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Reply to the person you earlier sent an email to in Desktop mail clients

By AJ | Published: October 3, 2009

There are many things I like about a desktop email client instead of a Web based application e.g. More and better filters, easy backup etc. but I hate Outlook and Mail (have not tried this in Thunderbird) for one reason – If I hit Reply to a sent message in my Sent folder to an email I sent to email@example.com, the email address it puts in the To field is mine and not email@example.com.

Now, I do not know if there is a setting in these email clients that I am unaware of (I’d be glad if someone can point out). All I know is that its in the Gmail’s Web Interface, which is slick. It knows that you want to reply to the person you sent that last email to and not yourself.

Posted in Random Thoughts, Technology | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness

By AJ | Published: September 22, 2009

Being a Web/Internet Engineer, I just had to share this on my blog. The url for the talk on TED is:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_zittrain_the_web_is_a_random_act_of_kindness.html

You’ve got to think about this very eloquent presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Zittrain).

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Yes, I do use LOL and places where I shouldn't…

By AJ | Published: September 21, 2009

It was a slow Monday afternoon in my office. Things were crawling and there was still no solution to the problem we were facing. Suddenly, in a short conversation with my colleague over the local chat messenger, we found the darned solution. While he discussed it in short and sweet chat lingo and I was typing a whole paragraph everytime.

We met for lunch again where he mentioned how my chat lingo was not proper. “I am trying to maintain my English standards”, I mentioned affirmatively. He replied, “Well! you anyhow should not write “I am laughing so hard here that I am going to die, on chat”. And he starts to laugh.

In this work plus social setup, I try to be extra nice and show that I can take jokes on myself.

“LAWL”, I laughed with (said to) him.

(In case you are still clueless —- LAWL = lol!)

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Twitter 2012 Insights

By AJ | Published: February 27, 2009

I read this awesome post Ted Murphy about how the world would look like in 2012 with Twitter. My first reaction was to find out if those Twitter accounts actually exist. Well turns out a lot of those do exist. Pretty much every twitter account mentioned there exists except the Parking Meters of SF.

I will give you the list with URL’s here:

1. Winwood != Winwood on Twitter. A gentleman with name Wojtek, from Poland is a TV mecahnic.

2. Whitehouse != Whitehouse of Twitter. 75 followers. No Bio available.

3. Tweetbar != Tweetbar on Twitter. According to their website:  Tweetbar is a wicked cool Twitter sidebar for Firefox and Flock. Not compatible with FF 3.0 at the time of this writing but will be, soon.

4. Young != Young on Twitter. Someone of Asian origin. :)

5. Lisa487 != Lisa487 on Twitter. How do I know that? Well, actual Lisa487 updated her (only) tweet on Jan 6th. She says “going to work”.

6. Twitair01. No twitair01 account on twitter yet. But there is a twitair. 

7. EMT != EMT on Twitter. Someone called Jason Machael owns it. Twit-Squatting???

8. JPMorgan != JPMorgan on Twitter. Apparently, this is a gentleman named Josh Morgan (cool!) who owns the blog http://www.respondingtoopportunity.com/ and finds The_Real_Shaq the funniest person on Twitter.

Personally, I am interested in knowing about Whitehouse, myself.

 

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Nothing is permanent, Not even Cloud

By AJ | Published: February 24, 2009

If you’re a geek, you know by now that there was a Gmail outage around 1 AM on 24th Feb (supposedly today) EST. And if you are a geek-ier person, then you know Gmail runs or uses already established Cloud of Google. Cloud, wait a second, can applications running on Cloud Computing architecture fail? Can an application which has essentially immense resources at its disposal fail like this? Do we need better Fault Tolerant and resource management architectures than this? 

Also, trying some stuff on Amazon’s service, I realized (I was a great fan of Cloud before) that there are a lot drawbacks and the biggest one being Dependency on a specific Cloud technology/company, that too for eons. Seriously, I do think that this type of architecture is so specific to a company implementing it that it is almost against the norms of what Web stands for - Universality.

I remember working with Axis2 (the Web Services SOAP engine). It didn’t feel sinful while writing a Web Service wrapper for an existing C function for local company and deploy it, which would be consumed by a PHP client. Why? Because I was actually taking a C function and making it universally (Web) accessible (or at least for that company). I felt that I was pushing the existing architecture towards web standards. Working with Amazon’s Cloud wasn’t such a feeling. It was like working with another Microsoft kind of a product. 

On the other hand you might argue with the example of data loss at Ma.gnolia. It wasn’t running on a Cloud architecture from some big firm like Amazon or Google (and it was bound to fail?) It was running on 4 Mac Mini’s. (I have been reading this and have not been able to get any citation for this but it was definitely not Cloud). I believe that Cloud computing has to emerge or evolve in itself and produce a standard. I think there has to be a conformity to certain architecture that each of these companies adhere to. Just like the idea it is based on: Grids. Otherwise, if I have to use their architecture for my new application, I would be scared of depending upon it and of course would think twice of migrating my current app to this architecture.

Meanwhile, I am happy working with the limited features my web hosting provides (for cheap) and forget about Fault Tolerance for the time being.

 

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PHP Model-View-Controller Frameworks – My List

By AJ | Published: February 16, 2009

I have been working on PHP for quite sometime and wanted to know more about the RoR kind of MVC frameworks for PHP. Now, anyone reading this is expected to know that having a framework like MVC is beneficial for rapid development and easy management of web apps. I like RoR but its base language – Ruby – is not a big industry standard, at least yet. Otherwise, I think Ruby’s Functional base is quite interesting and intuitive (once you learn it). I have programmed in Haskell too, which is a Functional language too.

Here are a few of the PHP Frameworks (MVC) that I found to be good at least when I read about them online. 

1. Symfony: http://www.symfony-project.org/
2. Mojavi: http://www.mojavi.org/
3. CakePHP: http://cakephp.org/
4. PHPOnTrax: http://www.phpontrax.com/
5. Prado: http://www.xisc.com/
6. Studs: http://www.mojavelinux.com/projects/studs/

Majority of these ‘good’ frameworks are inspired by RoR. What do you all think about these frameworks and which one is good and which ones are bad and in what respect. Or just tell me your favorite (reasons would be appreciated).

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

New Contact Form

By AJ | Published: February 6, 2009

Uploaded a new, easy to install and use contact form. Got rid of displaying my email address altogether. Hope this will make life better. Although, I do not have time to make it look slick right now. Check it out!

But just to mention that the form is a plug-in called “SECURE AND ACCESSIBLE PHP CONTACT FORM v.2.0WP for WORDPRESS WEB LOGS” By Mike Cherim (http://green-beast.com/) and Mike Jolley (http://www.blue-anvil.com/). Nice job.

Posted in Announcement | Leave a comment

Wish Lists Section!

By AJ | Published: August 10, 2008

I am not sure if this is a big deal for anyone, but I have a few books in the my Amazon wish list (see the sidebar, bottom). Some of them are absolutely mandatory and others only make me drool. So, just in case you have any of those books and are ready to part from it, please let me know. Otherwise, if you want to buy me any of those, I will personally make sure that God takes away 10% of your current sins for every book that you buy me.

Warning: You might never end up with zero sins. Fractional sins are allowed. I know this.

Posted in Announcement | Tagged | 1 Comment

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