Technology - Bridging the Geek Gap

Recession - Cause and its Effect

2009-09-09T05:14:00.000-07:00

This is a beautiful animated video on the current market scenario. Brilliant!!!

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

And then the May Flowers...

2009-06-23T06:56:00.000-07:00

Sending flowers to your loved ones has been a very old and tried out custom to patch up with friends, lovers or just to stay in touch. But with the advent of computers, and mobile phones, we seem to forget this ultimate show of affection. Flowers got replaced by emails and the SMS text got the better of the small chit chats that accompanied these beautiful ornate decorations.

Sometimes just sending a bouquet of fiery red roses or bright yellow tulips convey your feeling much more eloquently than what a thousand words might not be able to do.

Different flowers symbolize different emotions, and these symbolic meanings have been created over a period of hundreds of years.

For instance, the fact that Orchids are considered to be a symbol of luxury and magnificence derives from the fact that in the early Victorian era, these tropical blooms were an exotic variety on the British Isles.

However, in today's age we are growing genetically modified varieties of Daffodils in India! But, the symbolism still holds, so a newly married couple beginning a new chapter in their lives are best gifted with a bunch of bright yellow Daffodils.
While Stumbling on the internet, I came across some cool sites that let you send flowers, although of the virtual kind!! But that's the best we can do if we do not want to shift our A##'s from our seats and still appear as gracious as ever. These Flowers do not carry their exotic fragrance, nor are they capable of adorning your window sills. But they give you that fleeting emotion of exhilarating joy when one is treated with the view of a full blossomed nicely decorated vase.
Most of these sites let you send pictures of choicest flowers, along with some text message. They are delivered from your email box to the recipients in box.

Philip's Florals is actually a site for real flower ordering, but has a cool virtual flowers section.

So you can select a great looking bushel of white lilies and send it along with a nice text message. Another similar site is iFlowers, that has some breathtaking images of extreme closeups of the tender petals.
But the best so far that I have come accross is the snazzy and elegant, flash driven Flowers2Mail website. Here you are greeted with a collection of flower vases of various shapes and sizes, and a pretty decent selection of beautiful flowers to decorate it with. All you have to do is just drag and drop. What more, you can even send a small card along with the vase. All of it goes as a JPG to the recipient's inbox. Pretty cool, I must say. A great idea and executed to perfection.

The Central Park of New york also boosts of a website that has a cool flash based Virtual Flower page. This site not only lets you choose your flowers but also provides the code that lets you host the image in your website!

Bad Techwriting!!!

2009-05-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

An example of bad technical writing...

SaaS - The Future of Apps

2008-12-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

In this age of WiMax, using the Internet is no longer a privilege but fast becoming a necessity. And different sectors are trying to benefit from this. From Google Analytics to Online gaming, everywhere we see entrepreneurs trying to cash-in on this sudden splurge in the availability of the broadband.
This has spawned a completely new genre of application development, that is entirely web-based, and remotely hosted called SaaS - Software as a Service. While most ERP heavy weights like SAP and Oracle are grappling to top each other in the ERP/CRM space, small players like S-Force and WorkACE are slowly creeping in with their SaaS based models that offer lots of added benefits, and only a few 'manageable' disadvantages.
SaaS in simple terms means the concept of providing a software service to multiple clients from a single platform. The business models based on this concept use remotely hosted applications, made available to customers over a network.
The main advantages of this concept are:

Low initial investment from companies because of zero costs related to Licencing, Hardware and Installation.
The application is hosted remotely so no infrastructure need to be maintained for servers, networking etc.
Considerably faster implementation cycle.
Application can be accessed from all customer sites within days of purchase because just a browser is required to do so.
Possibility of easy and frequent upgrades.
Updates are made centrally by the vendor at the server.
Little investment on training of staff.
Taken care by vendor.

However, the most strong argument which critics point out against this business model is the compromise on security. But SaaS is better equipped to fight potential cyber criminals because they are in a position to implement powerful and multi-layered security blankets because of the ability to leverage the economies of scale. Cyber security is a exorbitant and almost out of hand expenditure for a single company but for vendors providing services to several companies the investment on Firewalls, Anti Phishing and Anti Virus software can be considerably higher.

The SaaS model of new age business applications should act as a moral booster for Indian entrepreneurs looking to set a footing on the same space as that of biggies like Oracle. These applications are quick to roll out, have a low upfront cost, are easily manageable and has easy accessibilty. Because of these reasons, this model would be particularly agreeable to the domestic market, where cost and time factors are paramount.

Lets go for a Picnik !

2008-03-10T02:58:00.000-07:00

While working at at a client location, I was suddenly stranded with some graphics in my document. I wanted to edit them, but the computer provided to me did not have any image editing software. My only recourse was MS Paint, which made even doing the very basic stuff like cropping, a real pain.
One of my friends suggested that I try out Picnik. And I did do that, and fell instantly in love with the nifty flash application available at this site, which lets you do a lot more than just crop and resize your images.

This site does not make you download any heavy program into your machine,and is up and running in a matter of seconds. Most of its features are presently free for all, but among the premium features are the Full Screen mode, yes that will make you forget completly that you are actually using a browser.
To work on images, you can either pick them up from your own computer or any of the popular image storage sites like Flickr or Photobucket.
I wish this had a image capture facility as well, till then, I am putting the 'Print Screen' button to full use !

Quite 'Writely' Said!

2006-08-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

Once I read somewhere that the future of IT lies in centralization. The computers of tommorow will not have a hard disk of their own, instead each user will have space in a central server where all documents would stored. Similarly all applications which a person needs to use would be located on that central server, and can be accessed through Internet by everybody.

If for a moment we overlook the concerns of Security and Internet Connectivity, then the most obvious benefit of this scenario is that all one needs at his end is a PC and an Internet connection.

Writely is a step in this direction. This is a completely web based word processor, which gives almost all the functionalities of word processors like MS Word, Open Office, Frame Maker etc. As off now Writely is supported only on IE5.5+, Mozilla 1.4+ and Firefox 1.0.6. Netscape and Opera do not support this application yet.

The application works very smoothly on a broadband connection, i.e. as fast a web application can possibly work. However its performance on a dial up connection is yet to be tested.

Writely allows HTML, 'Plain Text, MS Word, Open Office and RTF Docuemnts to be directly imported. However, you may just open a blank document in Writely and copy the contents from the clipboard. While you are working on a document, Writely provides a host of Formatting Features, Spell Check, ability to insert comments, pictures, tables, page breaks etc. However, you will have to stay content with the handful of fonts provided by Writely, as you are not allowed to add any fonts of your own. Besides, the possibility of decorating your document with stuff like Word Art, Clip Art as in MS Word is also not yet there. But then we should remember, that this is just the first step. May be Writely wants to preserve these features for its paid services.

But whenever you create a document, you will like to take a print or atleast see a print preview. Both these features are still quite primitive, infact, there is no such thing as Page Setup. So for taking a print you will have to first save the document in doc, rtf or odt format and then make the necessary page settings.

If Writely lacks in the Print department, then it certainly offers a lot more when it comes to the Web. The docs from Writely may be published directly on the web. You can make the document public, so that it may be viewed by all, or else you may also restrict the viewers to a chosen few. All you have to do is to provide the email id's of the people who are to view the document, and they would receive a mail from Writely, with a temporary password and a link for the document.
The document may also be directly posted into a blog. All blogs are not yet supported but a few popular once are covered. (I have posted this review from Writely) Whatmore, the published documents may be accessed by RSS feeders too.

Since Writely is now a part of Google, we may rest assured as far as the security aspect is concerned. No document is searchable on the web unless it has been given the 'public' status.

If more than one person needs to edit the document, then all the owner has to do is to add more users or Collaborators as Writely prefers to call them. Each of them will receive a temporary password and a link to the document and they all can edit the document simultaneously. The document may be shared between as many as 50 people.

One more feature of note is that Version Control is possible and more than one version may be compared at the click of a button.

With all these features, Writely is certainly the best possible solution for anybody looking for a web based word processor. Other similar services like Whiteboard and JotLive are still in the stone age when they are compared with Writely.

Writely still has some work to do as far as features like Headers & Footers, Page SetUp, Columns, User Defined Styles, End Notes and Foot Notes are concerned. But I can't wait till such things come, Writely is my MS Word of the Web for now and I hope it will be the same for you all too.

What is web2.0?

2006-08-14T08:03:00.001-07:00

The dot com fiasco of 2001 has resulted in
the evolution of a brand new concept of delivering content on the internet,
aptly named as Web2.0, as it is a new avatar of the original style of web
design.

Web2.0 is not exactly a new technology, but rather a set of principles and practices, which govern the design and content of sites which knowingly or unknowingly adhere to these principles.

The Web2.0 era lays more stress on providing Services to its users than dishing out the products in the form of releases as done previously.

Some of most popular services provided by the Web2.0 genre of websites are GMail, Wikipedia, Flickr, Amazon, ebay etc. What is common in all these services is that they are not very heavy applications but rather simple open source technologies, which might be hacked and reused by anybody. These sites rely not only on open source but also use light weight scripting techniques like AJAX.
Scripting languages like java script and perl were once decried by the software engineers as pseudo languages. But now these very scripts have become the backbone of quick and simple web applications.

Another essential feature of Web2.0 is that it relies on harnessing collective intelligence. Therefore, these applications are updated and enhanced on a regular basis based on the updates received from the users. The main benefit for the users is that they do not have to wait for new releases to come. Most of these applications may stay in a beta stage for years together. Moreover, this kind of a structure prevents the user from getting stuck between different versions of an application. All users of MS Office know how cumbersome and painstaking it is to maintain different versions of the same document!

Companies like Amazon and Google at first started off with a basic database, and then went on refining it with constant inputs from their users. Eventually they have now created a database which is tailor made to suit their specific requirements.
The online image data website, Flickr is another example! This online database of images allows all users add multiple tags to the images. This enhances the value of the images as now people can dig a lot deeper into the database and find out just the right image which they were looking for!
Point to be noted here is that, unlike as it existed in the Web1.0 era, Flickr does not decide the classification of its database, but has given its users a complete free hand.

Advertising on the internet has also seen some radical changes in the Web2.0 era. Earlier, most online advertisers focused on the major (read very large) websites to promote their wares. And the prevalent mode of advertising was mostly banner ads and pop-ups.
But off late, with the advent of Google's adsense, small, non intrusive ads can find place in almost any web page. Thus not only the major websites but also the small sites which incidentally comprise the major chunk of the web can also be utilized.
Now-a-days any serious website owner would like to use the viral marketing techniques of adsense to popularize his site, rather than going in for the more conventional methods of advertising.

However, apart from the above mentioned features, what really sets Web2.0 apart is the rapid growth of blogs. Earlier, people used to have personal web pages on which they voiced their thoughts. But Blogs have given a new dimension to the concept of freedom of expression. Use of RSS feeds have given a further boost to blogging as now one can access the blogs of his choice right from the desktop of his computer!

Web2.0 also encourages the application builders to break free from the PC Platform and explore the yet mostly uncharted territories of hand held devices, and other communication channels. One such example is iTunes, which lets users download music files to their iPods using their PC as a local database.

Lastly, Web2.0 always lays stress on rich user interface. That time is not far away when we will be using most of the applications like spreadsheets, word processors, email and chatting softwares etc on the web. With the vastly improved internet connectivity of today, the concept of keeping local databases and applications is a passe; the future is in web based applications like Gmail and Writely!

FullShot 9.0 – A Review

2006-06-23T07:51:00.000-07:00

Full shot is a shot that shows the human figure from head to feet, with some part of the body to give context.- Wikipedia

FullShot is a comprehensive screen capture tool, designed for Windows users, which does justice to its name by more than one count.While the market is flooded with screen capture softwares, and even some image processing biggies provide screen capture utility e.g. Paint Shop Pro, FullShot comes with a huge array of image capture capabilities which mark it clearly as the pick of the lot.

The Standard version of this application provides Full Screen Capture, Window Capture, Region Capture, and Object Capture. But what steals the show away is the nifty Title & Menu Capture and Freehand Capture features of FullShot. Using the Title & Menu Capture feature, only the Menu bar along with its drop downs may be captured without having to worry about the background. Freehand Capture goes a step ahead and lets the user define his own capture area of any shape or size!

Very often capturing long images like that of web pages is quite a pain, because they extend to more than one screen view. The only available option is to take shots in bits and then join the images using some Image Processing software like PhotoShop.

The Document Capture utility of FullShot makes such efforts a thing of the past, all you have to do is indicate which document/window to capture, and the automatic process will take over. The screen will scroll on its own as FullShot takes consecutive images and provide a real ‘FullShot’ of the image, no matter how long vertically or horizontally the image is.
Besides this, special effects may be used to capture images such as Drop Shadow, Tear, Stroke and Glare.

FullShot allows nine different ways of capturing images, including the ability to capture images from multiple monitors!

After capturing an image, further annotations may be added to it using the various options provided right there in the FullShot application, thus eliminating the need to use any other software for enhancing the images.

While taking a print of the images, FullShot not only allows you to add Headers and Footers, but also to add your own Notes to the image. Printing multiple images on a single page is also possible.

Among the other image utilities, FullShot provides a Thumbnail Viewer to view all images in a folder and an Image Explorer, which scans a drive for images of different formats. In total FullShot supports 19 different image formats. An image may be converted from one format to any other with the click of a button. The 'Batch Con' feature allows you to convert images in batches.
But what if you are not sure about which format is best suited for your document? FullShot's answer for this is the unique 'File size comparison' feature, which gives the size of the image in various formats.

The Enterprise edition of FullShot comes with a proprietary Image Database, which can be local or even on a remote server!!

For every new image record, apart from a Title, Subject and Description, Keywords may be associated with each Image. These Keywords are stored in a separate Master Keyword Table, and may be used to search the database.

The Enterprise edition also provides the facility of emails, with a proprietary Contact Database. Any image in the database may be sent to any or all the contacts without having to even checkout the image!

Exporting images as a Flash file is also possible in the Enterprise Edition.

So when you have tried all other ways to take just the right shot for your manual, then give FullShot a try, taking snapshots was never so much fun before!