Hi All !
Its been a while since I wrote a blog on my page. The reason its because, I’ve started writing for the 4cast.com – The new technology site in the making. Doesn’t mean, I would stop blogging here from now.
4Cast shall also host my blog entries.
Follow me @4cast here : http://www.the4cast.com/author/dwarak/
Follow 4Cast : http://twitter.com/#!/We4Cast
What makes Firefox the best browser ? Open Source ? nah ! HTML 5 ? No… you gotta be better than that. Look, I’m an average user just wanting to have the best browsing experience. I don’t really care if you got HTML 5 or 4 or 6 in it. Well, Its not just me. Its about how Firefox has maintained a significant user base. Obviously, it all comes down to the greatest collection of Addons that the browser has got !
We’ve all enjoyed using addons with Firefox. It’s even more fun to develop one right ? We just wanted to share it to a greater crowd there and thus happened the Add On Development Workshop at Madras Institute of Technology, Chennai on 25th March 2012.
The speaker for the event was Soumya Deb a.k.a Debloper. He got along really well with the audience and was very interactive. Assisting him were Dwaraka – (myself), Harvish and Naresh.
We had the session split up into 2 parts, covering, the need to have Addons- an introduction, setting the developer environment in 1st part and developing addons using online builder in the 2nd part.
All the participants had developed a sample add-on that provided a right click menu option to see all the ‘About:<--->’ pages using a simple javascript code.
Internet connection was slow but, we were able to manage though. Thanks to the MIT hospitality team ! You were amazing :) On the whole, the session was very productive and enjoyable !
Typing always makes us shit crazy ! English typing is a you-have-to-do-it situation. But, most of them using Internet, are non-Englsh speakers. How about typing in that language ? Not many would’ve learnt typing in that language keyboard layout. Phonetic typing might be an answer. But, do we have the right stuff to get it working ?
Yes, we got tools for that. Consider using Google Transliteration. It works, yes. But, native support for Phonetic typing is always preferable, if you want it to work in a cross-application platform scenario – not just the web. Unfortunately, Google has released its Input Method Editor (IME as how it is shortened) only for Mac and Windows operating systems. Poor old, Linux is left back :(
We’ll now see a workaround to this. iBus (Intelligent Input Bus) to the rescue. Let’s see how to get it working in Linux, in our case a Fedora 16 x64 operating sytem.
su –c ‘yum install ibus’
2. Once, the install is complete, you may run it by executing,
ibus-daemon from the run dialog window (Alt+F2)
3. You’ll now see a ‘keyboard icon’ getting displayed in your window
4. Right click the window, click preferences and choose the language you want;
5. Always choose a phonetic language;
6. Now, you’ll see an option to choose between the Input Methods as below.
7. Voila ! You’re typing your language ! (Tamil language screenshot has been given below)
Everything has a story behind it. Do you agree ? Once again, I’m going to stick to the same old style of why and how the Dual Power Phone Adapter came into being.
Okay. Down South in Chennai is where I live. We have the worst power shortages here. Nobody knows when the power may go and come back. Real Worse. So, one problem that usually irritates me is when I talk over my cordless phone and power goes down all of a sudden. Line gets lost. Well, after all it’s just 9 volt DC supply that’s powering the base station from the adapter. Why not, use it with a battery cum AC voltage ? So, you know, we could have it set it up like, whenever the power goes, we can use the battery for alternate supply. Cool, right ? I soon decided to make one.
Okay, that was the story behind and now we go on to the schematics of the circuit.
Essentially, you’ll need
In India, the standard power supply is 230v, 5A. Choose the transformer appropriate for you to step down the input voltage to 9v or required power supply that your phone needs. Check with the product manual.
Find my adapter here :
Below is the Cadsoft Eagle Schematic. Free to share and edit 
For sometime now, I’ve been intrigued on developing apps for Mobile devices and platforms. Sure enough, most of the devices right now, run either Android or iOS. Windows Phone 7 platform is slowly gaining momentum, with big break coming from Nokia’s Deal with Microsoft to produce Win 7 phones from now on.
The following is a simple calculator with text boxes and buttons that runs on Win 7 Phone Platform. Designed exclusively for those running v7.1 and above and supports Metro UI.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;
namespace calculator
{
public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
{
// Constructor
public MainPage()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
int x = Convert.ToInt32(tb1.Text);
int y = Convert.ToInt32(tb2.Text);
int z = x + y;
tb3.Text = Convert.ToString(z);
}
private void button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
int x = Convert.ToInt32(tb1.Text);
int y = Convert.ToInt32(tb2.Text);
int z = x - y;
tb3.Text = Convert.ToString(z);
}
private void button3_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
int x = Convert.ToInt32(tb1.Text);
int y = Convert.ToInt32(tb2.Text);
int z = x * y;
tb3.Text = Convert.ToString(z);
}
private void button4_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
int x = Convert.ToInt32(tb1.Text);
int y = Convert.ToInt32(tb2.Text);
int z = x / y;
tb3.Text = Convert.ToString(z);
}
}
}
The project is hosted at codeplex.com and can be found at http://kanaku.codeplex.com.
Oye ! We’re not talking about, atmosphere. Rather about, the Adobe’s Cross platform application runtime environment – the ‘Air’. Yes, just like any other Adobe product, Air is very dynamic, interactive and easy to deploy.
Adobe Air is a means to create Rich Internet Applications – RIA as how Adobe wishes to call it. If the term Cross-platform application runtime environment is a little confusing, take it to be, Adobe Air is a means to create application that utilize all the best components of both Web-based and Desktop computing to bring rich interaction and utility to the app for the user. Of late, a lot of applications are being built in Web based environment. Some of them over Flash, while some with Flex. Deploying these applications across all other platforms, Desktop (Windows, Linux and Mac ) and Mobile ( iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 ) has always been an issue to be addressed. With so many platforms and application environments, it is not easy at all, to create a run-time architecture that works in sync with all. Adobe Air is meant to eliminate that.
Many Corporate Giants have started shifting towards Adobe Air now. Adobe themselves are using it for employee directory. NASDAQ, Salesforce.com, Model Metrics are some of them using it currently. eBay also uses Air to deploy its Online Auction Application in Desktop environment.
With Air seeing development at such a fast pace, it is so disheartening to see that, Adobe has stopped development for Air in Linux. Why ? ‘Our priorities are currently towards developing the Mobile platform and the action isn’t currently in Linux.’, says adobe’s blog post. It has been over five months, since this happened. But, it was only recently that I noticed it. I wanted to install Tweetdeck, the One-for-all desktop Social Networking App, that uses Air in my 64 bit Fedora 16 Desktop. Though, Open Source Applications are great, there can never be a match to this freeware Tweetdeck. It’s convenient, easy to setup and you got so many tweaks and options to customize. But, there wasn’t any installation package or repository to do it. I desperately wanted to install Adobe Air over my Linux desktop and had finally done it.
Here’s how to do it.
chmod +x <name-of-your-adobe-air-installtion-file>.bin
You’re done. You’ll have installed your application. But, would not receive any more updates. If in future, some application requires a new version of Air to run that, you wouldn’t be able to run it for sure.
sudo rpm --import http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/xenodecdn/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora-15
sudo rpm --import http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/xenodecdn/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-15
su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'
su -c 'yum -y install ld-linux.so.2 gtk2-devel.i686 libdbus-glib-1.so.2 libhal.so.1 rpm-devel.i686 libXt.so.6 gnome-keyring-devel.i686 libDCOP.so.4 libxml2-devel.i686 nss-devel.i686 libxslt.i686 xterm rpm-build'
Run the following command
yum install libgnome-keyring.i686
chmod +x <name-of-your-adobe-air-installtion-file>.bin
Done. Great. You’ll run your Air applications now in Linux. Download your air applications and now, you’ll be able to run it with just a click ! 
Lately, its been all about html5 all around. In internet, magazines and news reports. What and why does it matter to all of us ? Well, for the absolute beginners of the Web, this is how it goes.
HTML is called the Hypertext markup language. During the early 90’s when the Web was still in large development, it was nothing short of an online photocopy of the books and documents in paper. Suppose, say you need to access a book in the web, you’ll get it as a full page, sometimes with nearly 20,000 lines of absolute text. No, images, graphics, nothing. Reading a book seemed much easier compared to reading it online. Whopping 20,000 lines, scrolling and navigating through the lines, proved very boring and un-interesting. Well, that was way back, like two decades ago.
The scenario changed step by step. The inventors of the web (mainly the people at CERN), realized, What if we could bring out each page in the book as separate web pages and provide a way to move to the next page ? So, now, you could access a single page at a time, navigation wouldn’t be a problem, a little content each page would make scrolling and reading much much easier than earlier. Idea was great ! and thus came the concept of Hypertext ! Hypertext is the way to link webpages. Plan was to provide a link to subsequent pages for navigation. And shortly, they introduced means to format the textual content in the webpages. So, now, you could differentiate between text sizes, underlines, bold words, paragraphs and things like that. Wow, web was improving greatly.
As time passed, “Why not introduce graphics and images ?”, the developers asked themselves. “Oh sure. Why not ?”. And yes, images made their way towards Web development. Slowly, it was images all over the place. And, one by one, new technologies came popping over. Notably among them, is the usage of Video in Webpages. Having videos in webpages is so cool. It brings so much life into things, a better interaction with the reader and provides greater understandability to the issue you try to address.
So, ok. Web pages have all the content. Now, how will the Web browser or the device you use to access the web content, understand where to have the video, paragraph alignment, the image placement etc. A way was needed to tell the browser that this content must be place here. That content need to placed there and like, the content that follows now, is a video and it must be centered. Each element of the webpage need to be identified separately. That’s how tags came into place in a HTML. Tagging of content in a HTML is exactly the reason why HTML is called the “Markup Language”.
Consider, you prepare for your exam. You have large numbers of pages to read. You don’t read them blindly. Do you? Wherever and whenever you come across some notes or points that are important and need to be emphasized while writing, you try to highlight them with your maker, underline them. In a way, you are marking things that are important, you mark up things that are heading or sub-headings. You differentiate among the content available.
The same idea is being used in the webpages. You are marking up the various elements in the webpage for the browser to differentiate between. This marking up, just as how we highlight in books, is achieved in the Web through the use of tags. Tags specify the content that follows, if it’s a paragraph, if that is an embedded audio or video object, if that is an external content etc.
A lot of features that the web of today uses, like Video and Audio, uses third-party applications and codecs (short for COder and DECoder) for playback. This restricts content distribution across various platforms. Like, some browsers like Mozilla Firefox support only ogg vorbis (an open Audio format ) and theora (open video format) formats. Mac’s Safari supports only .mp3 file formats . Opera again, support .wav file playback. These formats that the browsers support by themselves are called their native formats. What format will I choose to go with now ? Confusion !
This is completely eliminated with the arrival of html5. All browsers shall support a standard video element that could be embedded as a separate tag. Which standard video format could be used is being still debated on. Initially Ogg Vorbis Theora was considered. And amid concerns from Apple Inc., this was later changed to MP4, but is still in very much confusion as to which video format, the browser must support.
Another notable feature that would be introduced with the html5 would be a native support to a standard audio format. It is expected to be something among, Ogg Vorbis, MP3 or Wav formats.
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and MathML would become inline from now on. Meaning, they would also be available as tags to be embedded into. Scalable Vector Graphics is a XML specification for drawing Dynamic Graphics and Images with lots of features for compression and scripting ability. MathML would enable us to write Mathematical equations with much ease. Mathematical equation representation in Web pages has always been a problem from the very beginning. In most cases, it was done by the use of images for equation. This problem is also expected to go with the introduction of html5.
HTML5 allows offline application running and storage. Many other features that come with the html5 are, Timed media playback, document editing, Drag and drop, Geolocation.
With already a number of sites, starting to use the html5, this is bound to rock !
