July 2006

It’s been almost 3 months now, since I started this blog and as of now including this post, there are about 65 posts. As the posts keep increasing, having an “Archives” section becomes a necessity. A nice user interface is a must for the Archives section to be more effective. A good interface will help the user in quickly finding the posts of his interest. The default way that Wordpress displays the archives is by categorizing the posts under each month of a year. One more dimension of categorization is added by the “Categories" concept. However both these methods are not useful in digging the posts of your interest. For e.g. A user searching for posts related to vista, might click on a category say “Windows” and this query might return a lot of posts NOT related to vista. So a keyword/tag driven archives definitely makes more sense. In Wordpress this can be easily accomplished by the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.

Yesterday I noticed that some of the RSS feeds were not working in my feed reader (Outlook 2007). I thought it was some problem with the client and I never took the pain of checking further. Today I realized that many ISP’s in India have blocked blog sites and this was the reason for the feeds also not working. Access to all the blogs hosted on Blogger and Typepad have been blocked. However blogs hosted on Wordpress seemed to be working fine !! Wonder why ? The reason for blocking seems to be due to the letter received from Ministry of Communications. This letter seems to be a result of the recent Mumbai train blast. It seems the guys behind the blast used blogs to exchange information. But I am not sure how this calls for a ban on all the blogs. Blog is definitely one way of exchanging information. But the same can be done via E-Mail too, now this doesn’t mean you call for a ban on E-Mails too !!

The Beta2 version of Windows Vista was released a few weeks back. I had quite an adventure installing the Vista on my notebook. Check this post for more on this !

One of the requirements for Vista installation is that it requires a NTFS primary partition. I was so enthusiastic that I formatted my XP partition (FAT32) and installed Vista. I did use Vista for quite some time, later I realized some of the important applications that I use were not working in Vista. Vista used to freeze frequently and I hated it when I had to forcefully shutdown the notebook. I badly wanted to go back to XP

One option I had was to go for dual

...

Grab hold of the Vista Wallpapers at this link http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephensilber/

I have been a big fan of ClearType fonts and it was one of the features that I liked very much in IE7 and Windows Vista. For those who have not read my post on IE7 Beta3, here is the excerpt of ClearType: ClearType is a software technology developed by Microsoft that improves the readability of text on existing LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays), such as laptop screens, Pocket PC screens and flat panel monitors. With ClearType font technology, the words on your computer screen look almost as sharp and clear as those printed on a piece of paper. ClearType works by accessing the individual vertical color stripe elements in every pixel of an LCD screen. Before ClearType, ...

One of the features I liked in Google Desktop was the Quick search. Using this, I could quickly invoke the programs in the Start Menu, other than searching the files in my computer. But there were other reasons for me not using Google Desktop in the first place. It didn’t work well in my office system. After I install Google Desktop, the Google Web search stops working. (Even after giving feedback, I have not got a response from Google) Even the desktop sidebar is bloated with a lot of plugins/gadgets (Yup, it can be configured, but If I wished to have a few needed plugins in the sidebar, it looks bloated) Anyway this post is not intended ...

If you guys missed the Zidane incident in yesterday's final match, watch these videos. Video 1 : Zidane headbutting Materazzi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1i_l0OeeMc Video 2: More about Materazzi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpG4AHlZrL4 Video 3: An old video of Italian training (Not sure how genuine this video is :), but it is supposed to be taken during the Euro 2004) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0do5xlE9C_A There is one group supporting Zidane for his actions and another which feels he should have handled it more calmly ! I definitely belong to the first group :-)

Google as of today is undoubtedly the best/fastest search engine. Its also a well known fact that for any search in Google very few people go beyond 2 pages of search results.

Even though each search result in Google includes a “keyword related” excerpt, the data is always not enough to decide whether to click on the link or not. As an example, when I searched for “Snooker Rules” in Google, the first search result looked something like this:

As you can see from the result, it’s really difficult to make a decision whether the page really does have information on snooker rules !

The portal Saarr.com intends to overcome this problem. Here is how

...

One problem that I always faced while posting articles was with embedding images. SnagIt did ease this a little bit, but I still had the problem with the sizing of the images. I had to accommodate the image within the width set by the theme . If the image size exceeds this width, I have to go for a minimized version of the same.

One solution is to make this “minimized” image a hyperlink to the bigger/actual image. The problem is that the user is moved away from the current page and he has to again press the “back” button to go back to the article.

Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar, is a simple, unobtrusive script which can be used to

...

Check out this link to test how fast you can type ! http://labs.jphantom.com/wpm/ Of course you might find a lot of free tools to test your typing speed/skills. But the one created by Joshua Rennet is simple in usage and gives a quick feedback on your typo skills . You have to click on a text area and you are presented with a random block of text which you should type (If there are any mistakes you should correct it immediately !). At the end you are prompted with a message box with your typing speed measured in WPM (Words Per Minute) and CPM (Characters Per Minute). And yes you also have the count of mistakes you made The only problem I ...