Veera Sundar » Technology

Regional font support in Opera Mini

Veera — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:01:29 +0000

If you are using your Opera Mini mobile browser to access regional websites, you might have faced this issue. Instead of seeing the proper regional content (in my case, its Tamil), you might have seen boxes all over there in that tiny mobile screen. This is because, by default, Opera Mini browser couldn’t be able to render the complex scripts, i.e. regional fonts.

So, to enable the regional (Tamil or Telugu or you name it!) language in Opera Mini browser,

Open the address about:config in your opera mini browser. This will open the browser’s option page.
Scroll down until you see something like this: Use bitmap fonts for complex scripts.
Set the above option value to yes and then click on Save button.

That’s it. Now you’ll be able to enjoy the local content from your Opera Mini browser.

Technicalities:

All the web traffic from Opera Mini browser goes through Opera’s proxy servers, which optimize the web content for mobile experience. As I said above, Opera Mini does not have the capability to render complex scripts in mobile. So, by setting the above option, we are letting the Opera’s proxy servers to render the complex scripts as images and send those images to mobile browser. Thus you’ll see the regional content as images, instead of fonts.

PS: came to know about this tip when I met the Tamil tweeters on last Sunday. Thanks to them for sharing this info.

Codered – Less SPAM, More Code!

Veera — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:24:46 +0000

I hardly got ay response for my question about custom search engine to search only in programming related websites. I asked this because, at times I felt that I have been spending more time in Google search result pages than in the actual pages itself.

As you must be knowing, Google relies on PageRank and people know how to play around with PageRank. So, I usually get less relevant results on top of the ones which has more authentic data. Apart from this, I also wanted to reduce the noise in Google SERPs for my programming related queries. That was the reason why I needed a custom search engine.

Since no one replied (or there was no search engines like that) to my question, I created one for myself – CODERED. It’s a Google custom search engine which will only search in programming related websites. Not anything innovative – Just added my favorite websites to Google’s list (which you can achieve it using site:yoursitename filter too, manually!).

But which websites the CODERED searches? Well, currently there are few good websites that I have added to CODERED. If you would like to add to this list (you can recommend your blog too!), please give your suggestion here. Thanks!

Of course, please let me know your thoughts about this.

How to make Reliance Netconnect broadband to work on Ubuntu 10.04

Veera — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:18:06 +0000

If you are following me in this blog, you might be aware of that I switched to Ubuntu 10.04 last week. On changing, I had to give some effort to make sure my Reliance Netconnect broadband connection working in Ubuntu. Here’s how I did it, based on referring several sources and forums in the internet.

Method 1: The Out-Of-The-Box method

Getting internet connection working in this method is really a child’s play. Just follow these steps:

The MUST thing first – Buy a Reliance Netconnect broadband USB device! Most probably it would be a huawei device and I assume it is.
Plug-it in any available USB port. Remember, the port has to part of your laptop. Inserting the device in your friend’s laptop doesn’t make internet work in your laptop, obviously!
Ubuntu 10.04 should detect your device now. Now go to System -> Preferences -> Network connections and select the Mobile Broadband tab. You’ll see something like this:
From the above step, just follow whatever the wizard says (don’t worry! the wizard won’t ask you to jump from the building). Select India in Providers Country page and select Reliance in Provider page respectively.
In the last window, give a name to the connection (Reliance for example) and then enter your USB device number which is nothing but the mobile number in the user name and password fields (yes, both are same). In the Number field, type #777 if it is not already there.
If you want, you can check the Connect automatically check box.
Now, click apply and you’re done. The connection should work now. If you didn’t select connect automatically then you can click on the network icon on the Ubuntu top bar and select your connection which you created just now.

Unfortunately, the above method did not work for me. So, I researched (googled, to be accurate) a bit more and found another way.

Method 2: The Do-It-Yourself way:

Since Ubuntu couldn’t come to my rescue, I have to make my hands dirty to get the connection working. Followed these steps:

In order to manually connect with Reliance netconnect broadband we need two packages: wvdial (tool to make connections from a modem) and gnome-ppp (front end to the wvdial).
These two packages have few dependencies too. Means you need to install all of them. Since you do not have an active internet connection yet on your machine, you cant apt-get anything. So, get a help from your friend who *might* be having an internet connection system and download the below packages.
Now bring the above downloaded files to your machine and install them (right click and select Open with GDebi package installer) in the above given order.
Now open terminal window and give the command lsusb which will list all USB devices attached to the laptop,. You must see the Hauwei device listed there. And then give the command dmesg to see which port our model actually using. It would be something like TTYUSB0, TTYUSB1, etc.
Now give the command sudo gnome-ppp to start the wvdial front end utility.
Now go to setup and in that window select the modem port (/dev/ttyUSB0 for example, which you must have seen in the 4th step using dmesg command) in the Device field and click detect. Your modem must be detected now. Then select Type as USB Modem and select the maximum available speed for the speed field.
Click close and come back to the gnome-ppp front window. Enter the username and password (which is your device number), #777 for the number and click connect. Now you should be connected.
Here after, whenever you want to connect to internet, just open gnone-ppp and click connect. The settings must have been saved already.

Fortunately, the above methid did work for me, because of which you are now seeing this post!

Changed to Ubuntu 10.04

Veera — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:22:57 +0000

I was a Windows user for a long time. From the day I started using computer till last week, I never thought of leaving Windows.There were several software which kept me glued to Windows.

All was well until my friend inserted an virus infected pen drive to my laptop and it *really* screwed my operating system. I had to completely erase my hard drive to get it back on control. That incident made up my mind to change to a more secure OS, something like Ubutnu!

Got a new installable CD of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid OS from the latest edition of Linux For You magazine and installed the new OS last weekend. There were no glitches while installing Ubuntu on my laptop. The installation took about 30 mins and most of the features were working just out-of-the-box.

Had to struggle a little to make my Reliance Netconnect broadband connection work on Ubuntu (how I made it – in a separate post) and the screen resolution is somewhat lesser that what my monitor could support. But apart from these issues, Ubuntu has impressed me a lot in the past one week. The free OS has come so much closer to the priced counterpart – Windows. Congrats, Ubuntu team for achieving this!

So, in the upcoming posts, I might detail out my journey on a Linux based operating system. Be there!

If you have used Ubuntu before, feel free share your opinion/review through comments. I’ll be happy to hear that!

Google Wave opened to public – are you using it?

Veera — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:07:30 +0000

After an year of development, Google has opened Wave for public access. Now you don’t need to wait for an invitation to get a Wave account. Go to wave.google.com, sign up, fill in the blanks and you’re on Wave!

When the Wave was announced, it was mainly considered as a move from Google to overshadow Microsoft’s announcement of Bing search engine. Many developers thought that the announcement of Wave was too early as the tool was not at all ready for the big time. But Google had opened Wave as developer preview and gave access to it through invitations. Google asked developers to contribute to Wave in the form of Wave bots and APIs.

Now the Wave is open to public. After my initial impressions, I could see noticeable improvement in the current version of Wave. The speed has improved, there are several new Wave types (discussion, task tracking, meeting, etc) and an extension gallery is being introduced. Importantly now it is easy to read updated wave messages just by clicking next on each Wave. So, with out a doubt, Wave team has done a good job in bringing in this new collaborative tool to the main stream.

But the success of Wave, surely depends on the way people use it. For me, I haven’t figured out any use cases yet. I’m content with Gmail itself for my communication.

But I want to know how you guys are using Wave for collaboration. I have created a Wave to discuss this. My wave ID is: talktoveera@googlewave.com. If you’re in Wave, leave your Wave ID in the comment box (or wave your ID to me). I’ll add you to the discussion Wave and we can try learning Wave by actually *using it*.

Innovation – Why startups rock and big companies suck?

Veera — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:06:05 +0000

Believe me, when I say Innovation (in the context of software development), you would have definitely thought about a company/product which is in it’s early stage, i.e. a startup. Off course, there are lots of large companies in the market with lots of resources (a.k.a. developers) and infrastructure and funding. But why couldn’t those companies make it to your mind, when you think about innovation?

The reason is simple – process.

Just compare the way the developers work at startup with their big companies counterparts. Startup developers mostly develop from scratch (or building on other open code), bringing in new ideas, brainstorming about different technical possibilities, trying to improvise their code/design – thus trying to be innovative. These fellas don’t need to follow any process. All are on their own to do things differently.

By process, I don’t mean the water fall or agile. The SDLC is more or less common between big companies/startups. But most big companies have one extra thing – their proprietary framework/tool and the process to develop on the framework/tool. So, when a developer join a big company, he/she made to learn the company’s process. After this, there will be very less opportunity for the developer to think and do things differently. All he needs to do is follow some process and complete the work.

By saying this, I’m not devaluing the process. In my opinion, every big company MUST need some process in order to manage the large developer base. But, when the developers have the defined path (i.e. the process) in front of them, they mostly tend to take that path and miss to create new paths. In other words, the developers are becoming less innovative.

That’s why I say, when it comes to Innovation, startups rock and big companies, suck!

Why Twitter is not interesting to me anymore?

Veera — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 06:53:07 +0000

Why Twitter is not interesting to me anymore? – or, may be I should be more specific – Why Twitter Stream is not interesting to me anymore?. It is not because I’m following boring people in Twitter. The people I follow are in someway related to my work/friends and they tweet pretty interesting messages. But the Twitter stream does not deliver those interesting messages to me in a way I want.

First and foremost, Twitter is a live feed. i.e. I need to be online with my followers to see their tweets live. Off course, the tweets are archived and I can always come back and see them later. But I lose the interaction part here, because of my time zone (India) and the time zone of people I follow (mostly not in India) are totally different. It is something like a television broadcasting system. If you are not sitting in front of the TV, you miss the action. Period. So, what I need here is a better record-and-playback later mechanism for twitter messages.

Secondly, I use Twitter to interact with people. i.e. I reply to their message, by clicking on the ‘reply’ icon in Twitter stream. When the person I tagged (using @person) in my message, sees my tweet he should be able to understand that the tweet is actually a reply to his earlier tweet. He should be able to see a link to get the full context (like a thread) of the interaction. I remember a twitter app has this feature (but couldn’t remember that app name, plz comment if you know one). If Twitter has this feature built-in then it’ll be more usable.

Third, I need a rating system for twitter messages where I can rate and recommend a twitter message to my followers. Wait..wait..its not a Twitdigg application, even though the concept is similar. When I rate a tweet and when others also rate the same tweet, it’s popularity goes higher. I should be able to see what twitter message is so popular amongst my followers/the people I follow. Come on, Facebook has this (like), FriendFeed has this (Best of Day), why not Twitter!?

Fourth, ban Justin Bieber! (OK, I was just kidding!).

Fighting SPAM

Veera — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:01:33 +0000

My blog was never in the radar of spammers, thanks to the simple wordpress plug-in WP Captcha Free. The plug-in was so good that it almost blocked all the spam comments. But sadly, it is not the same story anymore.

For the past two days, I’m seeing lots of spam comments, escaping the spam filter, which try to sell youknowwhat thing to my readers. Luckily I had enabled the comment moderation. So all the spam comments ended up in my comments spam folder. But I was clueless why my spam blocking plug-in didn’t work at the first place.

Instead of wondering why it happened, I tried to implement some alternative ways to fight spam.

In WordPress discussion settings page, I added some key words that these spam comments usually contains to the comment blocklist. To tighten up the filter further I took the IP addresses and email IDs from these comments and added them too to the comment blocklist.
Closed the comments for the posts that are older than 14 days.
For the time being, installed the reCaptcha plug-in to block the spams. But this impacts my loyal readers, so I’ll be removing this plug-in as soon as the spam comments are reduced. Update: plug-in is now deactivated.

Now the number of spam comments are considerably reduced. But, I want to reduce them to zero. What do you do to keep the spams in control in your blog?

iLike – Please Rob Me, World of Emotions and Twitter Analytics

Veera — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:41:18 +0000

Pre-script: iLike is the post series that I was planning to start lately. From this week onwards, on every weekend, I’ll be writing about the things that got my attention on that week. The iLike things that I’m going to write about will be mostly on the tech side. I’ll try my best to keep the focus on Java + Web + Design theme. But sometimes I might write about things that does not fit into this theme, too. In this week, I’m starting the iLike series with these three interesting things related to Twitter.

Please Rob Me:

No, not only me. It could be you also, if you are tweeting too much. Please Rob me is an interesting Twitter based application. These days, many people use Twitter service to update their current location. The application brings out the danger side of this behavior. Please Rob me monitors the public twitter statuses of people who are tweeting when they leave their home. It then lists those tweets in the site’s home page, as the opportunity(!) to rob. Seems funny, huh!? But the tweet could easily turn dangerous as it invites the local robbers to pay a visit to your home. So, think again when you tweet about your current location, here after. But first, do check if you are on the rob list.

World of Emotions:

World of Emotions (WEM) is another twitter based service that got my attention recently. Similar to the Please Rob Me, the WEM is also monitoring the public twitter statuses, but for other reasons. The service has several twitter bots (@wem_smile, @wem_glad, @wem_happy and @wem_love) which actively look for certain key words in your tweets. For example, the @wem_smile bot tracks the smiley words like ha.ha etc. And then it collects the similar tweets around the world to display them on a world map to collectively identify the emotion of the world. Plus, it retweets your tweet too!

Twitter Analytics:

With out a doubt, twitter messages represent the pulse of the web community at any given time. There are millions of tweets are already there in twitter database and the count is increasing rapidly every minute. This huge amount of data gives the wonderful opportunity for the data mining. If the tweets are analyzed properly, it could reveal interesting facts about several things. And that is exactly what Twitter Analytics team is currently doing. Recently, Kevin (@kevinweil) – a member of Twitter Analytics team, has published such analytics for the Super Bowl. And, this article from High Scalability discusses on how Twitter team uses technologies like Hadoop to prepare the Twitter system to analyze 100 billion tweets! If you are building a scalable systems, you might find this interesting.

So, that’s it for the week. I’ll come with more interesting things for the next week. Subscribe to this blog, if you want to receive the updates in your feed reader.

Remember Bhuvan?

Veera — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:35:29 +0000

Do you remember the Bhuvan, which got introduced few months back? It was the geoportal from Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) with the label “made in India“. The portal was launched during the 62^nd Independence day celebration of India. It was launched as a free service and hyped that it could become an alternative to Google Maps. In a way, it came close to Google Maps but when you consider the India’s map. After all, this is what Bhuvan’s objective, to provide the visualization portal for the Indian terrain.

When the service was launched, it created lots of buzz among the India’s web user community. Everyone, who knew the news, were trying to access and test the service at the same time. Due to this increased load, the Bhuvan portal was giving poor performance. Adding to that, the map data was not exhaustive, since the service was in the initial stage.

Recently, ISRO has made some changes to Bhuvan to improve the service.

In order to enhance the user experience and have a smooth entry to explore Bhuvan, we have now removed the login process. You can now access bhuvan without any need of login credentials. Just click the enter Bhuvan button on the home page(www.bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in) and you will be taken to the 3D globe page wherein you can explore all the Bhuvan functionalities.

So, now there is no need to login to access the service. But, you still need to download and install the Bhuvan plug-in (11 MB). The service is not accessible in Firefox. But it works perfectly in Internet Explorer, though. Anyway, there is no harm in giving it a try and testing the service.

Have you tried Bhuvan?

Veera Sundar » Technology

Regional font support in Opera Mini

Technicalities:

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Codered – Less SPAM, More Code!

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How to make Reliance Netconnect broadband to work on Ubuntu 10.04

Method 1: The Out-Of-The-Box method

Method 2: The Do-It-Yourself way:

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Changed to Ubuntu 10.04

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Google Wave opened to public – are you using it?

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Innovation – Why startups rock and big companies suck?

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Why Twitter is not interesting to me anymore?

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Fighting SPAM

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iLike – Please Rob Me, World of Emotions and Twitter Analytics

Please Rob Me:

World of Emotions:

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Remember Bhuvan?

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