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Entries from Raj Shekhar

  • November, 2004

  • A gathering of geeks

    Yesterday I attended a meeting of a few fellow-geeks. The points that make a geek gathering different from normal people's gatherings are

    • The idea of the meeting was conceived on an IRC channel
    • More time was spent on planning what to do, than the time spent on actually doing
    • People kept referring to each other by their IRC nicks
    • Pictures were taken using a mobile camera
    • After the geeks had a shot of beer/vodka, they started debatng the OO capabilities in Python, history of python, squeak and other obscure topics.
    • And of course, how can I forget the debate on which CMS rules - mambo/Drupal or Plone
    An evening I enjoyed a lot :-)

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  • Firefox 1.0

    Firefox 1.0 got released yesterday. Yay !! If you have not downloaded it as yet, get it and reclaim the web. Google has put up a firefox on their search too. :-) . Surprisingly BBC is covering the launch too. Officially, Firefox is not "just for geeks " anymore. Welcome abroad unwashed masses. Here is the list of newspapaers covering firefox launch.

    While reading through the talkback pages at mozila, I saw that most people were having trouble getting Firefox from their local mirrors (which I guess had not gotten updated) or in accessing the Mozilla's website. Well, I took the easy route and just used the torrent to download my favourite browser. It was the first time I used torrent, and i must add I was amazed at how easy the whole process. Bittornado put a nice GUI and a easy to understand interface to the whole process.

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  • There is a Bloglines Web Services (BWS) . Never knew about it :-) . In another news, I discovered a nice skin for my wiki. \0/ One of my friends has launched a new blog devoted to books, music and movies. If you are a geek who enjoys reading and movies, have a look or volunteer to participate in the effort

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  • My wiki

    I have been experimenting with a few wikis for my site. A great place to look for your wiki needs is the Wiki Engines page on the WikiWik (which incidentally was the first wiki). I have settled for Pmwiki, which you can see here. My reasons for choosing the Pmwiki are

    • Written in PHP and released under GPL
    • Does not need a database backend to run
    • Easy to understand documentation
    • Customizations are in a separate configuration file
    • InterMap capabilities to provide links to other WikiWikiWeb systems
    • Ability to organize pages into WikiGroups, with headers and access controls shared among all pages in the group

    Link to my wiki

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  • October, 2004

  • using google api from PHP

    Now available for your downloading pleasure, is my GoogleSoap class. have you eveer felt the sudden need to use the Google's web APIs through PHP ? Worry not as help is at hand. You can use the GoogleSoap class to make your job easier. I have put the code and related documentation/examples in the public domain, so you can hack it up further. Some rudimentary instructions are included in the README file, I will add more to it as and when time permits me. Any additions/suggestions are always welcome.

    Get the code here

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  • why code maintainance sucks

    I have had to work on updating someone else's code for a few days now. The code was a headache to read because

    • It was not formatted to conform to my coding standard ... in fact it did not conform to any coding standards.
    • There was no version control ... oh wait, yes there was version control. It was version control by commenting out unwanted code. So I had to scroll through screenfuls to commented out code. I must take a moment to thank the programmers of Anjuta IDE, which helped me a lot a with their excellent syntax highlighting. Here is how you delete code.
    • Did I say there was no version control. There was a version control system. It looked almost like this
    • There was no comments.
    • There were spelling mistakes in variable names
    • PHP code and HTML were mixed
    • there was more .. i have forgotten it.

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  • I have been reading the Web 2.0 post archives. A quote by Cory Dotcrow which stands out

    Tech companies need to understand that easy copying of media on-line is not a bug to be fixed. It's a property of the Internet. They're convincing the world that this is a problem, and we need to fix that.
    I would rank it up there alongwith the William Gibson quote
    The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

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