2008

I hadn’t jumped on to the Twitter bandwagon for a while. I’m not much of a conversationalist, nor am I a very sociable. I also tend to stay away from social networks. But I figured I would try Twitter out for a while, mostly because it’s an outlet for short comments. For long articles, I have my blog. For sharing links, I have Google Reader and del.icio.us. I don’t quite have anything for that occasional moment when I want to say, “Hey! A great way to shred mint leaves is to freeze them!” ...

The popular way to create a class in Javascript is to define a function and add methods to its prototype. For example, let’s create a class Node that has a method hide(). var Node = function(id) { this.element = document.getElementById(id); }; Node.prototype.hide = function() { this.style.display = "none"; }; If you had a header, say Heading, then this piece of code will hide the element. var node = new Node("header"); node.hide(); If I wanted to hide the element a second later, I am tempted to use: var node = new Node("header"); setTimeout(node.hide, 1000); … except that it won’t work. setTimeout has no idea that the function node.hide has anything to do with the object node. It just runs the function. When node.hide() is called by setTimeout, the this object isn’t set to node, it’s set to window. node.hide() ends up trying to hide window, not node. ...

Some months ago, I was working with a client who wanted to set up a website with social commerce elements. (That’s Web 2.0 in fancy words.) They only seemed to have a very rough idea of what they wanted, so asked them right at the start of the meeting: “Why do you want social commerce?” Their answer was interesting, and one that I had not expected. They said, “We want to project the image of an honest an open organisation.” ...

I left my camera near the window of my office at Canary Wharf in time lapse mode on a cloudy day. The video is playing at 60 times normal speed. Check out the related time lapse videos. They're stunning. With this one, you can figure out which firms work till late in the night. Comments Sumit Dhar 27 Nov 2008 6:27 am: Hey Anand, Did you require some additional equipment to take snaps at particular intervals? ...

It’s been three weeks since I initiated the effort to type in the Dilbert strips and the results are encouraging. About 2 years worth of strips have been typed out. So this Dilbert viewer now has a reasonably sized index for searching. Many thanks are in order here. The first is due to geek.nl, whose images I have taken the liberty of hotlinking. Thanks also to those who’ve taken the time out to type strips: ...

In the 1980s, we rarely used to buy audio cassettes. It was a lot cheaper to record songs from the radio. It’s amazing that in the 2000s, this technique seems to be less used than before. If you wanted to record a song that was streamed online, you could go through the complex procedures I’d mentioned earlier to download online songs, or you could use the 1980s technologies. Get a tape recorder, connect the headphones of your PC to the tape recorder’s microphone using a stereo cable, and record to your heart’s content. ...

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to search through the Dilbert archives using text? This used to be possible at Dilbert.com some years ago, as a paid service. In late 2003, I needed to find some Dilbert strips for a client, so I’d subscribed for a year. I could then search for the quotes (I happened to be looking for “outsourcing”, so you can guess the context). But I can’t seem to find the feature any more, even as a paid service. The site looks a lot better, of course. But I can’t find strips. ...

You know those songs on Raaga, MusicIndiaOnline, etc? The ones you can listen to but can’t download? Well, you can download them. It’s always been possible to download these files. After all, that’s how you get to listen to them in the first place. What stopped you is security by obscurity. You didn’t know the location where the song was stored, but if you did, you could download them. So how do you figure out the URL to download the file from? ...

Here is the first interlude and the first line from some MGR songs. Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green.

While hunting for a VoIP service to call India, I found a fair variety of services that I'm sharing below. FreeCall appears the cheapest when calling India, at 2.5¢ per minute to a land line. I'm listing the rate from London to Chennai below. I'm not sure of the difference in voice quality between these. The only one I've tried is VoIPDiscount, which is not too bad. As a benchmark, remember that Reliance offers a calling card at around 7.3¢ per minute. ...

Some gadgets I've bought / got over the last few years. SDHC Card Reader on 17 March 2009 16GB USB Flash Drive on 8 Jan 2009 16GB SD Card on 14 March 2009 USB MIDI cable on 30 Dec 2008 Creative Labs EP-630/A Earphones on 30 Dec 2008 Recta Micro Compass Accessory on 30 Dec 2008 Strand iPod Cassette adapter on 30 Dec 2008 Keysonic Compact Notebook Layout Wireless 2.4Ghz Radio Frequency Keyboard With Integrated Touch Pad on 6 Sep 2008 TomTom ONE v3 Great Britain on 31 Aug 2008 BlackBerry Curve 8320 on 10 Aug 2008 Acer Aspire 5715Z Notebook Laptop, Intel Pentium Dual Core T2330 1.6GHz, 15.4" TFT, 2GB RAM, 80GB Hard-drive, DVD±RW, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, WiFi, Vista Home Premium on 29 Jul 2008 BlueNEXT BN-909 GPS Receiver SiRF Star III on 6 Jul 2008 TDK Recordable Blank 16x DVD+R Discs 25pack Cakebox on 6 Jul 2008 Sandisk MicroSDHC 4GB Card in 6 Jul 2008 HTC S620 (Excalibur) on 1 Jul 2008 Masterplug 4 Gang Switched Extension Lead 2m 13 Amp Fused on 31 Mar 2008 TRUST HU-4440P 4 PORT USB2 MINI HUB on 31 Mar 2008 Hama Compact USB 2.0 Hub 1:4 on 31 Mar 2008 Nintendo Wii Remote on 1 Mar 2008 Sandisk 2GB Secure Digital Card on 29 Feb 2008 Canon IXUS 70 Digital Camera - Silver (7.1MP, 3x Optical Zoom) 2.5" LCD on 29 Feb 2008 Verbatim DVD+R 25Pk 16x Spindle on 15 Feb 2008 Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive on 15 Feb 2008 LUPO DIGITAL TV DVB-T USB ADAPTER/DONGLE/STICK FREEVIEW RECEIVER & AERIAL FOR PC AND LAPTOP on 6 Jan 2008 Bontempi Keyboard - 61 Full Key GM, Midi, Stereo (AD177.12) on 4 Jan 2008 Mini-Headphone Splitter (Stereo) on 1 Jan 2008 Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000 on 26 Dec 2007 Kenwood FP580 Food Processor 2 Speed White on 26 Dec 2007 SanDisk Sansa m240 1Gb MP3 Player on 24 Jul 2007 Sennheiser CX300 Eco Ear Canal Headphones Black on 24 Jul 2007 Uniross AAA 1000mAh (4)Rechargeable Battery Ni-Mh on 24 Jul 2007 Logitech EX110 Wireless Desktop on 5 Mar 2007 Cordless Skype Phone Kit NON VISTA on 5 Mar 2007 LG 42PC1D 42" Plasma TV on 20 Jan 2007 Sony Ericsson Standard Travel Charger (UK) CST-13 on 12 Jan 2007 Uniross Sprint 1 Hour Battery Charger inc 4 x AA 2700 mAh Rechargeable Batteries - batteries upgraded from 2500 mAh on 11 Jan 2007 Fuji FinePix S5600 Zoom Digital Camera [5.0MP,10xOptical Zoom] on 17 Nov 2006 Fuji 1GB XD Type M Picture Card on 17 Nov 2006 DIGIHOME DVB915 FREEVIEW Digital Terrestrial Receiver with SCART Lead on 17 Nov 2006 Sony 80min/700MB Thermo printable CD-R spin 50pk on 28 Jul 2006 CyberHome DVD 401/0 Multi-region Capable DVD Player with DIVX on 28 Jul 2006 Rivision DVD+R 8x 4.7Gb 100 Cake Box on 15 Jun 2006 Dynamode 3.5" IDE Interface Disk Enclosure on 1 May 2006 SANDISK CRUZER MICRO 1GB on 3 Jan 2006 BenQ 16x External Dual Format, Double Layer DVD Writer - EW162I, Beige on 3 Jan 2006 Emtec DVD+R Cake Box 100pk on 3 Jan 2006 Panasonic NV-GS17B MiniDV Digital Camcorder [24x Optical, 2.5" LCD, DV out] on 9 Nov 2005 Comments Saurabh 14 Sep 2008 6:23 am: Small tip - If you are not a member of Amazon prime, then do check out their free trial..Cancel it just before expiry or better still, remove the tick for auto renew in your account! S Anand 15 Sep 2008 12:41 am: Is there any benefit other than free next day delivery? I usually end up ordering the free 2-4 day delivery, and end up collecting it from the post office during the weekend! So unless I’m ordering on a Friday or Saturday, next day delivery probably doesn’t help me much.

Here is the background music from some songs from 2008. Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. (One spelling is tricky. Try M instead of N at the end.) Comments Niranjan 18 Mar 2009 11:10 am: Any idea on 10th one? Sanketh 12 Jun 2009 7:22 am: Nice quizzes these … Swami 15 May 2009 8:15 pm: I couldn’t find out the last one. nirmala 18 Dec 2010 7:45 pm: couldnt find 9 n 10 help pls saravana 18 Apr 2011 9:23 pm: #10 hard to find Ranjani 7 Aug 2011 2:01 pm: 4/10 aafiya 6 Sep 2012 9:27 am: 10th is hard to find.me 9/10 Niranjan 6 Dec 2012 4:31 pm: 8 and 10 hard to find

This is a series on what Google Spreadsheets can do that Excel can’t. SPLIT(string, delimiter) splits a string using a delimiter. So if you have “one,two,three,four” in cell A1, you could split that into 4 cells using =SPLIT(A1,",") That’s similar to Data > Text to Columns, except that if the original data changed, Text to Columns does not revise the output. SPLIT can give you dynamic text-to-columns. This is pretty useful when processing text data, in three ways: ...

Andre’s mentions dumping Google Chrome because of lack of extension support, especially Ubiquity, and lists 15 useful Ubiquity commands. If you haven’t seen Ubiquity, you should. It’s a great extension that transforms your browser into an Internet command prompt. It is modelled on the Enso Launcher, which is a great piece of work by itself. I wasn’t quite prepared to let go of Chrome that easily. On Task Manager, seeing 10 Chrome processes, the largest of which takes up 60MB, is a lot more comforting, psychologically, than 1 Firefox process taking up 300MB. (I rarely hit my 1GB RAM limit, so it shouldn’t matter either way. Yet, the spendthrift in me keeps watching.) ...

This is a series on what Google Spreadsheets can do that Excel can’t. To sort data, use the SORT function. For example, if you have a list of products, their revenues and profits in A2:C9. Type SORT(A2:C9, 2, FALSE) in cell E2 to get the products sorted by the second column, revenues. This is a dynamic list. If you change the revenues, the products are reordered automatically. The first parameter to the SORT function is the data range you want to sort. The remaining parameters are optional. The second parameter is the column to sort by. By default, the data is sorted by the first column, in ascending order. In this example, we sorted by the 2nd column. The third parameter is FALSE for descending order, and TRUE for ascending order. ...

This is a series on what Google Spreadsheets can do that Excel can’t To get a list of unique values from a list, use the UNIQUE function on Google Spreadsheets. For example, if you have a list of browsers in column A, type =UNIQUE(A1:A17) at cell B1 to get a unique list of browsers. This is a dynamic list. If you change the list of browsers, the unique list gets updated automatically. ...

When I analysed my HTTP log last week, I had another motive: are there enough people accessing my site on a mobile device? Or is it too small at this stage for me to care about? Well, have a look at the numbers. Windows98.4% Mobile0.6% Linux0.5% OS X0.5% Yes, there are more people accessing my site through a mobile device than there are using Linux or OS X. That's shocking! ...

I went to the Google Chrome site. Clicking on the “Accept and Install” button… … automatically launched the downloader in Firefox… … and (after a fairly short while) started installing the application directly. This may be the most painless install I’ve done in a while. I clicked on “Customise the settings” This is what it looks like. And that’s it! It installs, and launches in just a few seconds. First impressions: the startup and rendering are really fast. ...

One out of every 5 hits to my site is from a bot. I spent a fair bit of time this weekend analysing my log file for last month (which runs to gigabytes, and I ended up learning a few things about file system optimisation, but more on that later). 80% of the hits were from regular browsers. 20% were from robots. Here's a sample of the user-agents: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; <a href="http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)">http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)</a> Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +<a href="http://www.google.com/bot.html)">http://www.google.com/bot.html)</a> Mediapartners-Google DotBot/1.0.1 (<a href="http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/#info">http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/#info</a>, [email protected]) Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 <a href="http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)">http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)</a> msnbot/1.1 (+<a href="http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)">http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)</a> FeedBurner/1.0 (<a href="http://www.FeedBurner.com)">http://www.FeedBurner.com)</a> Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; attributor/1.13.2 +<a href="http://www.attributor.com)">http://www.attributor.com)</a> WebAlta Crawler/2.0 (<a href="http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html)">http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html)</a> (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU) Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; I) ... You get the idea. The bulk of these are search engines. Over two-thirds of the bot requests were from Yahoo Slurp. Now, this struck me as weird. If I take the top 3 search engines that are sending traffic my way, ...

I've jumbled up pictures of 10 Bollywood actors. You can move the jumbled blocks around, like a jigsaw. Can you guess the actors? Comments sathya 23 Aug 2008 12:53 am: are you sure jigsaw 5 is right ? I guess it is A Kh. I entered the wikipedia spelling and it still says it is wrong. Sorry for the partial spoiler. sathya 23 Aug 2008 12:54 am: are you sure jigsaw 5 is right ? I guess it is A Kh. I entered the wikipedia spelling and it still says it is wrong. Sorry for the partial spoiler. ...