2006 December « TechNayak(mirror)

Breaking the browser back button

December 24, 2006 at 10:40 am | In Tips,Tricks and code | No Comments

Thanks to ajaxian, I found this small but effective javascript code which doesn’t allow you to go away from a page unless you close the browser. Dont know if this is a good or a bad thing, but here it goes.

window.onunload = function(){ location.replace(document.location); };

Zoho adds wiki to its suite

December 22, 2006 at 12:08 pm | In Cool Web 2.0 Sites, Web News | 1 Comment

Not long back , I had written about Zoho, a premier office substitue with a class of its own. These people just keeping adding more and more features to their already big basket of offerings. The latest however is the Wiki. We all know that wiki as a product is taking on new proportions. Its used for lot of online collaborative activities.Wikis are used as a control area, a global messageboard of sorts and its a world of help for people working in a project to document and edit common documents . Its only fitting that such a concept gets incorporated into an office suite. Great going Arvind. I think the next thing you got to do is create a more social like environment to promote more interactions amongst people using such products. Its definetely worth a thought.

check out the feature demo and also the developer blogs here

BSNL upgrades bandwidth for all users

December 22, 2006 at 7:28 am | In Web News | 2 Comments

The state govt run BSNL is going to increase its bandwidth for the same price in an effort to get more audience in the rural and also the Urban areas. BSNL plans to invest almost 2000 crores to up the bandwidth of all users to 2Mbps. The connection speed has increased by almost 8 times while the download speed will apparently increase by almost 3 times. Its a great move by BSNL who are facing a lot of criticism for their poor service. I think this is a great strategy to shut the critics and also totally wow the people to provide such incredible speeds at such low costs. Cant really picture how the other internet majors are going to counter this move, its definetely within their capacity to increase bandwidth as the existing lines support such speeds but the infrastructure to manage it all is infact the most important.

BSNL also realises the popularity of Online gaming and is going to announce a Online gaming service with fixed prices of Rs 100 and Rs 200. Will be a relief for all Indians in the World(of warcraft that is )

Easy Error Logging in Javascript

December 21, 2006 at 4:31 pm | In gyaan | No Comments

Ok, so there is firebug now to profile and even debug javascript. But supposing you are developing pages the old fashioned way and you want to log values from javascript but dont want to deal with those messy alert boxes, here is a relief. the following code will create a seperate log window where you can log messages.

function log(message) {
    if (!log.window_ || log.window_.closed) {
        var win = window.open("", null, "width=400,height=200," +
                              "scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,status=no," +
                              "location=no,menubar=no,toolbar=no");
        if (!win) return;
        var doc = win.document;
        doc.write("<html><head><title>Debug Log</title></head>" +
                  "<body></body></html>");
        doc.close();
        log.window_ = win;
    }
    var logLine = log.window_.document.createElement("div");
    logLine.appendChild(log.window_.document.createTextNode(message));
    log.window_.document.body.appendChild(logLine);
}

After this to log any message, just use log(”message”). for example this piece of code. If you dont want the log, just replace the log(0 function with an empty one.

for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    log("This is log message #" + i);
}

CSS is now 10 years old

December 21, 2006 at 4:14 pm | In gyaan | No Comments

Its ten years since CSS was developed. The W3C technology for design, CSS is celebrating this feat by holding a year long design contest, which will be judged by CSS co-authors Bert Bos and Hakon Wium Lie. These designs will feature in the CSS10Gallery.

CSS has redefined the way web applications are designed. I pesonally remember my first experience with CSS, I made a div tag appear in red, and fromthat day forward , I never wrote a web page without css involved.

With CSS, markup is separated from style, enabling accessibility agents to convey information to users with disabilities. CSS style sheets allow for the same document to be viewed with different devices, ranging from color monitors to mobile phones and printers.

Three cheers to CSS which makes it the best thing around. Wanna know what CSS can do, check this earlier post out.

Ajax Based DNS search

December 20, 2006 at 4:26 pm | In General | 1 Comment

Check out AjaxDNS

Thanks to Ajaxian, I found this new ajax based service which provides DNS based search results. Really cool, for webmasters and others alike.

It includes the following searches

Live DNS
Whois Search
IP Whois
HTTP Headers
RBL Search
Ping
DNS Traversal

Make and Elf of yourself

December 20, 2006 at 2:47 pm | In Cool Web 2.0 Sites | No Comments

Well thanks to InfoWorldTechWatch I found this great new 2.0 site, ElfYourself, which brings in the holiday spirit. The service lets you make an elf out of yourself, just upload a photo , crop it down to the face and your done. They even give you a number to call where in you can record your voice for the animation. Its really great!!! See my Elfomorphosis below. Happy Hoidays all…

http://www.elfyourself.com/?userid=6a75523a8da3c3ac2e4ec6fG06122000

Doomsday for enterprise software?

December 20, 2006 at 2:18 pm | In General | No Comments

I just read this great article on the growth and concerns of Oracle. Well Oracle might be in a bigger soup than what people expect. They spent about 10 Billion for PeopleSoft and 5 Billion for Siebel and things dont look picturesque. It goes to show you that big acquisitions need not mean big clients and more revenue.

The growth of the second quarter has apparently been down for oracle. The major blame is on how the concept of a software is changing. The first quarter posted profits of 80% but second quarter showed only 28%.

Im sure most of the peoplesoft and siebel clients will only rethink after being freed by licensing agreements. All the disgruntled clients now are free to rethink. Application sales have hit rock bottom, with SOA’s becoming more and more compatible to reuse and also lot of open source extensions to existing apps, sales/upgrades have become sparse. Also another factor would be the Software as a service model , companies like salesforce who are delivering hassle free software at low prices and extremely fast. Gone are those days where you would wait for a customised version of your enterprise software.

There are also service companies who provide such applications in a redistributable license, basically use a single licensed version to cater to all their clients. All in all things look chaotic for the marketing teams of such enterprises. I think its time, such companies rethink their strategies and adapt to the changing times. Is it doomsday for Enterprise software?

Yahoo and the Page Views Factor

December 20, 2006 at 2:05 pm | In General | No Comments

There is a new post on the Yahoo blog, which explains how yahoo has perceived the recent news of Myspace snatching the Yahoo’s page views crown. Yahoo goes onto explain that metrics such as page views and unique visitors are passé and that they were valid until technologies like flash and Ajax took over.

I totally agree with whatever they are saying. It makes absolutely no sense to judge a good site by the page views it gets. There are a lot of single page sites nowadays like meebo, blogmusik etc which cater to all the sites needs in just one page. Does that mean that its not a good site? The concept of unique visitors is also screwed up. Lots of people using wifi nowadays keep moving from one cell to another, every new node will have a new ip and unique visitors concept is obscure in these cases.

We need a new metric to handle this, it definitely will be something to do with userbase, geographical distribution, time spent on the site and other things or probably a combination of both. Only time will tell…

.docx reader / converter

December 19, 2006 at 8:06 am | In gyaan | 10 Comments

Updated : Please use Zamzar to convert docx files. Apart from this they even allow other file type conversions and they are the best I have seen so far.

There is a new format for word document and its the .docx format. It is a combination of XML architecture and ZIP compression for size reduction. Read more about the format here. People using pre office 2007 will find it a pain to deal with these documents. You have to download patches to prior versions of office. Else you could use the online converter to read those documents. I found this site through lifehackers tips and thought would share it with you all.

You could try these services as well

docx2doc

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