Buying a domain name
Nov 24th
Buying a Domain name can be tricky. It took me lot of searching and a bit of luck to get this domain and I love it.
entrepreneur.com has this nice article to help find a new domain name. Its worth the read.
Video Chat in Gmail
Nov 14th
Google has just released the Video chat feature in Gmail. Full story here.
Now on we can chat with folks right from the gmail browser window.
This feature only works with the newer version of gmail and the supported versions are FF2.0+
IE 6.0+ Safari 3.0+ and Gogle Chrome.
This feature has made google talk obsolete. Will we be needing it any more.
To get started with Video Chat in Gmail you have to install a plugin.
This link is also provided at the top left in your gmail page
Once the plugin is downloaded and installed you can start video chating with friends by clicking on there names
Moving To WordPress
Nov 12th
After a long stint with blogger i have decided to move to the WordPress. Blogger is great for a starter but as we grow we see its limitations.
WordPress has more flexibility compared to blogger and being open source it has lots of plugins and templates available. Plus the support community is prety large which can help us resolve our day to day problems.
I have choosen BlueHost for hosting the blog. The blog is called Digital Derby.
I will be cross posting to this blog and the new blog for a while. And once the new blog is fully set up, I will leave this blog as is.
The best blog editing tool so far
Oct 24th
Just downloaded the new Windows Live Blog Writer. Am not a big Microsoft fan but this shows why Microsoft is so good when it comes to User Interface. The design is sleek and its loaded with features.
The one feature which really got me was the preview pane. I have been using lots of other Blog editing tools but none of them had this. The preview pane actually shows how the blog will look when its posted not just a simple mockup.
The other feature like inserting links, pictures, videos etc are common among all the blog editors. But windows takes it a step further by providing a plug-in framework. Using this framework developers can provide custom built insert options. Whole galary of plug-in have already been created and they are all pretty useful.
One Plug-in which I have been looking was the Code formatter, And here it is in all its glory.
1: class MyClass {
2: public static main(String[] args) {
3: System.out.println("Hello world");
4: }
5: }
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }UPDATE : Looks like my blogger theam doesn’t like the code generated by the code formatter plugin. It looked nice in Windows Blog writer.
Looking forward to more useful plugins which can enrich the blogging experience. I remember the days when I used to edit the blogs on blogger website. 
. It was one of the biggest turn off during my initial blogging days.
And here is the screen shot of the preview pane.
Comments not working in iTheam Blogger Template
Oct 23rd
Looks like blogger has released a new feature, where in users can comment on a blog from the same page. They will not be redirected to a separate blogger style page. Full story here.
This is really a great feature. This will make the user experience uniform across the whole blog. The comments section can now gel with the post.
I had actually searched a lot for a blogger templates which has this feature. This feature is readily available in all the WordPress templates.
Unfortunately this has broken the Commenting feature in the iTheam blogger template I use .
To fix the issue I had to change “Comment Form Placement” setting to “Pop-up Window” which enables the old style commenting.
Blogger Dashboard -> {Blog Name} -> Settings -> comments -> Comment Form Placement.
Will try / search for a better fix till then “Old is Gold”.
How to create a Windows Service.
Oct 22nd
While working on one of my projects .. I wanted to run background thread in windows. Its pretty simple in linux/unix kind of env.. just append “&” to the command.
To do the same thing in windows.. i had to use a windows service. The article has detailed steps to do the job.
I was testing the example provided in the article. The try to start Notepad as a service. When i started the service i was expecting to see the notepad window. But nothing like that happened. Not sure why.
To test it I created a simple php script which writes to a file.
<?php
$filename = “c:\\temp1.txt”;
$fh = fopen($filename, ‘w’) or die(” Fatal ERROR can’t open file”);
while(true) {
fwrite($fh,”hi \n”);
sleep(100);
}
fclose($fh);
?>
And in the “Application” key of the registery provided the following command
php test.php
Now when I started the command saw the logs in c:\temp.txt file.
Using Gdata apis in Appengine
Oct 11th
I started digging into Googles appengine recently. Its a great service provided by Google. Now developers like us dont have to worry about the servers.. deployment and other stuff. If we have an Idea we can jump in and start working on it.
As my first project on appengine, am trying to develop a simple which fetches videos from youtube and displays in a page. Its pretty basic.
Nice articles describing it can be found here.
Found a small issue in this article. There is a small hack we need to do to use the Python gdata apis in appengine. This article talks more about it.
This hack is failing in gdata-python api 1.2.1 With the new gdata api instead of doing
gdata.service.http_request_handler = gdata.urlfetch
We should do this
client = gdata.youtube.service.YouTubeService()
urlfetch.run_on_appengine(client)
Lost a day figuring this out.
days of java are numbered
Oct 2nd
Are the days of Java and c numbered?
We are seeing a new wave of websites which are offering online application development and hosting.. the prominent being zoho creater. Here is a list of other such services..
New blogger Template
Sep 12th
After a lot of struggle I was able to set a new blogger template.. the blog has a new Look now.. This template is called the Itheme. The best thing I like about this blog is that the sidebar can be adjusted at run time.
I tried to customize this template and create a template with 2 side bars but failed miserable. Am still trying. Once it is done I will share it.
The story of square wattermellons
Mar 15th
One of my friends recently sent me a email forward about the Square Japanese watermelon. You can read the full story here. That is creativity at its best. The farmers have thought about a problem and solved it so nicely.
Lets take the story from another angle. Lets say we are the watermelon and the society is the farmer. The society has created certain rules and regulation. We follow those rules for the greater benefit of the society. Sometimes it can be uncomfortable. (Think of the watermelon). But then to gain something we need to lose something.