Indika’s Web Log

Last weekend saw the launch of Google’s privacy-busting Street View in Norway, and it didn’t take long for locals to spot a traditional Viking welcome for the Great Satan of Mountain View’s spymobile on the streets of Bergen:

Luckily for the Google operative, he was able to outrun the belligerent, rubber-clad locals and make good his escape:

Good stuff. This entertaining spectacle has prompted Norwegian paper Aftenposten to not unreasonably ask “Who’s chasing Google with fish spears?” ®

Share This

Google’s highly anticipated Nexus One “superphone” is released. During the demonstration, Google showcased a variety of the phone’s features, including a very impressive new photo app, voice input, and more.

They’ve now posted a handful of videos showing off each of these features, which we’ve embedded below.The most impressive video of the bunch is called Web Meets Phone. It’s sleek, stylish, and has catchy music — and was clearly inspired by Apple’s hugely successful iPhone ads. Google’s video weighs in at a hefy 1 minute 54 seconds, which obviously makes it long for your average TV commercial.  Still, given the production values of the clip, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google starts running a shorter version of this on TV. It may even splurge for a few extended showings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3htC7YYOf5k

Nexus One: The Big Picture

The phone looks more like the iPhone than any other phone on the market. There is no physical keyboard like the Android-powered Motorola Droid, and the tradeoff is a much slimmer design. The phone is 11.5 mm deep, slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS at 12.3 mm. It is also slightly lighter than the iPhone 130 grams v. 135 grams). The package comes with the phone, a removable battery, 4 GB Micro SD storage card (expandable to 32 GB), USB charger and microphone headset.

The Nexus one has four functional touch buttons at the bottom of the screen (back, menu, home, search) and a navigation trackball pointing device. It also has physical power and volume controls. But most of your interaction with the phone will be through the gorgeous 3.7 inch 480 x 800 OLED capacitive touchscreen. This is the best mobile phone display on the market today, blowing away the iPhone’s 480 x 320 display. The screen is bright and alive, and an absolute pleasure to use.

This phone is also powered by the Snapdragon 1 GHz core processor, which is more than able to handle the Nexus One’s 3D graphics, multiple applications running in the background and heavy browser use simultaneously. Unlike previous Android phones, there is no slowdown or lag when you push the phone’s performance, and less of a need to kill applications to keep the device humming.

On the downside: all this hardware bling is an energy hog. The screen will self adjust brightness and Google is smart about turning down the processor when it’s not being used. But I’ve found battery life to be woefully brief, even by iPhone standards. Officially the phone has up to 7 hours talk time, 250 hours standby, 5 hours of 3G Internet use, 7 hours of video playback and 20 hours of audio playback. Unofficially, I was able to kill the fully charged battery with 1.5 hours of continuous gameplay (Robo Defense) on the full-brightness screen. Be prepared to keep this phone near a charger at all times. You can easily view what’s using the battery, though (the screen is 71% of my current usage), and then adjust the hardware or software usage to maximize battery life.

Overall the Android is a superior mobile device, particularly when paired with Google Voice. Google is calling this the first of the Super Phones. And they may not be exaggerating all that much.

Share This

There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies. Your mobile phone can actually be a  life saver or an emergency tool for survival. Check out the things that you can do with it:

1. Emergency
The Emergency Number worldwide for  Mobile  is 112.

If you find yourself out of the coverage area of  your mobile; network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly this number 112 can be dialled even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.

2. Have you locked your keys in the car?
Does your car have remote keyless entry?
This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their mobile phone from your cell phone.

Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end.

Your car will unlock.

Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you.

Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has  the other ‘remote’ for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).

Editor’s Note: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a mobile phone!’

3. Hidden  Battery  Power
Imagine your mobile battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370#
Your mobile will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery.

This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.

4. How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?
To check your Mobile phone’s serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: * # 0 6 #

A 15 digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe.

When your phone get stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code.

They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless.

You probably won’t get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can’t use/sell it either.

If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.

Share This

Here is the newest YouTube sensation — Evian’s roller-skating babies. Check out the full video:

Share This

I’ve been working on a new Web site for the past few weeks. But instead of doing it alone, I decided to get some help from Firefox extensions. They’ve made my work a lot easier, and they all can be downloaded in just a few seconds.

Aardvark: Aardvark lets you select elements from a Web page and perform various actions on them. I use it to analyze the structure of a page. You can also remove and isolate elements or generate DOM code. I highly recommend it.

Find any code for the color you want.

(Credit: ColorZilla)

ColorZilla: If there’s a color on a Web page that you like, ColorZilla will find the precise code for it and allow you to paste it into your coding program. You can also create custom colors with its built-in palette browser. It saves the most-used colors for easy access later on. It’s powerful, it’s simple, it’s a must-have.

CSS Validator: CSS Validator adds a right-click option in your browser, sending the CSS to the W3C CSS Validator. It opens the results in a new tab. CSS Validator is a nice tool that will come in handy often.

CSSViewer: No Web designer should be working without CSSViewer. The add-on informs you of all the CSS information you’ll need from a site. Simply click on the page you want, open it in the Tools menu, and it will display CSS information. I use it almost every day.

FireBug: Firebug is one of those extensions that you simply can’t be without. It lets you edit, debug, and view CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Once you make a change to the HTML on the site, Firebug automatically displays it in the same pane. It’s extremely powerful.

FirePHP fills you in on all the issues with your PHP.

(Credit: FirePHP)

FirePHP: FireBug is a fine tool for CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, but FirePHP, which only works when you have the FireBug extension installed, creates a full-featured development experience. With the help of both add-ons, you can view the quality of your PHP and find errors. It’s a great aid.

Font Finder: Font Finder allows you to highlight a font you like on any site, right-click on the selection, and after choosing “Font Finder”, view the full CSS text styling of the selection. You can then paste that into your own Web page.

HTML Validator: HTML Validator is an extremely powerful tool available to Windows users only. The add-on gives you feedback about errors on the page. It also lets you know where problems need to be addressed. But unless you’re an advanced Web designer, stay away from this tool. It’s very complicated.

IE View: As long as you’re running Windows, IE View is a helpful tool. The extension adds an “Open in IE” option in the right-click menu, allowing you to quickly open a site in Internet Explorer. It’s a great way to check how a page looks in both browsers.

Java Console: If you want to see how Java applets are running on Web pages, the Java Console is for you. You can monitor and debug applets, and get a full report on their performance.

LinkChecker lets you know where the dead links are.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

LinkChecker: LinkChecker highlights links on any Web site and tells you if the link will direct you to a live site or if it will return a 404. I use it every day.

Poster: If you want to debug servers and make HTTP requests, Poster is the tool for you. It’s easy to use, you can set a content type, and within minutes, you’ll have all the information you need to inspect the results of your HTTP query. Useful.

Style Sheet Chooser II: Style Sheet Chooser II replaces Firefox’s built-in style sheet switcher and allows you to pick an alternate style that will persist on all pages of a Web site. It’s not something you’ll use often, but when you do need something of the sort, Style Sheet Chooser II is the way to go.

Web Developer: If you install any of the extensions in this roundup, Web Developer should be included. It adds a menu and toolbar to Firefox giving you the option to display a page’s style, view and edit CSS, and much more. No Web developer should be without it.

YSlow: YSlow requires FireBug to be installed for it to work, but it’s a great way to find out why your site is running so slowly. It analyzes Web pages and returns issues that are slowing the site down, based on Yahoo’s rules for high-performance Web sites. I use it often to find out where I can improve the speed of my sites. Try it out.

Share This

Google on Monday unveiled a new Web-based tool, Map Maker, that lets people add roads, lakes, businesses, and other features to unmapped regions of Google Maps.

With the tool, people can using tracing tools to build maps in Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, and Vietnam, according to the Google LatLong blog. Also open for cartographic contributions are several Caribbean nations: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s great that this kind of activity can be crowd-sourced (please excuse the jargon) so the community (please excuse the jargon again) can contribute to a project that reduces the amount of digitally uncharted terrain. Google has given us a way to help make a difference that, while small, could collectively become quite large.

But on the other hand, I can think of worthy causes in greater need of charity or free labor than Google. If we’re all going to be augmenting Google Maps with user-generated content, wouldn’t it be nice if we could do it through a more neutral mechanism that lets others benefit from the work, too? Geotagged entries in Wikipedia show on Google Maps, but not Google Maps alone, at least theoretically.

Overall, I think my first reaction will carry the day for me.

That’s because, fundamentally, Google Maps is a service not just consumed by many but also repackaged by many through the availability of the Google Maps API (application programming interface). So until the day Google flips its Don’t Be Evil switch to the “off” position, Google Maps is in effect a public utility, and many can benefit from contributions to the service.

Google Map Maker looks slick, but it would be slicker with better satellite imagery. Parts of Iceland, one of my favorite places on Earth, are too coarse for any tracing.

Share This

Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest computer chip maker, said today it has developed a new solid state drive which is expected to replace hard disk drives in laptop computers.

Samsung said its 256-gigabyte solid state drive (SSD) for data storage is 2.4 times faster than traditional hard drives. The company plans to begin production of SSDs this year.

The new SSD “represents a bold step in the shift to notebooks with significantly improved performance and larger storage capacities,” the company said in a statement.

Samsung described the new SSD - which is 6.35cm long and 9.5mm thick - as the world’s smallest of its kind. It can read up to 200 megabytes of data per second.

It said, citing market research agency iSuppli, that 35 per cent of notebook computers would use the SSD by 2012.

Wow so when we get in to the SSD world we can do this (see below) with our old harddrives

Share This

Today I will be attending the  Las Vegas PHP User Group meeting held at UNLV. This is my fist time at this user groups and eager to meet some cool coders.

Also if there are any interested guys gals here is the link to the usergroup meetup page.

 Meet PHP Developers near you! Come to a PHP Meetup to exchange ideas and talk about code, architecture, innovation, and open source in general. Anyone interested in PHP is welcome!

UNLV Student Union Building

Map to the Student Union Building. There is parking infront of the building.

Most food stalls are open till 8:00 pm. check the exact times here. 

Share This

Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems, is now available in both Silverlight v1.o and 2.0 builds.  Silverlight, while it still has a long way to go to become as widely adapted as Adobe’s Flash, is leading the charge for Microsoft to become a more open eco-system for development.  Moonlight is not a Microsoft project, but Microsoft has been working together with Mono,  an open source project sponsored by Novell, to develop and run .Net client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix, to make a Linux version of Silverlight happen.

While many pundits seem to be stuck in a “Microsoft isn’t open” mode, many indications are that the company has turned a corner, and with Silverlight, and Live Mesh, and the Windows Live platform, seems to be moving toward, if not actually embracing, a more open attitude.  Recent announcements by Google, Yahoo,  MySpace, and Facebook also indicate a general trend toward opening up the software world.

Moonlight Downloads

Share This

Wine and Mono are great project that enable windows applications to run on linux plattform. Wine also enables windows apps on FreeBSD,Mac OS X and solaris.

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

More information can be read in the articles Why Wine is so important, and Debunking Wine Myths. If you are wondering how well a particular application works in Wine, please examine the Applications Database. For installation instructions and step-by-step help with running Wine, take a look at the User Guide.

Wine is free software. The licensing terms are the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1.

Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development  of Linux applications.

Operating Systems

• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Sun Solaris
• BSD - OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD
• Microsoft Windows

Share This