Vivek live and kickin'

With the news of GSuite legacy being discontinued I needed a way to manage the personal family email accounts. Everyone was in any case using it as a forwarding email address so had to figure out a way to continue using it that way without moving to a paid version as none of these accounts are business critical accounts. The first thing was to move the domain control to CloudFlare. Then in the cloudflare dashboard selected the email setting and requested for access. It took me 2-3 days to get access so not exactly sure how long it will take you or if its out of beta by now. Once you have access to email routing you can forward mails which is the easy part . In this case I'm forwarding the emails to my gmail account. Now the problem is how do you reply or compose mails with your custom email address.  Step 1: Add the following line to the DNS TXT record " include: _spf.google.com" . This will allow google to send emails on your behalf.  Earlier it was:  v=spf1 include:_sp...

Though there is no link between the two, but I am amazed at the amount of work that has gone in making Google Wave . It is a whole new way of working. The first time you look at it it seems really complicated but once you see the demo you see the real power of collaboration. Its wiki + email + forums + blog + .. nearly all the tools one uses for collaboration today. If nothing else it will enable Google Apps to make inroads into the business community. Coming back to fefoo , the amount of work I've done almost feels comical in front of Google Wave . I am almost done with all the features now. I was working on a new feature for the last two weeks but had to drop it as I was unable to get a usable UI. I've tried many ways to implement it but nothing seems to fit in. I will probably move it to the next version.

If you want anonymous results from Google you can use this simple DNS hack to get the results from Google. Since you will never be logged in you will always get clean results and also no searchwiki results. Never realized how much cleaner the results are if you are not logged in. To get the cleaner results add the engine to Opera, Firefox, IE and Google Chrome. Its just a DNS hack so you still get all the results from Google. But its all anonymous since you never log in. All the traffic is sent to Google but the cookies are not set as you can never log in so more or less you can be anonymous. Its still a hack so it can be turned off by Google anytime. But its good while it lasts. This is what you see once you use Google Clean . You are never logged in so the results are anonymous and you will never get any SearchWiki results. You can always go back with a single click incase you want the SearchWiki results. Here is how you add it to Firefox. The search box should be a little blu...

A project I was working for the last 2 years is finally turning out to be something. The idea has gone through half a dozen different versions and variations but I think I finally like what its turned out to be. Still need a bit of work to make it beta. Even if no one else uses it I think it does have the features I have been missing on most search engines. I started out with solving my own problem with searching and in the process have been able to work on tackling the search problem in a somewhat different manner. Given the fact that I don't have the resources or the skill to design a search engine I have tried to solve the problem with the existing search engines. I will hopefully release it in the next few weeks. Still not sure how the reception of this product will be.

Its the last day of my easter vacations and five days of good work. I had initially planned to go out somewhere for these holidays but as nothing really worked out I ended up staying at home. So instead of wasting my time sleeping and watching TV (which I still ended up doing) I thought of finishing my ever growing list of personal projects. But instead of starting work on one of the pending projects I ended up starting yet another project. I searched around for an open social container and I found one but it was in Java and since I don't have any server which would allow me to host the project I ended up working on my own open social container. Well I worked on it for two days and it at least works with most of my samples I created for open social and also a few other gadgets. As of now its completely in JavaScript so in terms of security there is none to speak of, but by the end of it I did make a container and learned quite a lot. The code still looks way to hacked up to put on...

I was going through my past posts and it really feels strange reading the posts. Some of them seemed so funny and totally stupid to say the least. I was compiling the list of posts that get the maximum traffic from google. And the winners are.. The best mobile development platform for hobbyist programmer After trying my hand at every possible mobile platform this was supposed to be a rant and unfortunately got featured on slashdot. This was a classic case of a stupid article getting attention. It was half written and there were a few things missing at the time it hit slashdot. I really wish I had completed it before it was on slashdot. Speed up your AJAX based webapps This one was written keeping in mind something new and happening and today nearly every webapp that I can think of follows it in some way or the other. If nothing else I did start something interesting. Till then none of the webapps were using these caching techniques. I really wish people followed the topic a little more...

A huge list of Orkut/opensocial applications http://opensocialdirectory.org/wiki/Main_Page I saw a couple of other pages where you can get a list of applications. I will be updating this list when I get more urls. If you want to know how you can add the applications to your orkut profile check out this post These are some of the applications which I like. 1) .. will update later Now for some ideas I have. A cool looking wall where friends can draw on the canvas. Add pictures and other things. It could turn out to be a complicated widget but it would work. A widget to use the awesome new service drop.io . If you visit my drop [ http://drop.io/vivekjishtu ] you can drop files, links and notes on my page. And all of it without filling up a single sign up form. A twitter widget where a user can post and keep in touch with other friends. I was making it but still not done with it. Anyhow the next application to be completed would be drop.io

After trashing the open social platform last night I thought of developing a hello world application for the platform. Here are a few screenshots of the sample applications that I built tonight. Facebook application on Orkut Digg on Orkut Reddit application on Orkut If you want any of these open social applications on orkut, you need an account on http://sandbox.orkut.com . You can apply for the sandox here http://code.google.com/support/opensocialsignup/ . Once you have access to the sandbox goto http://sandbox.orkut.com/MyApps.aspx and use the following urls to access the applications. Facebook Application - http://vivekjishtu.com/opensocial/facebook.xml Digg Application - http://vivekjishtu.com/opensocial/digg.xml Reddit Application - http://vivekjishtu.com/opensocial/reddit.xml They are nothing more than simple iframes but it defiantly seems cool the first time you see it. Technorati Tags: facebook , orkut , reddit , open social

Probably I just don't get the whole social networking idea, or at least the idea of having applications inside a social networking websites. So far the coolest facebook app I've seen is the one which lets you view messages from orkut. And that too 'cause you don't have to log into two separate accounts. Other than that I would have to be a teenager to like the kind of applications on facebook. I was going through this video. I've tried really hard to see the interesting bits in the new platform but it seems like such a drag. The whole presentation seemed boring. But like I've said before I just don't get social networking. I have been a little too much on Orkut lately. Not that I think its productive, but it seems like a good place when I am really bored. But if they also add applications like facebook and I have 10+ invitations to try out the latest application I might also end up leaving orkut for good. Right now I am half asleep so am not sure what exact...

I was surfing on digg.com when I cam across this gem of an advert. Its for some pornographic/adult content but seeing something like this on the google adwords network certainly came across as a surprise. Its the first time I came across something like this, I always thought that google would have some filters to stop content like this from getting through. I am really not sure if google has started allowing links for adult content on sites like digg. But someone would have some explaining to do at least in this matter. Technorati Tags: google , adwords , adult

After sticking with the simple blue look Orkut seems to be going in for a major makeover. I have been waiting for a while now [2 hours :)] but nothing new till now. UPDATE: Finally found a link which shows whats coming up. Its on Google System and should give you some idea of whats coming up. I thought it would be a MAJOR upgrade, but it seems a very minor cosmetic change. But then again I have still not seen it live so still waiting for it. UPDATE 1: Some more screenshots on Blogoscoped . Now they seem to be different when posted side by side.

I was a little shocked to see some of the pages on my site http://viamtic.com/ dropping from PR 6 to PR 0 in a day. I don't use any crazy methods to increase my PR. So last night I wasted nearly 2-3 hours to figure out the reason for the change in PR. Did quite a lot a research and was a little shocked to see such a drastic change. The page rank of this blog was down to 0 from 4. When I woke up today I saw my page ranks restored to the original values. So I guess it was a temperory glich that was causing the problem. Technorati Tags: pagerank , PR , Page Rank , Google , , Google PR

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...