Mixed Ideas

The Workstreamr team had a party yesterday. Geoffreys was the venue. Ben was the host and we reached a bit late after the delayed travel. The party had already started when we had reached there and we started out with a Corona each. Abhijat was fasting and did not have any alcohol. Amol joined us later when we ordered a Long Island Ice Tea. Little did I know that this one was going to be one nasty drink. As I understand from Abhilash, it was a mix of Gin, Vodka and White Rum. One nasty combination. I was half way through the drink when I asked Amol about the complexities that were involved in getting into the Product Usability and Design Group.

I consider that every individual involved in a project/class bring a unique set of ideas to the table. Some give more and are able to imagine a situation fast. I consider myself to be artistically efficient. I like to work on Photoshop and Gimp is my favorite. The Workstreamr Client which is in Adobe AIR uses Html, CSS and javascript, was done with some sense of what a typical client would look like. The available clients were also taken into consideration along with great IM clients such as Gtalk and Open Source Gaim ( I am not that into Yahoo! coz it cramps my system sometimes). And I think I did a pretty good job at it.

The point here that I express is how much effectiveness can I as an individual can provide if I were to be in a position designing the usability. programming concepts come into picture here and as per Amol, Web 2.0 applications design often requires this kind of a background. If you are able to visualize a product taking into consideration all its complexities, both technical and usability, then you could shine anywhere. That is what I try to communicate. To think like a normal user, a majorly dumb one, is a main ingredient. That lets you conceptualize more I believe. It is sure that I would not let go of programming. Ten years down the lane I still see myself as coding. But I also would like to explore the designing area, just to get a feel of it. Not taking in too much responsibilities but expressing my ideas so that the end product would gain.

To have an idea is normal but to struggle for the idea makes the thought worth while.

Wirefree Net

After a long struggle, We got the net up and running at our place. It all started with Srinath getting the broadband 7-8 months ago. I had always thought of buying a wireless router than would enable the both of us to connect to the internet. After the Apple Macbook came I was keen on getting this done. The Mac Leopard updates also had to be done. I got the updates done but the wireless thingy got delayed.

Finally we got the Linksys Wireless G Router and tried to set it up. Did some things that Chetan had told me to do. Did not work. This included making the DSL Router work in a Bridged Mode. I changed the IP of the wireless router, made to accept the PPPPoE settings .. All went in vain.

Then today the airtel guy comes. Sets up the DSL router to work with an IP (192.168.0.1), sets up the wireless router to have a DHCP setting, resets the router and wallah it starts working. This makes me feel that to have some things done you will need to spend more time and effort in it as well as get advice from someone who knows what he is doing.

Thanks Airtel guy .. Didn't get your name though !!!

The XCode IDE

The first demo of the Workstreamr app was given on Friday and Monday. Just before the Friday demo, Manish had a small announcement to make. To try to build a client, as the client we currently are building, that would run on an Apple iPhone. The reward would be an iPhone itself (so ha says) ! I, along with others were definitely interested. The browsed through the latest SDK that Apple had released for the iPhone and came to understand that the SDK needed a Mac for the development. That clearly justified my buying a Mac !!

I downloaded the SDK. A 1.3 Gb dmg file ! When installed, I found my XCode IDE overwritten with the new XCode version IDE which supported the iPhone development. I even downloaded podcasts with the Apple Evangelists giving excellent tips and tricks on iPhone based development. As I have only done development for the desktop, it was necessary to understand that it was not the same thing. Development in a phone which has memory and power constraints in tricky. The consistency and accuracy to be followed is extremely important.

I also came to know that the development language for independent apps in the iPhone was Objective C, a ANSI C based superset. The constructs are different and sometimes confusing. I like the part where messages are passed for method calls, it reminded me of Ruby. I am still trying to get in grips with this language for further development.

I was mesmerized by the development platform that Apple provided. XCode for app development, DashCode for web based development, Instruments for performance analysis. The iPhone development does not has the Interface Builder support yet but once it comes there no beating the toolkit.

Looking forward to some excellent programming on Objective C now !!!

Feed Aggregator

The world is going for such an era where information about a person, his resume could all be found in the Internet. Search for someone, his/her blog comes up with references and stuff he/she has done and then evaluate. My firm also have started believing in this and Manish took the initiative of aggregating feeds from various employees and showing them in the corporate website as blog entries.

The Idea is simple.

1. Have a simple file maintained which has the username, his blog rss feed url, picture image file name and the tags he needs to filter. This file would be a wiki for my sake.
2. Have an application take this file as an input, get the entries, access the feeds and put it in user buckets.
3. Get all the entries, order them by the descending order of the updated date (created date) and fill in in another bucket.
4. Create the html after going through each entry. This Html would have pagination and more/less links for each blog entry and long with the image

My initial idea was to go for Ruby. But the libraries that I found was unsuitable to accommodate the rss and atom feeds. I tried my best but at the end of the day Java was there to help.

The base html was a static page which accessed the created blog.html file by Ajax. I use dprototype for this as well as the more/less feature for each entry and pagination. Simple String Tokenizer for tokenizing the data from the file, Rome and Jdom for the feed accessing functionality, some nifty code for the htmlcreation, log4j for the logging part and user/useraccessor classes.

It looks good !!! It will be up in the corporate website pretty soon !!