & then set required image & height(200 * 150)  in HTML. This would cause unnecessary bandwidth waste which can be easily avoided by uploading the resized image of the desired dimensions.
  • You should learn about ‘Alternate Style-sheets’ if you wanna provide multiple themes to the webuser. Basic usage of this can be found at: http://javascript.about.com/library/blswitch.htm
  • One important, yet highly ignored practise, is providing a Print specific stylesheet for the page. This is possible by specifying media=”print” on the stylesheet link, like <link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”/css/print.css” media=”print” />. And, let all the unneccesary data be hidden in this css file (like, ads, navigational menu, header, search bar etc.). Keep the print to minimum.
  • It would also look good if we provide the end-user a ‘Print Preview’ from inside our page itself. This isn’t any magic, its similar to multi theming concept as said above.

Yes, I understand these are very basics, but don’t we know that Basics are the building blocks of any application?

Update: The Print Preview concept is borrowed from
http://www.alistapart.com/d/printtopreview/example.html.
Click on ‘Print this Page’ on the LHS of the page & see that page layout changes, giving the user the Print Preview Experience

GTalk: Display Images Cache

0
2 years ago
by Sai Prasad in

In my last article, I talked about the way of obtaining a user’s display image in Yahoo! Messenger & Google Talk, over the internet through http protocol (the browser way). In this case, it is the browser’s decision about the cache to be used for those images. But, the IM client Applications(googletalk.exe, YahooMessenger.exe) are stand-alone applications. And we do not expect them to fetch the display image on the fly over the wire from the internet, whenever the image is to be displayed. The most simple, obvious but yet powerful solution is  to maintain the cache of images on the disk.

Now, my point of this article is, what is this cache location of images, so that I can easily navigate over to there and pick a friend’s avatar from there..  :-) Well on Windows Systems, the display images cache directory for GTalk is:

C:\Documents and Settings\<windows username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\avatars

The images saved in there are PNG files with transparent background, so you can open them with basic image application [maybe, you need to change the application extension to .png]. Do you observe there are two images for each id  there ? One image is 32 x32 [ends with .online.avatar] and the other is 96 x 96 px image [ends with .original.avatar].

You can find much more information about GTalk at http://www.customizetalk.com. This site has some useful information all about the GTalk Themes Development, GTalk Bots Development and many other interesting [and not complicated at the same time] stuff.

Its fun as well as  interesting to find how simple a powerful application can be. Sticking to development basics :)

Update: Find some interesting Google Talk emoticons & their string equivalents here : http://tkhere.blogspot.com/2007/12/brand-new-google-chat-emoticons-no-one.html

Display Images in Instant Messengers

0
2 years ago
by Sai Prasad in

Have you ever felt while chatting that your friend’s display image is awesome ? If you ever felt so, the most obvious thing you’d try to do next is save the image [so that you can use it later on some purpose]. But, in general, the messengers do not support saving the display images [No, you can't just right-click on the menu & select Save]. Well, I just explored & experimented a bit with Google Talk & Yahoo! Messenger to check how to access the display images through an http url? So, here are my results:

  • Yahoo! Messenger: The display image of all the users are publicly available on the web. To access the avatar / display image of a user whose Y! Id is yid, then just navigate to:

    http://img.msg.yahoo.com/avatar.php?yids=yid

    Here comes a shock now !! All images are publicly available, meaning that everyone has permissions to save your image onto their disk.

  • Google Talk: I’m not really sure where the images get loaded from on GTalk, but on the GTalk plugin available on GMail, the images are loaded from: https://mail.google.com/mail/photos/username@gmail.com, where the username is the user’s Google username. On contrary to the Yahoo! Security Settings, these images are NOT publicly available. You cannot access the images of users who are not in your friends list. Also, this URL checks for your valid session, meaning that you need to be logged into GMail to access these images.

I was actually wondering if there is any tool which can list me all the data-transfers happening b/w my IMs & the host sites? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we know all the endpoints of an IM server, the message formats etc. [We can probably develop our custom messenger for that IM service, if we get to  know those details :) ]

Well, now girls [especially Indians, who are conservative] should give a thought before uploading their display image, if they do not want their pictures to fall into wrong / unwanted hands.

Now, its time to have fun by tricking your pals by their own display images as yours.. :D :D

New Domain

2
2 years ago
by Sai Prasad in

Hi!!

A post from me after a long time, and this time I’ve news to share. I bought a domain name for myself [not a great domain name, though :( ]. I found a place to host my site temporarily for a few months.. :)

As can obviously be seen, this is powered by wordpress. I’ve taken a bit time to import all my previous entries into this blog [from Blogger, Y! Blog]. In case, u need any help regarding the first step to migrate from blogger to wordpress, I’m happy to help you…

The main purpose to get a domain is: I do not want to lose touch with web development & i wouldn’t be laxy if its my OWN domain / site. Now that I’ve got a domain for myself, I’m planning to host a few small services on my site. Keep looking this blog once in a while. [I suggest to go for the RSS feed].

Looking forward to develop for my site.. :)

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