Psychic thinking, technically of course

Just could not help linking to " Some women are like Internet Explorer... ". Here a guy working for Opera has given a comparision of various browsers to women. technorati tags: women , broswers

Tried adding a comment on a friend's livejournal blog, and it gave me an option of using an OpenId. Sounded interesting and i had to go and check what it is. Yup, as the title of this post suggests, OpenId is another Single-Sign-On . Checked technorati, and their OpenId's wiki and found that there are there single sign ons also. (Check LID and its wiki ). Sounds promising considering that they have used REST principle (ya, similar to my previous post). Further they are trying to get LID and OpenId to interoperate. (project named Yadis . Good feature about LID. If you do not want to trust them with your identity, etc.etc. u can go ahead and host it on your own server. technorati tags: LID , Openid , Yadis , Single-Sign-On , REST

Till now, i had no reason to shift to a different browser. I mean, what the hell, IE does work right? And most of the web administrators do keep in mind IE, considering the number of persons using IE. So why did i have to shift? No, that does not mean i support one browser and dont want to support others. The point i am trying to make is, IE works, and i get my job done. And now comes along flock .Of course, in Firefox, i had options of downloadng plugins or writing new plug ins for myself, but should it not be part of the package. Searching for plug ins would have been a downtime. Anyway flock looks like a good add in for me. Helps me create blog posts.(This blog post is being written using Flock). Looks are REALLY goood. Have to try out all the features, but till now i still doubt whether this is a beta (looks pretty stable to me, till now atleast). technorati tags: Flock , browser war

Firstly, no i am not dead (how surprising!!!). Was busy with work, and later was busy with how to get out from work. During the past few days, i am observing some changes. Changes over the net, changes in my attitude towards my official work, etc. etc. Forgive my not delving into the latter. Looks like indians seem to be getting majorly into blogging, and following up other blogs. Yes, i know it has been there since quite some time. But the indian blogger turnign the wheels of justice, etc. etc. is somethign which was unknown previously. Wel done, indian bloggers. And for those who dont know what i am talking about, perform a search for Gaurav Sabnis/Rashmi Bansal (these are just examples, the complete list would have required many more hours of my offically working time ;) ). Or do a search for "IIPM war"/"Manjunathan". But whatever happens dont ask me where to search, or which search engine to use. Speaking of search engines, have you heard of Riya ? or Releton ? ...

Blog power, do you believe in it? Summary: Gaurav Sabnis blogs a link to an article to a magazine called JamMag. The "concerned party" in the article issues a legal (?) notice on him via email. Threats issued to Gaurav's employer. Blogs protesting this starts off. Blogs insist to the right of speech And here i am, blogging it. If blogs do not have the right to free speech, what is democracy? In the end, it depends on the reader to decide for himself/herself as to what is right, and what is not? The posting on Gaurav's blog was not authoratitive. It was just his opinion, then why should he be asked to delete it? And why threaten? He just linked to the page. Does that mean i should not blog about any single technology, because it is detrimental to the growth of other technologies? So i have decided to join the fight for "Free speech to blogs". I am not sure why i have mentioned IIPM as the "concerned party" everywhere in this post. Guess it was to b...

Found a superb aggregator called Attensa . It's an MS Outlook attachement, and retrieves all my RSS feeds. Finally i dont need to go to blog lines any more. They referred to another site called Del.icio.us . This site is a primitive manner of storing you bookmarks online, tagging etc. Sounded interesting, need to play around lots more. As for Attensa. Serious suggestion... download it, if you have Outlook installed.

Been busy lately and so have not managed to post for quite long. But I just had to post this. This post is dedicated to all persons who dont know anything about the fight between MS and Google: Check out the links starting from: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5875433.html?tag=nl.e589 There are more links as you get thru the article. Be sure to read those too. And just as a side-note: Check out " Atlas ". These are client side and server side components, which easily (??) enable you to make Web calls. This is done by encapsulating AJAX. (please dont insult by telling me that you dont know what that is).

Been observing since past few days. Is Start copying google??? Or is it the other way. But anyway i am keeping accounts in both. If you don't know what i am talking about: Check, start.com/myweb http://www.google.com/ig . http://www.start.com/1/ (Remember to click the Show button if it is shown) http://www.google.com/searchhistory http://sandbox.msn.com/ http://labs.google.com/ http://www.start.com/2 ???? This list was prepared after excluding downloadables such as Desktop Search, toolbars etc. The last link i would like to point is www.broom.org/epic . And you will understand why i mentioned all this.

Suddenly struck me.....Are'nt single sign ons becoming popular? First it was Microsoft with their Passport. Now google suddenly seems to be moving towards it. If you dont know what i mean check their, personalized google , Search History , and Gmail . You can use the same gmail account on all three. Wonder when i will be able to associate my blog with gmail and orkut also. Anyway i became an MCP yesterday, in ASP.NET using C#. So i can officially charge more. HAHA. I know atleast one company whom it does not make any difference. Ya, that i work there.

Bloglines seemed to be showing me that there is some problem with my blog's atom feed

I was using Callback (AJAX) to retrieve a page i had developed . Lets start all over, I was using AJAX to retrieve a part of the contents of a web page. Cool, simple, it downloaded without a pain, then I innerHTMLed it to a span tag. Worked fine, successful, clapped my hands etc.etc. Clicked on the button which had seemed to appear out of nowhere. And then, it all fell apart. The feared exclamatory symbol appeared on the status bar.... And for the newbies, thats an indication of a JavaScript error in IE. Of course, as usual i was all curses at my IE window......Anyway to make a long story short (i AM quite sleepy u know). the scripts which i seemed to be innerHTMLing to the span tag are not executed. And what i mean is anything between the script tags which have been innerHTMLed to that span tag are not executed. Of course i can see a ray of hope in the distance. I mean the distance till tomorrow morning. And just for kicks, check out a hi-fundoo flash file titled EPIC 2004 . And for...

Think.... A web service (or maybe just a ASP page) renders and serves an XML generated based on the inputs passed to it. A web browser picks it up, uses XSLT to transform it into a lovely page. And what do you get, an application which does not waste too much time on the server. Do not speak, just think.....Does nt your mind do a full revolution??? Anyway my friend really sparked that idea, said he has seen it implemented somewhere. But it was scrapped, cos of the sheer volume. (i dont wonder what he is talking about). Just as an afterthought i do wonder how long will Gmail function. (wont it be complicated using XmlHTTPRequest all over your page).

Was browsing the net, and found some old link to BOFH. Not sure as to how many used to read PCQuest some time back when it used to come, but i remember reading them, with of course re-reads and re-re,etc...i can go on you know. Anyway, it's about a system operator who is bugged by no-brainers asking silly computer related queries, and this guy repling with wierd answers. I had never known the origin of this character, until i saw this . Anyway for those who have never read BOFH, here are two of them.

Me, victimized. And i had always assumed that i have no chances of remembering that place which everyone used to call "Engg. College". Guess i am human cos i had this sudden rememberance, of college. or to be more exact, the time in college. Hm, <day-dreaming> . The fun we had, the various ways in which i screwed up my life, etc. etc. And you know what, I would'nt mind going thru it all over again. (as long as the studying did not come into the picture). Anyway I used to assume that MIT was the only place where you can screw up your life. That was until yesterday. Friends (highly) recommended to me the book " Five point someone -- Chetan Bhagat ". Now I realize, you can screw up even in IIT. Yup, the book's good. I even remembered our lecturers. Wont get into detail, as i don't want to mention all the negatives that i thought about. But i do still remember them. I remember all the class mates who used to screw up their life by studying day in and d...

Remember the post " Wondering what happens inside those .NET classes? ", where i mentioned about "Reflector". Well, I found some really tooo goood add-ins for them :D. (I had not known about the add-in feature). Anyway check .NET Reflector Add-Ins , or check out the Add-ins workspace on gotdotnet . Guess even i should wirte an add-in. But to do what? Sounds like a question to be categorized under "Some questions in life are never unanswered".

Realization dawns...... Lots of Will power is required to shift away from Wills Power. I guess 75% of the presons who read this, will understand what i am talking about.:D

This XmlHttpRequest thingie (aka Ajax as pointed out by Rakesh), is getting INTO my blood. Can't help it, the features provided are really good. Gone are the days when we required to call form.submit(), everytime we needed to validate simple items, etc. etc. Whew, just thnking about the possibilities screws up my mind. Was checking out as to how others have used this object, and came up with this small list, Gareth's blog , the whole of Gmail , (something which i guess everybody does know about). Google Maps Google Suggest Seeing the list, makes me think, maybe i should shift to google :D Then i came across this site, which talks about Usability Guidelines for XmlHttpRequest . Wow, that's something new. Anyway checked it out and found that his examples and mis-examples are somethings really worth reading about. Further if you really dont know what i am speaking about, this site of apple's is a great explanation of the object and it's functionalities. I guess i bett...

Enough of idle minds' posts. Instead got down to the engines of coding and coded the "Top News Stories", available on the right :D, on the side bar. Initially on load of the page, i was planning to show all the current top stories, accessing it from other sites. But, IE seems to have some security restrictions on a web page accessing resources of other web sites. Ok, i think that's what it is. So it pops up some security message. So i have shifted over to using a textbox and a "Go" button. On the click of the "Go" all the news as per the xml feed in the text box will be displayed. Go ahead and try it, but remember to click "Yes" on the security warning. Anyway for the knowledgeable. On click of the "Go!!!" it uses XmlHttpRequest , retrieves the XML feed from the site mentioned in the text box and displays it in "user friendly" format.

Was bored with the looks of the blog. So changed my template. As usual, noticed that none of the templates provided by blogger suit my personality. Have decided to re-design and bring out a new template. Till then, this will do. Need to get in and do some coding too (have planned to add some RSS feed to catch hold of top techno news in the side bar).

Yeah, as usual, i was sitting idle. I was planning to be exact, planning on how to spend (or should i say ruin) the next few years of my life. That's when a friend came over and showed a site, http://www.broom.org/epic/ . An excellent sci-fi flash file, describing about what may (???) happen in the future. I have been pro-google for a long time, so I had to mention about this link. Is it possible? Will it work out? Will i be reading what my friend is reading? Who knows? Atleast gives me a new reason to survive till till 2014 (as if i wont otherwise :D).

Continuing with my previous post titled Client CallBack in ASP.NET 2.0 , I finally found, Dynamic HTML and XML: The XMLHttpRequest Object , a great article explaing everything about the XMLHttpRequest object and its applications.