It seems like the Chrome browser in Ubuntu has some issues in displaying Tamil fonts. I guess, other Indian languages also might be having the same issue. The weirdest thing is Firefox was displaying the Tamil content properly.

So, after searching through the Chromium group for a while, found the fix for this issue.

To fix Tamil font in Ubuntu Chrome

1. Open Terminal
2. Go to the folder: cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont
3. Delete FreeSerif.ttf: sudo rm FreeSerif.ttf
4. Delete FreeSans.ttf: sudo rm FreeSans.ttf
5. Close and re-open the browser.

The Tamil font should be displayed properly now.

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I’m not a power user of Twitter. I don’t tweet much and according to Tweetdeck, I have an average of 1.75 tweets/day. But still, I read a lot from the people I follow in Twitter.

Based of my usage pattern, I find it much much effective not to use any native twitter clients. Instead, Opera Mini + Twitter Mobile site serves as a killer twitter client for my android mobile.

Here’s why:

Unicode font support

First and foremost, I can enable the Regional font support in my Opera mini browser and can read the tweets that are not written in English. This is a BIG plus and one of the main reason I don’t want to switch to a native client (Until there’s a built in support for Unicode fonts in android).

Always lists the latest tweets first

Whenever I open the twitter’s mobile site, it lists the latest tweets on top. During day time, I check the tweets may be say every 2 hours and the site always lists the tweets that are fresh. If and only if I’m interested in what my friends said in the past, I could scroll down and see their tweets.

But this is not the case with native twitter apps which lists the tweets from where you left it in your last session. I had to manually scroll to the top while unnecessarily downloading all the tweets from the web, thus increasing my data usage.

I searched for any settings to show the latest tweets first, but couldn’t find it in official Twitter client. Not sure about other apps, though.

The UI nightmare

I have a small screen Android mobile (Samsung). So, when I try to tweet something from the Twitter app, the split up of the UI space taken up different elements of the screen is (ha! you think it is easy to take screenshot in Android!?) :

1. The Android keyboard – 60%
2. Tweet and Cancel button bar – 10%
3. User image and user name panel – 10% (seriously, why do I need this!? Don’t I know I’m the one who’s tweeting!?)
4. The tweet textbox – 10%
5. Photo and location icons panel – 10%

Thus leaving only 10% of UI space to the text I’m typing and making it hard to read. Even worse, it always shows the first line of the tweet and never scrolls to show the second line.

Never the case with the mobile site where the tweet textbox gets 40% of UI space.

And, that’s the reason why I don’t care about any new Twitter interface changes and still love the simple and effective Twitter mobile site.

What do you think?

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Recently I got hold of an empty Rackspace server in which we have installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal version. My next step was to setup the LAMP stack in that server to run our PHP site.

First I tried to install XAMPP for Linux. But unfortunately, it failed because XAMPP only supports 32 bit operating system and ours was 64. I didn’t want to spend much time on fixing that issue, so I moved to setup the LAMP stack by other means.

Here’s what I did (after googling/referring a lot):

1.Install lamp-server

1. sudo apt-get install tasksel [installs the tasksel that helps you to install multiple packages as a single task]
2. sudo tasksel install lamp-server [it will install the lamp stack in location /etc/]
3. http://yourdomain.com should work now.

2. Configure PHP Curl module

1. sudo apt-get install php5-curl [downloads and installs curl module]
2. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart [restarts server for the changes to take effect]

3. Install phpmyadmin

1. sudo apt-get update [updates the packages repository. When I first tried to install phpmyadmin without updating, it complained that phpmyadmin isn't found.]
2. sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin [will trigger a installation wizard]
3. Choose apache2 for the server configuration and choose no for database configuration (since we have already installed database).
4. sudo cp /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d [copies the server configuration so that it is accessible via web]
5. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
6. http://yourdomain.com/phpmyadmin should work now.

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Last week, I attended the x.commerce conference - Innovate - where eBay launched its new platform for merchants and developers. I have already covered(or tried to cover) the event as it happens. In this post, I’m summarizing my key learning from the conference.

Remove the e from e-commerce

First of all, the whole point of the new x.commerce platform is to remove the e from the e-commerce.

The two separate worlds of online and offline commerce are increasingly blending together. The growing trend is that we no longer differentiate online buying and offline buying. As an end user, we want to buy the item. It doesn’t matter how we are buying it.

By launching its new platform, eBay provides the ability to developers to come up with innovative apps that combines both online and offline experience and gives a streamlined buying experience to the end users.

The x.commerce developer package is already available for download and it has all the necessary code sample, SDKs to start with.

Magento is the wordpress of Merchants

Magento, the eCommerce platform, was recently acquired by eBay. Innovate emphasized the role Magento plays in commerce world. Magento helps the merchants to setup a online storefront easily. Additionally, it has lots of features that makes merchants life simpler: for example, the integration with Adobe lets the merchant to see the detailed analytics data of their business, and one click upload to eBay and other major marketplaces.

There’s a huge market for developers in making Magento Plug-ins. Since, x.commerce will definitely gain some traction from the merchants around the world, it creates lots of opportunities for developers to get some more business.

PayPal Access – Identity Provider

If developers started using x.commerce and develop custom storefronts on top of Fabric, the common requirement they might have is to manage users. Every store website needs the user registration/login and then collect bank/credit card information from users.

If PayPal has already solved the same problem, then why not open it to the world!? With PayPal Access, developers can let their users to login with their PayPal account. No need to create a separate user account for each and every store websites out there. Its like the OpenID for commerce.

Finally,

The launch of x.commerce platform is going to open up huge opportunities for merchants and developers around the world which might lead to innovative applications that benefits the end users.

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Just now reached the x.com conference that is happening @ San Francisco. eBay is going to announce its new commerce platform. Will try to update the news as soon as it happens (kinda live blogging!).. wait for the updates.

9:45 AM Recently eBay acquired Magento – the eCommerce platform. One of the key point of this new platform launch is integrating Magento APIs with existing eBay and PayPal API.  Two developers from Megento team are now demonstrating how easy is to use Megento even for a common man. Publishing inventory to multiple marketplaces is just a click away in Magento.

Magento demo is going on full swing. The commerce platform has full suite of tools including analytics.

Okay.. Magento got a nice interface with graphs and data points. Something similar to Google Analytics. The analytics module is integrated with Adobe.

Running ad campaign from Magento is just a click away (actually 2). Select the products you want to run ads and then choose the platform (Google / Facebook). Your ad will be online. No doubt that Magento makes the merchants lazy.

10:00 AM Magento supports automated localization. A chinese developers demoed how he used Magento to build a site that is automatically translated to French and Chinese.

10:07 AM Magento Connect has over 4000 extension which are downloaed over 4 million times. Its the market place for the Magento extension that enable the users to extend the power of Magento.

10:10 AM Launching PayPal Access – The commerce identity. Looks like the open ID for commerce. Now going for a demo. PayPal has around 100 million active users. With so much of data, it is a no brainer to introduce such a identity provider service.

Cut and Paste JavaScript and you get the PayPal access button in your webpage that enables your users to login with PayPal account. Makes sense, if your eCommerce website users logs in with an account that has bank account and credit card connected to it.

10:20 AM Betsy from ToysRus demoed the product shopping right from a mobile phone using RedLaser another eBay acquisition. Its a mobile app for scanning bar/qr codes. It also shows the related products from local places when you scan the product code. From there, it is easy to buy the product using PayPal.

10:30 AM Facebook platform marketing director (eBay) is talking about social design and how friends and social web influence our decision to buy. There’s a huge scope for innovating new shopping experience using Facebook Open Graph API and eBay and PayPal APIs.

10:40 AM the keynote is over. The real action starts now. Heading to sessions.

11 AM Photos from the break.

The X

eBay PayPal booth

a booth @ innovate conference

one of the delicious session, Lunch

colorful entrance @ innovate

12:30 Introduction to X.Commerce platform - session by Neal Sample (CTO of X.Commerce). Talked mostly about integrating Magento and its capabilities to publish to multiple channels. Lots of information about the Fabric which connects the eBay product APIs with your application. The news from CTO is the Fabric is already ready and can be downloaded right away from x.com

1:45 PM The future of real web applications - speaker differentiate the difference between native apps and web apps in mobile. As we all know, web apps has the advantage of silent update and wins the race.

2:00 PM Use HTML5 + CSS3 in mobile development rather than native code. CSS3 can be used to design the attractive animations. Adobe is coming up with Edge to achieve that. Now all the HTML5 features are demonstrated and recommended to be used. For example, instead of using Cookies, use local storage. Because cookies are insecure and enables the data to be theft with little effort. Local storage don’t have this problem.

2:15 PM Wow! cool demo about syncing HTML5 video and your article navigation. Using data-start and data-end attributes you can mention which part of the video associated with the article so that when the user navigates through articles, the video is synced automatically. Here’s an related article  - Syncing content with Video. Here’s the presenter’s home page: Christian Heilmann and the presentation

4:00 PM Obviously, the conference saved the best part for the last. The day ended with the key note speech from Blake Mycoskie who’s the founder of Tom Shoes. Blake narrated his companies story, the cause behind founding such an organization. For the ones who hadn’t known about Tom, it’s the shoe selling company with a social cause behind it – every pair of shoe they sell, they give one pair to the children in need”. The way Blake narrated his story so inspiring that at least some percentage of audiences would have definitely decided to found something similar to what Blake had done.

6:00 PM And the day ends with a rocking party @ Moscone. Unfortunately, as we had to travel back to San Jose, we left the party in the midway half-heartedly.

Day 2 – Oct 13

10:00 AM Thanks to the one long hour commute, we reached the place a bit later than we anticipated. The panel were already discussing about the consumer trends. Now looking forward to the afternoon sessions.

11:00 AM The end note is PayPal is absolutely committed to investing more in x.commerce. 

11:15 AM Chris Bangle – the Automobile designer is on stage now. And, he says anybody can be a car designer. Download some cool car photos from internet, user photoshop to combine them and your are done!  Never knew that even automobile engineers use the Cut & Paste technique. :)

11:30 AM Chris has done with his speech. The main take away from his talk was that you should always answer three questions why, how and what before doing anything.

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