Saturday, November 21, 2009

Google's "Chrome OS" is Bad Evolution

I am a computer engineer. I will always love to see computing evolving in right direction.
Google Chrome OS is bad for evolution of computing.

Computing evolved with Desktop computing and then web apps. Browser Based apps are always slow and faulty, they can never be as robust as a desktop application can be.

After The invention of web services and REST API, I would love to see web enabled desktop Apps.

I love the concept of Portable Apps , When we mix concept of portable Apps and Cloud Based storage, we can achieve much better results.  BUT Google will never let it happen, they are re-inventing all those age old things again in browser. I have posted a small video response on you tube.

Here it is.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Phonetic Translation For Hindi

Hello!! I am an Indian, and for obvious reasons I have many friends on twitter who are also Indian and  we communicate in Hindi very often. Wait!! We don't type Hindi on twitter, because Hindi typing requires a special keyboard (or at least special Input Method), which we typically don't keep with us. Its because we Indian officially work in English Language.

So if you are a foreigner and You see this phonetically typed Hindi, No way you can get it translated to your own language.

So For you I have created a small JavaScript hack so that you can translate Phonetic Hindi into your own language.

This is not for only who are foreigners, If you are Indian & still you have problem in understanding Hindi, here is Tool for you.

Demo

How to develop on your own??

This is a Mashup. I am using 3 different service.

1.Script Convertor

2.Google Translate API

3.YQL (a very useful platform for creating mashup)

To see the source code open the demo page and view source.

I have written only few lines of  of JavaScript to do this.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Coding Bullshit Meter (Outlook Addin)

I thought this will be fun. We developers often get some mail from corporate management, which are completely bullshit to us. How much bullshit it has?? Lets calculate? To calculate I have created a small outlook Add-in (plug-in) which will Display the bullshit percentage on the ToolBar when you select the mail item.


Some of the keywords its uses to calculate the bullshit is this


synergy,strategic fit,gap analysis,revisit,bandwidth,best practice,bottom line,hardball,out of the loop,benchmark,value added,proactive,win-win,think outside the box,fast track,result driven,empower,knowledge base,total quality,quality driven,touch base,mindset,client focus

This is the first time i am developing any kind of Add-In for any application. I used Visual Studio 2010 (beta) 2010 for developing.

You will get many problems,  when you will develop an outlook plug-in. One of the biggest problem I faced was that "Event of 'Item selection change' was not firing".
this.Application.ActiveExplorer().SelectionChange
I finally come to know that you need to keep a reference of the ActiveExplorer all the time in the class.

Ok, this trick worked!!!

Download Source Code Here

I am not creating installer for this (or any kind of set-up). If at all you want to use this, please download the source code and compile on your machine. You might need Visual studio 2010 for this.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Simplest Way to Add code review using CodeCollaborator

One of the simplest way to add code review is by doing a diff on 2 folders. Where Folder1 Contains the previous code and Folder2 contains updated code.

Unfortunately the documentation was lil messy and I was not able to do it.


Here is simplest simplest example.

Use command line client of Code Collaborator and type this command
ccollab adddiffs new  Folder1 Folder2

Instead of new, you can write the review number which you have created at your server.

ccollab adddiffs 12345  Folder1 Folder2

I had problem about this, so posting here. May be this will help you as well.

Good thing is smatbears people are on twitter and they helped me.. Thanks guys.