A day without a honk..

As I had to give my bikes battery for recharging, i was left with no choice to travel a day in the bike without the battery in it. By saying that, there is no way i could use by bikes horn, till the battery is ready. Earlier i thought, its not a big deal driving in Chennai without hoking off. But now i realized its really a tough task.

With roads blessed with jay walkers, unruly drivers, right-in-the-middle-of-the-road cyclers, jump-out-as-you-like bus takers, its close to impossible to drive in Chennai without honking. Its almost like driving without breaks. But as i said, i was left with no other choice, i had to take my bike.

Earlier i tried to take a bus, and it took me around two and a half hour to reach my office(just around 15 kms and in the bike it takes around 45 mins in peak hours)! So these days taking bus is not even an option for me(either take the bike or stay home :) is the policy).

While driving to office, i had no big problems driving without hoking. Except for few cases, like bikers who travel at less than 20 kmph(generally with a mobile in their hand), auto drivers who turn their vehicle as they wish, drives who hate using indicators, people who dont honk in turnings(hey dont look at me, i did not have a choice) and children.

Children are the main issue in the above list. While auto drivers are more unpredictable than most children, we still have to be careful driving behind children. The up-sides of driving without honking is you cannot drive faster or do rash driving in this hectic Chennai traffic and ofcourse, you wont contribute to the noise pollution(at-least for that day).

All in all, it wasn't really a terrible experience. I feel its a good practice to have a no-horn day once in a month or fortnight.

ZohoCreator 3.0 Release Video

ZohoCreator rolled out their 3.0 version few days back. The highlight of the release was their release video. The Comic Video showcasing the features/power of ZohoCreator using cartoon characters was really awesome. Embedding the same below.



ZohoCreator fans can rate the video here.

Cool songs in recent times

Recently i stumbled upon a cool song from FloBots called Handlebars in a radio. I haven't heard about the band called FloBots till i chanced upon this powerful song recently. Having loved this song so much, wanting to hear again, digged YouTube to find the song here . No wonder the song got over 10 million clicks and over 76,000 comments within a span of just 5 months! Below is the song.



Another song which caught my attention was Viva La Vida by Cold Play. The song is really awesome and will linger in your ears even after the song is over :). I must tell, i had become a fan of Cold Play after this song. Below is the song.



A song that truly needs a mention is, So What, by Pink. Yeah you read it right, Pink is back and the song rocks! Here is the song, below is the embedded video.




Few others that are really good are,

• Ne-Yo - So Sick,
• Christina Aguilera - Keeps getting better,
• Katy Perry - Hot and Cold,
• Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love,
  
• Secondhand Serenade - Fall for you,
• Danity Kane - Damaged,
• Rihanna - Disturbia,
• The Middle - Jimmy Eat World
  

More to come soon....

Type in your local language - Firefox Extension

Ever wanted to chat in Tamil(or any other Indian Languages) from Zoho Chat or Gmail Chat? I have been longing to do so ever since i saw this feature in Orkut.

Google recently released their Language API, which include Translation and Transliteration APIs. Using their Transliteration API, we can convert any English text to native language(Ex: Tamil can be changed to தமிழ்) on the fly(like in Orkut). This feature is really useful while we chat or post comments.

Of-course we cannot expect every site we use to integrate this feature...but we can anytime build an extension in Firefox to fulfill our requirements. So one fine day i sat down and started writing a GreaseMonkey script...which happened to work in Firefox-2 and failed to work in Firefox-3. Dejected by the output, started porting the code as an extension, which worked fine in FF3 after a couple sleepless nights!


Here is the Firefox Extension i wrote to get the Transliteration feature plugged in to sites like Zoho Mail and GMail. As the extension is currently under Experimental category, you will need an account to install the extension. IE users please excuse :)

Currently the extension can transliterate the texts in 'textarea' alone. Hopefully will extend this feature to editable iframes very soon.

The extension is still in early stages, so bugs are common :). Please share your thoughts and report any bugs you face here.

Update 1: Version 1.0.3: Lots of bug fixes, Preference box with default language, text box support based on user preference

Update 2: Verion 1.0.4: Performance and issue fixes. Recommended Install.

Update 3: Verion 1.0.5: Textarea/textbox style corruption issue fixed. Recommended Install.

Update 4: Addon is now Public!! You dont need an account anymore to install your copy!

Update 5: I am(was) lobbying hard to get the latest version of the addon reviewed. Will try harder when I get more time. Till then please use the experimental version from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-transliteration-formerl/versions/?page=1#version-1.9

Firefox 3.0 Experience

The much hyped Firefox 3.0 was released yesterday(Jun 17th). I too wanted a copy installed in my work PC which incidentally is a Linux Box. I have never installed Firefox in my Linux box in a single attempt! Anyhow, i successfully installed a copy in my PC after struggling with it for some time.


Some of the good features i noted about Firefox 3.0 are,

• A lot faster than Firefox 2.0
• Smart location bar(which was frustating factor initially...simply rocks now)
  
• Fonts looks smoother
  
• Taggable bookmarks
• Smart Bookmarks(Which lists Most visited sites and recently bookmarked pages)
  
• Offline support!
• Integrated Anti-virus(off-course for windows alone)
• Enhanced Add-on manager and download manager
  
• Integrated Feed reader
• Cool password manager(No more ugly save password dialog)
• Better session and crash manager.

Well, every product has its ups and downs. All we hope is lesser downs on products we use :). Some of the downsides of Firefox 3.0 are,

• Crashed a couple of times in first one hour
• Native look-and-feel. This totally sucks in Linux(but looks good in Mac). If i have to make it look better in my Linux Box, i have to tweak my Linux UI Manager. Even current themes dont solve the problem fully!
• Partially lost my toolbar bookmarks(was able to recover it from my older version though).
• Higher(yet adjustable) memory usage(noticed only in Linux box)
• Most of the addons installed on the earlier version is yet to get compatible with Firefox 3.0
• Will kill you with proxy username/password dialogs if u dont click 'Ok' button on time. My firefox once opened 100+ of those dialogs!
• Ugly border appears on all text boxes while typing on it.(happens in linux, not sure in windows)
  
• Had real time to get it run in my Linux box

The smart location bar that Firefox 3.0 sports was really one of the frustrating factor initially. But the bottom line was, it needed some time to adapt with our browsing habits. Firefox brings up sites list as we type in the location bar. Earlier, it was done with a simple starts-with check(if u type goo, firefox brings up www.google.com in the top of the list). But in Smart location bar, if we type goo, it will bring up reader.google.com if you used to visit reader.google.com quite often than google.com. i.e. the sites are ordered based on the visits.

One downside of Smart location bar is, it takes the title of the site we have visited in to consideration(which means, if you have often visited gmail many times and try to type mail.yahoo.com, gmail will be listed first).

On the whole, Firefox 3.0 is far better and lot faster than its earlier version(though it needs few improvements). Its sure to give IE(and other browsers) a run for the money!

p.s:

A little insight on how to run firefox in Linux successfully if you ever get the below error
Error: in guard: symbol required but got: Error: fatal: looped fatal error

This was the error which made me go bonkers while installing Firefox 3 in my Linux box(Mandriva 2008). After a lot of googling, I found out that the issue was due to the UIM(ver: 1.4.6) installed in my machine. To run Firefox, there were just 2 options left. I either have to install the latest(1.5.1) version of UIM or uninstall UIM from the machine. 1.5.1 version of UIM is not available for Mandriva 2008, so i had to uninstall UIM(which actually is not useful for me) through drakconf to kick-start Firefox in my machine .