Hello there!

I am moving over to a place which I think is better… Obviously my blog goes along with me. Head over to http://jodhpuriguy.com for the latest updates and new content.

avi

Google published the initial documents about OpenSocial API yesterday. Wondering what it is? Well look here. OpenSocial has been referred to as (one of) the biggest competitions to Facebook. If you have used facebook, you would have heard of the thousands of applications that are available on facebook. These applications are not developed by FB but by other developers from other companies. The powerful platform and the user reach has been the biggest advantage of facebook. And it was looking like it is going to be difficult for anyone to reach their level anytime soon.

Then came the news about OpenSocial. The fact that more than 200 other web organizations(the participants include myspace, Hi5, flixter etc…) are taking part and going to actively support OpenSocial was interesting. It would lead to several changes in the field of “Social Networking”. One thing I see in near future is the facebook-isation of orkut. We have had the “Updates” feature available on orkut for quite some time. This “Wall” would provide a platform for app developers a medium for communication. You will soon be able to add applications to orkut the same way you do it in facebook.

Now this could very well lead to a direct consequence: Google competing with a lot of products from other companies. For example I saw the “Ask Friends” feature on orkut recently. Although it is not mentioned anywhere that it uses openSocial Api, I would not be surprised if it did use it. The reason why I mentioned it is that, with this feature, Google is directly taking on Yahoo Answers!(which is way ahead at least for now…). This and I believe many more things that are yet to come will probably change the perception of limits of Social Networking…

A Nice video… the music is good too… something to think about…

Although its been more then a month since I landed in Korea and about 20 days after I took off from there… The post about the trip has been missing for quite some time… Korean Trip for Microsoft Imagine Cup was a great learning experience and a lot of fun! Although the days there were limited and we had quite a lot of work to do… I did get time to take some pics and make many friends whom I will probably never forget. Here are some of those snaps… Oh btw I was carrying a brand new Sony CyberShot T20 or something. It was GOOD!

The Main Hall
Participants from 55 different countries were present here on the first day dinner

The Team!
From Left: me, dj and Vzu :)

We had the chance to be there in a nice weather.. It rained on few days and it was pleasant on others. Something like this:

The people there were friendly, helpful and really good looking. Here are a few kids…

The last one’s name is June!

There are many more images I wanted to post… but probably later…

Recently I was working on a blog design at daiictians.blogspot.com. We thought it might be good to have a three column layout for the blog… As we had to let lots of contributors post the posts, Using wordpress was not possible… We decided to use blogger because of its features and the backing which ensures more updates down the road.

So here’s a DIY blogger layout hack:

First of all, What we finally want:

Now to do this, you’ll need some HTML knowledge, Some css knowledge and Time! The rest has been done by blogger itself. Blogger provides a very robust templating system with a good UI for “users”. Their custom tags give you enough power to give the website a completely different look. Here goes our effort:

1. Firstly Select a simple template. We selected “Stretch Denim” from Darren Delaye for our site. It was really simple looking and we didn’t find anything better to suit our purposes.

2. Now comes the HTML part.

Note 1: The blogger tags are like any other html tags. But they have specific usage. A <b:section> . . . </b:section> tag lets you add sections to your site. The sections can then take form of an additional footer, a header and even a column.

Now you’ll add a section to the template of your site. The Edit HTML option can be found in the “Template” tab. Go to the page and search for b:section class=’sidebar’. The tags contained in this section form the side bar for your blog. Here you can manually write one more <b:section> … </b:section> tag just after of before the sidebar section. I Added it before the default sidebar.

3. Also copy or cut -paste one of the widgets from the original sidebar to this sidebar so that editing the gui becomes easier. Be sure that you give a different ID to the new sidebar section. It’ll be easier if you keep the classes same though.

Note 2: Did I mention that the <b:widget /> tags used to denote the widgets? Well yes they do…

4. The CSS part:
Now you need to copy the css correcponding to the sidebar ID and modify that to position your sidebar properly. I just copied the css and changed the positioning. I’m putting mine here:

#sidebar-wrapper {
margin-right:5px;
width: 180px;
float: right;
background-color: $mainBgColor;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
/***** I added this*****/
#sidebar-wrapper1 {
margin-right:2px;
width: 150px;
float: right;
background-color: $mainBgColor;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
/**** End******/

Be free to edit other css if you want.. I changed the width to suit my needs…

5. Now most of the work is done. Hit the preview button to have a look at the new layout!

6. Blogger will intelligently parse the template to change the UI on the customize page. You will see a UI similar to this after changes:

Have fun editing the new 3 column layout! and comment any questions you might have!

Mini Update Begin:

Last week was a really busy busy week for me. Had a report to submit for my SoC work to my mentor on the first day… Had loads of work to do… Joomla, Silverlight, Neural Networks, Peek-a-boo, Anisotropic Diffusion filtering ;), and what not.

Mini Update End;

I kinda like 7 sentence posts ;)

Now a few pics I took some time back in my college campus(DA-IICT):

(2)
The Monkey

And yes… I am still waiting for the dogs to give better pose and for proper lighting when the cats are there…