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Showing posts from 2005

A brand new day

After trying to blog using every possible tool in town. I am blogging using an email client. Just finished installing Apache, MySQL and the complete website in less than 20 minutes. XAMPP really makes things so simple. 5 mintutes to install the server software and 15 minutes to setup my own site. This is really cool. P.S.: I guess blogging using email is not working so I had to post it using Blogger :(

Viamatic foXpose downloaded 4000 times in 5 days

When we started making the Viamatic Tabnail extension we thought it would be the one which would be downloaded more. It has a very original design and I still feel it is a better extension than foXpose . The funny part is that it took a few weeks to get the final design of foXpose ready. Initially we started out with a sidebar extension, then we switched over to another design. After trying out many combinations we finally settled in for the canvas inside the tab. It might seem easy to make but getting the design right was a real headache. We first got rid of the image and replaced it with teh canvas. But this design had a flaw, how would you know if the page has loaded. So we had to keep both the image as well as the canvas. The second thing was as the number of tabs increased it would be impossible to show the canvas. That was another design challange. All this seems like smart talk now but all I can say is that it was a really good effort that went into designing the Tabnail exte

Bye! Bye! Google. I am back to Yahoo!

Its been more than a week and google has been acting really funny. The only way of getting onto google is to use the IP. That is really frustrating. I have changed the default search engine from google to Yahoo! Whenever I wish to search for anything all I see is the problem with the DNS. I really don't know if its a problem with thier hardware or someone has hacked into the google plex. These two lines are what I normally see when I unknowingly use google. " The connection has timed out The server at www.google.com is taking too long to respond. " The outages seem to be increasing at such an alarming rate that now its almost impossible to log onto gmail. The only way of checking mail on gmail is through a mail client. I started using the IP but that does not make life any easier. So finally after being frustrated I am back with Yahoo! If you use Yahoo! as the default search engine in firefox it hardly matters if its Yahoo!, MSN or Google. Next time if you do not get thr

Working in India.. doing the odd jobs... and yet feeling proud..

This is more of a rant against out sourcing and the way indians are taking up jobs. In a way outsourcing is good but on the other hand we as indians are doing third grade jobs. Most indians when they join a college hardly know what they wish to do. Even once they finish their studies don't know what they want. If being a doctor was cool every other person would be going in for that. So like sheeps everyone is following the set standards. Since being in the IT sector is cool (lots of money) every tom, dick and harry seems to be jumping in. With the dumb ass projections comming up that the IT sector would boom and blah! blah! the innocent victims are the indians who are jumping in the band wagon. Where will they be 10 years from now? No one knows and no one cares right now. We have jobs and lots of jobs and that is all that matters. And this is one thing which really makes me sick. People are acting like sheep and will end up stacked up in a cubicle for the next 10-20-30 years of the

www.vivekjishtu.com

Finally bought vivekjishtu.com and got it registered. So now the domain vivekjishtu.com points to this page. Nothing earth shattering in it. But just wanted to write it down. Okay as for the " next big thing " I just hope it does not turn out to be a dud. So all I can do is keep shut about it :| But still I would like to add a brief overview of what the so called NBT ( next big thing ) is. It will allow you to blog anytime, anywhere. It will allow you to write and compose emails. Plus the coolest part is that it would be purely plugin based. And the final cool point would be that it would be cross platform and would work on IE (Internet Explorer) and firefox. It will support blogger, wordpress, gmail, yahoo, hotmail and a few others. Adding a webmail or blogging software would mean writing a little plugin for the NBT. I guess I have written quite a lot. Most of it is right now in my brain but I hope it should not take more than 15-20 days to get a working prototype. Any VC

Viamatic Thumb Tab

Yesterday launched the extension for firefox that shows thumbnails in firefox tabs. The good part is that all of it happens in realtime. There are a few problems using this extension. The biggest one being that it uses quite a lot of memory. This problem should be solved in the next version. My foXpose extension seems to be hanging no where. I will try and wrap it up in the next two days. The " next big thing " seems to be hanging nowhere.

Broadband in India a pathetic lie

With the kind of tarrif structure broadband can never ever take off in India. I guess there are a bunch or morons who make the telecom policy in India who have little or no idea what a KB, MB or GB is. To have a sample of this take a look at the tarrif plans offered by BSNL in thier GPRS segment. Rs. 199 rental scheme 10p per kb which works out to be roughly Rs. 100 per MB :) and the other scheme is Rs 345 which offers unlimited download. I mean where is the logic in offering the 199 scheme. Its is to screw up the normal person who has little or no idea about these things. One of my friends had opted for the 345 scheme but the wise guy at the exchange changed it to 199 and my friend got a bill of Rs. 12,000. Cause he had downloaded 100 MB of data. So if he had got the 345 scheme he would pay Rs. 345 but due to the staff who know little about KB, MB or GB he would have to shell out 12,000. Then comes the other offering by BSNL and the other private players. Broadband with limits, 1 GB i

AJAX Yahoo! Mail 25000 downloads in two months.

I guess finally the AJAX Yahoo! mail extension would reach 25000 downloads in about 2 months. Plus the greasemonkey AJAX Yahoo! mail user script is also not doing all that bad. It was a little suprising to see so many people actually using it. Today I finally submitted the user javascript for opera, lets see if it works out the same on opera. Its been a very strange two months for me. I resigned from my first real job :) After such a long time I am doing what I have always wanted to do. I hope that our next three extensions will be released with firefox 1.5. Since the two of those use the canvas tag introduced in 1.5 it makes sense to launch them once 1.5 is launched. As for the third extension it is a mix of flock + greasemonkey. I hope I am not spilling out too many beans. Two months and a few extensions, somehow its not too bad. I just hope XUL web applications somehow hit big time. All it needs is a little push from google. Technorati Tags: flock , greasemonkey , AJAX , firef

Unable to open Wordpress.com and Flock.com

This is a very funny thing. I am unable to open flock.com and wordpress.com and I have literally no idea why its hapenning. The other site I remember I tried to open was zimbara.com (spellings could be wrong. These sites simply timeout. I had to download the flock browser using http://flock.com.nyud.net:8090/. I have no idea what the servers at nyud.net are doing with such huge amounts of traffic that they seem to generate. But it works and that is what really matters. Technorati Tags: wordpress , wordpress.com , flock , flock.com

Flock and the first impression

Well I will start with the first impression. It seems clumsy at best. I know I am being harsh, but it seems to be out of place on my computer. The one thing firefox got right was that they were not trying to impose the browser on you. You are given a very basic shell which you can extend as you wish. If you like themes you download it, but if you don't, nobody imposes it on you. That is one place where I see it as a negetive. But in anycase these are very early days and its just a developer preview. So things could change. Besides that I kinda like this blog editor. I am also making a similar extension for firefox, "ezBlogPad" but I have not even started that as yet. So that will be completed once I start it. Other that that it seems just like firefox with a clumsy theme. "The theme is soothing and blah!", says xyz. I don't care how soothing it is. It is trying to fit in with all my other programs and it looks like an alien. But that is just my first impress

Flock the social browser

I finally started my preview of the flock browser. Just started it and this is my first post from it. I will test it out today and lets see if this becomes my default browser :)

Guest House

Image
Guest House Originally uploaded by Vivek Jishtu . Its been nearly 3 years. Wow thats a really long time since this pic was taken.

Getting a hang of XBL and HTC

What behaviors are to IE, bindings is to Mozilla. I love this post, as I am writing after quite some time. All day long I read and studied a lot about these things. Here are some links you might like to check out. http://dean.edwards.name http://webfx.eae.net/ http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/ http://webmasterworld.com/ There were a couple of more links but I guess I forgot to bookmark them. Anyhow these links should give you enough information about XBL and HTC. The concept seem so stupid at first but they really make a lot of sense.

Airtel GPRS sucks

I feel a kind of emptiness that I have not felt in a very long time. I just wanted to write it down somewhere. Really do not know what is going in my head. I just feel a little too confused. Just a week back things seemed so clear and then there are doubts cast all over. I think this phase will get over soon enough but till then need to put my head in the right place. Eventually I would like to work on XUL, XForms and SVG. But cannot say what and where things will lead to. I am just not thinking of technology all that much. But let’s see, tomorrow is another day. I am using a GPRS connection now and it simply crawls. It refuses to log into Google Talk, plus there is no way I can use any S/W to upload the blog articles. I have to log into Blogger and post them from there. I hope I can get a broadband soon enough. I had forgotten that net can be soooo.. slllooooooooooowwwwww. It’s taken me 3 hours to post this, and I am not kidding. Anyhow I did a couple of things du

The good, bad and ugly of "Regular expressions"

“Regular expressions” is one topic, which I love to hate. It needs to be used every now and then but the problem is that I never seem to get it. It’s been so long that whenever I try to write my own I simply make a simple search of google and I normally find it. So that is the max I know about RE. Lets see when I can finally get over this. Maybe someday.

My tryst with XML

I have been using XML in some form or the other for about 6 years now. Till about 2 years back I thought of XML as just another way of storing data. I guess I never really got over the fact that it was so simple and just some sort of extended HTML. Over the years I got to learn another language TCL, at first I simply did not enjoy working in it. I just could not stand the way the syntax was. It felt so restricted. I always programmed in C/C++ or some or the other flavor of BASIC. But learning TCL was like unlearning a lot of things. But by the end of it I started liking how it worked. Its not just me but a lot of people I know who develop some kind of phobia or I should say a mental block to technologies and concepts. The biggest place where I lag today is Regular Expressions. I can write the simpler ones but as things get trickier I will “google” is rather than write it myself. That is one place where I really need to work. Anyhow I guess I have gone far away from the topic. The proje

Microsoft, a misunderstood company.

Need to write this one. It has been going round and round in my head.

Just ignore this post.. will modify it soon

When ever I think of Microsoft I feel that it is one company which is talking a lot of flak for things it’s not done. They are being called slow to respond to a lot of things. Windows Vista is 1-2 years late. But when we see things in a larger perspective can anyone ever say how much time is required to build an OS of that magnitude. When everybody is trying to cut you right, left and center. Let’s see how many OS companies there are, Microsoft, Redhat, Novell, IBM, HP, SUN, Apple and a few others. But can any of those OS’s except for windows support such a diverse range of H/W. I doubt it. Most of the times companies take decisions which would give them leverage. I will continue this some other time as I am really sleepy but I will complete this one soon. Okay just for the record, I think Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google as of today are one of the best in there class. Not a very new statement. But what I really mean to say is that they have grown to proportions where it’s hard for them to

AJAX + XUL the next big thing

The coolest thing on the web would be AJAX + XUL. It is the next logical step. With Xforms and other implementations still not ready. AJAX + XUL will make an impact that you will soon see across the web in the next few months. Stay tuned.  

Google = BETA

Google should soon rename it self to Google the BETA company. There is hardly a product from Google that is not in BETA. Except for search I guess all other products are in BETA. So if anything goes wrong they have the safety net with them. “ You were using a BETA product. ” Google seems to take less responsibility than it should take. Take for instance GDS 1.0 BETA was launched followed by GDS 2.0 BETA. When was the final GDS 1.0 launched? They have started a revolution where nearly every company is trying to release BETA products. Not to the BETA testers but to the general public. I mean if for some reason there is a major bug in GDS 2.0, Google Talk or even for that matter Gmail or Orkut. The BETA tag will be there to bail them out. What happens to the poor guy who tried to do the beta testers work for them. Google is getting free beta testers or should I say free guinea pigs to test out there products.

Ladies and gentleman XML has arrived

Please join your hands for XML. In the next few months you will see just about everything in XML. After a huge bang and an almost eerie silence XML will be out again. This time to stay for a very long time, XHTML has more or less replaced HTML in most websites that are still being maintained. Soon you will XML in nearly everywhere. Every language has more or less some way or reading and writing XML. At first XML might overwhelm you. But once one gets the concepts right it’s almost like a walk in the park. I for one have loved binary formats but once in a while if it’s a plain text format I would prefer to use XML.

Yahoo! AJAXed 2000+ downloads in 2 days

Here I go again. Anyhow I had posted a couple of new and old posts but I guess blogger of I screwed up. I will update my blog in the next 2-3 hours if I am still awake till then.

Yahoo! AJAXed 2000+ downloads in 2 days

WOW! After so many years I updated my site. It was last updated in 2002 and made sometime in 2001. http://geocities.com/vivekjishtu http://vivekjishtu.tripod.com/ No more tables. It still looks like the older site except that now it is resolution independent. I also got whatever pictures I had clicked with my digital camera in 2001-02 onto flickr   http://www.flickr.com/photos/60174443@N00/ Other than that the Yahoo! AJAX plug-in has been downloaded about 2000 times in the past two days. https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1127&vid=5326 ( Firefox extension http://greasemonkeyed.com/scripts/show/1530   ( Greasemonkey script Will hopefully write after some time. Hopefully a plug-in for the google side bar.

Captains log 23rd August

Captains log day 23, wow I always wanted to write that. Anyhow today was one sweaty day. I guess Aman will finally make the XUL application ( I am in love with the concept of XUL, and such kinds of applications. I just hope we can make something using XUL, web services and XSLT. I know all I am doing it throwing big words that mean little or nothing. Anyhow while I am at it I finally learnt XSLT, I had been avoiding it for a rainy day. Finally I did learn XHTML, XML, and the wonderful XSLT that converts XML into XHTML. Wow! This one looks so good with so many acronyms that I will go crazy explaining people what each means. As far as the Viamatic WebMail++ application is concerned, I guess it’s more or less a DUD(. Anyhow I learned a lot of JS and DHTML while making the script/extension for Firefox. So even though no one will use it, I did learn a lot while making it. I hope this effort does not go waste. So far I have learned DHTML/XHTML/XML/XUL/XSLT/AJAX and couple of other acronyms

Yahoo! Mail AJAXed

Worked my ass of on the Yahoo! AJAX thingy but I guess the whole thing is just turning out a waste of time. No one seems to use it. Guess have to stop thinking of making free stuff and focus on products where there is money. So in the end NO MORE OPEN SOURCE WORK.

XUL the final frontier

Wow! I like the title of this post.  Actually this is the next in series to GBrowser. It could be called part III of the series but I guess a new title is apt for it. Okay going ahead with the reason for creating GBrowser somehow I feel XUL is the by far the biggest reason for it.  You might think I am going back on my words and whatever I said so far makes little sense to what I am saying now. The big “ Evil ” company has a technology XAML. In a way that is the Web 2.0 or should I say Web 3.0, in a way the application would work online but with an interface that would sit on your computer. SO WHAT??? Okay now if M$ gets to rule the web with there new technology where does Google go. For XAML applications to be built and run it would require the latest H/W and the latest S/W Windows Vista or the least would be Windows XP SP2. That is where the browser scores I mean GBrowser will scores. It will hopefully use XUL that is the XML used to define the interface which in a way is a lot like

GBrowser? Why another browser Part - II

So the point I made in Part – I was that Google needs to make there own browser because it would never want to be controlled by the “ Evil ” Empire (Personally I seem to like the “ Evil ” Empire and would never call them that unless they mowed me down() Okay now to the more important point of having there own browser. Let’s talk about Web 2.0 or maybe Web 3.0 or whatever the next level of web is. Today if you want to open a calendar application. You would open up http://calendar.yahoo.com/ or something similar. What if instead of a simple html page a complete application opened up in seconds and you could simple make the changes online. As a developer you could make changes to the application anytime as it is on your servers and as a user you would be able to access that application from any device (computer) on this planet as long as you are on the net. So what does all this have to do with a Firefox, GBrowser, Safari or IE?? Firefox has XUL okay it will also support XForms and SVG s

GBrowser? Why another browser Part - I

This is what has been going in my head round and round for quite sometime now. Why-O-Why? Is Google interested in Firefox and its developers? That seems like a stupid question. Well they need a browser that they can call there own. Maybe “GBrowser” or whatever they may call it later. Why GBrowser??? Browser in a way is the future OS. So who so ever has the browser rules the planet. Now you might think I am talking like a dumb ass.  Well there is one guy who is really smart with all this “ Steve Jobs ”. Mac for a very long time did not have a brower that Apple made. So those guys spent a lot of time and developed safari of course they used the Konquers source code or to be on the right track KHTML sources to make their own browser. So now Mac controls there own market unlike earlier when Microsoft was controlling the Mac market with IE being the default browser for the Mac. So where is all this leading to. Well today if you want to search for anything you normally go to Google (at least
Way too much work and yet so little time :P Wow! I love to complain. Okay have too much work plus the damn laptop is stuck with the dealer, just hope i get it soon. My blog writer is stuck. Nothing hapenning with it for 2 weeks now. I hope I can release it in 2-3 weeks time. Just wishfull thinking :D
A wet wet day to start with. Got drenched the moment I stepped out of the house. Had to come back in and change :D After that the day was, really don't know how to define it. Long and very long, almost no work worth anything was done. Stared at the screen for hours without much output. Had way too much going in my mind. I just wish life was a little more simpler. It seems to be filled with way to many uninitlilised variables which seem to point to nothing or mostly dangling pointers. Wow am I a genius or what? Well the good things for today has to be setting up WebDAV and ftp access in eclipse. Just before I forget Eclipse is so damn cool. I mean you can literaly use it for anything you fancy. Name the language and it has a plugin. The SWT is one great way of working. No more stupid looking swing applications. Though JDK 1.5 has improved the complete look and feel of swing, but native look is something that rocks. Well its a long journal I've written so far :) I will try to w
So you think you are a hacker just try these sites out: http://laputa.sytes.net:83/ganux/ Try and login into this one as the root awesome JS coding

Checkout these pages

Yahoo! Search MSN Search If you see carefully they will look a lot like Google . I ponder why??     
Well today is saturday and its been a long and boring day. The cool partof this day was that I was listning to Capital Disney all day long. They play some really cool music.
Hi there this is my first blog..