apnerve

Now I know the reason behind Yebhi's obscene ads.

2012-01-20T12:26:00.001+05:30

Yebhi's summary on the search page explains it all :)

Where the hell is Matt?

2012-01-17T08:51:00.001+05:30

I had watched this wonderful video long back. The more I watch it, the more happier I feel. I liked the way he got the whole world(in a way) to dance with him. This video made me smile and made my day!

This made my day.

2012-01-15T10:33:00.001+05:30

Oh, the methods you'll compose

2012-01-11T08:46:00.001+05:30

This is the text from the awesome ignite talk given by Tim Berglund

When a coder sits down to start banging out code
The first thing to start crowding his cognitive load
Is whether his program will do what it should
Correctness, he says, is what makes my code good

It’s the function that captures the coder’s attention
Behaviors and inputs and outputs are mentioned
As if the one good that a coder can bring
Is to spin the right wheels on some Turing machine

And compiling and linking and running are great
(We need to do these to put food on our plate!)
But the shocker that might leave you scratching your head
Is that actual code is less written than read

We spend more of our time in maintaining our stuff
Than we ever spend writing the simplest of cruft
Which means that unless you’ve got something the matter
You’ll try to learn just a few code style patterns

So coders and countrymen, lend me your ears
As I teach you some lessons won hard through the years
From that Beckian book about implementation
And patterns that derail code suckification

A classical problem is how to name things
(Oh, the anger and fights and dissension this brings!)
Like off-by-one-errors and cache expiration
A permanent answer’s beyond expectation

But a class should be named to describe its intent
Not its implementation, though that’s how were bent
A superclass name should be pithy and short
And the subclass’s name a more detailed retort

When you look at the name of a class you should find
The idea that hatched in the first coder’s mind
And just what is the thing this class wanted to do?
And what should you be thinking when first you call “new?”

When you can’t find a name for a class, it’s a sign
That the metaphor’s actually escaping your mind
A good metaphor helps more than comments or training
To inform other coders just what you are saying

The next thing we’ll consider together is state
(Which wouldn’t be bad if it wouldn’t mutate)
The functional people may think that they profit
But objects we code will change state; we can’t stop it

It’s not just concurrency where it can bite us
Although many suffer from thread-lock-wait-itis
The way that we organize pieces of state
Can make all the difference between good and great

Group similar state close together and see
Just what happens in time to your code quality
If you think of the reason your data is altered
Your sense of the meaning will be less assaulted

The things that are changing together should be
Very close to each other, viewed all on one screen
The data whose purpose is common? Same thing.
If they all work together, keep’em all in one scene

Remember the scopes an imperative language
Gives to you to gather together your baggage
The method, the instance, the class scope are able
To keep you from having too much on the table

The changing of state is a serious problem
And I think that we’re starting to locate the bottom
But as long as assignment is part of our ken
We’ve got try hard to keep data reigned in

See, the coder who’s reading this pile of junk
Is bounded in what he can think of at once
Don’t make him scroll all up and down every file
To find and recall every identifier

Now the methods we write can get out of control
When we make the one reading them scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll
A method that’s long and meandering is bad
But a method that’s short and composed makes us glad

To compose a good method, just think of the scope
Of the things that it does, and with that you can hope
To keep all of its actions around the same level
Or else its abstractions will leave you disheveled

A method composed by a coder who tries
Will read like a story with just one plot line
Each part of the story it tells is the same
As the rest of the method, with all the same aim

To understand just what composing’s about
Imagine a story of when you went out
And started the night by first changing your clothes
Then switching to tell me the distance you drove

Then up and describing the way you shift gears
And a long, pointless tale about your rear-view mirror
Then changing your story to cover the dinner
And how it was cooked and how long the sauce simmered

Then skipping ahead to the movie you saw
But not telling me even one detail at all
Now what would you think of this crazy approach?
My mental disturbance would be hard to broach!

It’s the very same thing when we factor a method
Each one should stay small with its purpose embedded
In a series of readable sub-method calls
And inside those methods go all their details

When people are learning, they sometimes prefer
First to know all the details and from them infer
All the concepts producing the detailed design
Either concept or detail can govern the mind

When composing your methods, keep this fact in mind
And please think of the coder who’s struggling to find
The whole shape of the picture zoomed all the way out
Or the flipping of bits when that’s what it’s about

I think if you’ve listened a little to me
You might start to catch what I want you to see
It’s good when we write code that passes its tests
But mere functionality isn’t our best

It’s the human who sits down to work with our code
Our ideas we want to this one to be showed
So remember this saying, to the best that you’re able
The reason you write code is to love your neighbor

Some crazy stuff you can do with your iPad

2011-12-17T01:23:00.001+05:30

Experiment with SwiftKey

2011-12-15T19:45:00.001+05:30

This is an experiment with SwiftKey. The content that follows would be purely SwiftKey predictions. I'm not editing that.

___

I think the best, and the rest of the day! I hope you enjoy your weekends are fun. The creator of the day!

___

Tyranny of the LIKE button!

2011-11-30T15:55:00.001+05:30

via media.smashingmagazine.com

Creative(and fun) stuff that happened after "Kolaveri di"

2011-11-25T14:19:00.001+05:30

Creative Ad Campaigns I liked

2011-11-24T11:18:00.001+05:30

See the full gallery on Posterous

Crowdsourcing explained!

2011-11-14T15:53:00.001+05:30

via netdna.webdesignerdepot.com

"funny-like" video unlocker

2011-10-16T19:38:00.001+05:30

I found a funny link posted by my friend on facebook titled "Best Penalty ever!". The moment I click on the link to watch the video, it opened in a new tab instead of playing directly inside facebook. Moreover, it asked me to either 'share' it or 'like' it in order to unlock the video.

Problem

This is similar to a dark pattern called Friend Spam. There is no problem in the site developer to expect the user to share the video. The problem comes when the user is FORCED to share the video. It is the user's decision to make whether he chooses to share it or not. I would share the video only if I really like it, after watching.

Solution

On careful examination of the webpage using firebug, I found out that the lock is imposed by using an overlay '<div>' on top of the video. I wrote a bookmarklet to remove that overlay.

funny-like unlocker

Drag the above link to your bookmars toolbar and click on it to unlock the video.

Ressurection

2011-10-13T02:46:00.000+05:30

I've been inactive on my blog for 2 years or more. I tried so hard to bring it back to life but thanks to my procrastination, I simply couldn't.

Today, I found this interesting thing called webmaking 101 in P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University). I took the challenge and the first task was to write a blog post about it and here I am, writing about it. I hope to use this as an excuse to keep my blog updated

Angry Anna!

2011-08-26T11:39:00.000+05:30

A funny game from gamesalad

the only post in 2010

2010-12-31T23:59:00.015+05:30

This is my first and last post in 2010. My activity on twitter, facebook and posterous has killed my blog. I'll try to bring it back to life in the new year.

Wish you all* a Happy New Year!!

* all = me + search bots.

uhuroo - content collaboration made easy

2009-06-24T15:05:00.003+05:30

Recently, I've started playing with this certain web app called uhuroo. My very first response was -"Lol! here comes yet another online file storage service". But after using it for about 2 weeks and experimenting with various useful features it had, I must admit that I fell in love with this wonderful app. Why? read on...

what exactly is this uhuroo thing anyway

Uhuroo is a web based tool for information sharing, which allows creating online folders where you can share documents with internal team members (i.e. specially in distributed locations), customers, and other external collaborators. You can also maintain document revisions in a centralized repository and also record everyone's feedback on the content

a closer look at uhuroo

Well organised information is always easy to retrieve. Uhuroo makes it possible to organise data efficiently by means of tagging, ranking and discussion which helps users Collaborate Effectively. I feel there are 3 important things to look for in any information processing system:

Information Storage

Storing information should be easy and the stored information should be secure.Uhuroo offers an easy way to upload files(information) through email push. Once you choose an email account for a folder, files can directly uploaded using email attachments. The subject becomes the title of the document and the body becomes the description and the attached file is uploaded which is stored securely in uhuroo's servers which have zero downtime. Uhuroo also provides a web interface, browser plugins and desktop addons to do the same. view the complete feature list.

Information Organisation

As I said before, well organised information is easy to retrieve. If you are logged into the web based uhuroo system, you have a number of social networking / bookmarking features: documents can be rated,tagged,ranked and commented on.

Information Retrieval

When you login into the web based uhuroo system, you are greeted with a dashboard which is a birds eye view of what is happening across all your teams. It also shows the ranking statistics based on some of the above information: most frequently read, downloaded, subscribed document, most discussed document, most popular post or author, most popular tags.

The full text search helps us find data faster as it even searches within the files! One more feature that I liked in uhuroo is the filter option using which we can filter data based on Author, tags, date posted on and rank. Uhuroo also keeps you updated with the latest version of the document (in case someone uploads a new version) by sending you an email.

in a nutshell

Uhuroo makes it really simple to share data with your group at the workplace. (Data meaning doc, ppt, xls, emails, pdf, images, video files)
All this data is then accessible at one central location.
Features like search within your content (even within the documents), tagging, ranking to make it easy to search through heaps of data.

Hence, it is really made for teams overwhelmed with content getting lost or going out of sync in email, folders or corporate LANS, and are looking for better ways to share and manage content internally and with, partners, customers or other collaborators

For more information check out uhuroo website

7 random things about me

2009-05-27T16:39:00.008+05:30

I haven't been tagged by anyone for the "7 random things about me" meme. So I take the opportunity to start a meme myself.

meme?

A blog meme is ~~a meme~~something that requires active participation by the blogger and (rarely) traces back to an originating source. It is a question that a blogger answers to share some personal perspective or experience on random topics.

the rules

Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they have been tagged.

7 things

When I was young, I wanted to become an astronaut.
I haven't seen the movie - Forest gump yet.
Once I fell in love with a cartoon character - jasmine, of Disney's Aladdin. She is still my crush ;)
I need food, water, air, sleep and a computer to survive
I've been awarded all the grades available except AA and AP. (yes! XX, II ,FR, FF … everything!)
I can write in reverse order (mirror writing) with the same speed as I write normally.
I hate JOOMLA (a Content Management System), Mallika Sherawat (who, by coincidence, shares by birthday) and CH101 (I still have an active backlog in it!)

7 people I tag

g2 - coz I simply love his humorous posts
vivek - coz he loves writing absolute random stuff
artagon - coz I wonder what his 7 things would be
pramod - coz he hasn't posted anything since a month
zubin - coz he compiled a long todo list
ravali - coz she has already posted 101+ things about her and I wonder which 7 will she choose.
manku - coz he remains a stupid!

PS: @ the above 7 people. Post a comment here once you are done with your 7 things.

blogger navbar hack explained

2009-05-25T20:54:00.010+05:30

Many people use blogger to power their blogs and find the navbar at the top very annoying. Some of them came up with some nice tricks to hide/remove the same. In this article, I'll be explaining how the trick works.

#navbar-iframe{ display:none !important;}

you might have come across this code in many articles. Well... this is how it works.

blogger adds the following code to your blog.

 [iframe src="..." id="" navbar-iframe ...][/iframe]

If you observe carefully, this 'iframe' tag has an ID attribute set to "navbar-iframe". Inorder to hide it we set the CSS rule "#navbar-iframe{ display:none;}" which tells the browser that the element with the ID attribute "navbar-iframe" should not be displayed. However, Blogger adds the following CSS automatically

#navbar-iframe{display:block;}

And since this CSS rule comes after the one which we applied, the latter has more preference and our rule doesn't get applied. This is because of the CASCADING property of CSS. Inorder to override this, we have an "!important" declaration. A rule that has the "!important" property will always be applied no matter where that rule appears in the CSS document. So if you wanted to make sure that a property always applied, you would add the !important property to the tag. So we apply this "!important" property to our style:

#navbar-iframe{ display:none !important;}

Now, display of the tag with id attribute "#navbar-iframe" is set to "none" which tells the browser not to display the same. Hence, the navbar gets hidden.

The same thing can be achieved using javascript too.

document.getElementById('navbar-iframe').style.display='none';

This method has been used in http://apnerve.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-apnerves-hide-blogger-navbar-widget.html

PS: Few other CSS rules that work are:

#navbar{display:none;}

#navbar{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}

.navbar{display:none;}

.navbar{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}

twitterfilms

2009-05-24T18:07:00.006+05:30

Today I got addicted to the new trending topic in twitter - #twitterfims Here are some of the best tweets I came across while madly adding few of my tweets too.

Kyonki tweet bhi kabhi blog tha - @vivekk
140 ki last local - @rkavan
kabhi tweet kabhi retweet
140 akshar prem ke - @me :)
The retweet of extraordinary tweets - @me :)
Twitterers of Carebbean : the dead man's tweet
tweeting tiger … retweeting dragon
saving private tweet
tweets and the DMs

… and there are many many more sprouting up.

A comic is worth thousand words.

2009-03-01T03:52:00.004+05:30

Everyone loves comics. I love them too. As a kid, I always loved Tinkle, tintin, Chacha chaudary, Nagraj, (and few others from RAJ and Diamond comics).

Years rolled by and my taste also changed. Now I like XKCD and AbstruseGoose. Both are aimed at geeks and are about programming, physics, math and some geeky stuff. Check them out.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Most of the companies have realized this recently and now they have blogs with comic strips instead of boring text bragging about their product. Google, as always, is the first one to use comic strips for promotion of their product - Chrome. Another such company is CollCraft. They are planning to launch their product - uhuroo in a short while. They publish wonderful comic strips about enterprise software, in their comic blog - uwoes. Webcredible uses comic strips, instead of boring articles on user experience.
Just imagine how it would be if our academic material were presented as comics. As for me, I promise, I would never leave any chapter unread. Cuz a comic is worth thousand words and everybody loves comics.

Comment and win prizes!

2009-02-24T03:34:00.002+05:30

I never knew that we could win prizes just by commenting until I saw a tweet from @smashing regarding their "comment and win contest". After posting a comment I noticed a similar website called instantshift, which hosted a similar contest as per the entry - "comment-and-win-a-free-membership-to-elegant-themes". Without wasting a second I posted a comment there too.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

Taking part in this giveaway is easy… well, maybe not that easy. We’re keen on seeing a lot of comments and want to see at least 5,000 comments in this post, so spread the word and help us get to 5,000 or more comments and then win one of the smashing prizes below. The 5,000 comment challenge is important, folks. If we don’t reach that goal, then the prizes get torched. Okay, they don’t get torched, but the giveaway only kicks in after 5000 comments

I wish I could win one of them. Try you luck by commenting. May be you could win a prize.

apnerve's hide blogger navbar widget

2009-02-20T21:16:00.006+05:30

One fine day, I posted an entry on removing the blogger navbar, which can be found at :: How to remove Blogger Beta Navbar. This trick involved editing the HTML template, which confused many people (here I must admit that my description wasn't very clear). So I thought of making this trick easier for everyone and the result - a navbar hide widget.

All you need to do is click on the "Add to Blogger" button.

Wasn't that easy?

ps: Using this widget, you can choose any template you want and still have your navbar hidden.

funny comment trick

2009-02-16T22:00:00.009+05:30

Yesterday, I sat all night before the comp, customising my blogger template. Starting with a 565 template by douglas bowmann, I ended up creating a new template altogether - a 3 column template with good SEO (Thanks to amanda of bloggerbuster and Antonio Lupetti of woork). But...(there is always a but) I wasn't happy at the result. Why? Because my blog seems to be still one among the most ignored and unread ones. So to make myself happy, I devised a small, funny trick. To be precise, it is too simple to be known as a trick. I added the following code


a.comment-link:before{content:"476";}

...And wow! I made the "0" comments to "4760" comments. Lol! but (again) the fact remains that my blog is still the same old unread and ignored one :(. So I removed the code now. Well... you can try this one out if your blog also gets very less visits :)

Please consider commenting if you like this trick. :)

aamir khan at IIT Bombay

2009-02-15T07:03:00.004+05:30

Aamir khan is in IIT Bombay, shooting for his forthcoming movie - "3 idiots". This movie is based on Chetan Bhagat's novel "five point someone".
UPDATE: Aamir khan was seen playing baddy with Mittal (Prateek Mittal, 3rd yr, B-Tech, Elec). y0! mittal \m/

1234567890 day!!

2009-02-13T21:05:00.004+05:30

On this Friday, Feb 13 at exactly 3:31:30 PM (PST), Unix time will equal '1234567890'. You can check the exact time left for this time on the site http://www.1234567890day.com/. Happy 1234567890 day!!

ping.fm - one ping to rule them all

2009-02-02T05:59:00.001+05:30

I just added the ping.fm's IM bot. Now I can update my twitter tsatus, tumblr, identi.ca, blogger, wordpress from gtalk using this bot.