Archive for January, 2008

Dark chocolate. Old things revisited.

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

Hello there!

If you have seen earlier designs of my website, You would have noticed that I recently moved on to a blog format. Just before it, I had a simple but a milestone website which I would now refer to as Dark Chocolate. This website was special because of many reasons. Let me list some of the features here…

  • Leverage use of Javascript & AJAX while supporting older browsers through same interface. The website uses AJAX to load page contents and caches the contents so you will load any page just once! If for some reason, no javascript is not available, You are NOT redirected to some other webpage. Instead, you can just click on the same links to navigate to some other pages. For a normal user: If javascript is available, you get fast loads and cached contents and otherwise, you browse normally.
  • The Even if you use javascript, You get to copy past any link and get the same page in other browser. Let me explain it in a bit more detail… Normally, when a website uses javascript, the history gets broken and you cant get the same page if you copy and paste the link in a different window. In dark Chocolate, each of the page has a unique page url which enables the user to just use the link as it is…

 Screenshot

Have a look at it! and tell me how it was…

EDIT: The website used jQuery as the javascript library.

Have something to do? YouDo is for you:)

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

Recently I posted about many things I need to do this quarter. I wanted a simple ToDo manage all the things I had to do. Although there are loads of services out there, many of them were web based and hence no access when I am not connected. For those on desktop, Where is the syncability? And how do I modify the ones on desktop to do all the stuff I want to do? I thought I’d rather create one of my own :)… I had named it DoIt initially but then changed the name to YouDo today. Want to know more? Well… its coming pretty soon… Meanwhile here’s s screen shot.

screenshot

Muzik!

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

Muzik! Today, I got my new Sansa C250 Media player. And guess what?? I am really excited about it :D. The details follow:

This small sized media player can’t be compared with iPods and so wont do it… On its own, The C250 looks really small and fits the small pocket of my jeans. It looks goods and everyone who saw it, Liked it. The device has a simple interface but boasts many features. The sound quality is good, I guess I’d give it 3.5/5. The FM radio and the voice recording are features we dont really get to see in some players.Apart for that, You could add photos to the device which can be viewed from its colored(although very small) screen.C250 comes with a rechargeable(through ausb port ofcourse) battery that can be taken out when required. It also has a microSD slot which I dont think I’ll use as I guess 2GB is enough for a day I would probably be syncing it after that…

Running the player was easy… just plug it in and you got it working. I use windows media player to sync the songs but you could just copy paste the music in the music folder and it work:). Although I have not yet tested the battery life of the device, I guess it should be enough.

Now the bad parts: The screen is too small to do anything with the photos. The UI, though simple is pretty boring and bland. They could have done a lot better job of it. The earphones that came with it suck big time and are not at all comfortable.

Sansa C250

Are they living on same earth?

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

I know I am too much into technology… living in twitter, techcrunch and engadget, I keep forgetting that there is the other side of crowd there too… Ramnath pointed out these hilarious comments to me today. Head over there and read them!

[Reproduced below are the links to the comments...]

that wont work without THEFT of intellectual property
Vista is the Future
It wont happen
You are kidding arent you ?

A month later…

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

So its been almost a month since I posted here last. I thought I”ll do one today and probably more updates soon… I am taking quite a few interesting courses this quarter. The courses on Machine Learning & Next Generation Search Systems look specially interesting. I will formally look at many of the algorithms that I had used for Recog. In other news, today I heard about the Windows port of KDE. It does not support Vista yet and I am waiting eagerly to try and test it out :).