Developing for the web? Are you Sure?

There are countless number of web developers in our own backyard. Ones calling themselves experts in the field and yet dishing out the most standards non-compliant websites which may nevertheless look great but fail so grotesquely on a browser that it was not designed for (which usually means anything other than IE).

Are you a student, aspiring to learn web development? Or are you an experienced developer finding it difficult to give cross-browser compatibility to your developments?

Are "Where to go?" "Whom to ask?" and "what to do?" are three big questions looming in your head? Fear not for Opera has created a very nice resource just for you.

Image Source: http://dev.opera..com

I being interested not in hard core web development but nonetheless in web standards, while flipping through various Google results, stumbled upon this resource, created by my favourite browser company - Opera. The Web standards Curriculum.

I found it terribly useful and it made a lot of sense. Most of all, it was very simple to understand even to a n00b like me.

The series of articles have just begun and Opera promises to have more than 50 articles, soon, on the subject. Hoping to see a lot of great articles, here's wishing the Opera team all the best.

Let me know how you like this resource, what, in your opinion is lacking or needs to be added.

Netbook screen too small? and other views...

@rakkimk's request for my suggestions about netbooks led me into having a discussion about netbooks with him on twitter. Thanks, @rakkimk :)

  

Posting the tweet conversation here for the benefit of all. FAQ format.

1. Looking at a great netbook? How much did your Samsung one cost?

Ans. Mine costed Rs. 15,300 bought at SP road in Bangalore.

2. Is the 10" screen not too small? Is it not stressful to the eyes?

Ans. Well, 1. screen is matte finish which prevents reflection and which I like. I hate gloss. 2. Great size for portability 3. Once you start using it, it just fades away and let's you do your thing, unless what you do involves multi-page spreadsheets. or presentations or watching HD movies.As for normal SD vids,it's not bad.The clarity is great & in fullscreen mode-quite /good

3. This one is 15K and iPad is 22K ($499). Did you think about iPad at all?

Ans. Yes I did. iPad and MacBook Air. First of all, my budget wasn't permitting. Secondly, iPad sucks in terms of not having ethernet, flash support, hackability, USB support etc.. MacBook Air was just plain costly.

Besides, my purpose was to use it as a download machine that stays ON 24x7, netbook itself is an overkill. Should've got a NAS box.

After all this, support is my major priority. Samsung support - I can find in any major town in India. Apple - Not so.

Signs of an obsession

What are the signs of an obsession with a Job?

I recently discovered I'm becoming Obsessed with mine. Here's how...

Sign no. 1: Working my ass off and not feeling too tired at the end of the day.

Sign No. 2: Working late nights and not minding it

Sign No. 3: Going home only to eat and sleep, but not even doing that. Coding instead, even when at home. Contemplating staying at office on most days.

Sign No. 4: Reading up more about code and design than any other type of article.

Some might say that this is going crazy, but I beg to differ because, after all, what do we work for? It is to enjoy ourselves with the money we earn, right? If I am enjoying myself facing the challenges the job throws at me and craving for the rush of achievement at the end of solving that challenge makes me feel good, then that's good, isn't it?

Think about it.

Having said that, I'm not saying one should make their hobby as their job. That'd be the dumbest thing to do as I found out. In fact, that's the exact thing you should avoid doing. If one takes their hobby as their job then they'd start doing what they love for money and not for the love of it and soon it turns out that one starts to hate their HOBBY!

So, keep personal & professional lives separate but love whatever you do in both.

First week of adventures with the new Netbook

Finally managed to garner enough funds to get myself the new Netbook. Yeah. Spare the advice about whether I know what I have gotten into as the answer is YES, I DO! and here's proof: http://www.etiole.com/?p=4907

My first day with my new prized possession began with I trying to get a practical OS installed on it. Yes, in order to save money, I bought the FreeDOS version. And, with that OS, come on! you can do nothing in today's world.

Before I began the installation, I being I, went into the BIOS and meddled with all the settings, explored it and finally found the option to set BIOS password. God! Why did I do that? Seems, the Samsung N148 netbook has its keyboard layout configured differently in the BIOS (before the drivers get loaded). After I set the password, though I was typing the right password, it was saying that it was wrong and wasn't even booting into the OS.

Then I read the manual and found out that the BIOS password can be reset by calling Samsung's customer care but it will be charged. Cursing my luck, I started scouring the Internet to find a way to short the jumpers to reset the BIOS as I knew that this was all they were going to do anyways and I didn't want to pay for it.

Found a lot of articles and pictures which said the pins were found underneath the RAM , like this one e.g.: http://www.sammynetbook.com/forum/threads/9287-cmos-password-NC10 There you go! In a purely geeky fashion I opened the RAM compartment, plugged out the RAM and shockingly didn't find the pins there. All this on Day 1 of buying the Netbook. Thank God I am not in my teens, or else I would have gotten a nice dose of my parents.

Finally, did some more searching and found another netbook that had the pins in a different place than the typical ones. Tried looking at the same place on mine. Took some time to figure out that it was hidden underneath a pice of insulation tape that I had to remove. Overjoyed in finding the pins, wasted no time in shorting them. Did that, put back the covers and tried booting. Guess what. The BIOS hasn't been reset.

Tried many a time in vain. It wasn't getting reset. Then, to find out whether I was typing the wrong password, tried searching for a way to decode the password. Found out that the Hex code that is displayed along with the error message for BIOS being locked actually is a cryptic way of letting you figure out the password. Type the hex code and get the password using this tool for Samsung laptops: http://sites.google.com/site/dogber1/blog/pwgen-samsung.py (Python script)
or the Windows binary:
http://sites.google.com/site/dogber1/blog/pwgen-samsung.zip

For other laptops refer this Blog: http://dogber1.blogspot.com/2009/05/table-of-reverse-engineered-bios.html

Using this tool revealed that I was indeed typing the right password.

This was when I realized that the keyboard layout may be wrong as I remembered that earlier in the FreeDOS's command prompt too, I had some messed up commands being typed because of wrong key map.

I connected my desktop's USB keyboard (which I luckily had besides the wireless one), and typed in the password. Voila! It accepted. Immediately I removed the password.

Phew! That was one hell of a ride, I thought I should blog about it. So, here it is.

After this ordeal. I was too tired to go ahead with anything else, the clock had struck 1 AM and I had to work the next day so went to bed without bothering too much about the OS which was what I had initially set to do. Whatte Day, eh?

Day 2:

Naturally, I wanted to install Windows 7 on it but didn't have a large enough pen/thumb drive. You need a minimum of 4GB. Yes, that should remind you that it lacks an optical drive, if that had skipped your mind.

Prior to getting the netbook, I was experimenting with Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and was quite amazed at the evolution of linux from a few years ago. Everything on my desktop had worked out of the box. And it was only 693.2MB. Since I had heard a lot about Ubuntu's unity interface in the netbook edition, decided to give that a try. Since the pen drive had to be bootable, tried using the tool that came with the ISO but that failed to boot. Then found out of this neat tool: UNetBootIn.

This tool offers to download any one of the various linux distros and directly create the bootable Pen drive or can do so from an ISO image that you already possess. I chose this option and allowed it to do its job. Absolutely no intervention required other than selecting the source ISO image and the destination pen drive. This took about 15 minutes.

Just noticed this Ubuntu's site : http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download

They're recommending another tool called Universal USB Installer.

After this, I plugged in my pen drive to my netbook, booted from it and installed Ubuntu. I was amazed at the unity interface of ubuntu. Quite nifty, but having gotten used to the regular Gnome, I wanted to switch back to it. I thought I had to reinstall the desktop edition. Surprisingly, all I had to do was switch the option on the login screen to desktop edition. Thank God!

The latest version of ubuntu offers to install restricted drivers and extras meaning copyrighted video codecs and drivers for your graphics chipset. This is neat considering that in earlier version, you had to manually search for those and install them.

Took the netbook with me to my Uncle's place where I was visiting for the Diwali holidays and my cousin seemed to have a 4GB pen drive with him. Borrowed it, created the Windows 7 boot from pen drive and installed that too.

So far, so good. Having fun. Let's see how it goes.

Please leave your thoughts...

How to enjoy a movie by hook or CROOK!

There’s always the dilemma when watching a movie in the cinemas. First, there’s the want of people to go with and at the same time, the silence at the right moments in the movie. You can never get both. If you take people with you, there’s always going to be a dialogue or two that you missed because your friend sitting next to you uttered something that you, now, don’t even remember. What do you do in these situations? Well, here’s an advice to enjoy the movie, and also have loads of fun with your company.

First, choose a movie that you know is going to be boring. Yes. BORING! Your enjoyment level is inversely proportional to the quality of the plot. The worse the plot, the more you’ll enjoy it. Next, choose friends who like crowds and make a lot of noise. The more shameless ones, the better.

And lastly, if you aren’t paying for the tickets, Super! You’ve got your concoction for a great day out at the cinema.

At this point, you might think that I have gone insane, but give me a chance to reason myself out.

First of all, let me lay out my credentials for giving movie watching advice, especially this kind. This advice/suggestion is based on my experience last week watching the movie “Crook” in a multiplex.

Perhaps many of you have already figured where I’m coming from.

Yes, I watched “Crook”. A movie, from what I’ve heard begs to obtain the same kind of review that “Dabangg” did. What? you ask? The review read something like this: “Dabangg is so ridiculous, so stupid, so pathetic that it is actually good!”. Yes, that’s what it read.

I haven’t watched Dabangg. Who in the right mind would after reading such a review? So, I can’t comment on that but this line would apply very well to “Crook”. Good that it was a company sponsored ticket.

Here’s where I would’ve said “I want 2 ¹/₂ hours of my life back”  but surprisingly, (yes it is surprising to myself) on the contrary, I really enjoyed the time. How you ask?

Here’s how:

First, my company of colleagues all understood the language of the movie, Hindi in this case -  A key ingredient for having a good time. How is that a matter, you ask? Well, you’d be surprised how often people go to the movies without even knowing the language and then complain that the movie was bad.

Second, the movie, to its credit had very good music. Being the crazy fanatics that we are, we enjoyed the music like the Low Class Locals without bothering even a little bit that it was a multiplex. After all, what’s the point of sitting silently in an Air conditioned cinema after paying such a high ticket price and not enjoy the movie thoroughly, however crappy it may be.

However clichéd it may be, I’m still going to say – last but definitely not the least, the movie’s plot itself which is what I want to talk about the most but I don’t want to kill the fun for those who haven’t experienced it.

So, a few scenes only:

The plot is about a guy who is a crook in Bombay (Emraan Hashmi) being sent to down under – Australia after his identity being forged by his God father (Gulshan Grover) who is a Police officer. Yes! can you imagine it? Gulshan Grover plays a good man in this movie which absolutely doesn’t suit him. After Hashmi lands in OZ, meets a fat guy from Gurdaspur who’s there to study in a college on scholarship. For some reason, Hashmi always refers to the fat guy’s town as Hoshiyarpur and the fat guy corrects him every single time. This goes on throughout the movie and once Hashmi actually says it correctly but the fat guy, out of force of habit, trying to correct him, says “Hoshiyarpur”. OK, that was one of the funny scenes so sorry for spoiling the fun.

The plot starts with Hashmi falling for an Indian  girl who had come to pick up the fat guy from Hoshiyarpur but actually picks up Emraan Hashmi instead as he impersonates the fat guy.

Hashmi gets a job as a taxi driver from a Punjabi gang who provide refuge to illegal Indian immigrants and finds them jobs. The funniest bit is that after every sentence that anyone in the gang utters, they all one-by-one say “Fact Hai!”.

Many such small nuances make the movie watchable without which the already crappy movie would’ve just been pathetic.

The plot thickens with the flash-back of the heroine’s brother killing his other sister while trying to abort her pregnancy at a very late stage after finding out that the father of the baby was an Australian.

At the same time there’s the outbreak of Indians getting beaten up by Australians for being of a different colour. I thought this bit was over-exaggerated. They show the fat guy getting beaten up in hospital and the doctor explaining his condition to Emraan Hashmi and the heroine.

For some reason, the whole movie though claiming to be set in OZ, always has American accent spoken by the white people. The worst part was when the Doctor informs about the condition of the heroine’s brother who was attacked by Australians. The Accent is a strong Texan. Throughout the movie, I didn’t notice a single white man/woman speaking the frickking Australian accent.

The climax, which was the culmination of all the emotional drama of the entire movie and supposed to be the most serious turned out to be the funniest scene in the movie.

The Brother of the heroine is disillusioned that his sister was killed not by him trying to abort the baby but by the Australian who got her pregnant. There are such blatant logic FAILS in the movie which makes it watchable because that’s what made it funny.

The brother then kidnaps the Australian man’s sister and tries to kill her the same way his sister had dies – On the table, in order to take revenge. This is the climax scene in which the fat guy is made to dig a grave for her while the brother prepares for the murder. As expected, the hero arrives on time and explains the truth and tries to reason with the brother but he doesn’t understand. The fat guy, in the meanwhile listening to Emraan’s speech gets enlightened and revolts against the brother who keeps ordering him to continue to dig. The fat guy finally loses it and kills the brother with the shovel that he was using to dig.

The kidnapped Australian girl is rescued and the story ends there.

Note:  Pay attention to the small dialogues in which lies a little bit of entertainment in the form of it being so pathetic that it is actually funny.

Wow! I am amazed, I could write so much about such a crappy movie. In one line, a lot of good talent Emraan Hashmi, Neha Sharma (perhaps it’s just me but she looks strikingly similar to Angelina Jolie), the Punjabi gang, the fat guy, the brother – all wasted colossally in this movie.

If you are getting a free ticket and some noisy comment-passing, extrovert friends, go watch this movie. Otherwise, don’t even bother.

So, now you know how to enjoy a day-out at the movies by hook or “Crook”.