Saturday, April 30, 2005
SCTCE Alumni is built on a forked Wordpress 1.5 code-base, with a hacked register page, profile page, and with insinuating site-graphics replaced.
For Loyolites reading this, it is also a small-tryout of the features I’ve planned for the LOBAglobal site, now really outdated.
Loyolites, SCT-ians, everybody, please leave your comments/suggestions below. And watch that site for updates.
Tags: design • me outside • web
Sunday, April 24, 2005
The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster. The blog of Darth Vader.
Tags: chaff
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Best College Resumes, if you’re writing one, this could be a serious help.Tags: chaff
Thursday, April 21, 2005
For those of you using Firefox, this could be a nice feature to know about.
Right click on any search box (on say Google, or Answers) and you’ll have a context menu option called “Add a Keyword for this Search…”
Click on it, and you’ll be presented with the Add Bookmarks dialog-box. Make sure to fill in the keyword text box - make it something distinctive and easy to remember (like dict for a dictionary) and save the bookmark to the folder conveniently provided by Firefox (called Quick Searches).
Now you can type in “<keyword> search term” on your Firefox address-bar and it’ll jump directly to your search result. Enjoy 
I’ve bookmarked Answers.com this way (to a keyword ‘a’). The advantages of this are pretty obvious; I want a sure-fire answer to anything, I just type in “a <topic>” in the address-bar and zoom… I’m informed 
Tags: software
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Creating a shell extension with C#: using COM elements in C#, and some words on backwards compatibility.Tags: development
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Friendship isn’t a big thing; It is a million of little things
That isn’t my quote exactly, Wikiquote helped, but I wish it were mine. It condenses everything I have to say about the topic in one line. About problems in friendship, I have to say a bit more.
I have always been a person who has gotten along pretty well with everybody, and as a corollary, I’ve never had strong connections with many people. I’m a decided introvert, and I have few pretty close friends. But at the same time, I’m quite “friendly” to a lot of people - a lot. And I’ve been irritated at a lot of people, but I don’t think I’ve hated anybody. And yeah, I’m almost always willing to give way if it makes things better, mostly because I don’t really care about most of the people I talk to… I care more about living a life unimpeded.
In unflattering terms, I don’t have a backbone. I don’t stand up for my issues. I don’t try to get to know people. Neither do I care about most of the people’s views. I don’t consciously or unconsciously think about my friends a lot - even a lot of my close friends, and I do a lot of stupid things which have hurt a lot of people.
I’m lucky though that I’ve had some good friends who have taught me the secret of a continuing friendship, and it’s pretty simple. Don’t judge. Don’t even try. Don’t try to find reasons, don’t make a fuss. People make mistakes, even your closest dearest friends. Making them admit it is not going to solve stuff, just forgive. And forget. I believe there is something in every friend I have that I like and respect above anything stupid or silly or even vicious that they might do. I know, because I’ve consciously been all of these things, and still been forgiven for it.
And lately, I’ve been sincerely glad I am like this.
Tags: musings
Saturday, April 16, 2005
XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheatsheet. Good!Tags: development • web
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Ganguly appeals a ban, would’ve made more sense if he could actually play the game. =)Tags: chaff
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Creative Archive Licence Group by the BBC seems like an excellent idea.Tags: chaff
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
A word about the spanky new date boxes on the left… they are floated left, and created using semantic markup and valid style :-). Insert this into any Wordpress blog, and you have the barebones structure of my date box:
<?php
$date = the_date("d:m:y:Y", "", "", FALSE);
if($date) {
list($day, $month, $year, $yearlong) = split(":", $date);
?>
<div class="date">
<span class="day">
<a href="/log/<?php print $yearlong ?>/<?php print $month ?>/<?php print $day ?>/" title="Click here to view all posts on this day.">
<?php print $day; ?>
</a>
</span>
<span class="month">
<a href="/log/<?php print $yearlong ?>/<?php print $month ?>/" title="Click here to view all posts of this month."><?php print $month ?></a>/<a href="/log/<?php print $yearlong ?>/" title="Click here to view all posts of this year."><?php print $year ?></a>
</span>
</div>
<?php
}
?>
And of course, the style rules:
.date {
display: block;
margin: 5px;
padding: 2px;
float: left;
border: 1px solid #444;
background-color: #111;
color: #eee;
text-align: center;
}
.date span.day {
font-family: trebuchet ms, tahoma, sans-serif;
font-size: 2.2em;
display: block;
}
.date a {
font-weight: normal;
text-decoration: none;
color: #eee;
}
.date a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
}
.date span.month {
font-size: 0.9em;
font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
display: block;
}
Now a few words about its features: it only appears “once per day” so the page won’t be cluttered up with date boxes. Then too, the day, the month and the year are clickable so you can directly navigate to their pages. There are still a few issues remaining regarding the style when a day has too few posts, and it also seems to mess up a few of my pages, so it needs a bit of work. But imho, it spruces up the visual appeal and the usability of the site a good bit
Tags: development • vysnu.com • web
Saturday, April 9, 2005
For an XHTML page to be valid, it should of course, validate. (Funny sentence! <g>)
An oft-forgotten rule though is that XHTML documents are XML documents, and because of that, they must be served using the mime-type application/xhtml+xml. Internet Explorer predictably, chokes on this, therefore, you need some selective magic to accomplish this. If you’ve got PHP on your webserver, the following script will do the deed:
/*Send application/xhtml+xml to compliant browsers, text/html to others*/
if ( stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"],"application/xhtml+xml") ) {
header("Content-type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8");
print "< "."?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?".">";
}
else {
header("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
}
Tags: development • web
Friday, April 8, 2005
Cluetrain has been the central factor I use to judge businesses for some time now, and it surprised me today that the only reference that I found to it in this blog is a rather shallow one when I mention ASmallOrange. Time to rectify that
The essence behind Cluetrain that I like is that it urges companies (even, or particularly big corporates) to be more personal in the way they deal with their customers. Instead of presenting an unapprochable corporate front to their lowest-tier customers, companies are urged to open up their doors and facilitate an honest employee-customer relationship - in some cases, friendship. This is the idea that business, at the very bottom, are fundamentally human, and therefore it requires a human touch for it to be the most successful.
I first heard about the Cluetrain manifesto when I heard it being refered in connection with Fastmail (whose email id I still use), but I should’ve recognized signs of its proliferation even earlier. Perhaps the most famous (and over-used) example is Google and it’s do-no-evil mantra, and it still remains the most successful psuedo-example. The Cluetrain manifesto though makes the most sense if you are a startup. Take the earlier case of Fastmail, or even ASO which has seen an explosive growth simply because of its word-of-mouth advertising. Head over to their forums to see why this is justified.
The entire text of the Cluetrain manifesto book can be read online, and I urge people even remotely interested in marketing to give it a glance. Even the chapter names are illuminating.