What do you collect?
Mar 15th
Recently read a book by David Baldacci called “The Collectors”. Really a superb book. The story is very intriguing and one can’t keep the book down before completing it.
Some good things I learned from this book. In story all the characters’ are collecting something. Some collecting book, some cars, other money (something we all do). That makes one think. Are we all collecting something. Like the smiles of our friends, blessings of our elders, love of our beloved. Some of us collect praises of others and there are others who collect goodwill.
Can we somehow classify all these things one is collecting. A simple classification from my perspective. Things that give us happiness and things that give us sorrow. One should always try to collect the first and avoid the second. But first we have to identify which of the things we are collecting gives us what.
I think the same thing holds good for folks like us writing the blogs. We are also collecting something. What am I trying to collect right now… comment from the readers of this blog. Ha ha ha.
I have been reading lot of books recently, and wanted to keep track of which once I have completed and which I wanted to read. So I added a Facebook application called “iRead”. In this application one can write reviews about the books and share them with friends. Good to go through what our friends have to say rather than ending up with a lousy book.
I don't have words
Mar 13th
Read this post by Jeffrey Walker recently.
http://radiowalker.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/cancer-20-the-killer-app/
Don’t have any words to explain what am thinking right now.
Making a framework or finding one
Mar 7th
I used to work in Oracle Corporation India for a product called Enterprise Manager. I was very new to the industry and didn’t know much. It was a hard time during the initial days. The product was huge. There was so much code some in java, some in plsql others in perl and god know what else. When I was given a bug (a software defect) to be solved i used to take ages to find what’s wrong leave alone solving it 
.
Then one day I asked my manager to help. He solved them in minutes. I mean just like that. One thing I noted was that he was using lots of scripts and shortcuts which he had developed earlier. Thats when it hit me. I left all my work and started making my own framework of scripts. It took me about a week to create the skeleton. Then about a month or so to fine tune it. But once it was ready I was on booster. Give me any damn bug I was able to solve it. Later I was able to take up enhancements and projects also. It was great fun.
Though the framework was doing good but it required frequent changes. With my work load increasing I was not able to keep up. So I started searching again. This time I found that there are lots of open-source frameworks for solving these problems. Some of these frameworks were so SIMPLE, i felt foolish. Why didn’t I find them earlier. And wasted so much time creating one. I tried these frameworks. They were good. But by the time I could put them to proper use I moved out of oracle. Another company another framework.
I noted something else too during my stay at oracle. There were some bugs which were really not solvable. I tried all possible permutations and combinations but no use. 
… They caused me ample frustration. Some of these bug were lying in my queue for about 6–7 months. At last I decided to leave them and work on other which I could at least solve at that time. But these problems always stayed in my head. Probably the guy who replaced me would solved them.
Do you use any framework in your daily life?
Did you make them yourself or did you use an existing one?
Can your framework solve all the problems in the field?
If not how did you cope up with the unsolvable ones?
AddThis
Mar 5th
Hope you have heard about social bookmarking sites like http://del.icio.us/. There are many other sites which provide the same service. AddThis aggregates all this sites into one cool button.
Something about social bookmarking. The problem is more and more pages are being added to the Internet day by day. Some of them are genuine and other are spams. Its getting really hard to find the right information we need. Thats where social bookmarking come in. Here one can bookmark a site he / she likes. These bookmarks can be shared with the friends. Its much better to see a site already bookmarked by someone.. rather then google it.
I use Del.icio.us. My bookmarks http://del.icio.us/kmanicka. I have also installed a firefox plugin which makes it lot easier to maintain these bookmarks.https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615
SiteMeter
Mar 5th
This site can be used to keep track of the visitors to your website. It has lots of cool feature. The one i liked most is the world view of the visitors.
Check out the world map of cricket madi.
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s44cricketmadi&r=79
With the internet the world has become a very small place.
Reality Check the 5 questions
Feb 29th
I have registered Dr Mani’s mailing list who blog at http://guydz.com/moneypowerwisdom/
His blogs and mailing list are a great source of wisdom and inspiration.
In one of his recent emails Dr. Mani suggested 5 questions we can ask ourselves when we feel low or frustrated. I tried them and it really worked. These are the 5 questions, hope it works for you too.
* What do I want to achieve with my work?
* How much money do I need for this?
* Do I need big numbers to reach this target?
* Is what I’m doing taking me towards my goal?
* Am I happy doing what I now do?
My answers ..
1) that, that and that.. (its a secret)
2) not much.. a million will do.
3) I guess 1 followed by 3 zeros in the box which says readers at the top right.
4) am not sure of that yet
5) but ya am happy really happy. I think thats what matters most.
It’s The Journey That’s Important… By John McLeod
widgetbox
Feb 29th
This websites provides a framework to make and share widgets.
A widget is a small application which can be embedded in any html page.
In my earlier cricket madi website, i had used 2 widgets .. Yahoo’s cricket scores widgets and a chat widget.
Similarly combining more widgets like the we can make cool applications. Widgetbox has a large gallery of widgets for public use.
Once we have made a widget in widget box.. we can easily share it in social networking sites like facebook, orkut etc… or blogging sites blogger etc.
WidgetBox have also introduced a new term called blidget (or at least I haven’’t heard of it till now). Blidget are blog feeds as widgets. Another feature that they provide is building facebook application.
I will try these sometime later.
Google Adsense
Feb 27th
I don’t have to say much about this. Looks like the world has gone crazy about it. Writing this post just for the sake of completeness.
Google Adsense is a Ad Service. A website publisher can register to this service and show ads in his website. If a visitor clicks on the ad the publisher get some money.
Google takes the burden of going through the website and showing relevant ads which the user is most likely to click.
<!–
google_ad_client = “pub-9947446767032965″;
/* 125×125, created 1/5/08 */
google_ad_slot = “3674615838″;
google_ad_width = 125;
google_ad_height = 125;
google_cpa_choice = “”; // on file
//–>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
GooglePages
Feb 27th
GooglePages is a free Website Hosting service provided by Google…
One can easily create there websites using the Google Page Creator. Its a online tool and has lots of templates to choose from.
We can also upload other files to the googlepages server.
I created the CricketMadi.com files locally and uploaded them.
Apart from the ease of use I found some shortcoming in the site.. The website name the extra googlepages.com looks bad. I think I read somewhere that we can buy our own domain name and redirect it to this site but haven’t tried it myself.
Another issue is the upload feature. It allows for only one file to be uploaded at a time. I guess it is because of the fear of Spam. But google should think of making it better.