TechNayak(mirror)

Loosk like the war cry for the Office wars has just resounded, Google docs just released two new features in their host of features. You can have different revisions for your spreadsheet, basically rollback to an older version if you wish to discard changes( cvs, perforce etc all built into applications, hmmm, now there is a concept).

The other offering is the ability to share your spreadsheets usign a link that is provided. This link gives a direct path to the spreadsheet and need not be integrated with a google account. Good one !

So you work at a company and need to call your peer on the other side of the world, but the problem is, you don’t who he is or how to contact him. CogMap has the perfect solution to this, CogMap is a  Oraganisation Chart wiki that lets you see, edit and create organisation charts online.

There are already some sample org charts available of google ,  Microsoft , yahoo etc. This could be a boon in the making for many companies with vast number of employees and many verticals(or is it horizontals). There have been many such tools which implement org charts , but have been thick clients and limited. With the new web based , wiki like look and feel, things could actually start moving.

Ok, so we have so many new releases of a software , that by the time the development activity finishes there are almost three or four iterations to each of the individual components. Alex Russel of Dojo has realised this problem and has written very small wrapper classes to include the master dojo bootstrap. This could always point to the most stable build, but im not so sure of that.

<script src="http://download.dojotoolkit.org/dojo_0.3.1.js"></script>

and release 0.4

<script src="http://download.dojotoolkit.org/dojo_0.4.1rc2.js"></script>

Thats all you got to do, you can use the dojo.require() to pull in any more packages and also include  custom packages from your local server to work in sync with this. Now thats simple isnt it.

Ok, so we have a bunch of startups on code searching, all in the onset of Googles very own version. Now we have krugle, a code search engine. Techcrunch reports that the open source search engine Nutch is handling the backend. I like this site for a variety of reasons, one of the main being, I can see code. Weh you search for terms you do see code in the search page. Apart from this the top bar has two distinct features, techpages , which shows pages related to the term that is searched and also Projects, which shows projects related to the search term that you are working on. To see a sample, i searched for WordPress and yes i could see certain wordpress hacks, techpages showed me relevant pages on wordpress and best of all projects showed me plugins to wordpress and similar products. Really cool, definetely a great place to check out the alternatives to a product or a service. So you want a “email component or java”, run it on krugle and see for yourself

Official Google Blog: Adieu to Google Answers

Well, looks like Google Answers will make the trip to the unknown. Google Anwers, was a project intended to be a place where people could ask questions about anything and everything, and other users would reply back. Users could even have questiosn with rewards, where the person posting the question has a sum of money on the question and if he/she is satisfied with the answer a person gives, the money can be redeemed by the user who answered.  The questiosn were well categorised and I really expected the service to grow at least on the technical front as lot of people, especially open source users have had troubled times with some configuration or a piece of code that just didn’t work. Looks like the response on this one was poor and Google has decided to shut down the service pretty soon.

I agree that a computer without an internet connection is passe’ , but have we ever thought of the people deprived of the five basic senses. Im talking about the blind, deaf, disabled people and their accessability of computers. Thankfully many companies are investing dollars to help better their experience with the computer. Google’s T V Raman , a visually disabled engineer, who has been striving to develop better usability of computers for the blind has just conjured up another innovation. This time around its Audio Captcha’s.

Captcha, is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, a method based on the Turing Test to differentiate a Person from a bot. These are the blurred letters that usually preceede a submit button , that you have to enter to prove that you are not a bot simulating signup. Google has just developed an Audio Captcha mechanism in which the captcha is a simple series of words or numbers narrated by the computer, which the user has to enter after completion of the audio. To prevent bots from imitating this, as its not hard to find speech to text convertors, a little amount of distortion will be applied to the audio piece.

I sincerely appreciate the efforts by Google to help make the web a better place. Its a satiating feelign knowing that, when people are busy developing richer and stylish UI, there is still some innovation in the area for the underprivelleged. Kudos Google and TV Raman !!

Ok, so you have discovered a great new integration service, which integrates your yahoo, gmail, and all other mails to one place and gives you a single point of control. The site requires you to give them your login credentials, and you do. Now, how sure are you of the site that you just gave your email passwords to.

have you even thought about how dangerous an activity that is, take for example your gmail username and password, thats basically giving away your calendar, checkout, adwords , orkut and hundred other services’ password. Think about it, you mail box has all your information, credit card numbers, financial statements, personal letters, addresses and other critical data that you wouldnt want other people to view. A lot of people don’t think about all this when they do give out their passwords.

Please and I mean please don’t treat your personal credentials so lightly, it can prove very dangerous. You never know, one day you may start getting charged for things you never bought. Here are a few tips ….

•  Make sure the site is authentic, read more about them.
•  Look for the SSL certificate if any .
•  Check for phising, everybody remembers the ICICI bank fraud site which got access to many ICICI bank accounts and also ork0t. Mozilla 2.0 and IE7 both have phishing filters, make sure they are ON .
• Make doubly sure that you really want to use such a service. A little more work is always more secure than a service.
• Look for a “Skip This Step” , there is alwas another alternative.
• Don’t ever give out your financial site credentials, this is a serious no no

If the users become more aware, Im sure such sites will stop misusing personal data. We will also have lesser spam to deal with and also more security. Stop complaining that the internet is not secure, learn how much ever you can on staying secure.

EyeOS free Server | Web desktop - Web OS - Web office - your data and applications everywhere

EyeOS is a web based OS which hopes to be the perfect OS for teh web, with a folder browser, social bookmarking, Office suite, calendar, music player, photos, galleries and other data management tools, eyeos sure looks like a thing to watch out for. The thing that impressed me abotu eyeOS was that it would be free and open source for people to integrate their apps into its space. Good, especialy since Google docs and others are eying the office automation space. eyeOs has got absolutely no funding and is currently running on donations. They have three versions, which is downloadable and has varying range of features.  Here is wishing them luck!!

Just love the entire process …

Open jacob is java Rapid Application Development toolkit based on the eclipse framework. It helps creating new components, and Richer UI. THe framework looks really good from its look and also provides built in compnents which can eb deployed on any J2ee container.

These are the features of jACOB,  and also it seems a pretty reliable also. Some of their offerings include a ready to customise DB app and also AJAx based mailing component. There is also a 2D drawign framework and there is also a demo here which tries emulating the components of Visio to prve that something like visio can be made on the web. WOW, now that would be great. check out the demo here and also see the screenshot below.