The Nerdy Site of SJ

New Vistas - SP2

2011-02-14T13:18:00.001+05:30

So I upgraded Windows Vista to Service pack 2 and got 30 GB freed. Should I be angry at having had 30 unusable GB for so many years or do I think them for freeing it up now. What Microsoft taketh Microsoft giveth back.

A quick google search revealed that there is a cleanup utility that didn't run after earlier releases that SP2 takes care of. More here http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2009/06/vista-sp2-frees.html

What surprises me is that none of the disk cleanup tools seem to have found this. Microsoft's own Disk Cleanup tool as well others like CCleaner and Gary's Utilities missed it . Maybe their pro-versions would fare better?

PDroidF

2010-11-22T16:06:00.000+05:30

Temporary placeholder page for my new Android project. :-)

The code repository http://code.google.com/p/capturetopdf/

More to come. Stay tuned ...

Android Presentation

2009-07-15T16:46:00.001+05:30

A presentation on Android I made at work.

Add The Golden Ganesh Widget to your blog

2009-07-05T18:33:00.030+05:30

The Golden Ganesh widget.

This widget will link to all the episodes on The Golden Ganesh radio-drama.
Episodes become available as I post them at my primary blog.
Read more about it here or see the trailer

<img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_oWW2rjOt7wI/Sk8ORaDqhGI/AAAAAAAAPd4/BFp3c_WF0VM/Ganesh%20Art%202.jpg" usemap="#ganeshmap" alt="Ganesh Map" border=0/><br/> <a href="http://sxjthefirst.blogspot.com/2009/07/valuehttpflickr.html">Click to know more </a><map name="ganeshmap"><area shape="rect" coords="1,139,18,160"    href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-1.html" alt="Episode 1" ><area shape="rect" coords="16,139,35,160"   href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-2.html" alt="Episode 2"><area shape="rect" coords="36,139,51,160"   href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-3.html" alt="Episode 3"><area shape="rect" coords="52,139,66,160"   href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-4.html" alt="Episode 4"><area shape="rect" coords="67,139,84,160"   href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-5.html" alt="Episode 5"><area shape="rect" coords="85,139,101,160"  href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-6.html" alt="Episode 6"><area shape="rect" coords="102,139,119,160" href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-7.html" alt="Episode 7"><area shape="rect" coords="120,139,136,160" href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-8.html" alt="Episode 8"><area shape="rect" coords="137,139,178,160" href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-9.html" alt="Episode 9"><area shape="rect" coords="12,160,30,180"   href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-10.html" alt="Episode 10"><area shape="rect" coords="34,160,64,180"   href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-11.html" alt="Episode 11"><area shape="rect" coords="68,160,88,180"   href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-12.html" alt="Episode 12"><area shape="rect" coords="102,160,120,180" href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-13.html" alt="Episode 13"><area shape="rect" coords="122,160,140,180" href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-14.html" alt="Episode 14"><area shape="rect" coords="51,182,72,200"   href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/07/golden-ganesh-episode-15.html" alt="Episode 15"><area shape="rect" coords="73,182,98,200"   href="http://jsridhar.blogspot.com/2009/08/golden-ganesh-episode-16.html" alt="Episode 16"></map>

This button will take you to a blogger page which will take through the steps to add the widget. It's as easy as clicking on the button below!!!!

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Kurushetra Tech Fest

2009-01-16T19:46:00.000+05:30

It is that time of the year when the battle begins as KURUKSHETRA (the UNESCO accredited International Techno- Management festival of The College of Engineering,Guindy)unleashes its power. This time among loads of exciting events there has been a lotta buzz online as well. PROVE OR DISPROVE that debuts this year is one such online event which gets your better sense to light. Fallacies, science myths, superstitions have long since choked the existence of pure logic and scientific reasoning. With the likes of Aristotle, Plato, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Tesla, Faraday and many more having walked on this planet the time has come to erase and rewrite baseless beliefs into facts or simply trash it! To follow the path of these great men and further their unspoken mission, battle it out at www.kurukshetra.org.in (Events-> Trinity->Prove or Disprove)!
Celebrate the spirit of reasoning!

Google Chrome: The newest new browser.

2008-09-03T14:54:00.002+05:30

Starting a discussion about Google Chrome the new browser.

I had read the comic they made to announce the release (Google it). I downloaded it earlier today and have been using it for a few hours now.
Kudos to Google for: 1. It's a really stable browser for a first release. Hasn't crashed so far. 2. The download bar is tab specific and unobtrusive and neat looking.
3. The search bar is very good and highlights the text that matches the search and the lines which contain matches are colored in the scroll bar. Too difficult to explain try it out.

4. Looks good if you like FireFox 3 you'll like this. See screen shot of new tab.

5. Good tabbed browsing support. Allows both mouse (the + button) and keyboard (ctrl T) to open tabs. Tabs can be dragged out to create a new window. Tabs also open fast.

6. Compatible with most sites including this one. YouTube videos, Google Docs (of course) all sites I visited so far worked with it. Though there were niggling issues with only one ironically enough iGoogle ... google's own home page. Does spell check as you type like FF. As the browser is based on the proven Webkit browser engine it helps with the compatibility.
7. Each tab in the browser is a process. See the task manager screen shot you'll see multiple chrome processes for each tab. (See bugs below.)
8. The browser's own task manager which shows the memory and network usage of each tab is an awesome feature. You can see at a glance which of sites is hogging bandwidth/memory. It also allows you to close a tab but more importantly it allows you to close any plugin which will be run its own process. For example when I play a YouTube video I can kill the video without killing the whole site. Google touts this as a secure way of doing things only time will tell how this plays outside of their labs.

Google has taken the idea of a secure sandbox from their Google Android project (my previous post) and used it here and used it well IMHO.

Cons:
1. Each plugin runs as a process but not each instance of the plugin in each tab. For example if I have two YouTube videos playing I will see one Shockwave plugin (which Youtube uses for their videos) process for them. If I kill it both videos and any other application using the plugin will all die. This makes sense in a way because most to the time you will kill a plugin when it's doing something malicious so all instances would have to be killed. Still since they have gone down would be good to have a way to kill with finer granularity. ( Do I sound like a nerdy serial killer?)
2. They have made some major departures from the usual in UI design. No menu bar at the top and the book marks menu is different from what I am used to. This might just be a case of getting used to but novices might think twice before adopting a new browser. As for myself I like the changes - it is roomier.
3. No extensions? themes? toolbars? WTF! I can only guess later releases will address this.
4. No saving of current tabs? No warning when closing a window with multiple tabs? I mean even Microsoft Internet Explorer has that.

Bugs:

1. The windows task manager shows each tab as seperate processes however killing one seems to kill the whole bowser. More importantly: If I open two Google Chrome browsers killing one kills the other!!!

The real question that needs to be asked is: Is this worth giving up my current browser for?

My answer is NO. It's a good browser but I don't see a convincing reason to move from my current browser. It's not just the minor glitches - after all FF, Safari and Internet Explorer all have some - the browser it self doesn't seem to have THAT ONE THING which will tempt people to move. When I first tried Firefox in '04 I was wowed by the tabbed browsing. Then the ease with which you could add plugins, add-ons, themes, toolbars etc etc. Later on was added the ability to save your tabs when you exit. Chrome's best features seem to be under the hood but how good these are we don't know yet. The only documents out there are those created by Google itself which is not a neutral source.

Conclusion: Very good product but I am not going to click on the "Make Google Chrome your default browser" button just yet.

Contacts Extended

2008-04-14T00:52:00.001+05:30

Contacts with Presets a.k.a Contacts Extended.

The source code and more hosted at http://code.google.com/p/contactspresets

Introduction: Contacts Extended is an extension of the typical contacts application that’s ships in almost all mobile phones. This application runs on the Android platform. It provides the functionality of the usual contacts applications plus a few “extended” features.

This application is a proof of concept and many features are yet to be implemented. Please refer TODO section for future enhancements.

Details:

The following actions are supported by Contacts Extended.

Features similar to the existing Contacts application:

Maintain Contacts: CRUD features for storing and retrieving contacts. The UI for CRUD is implemented as a menu in the main Contacts Extended screen as seen in the image below. The menu options are self-explantory.

Making Calls: To make a call

1. Select the contact to call or scroll to the contact and select View XC. This will take you to the Contact View screen.

2. Select the number (Home or Mobile) to call or move to the number and select Call from the menu.

New Features:

Autofilter contacts: In the textbox in the top of the main screen the user can type in a few characters of the contact he is searching for. This will trim the list of contacts to only those names matching the characters typed. In the image below, for example, only names beginning with “Ma” are shown.

To show all contacts again delete the characters typed in the textbox.

Contact Presets: This new feature allows the user to specify certain actions that the application must take before calling a user. Currently three actions are supported (Action Names and Values are case-sensitive. The first two actions will be most useful for those making conference calls which usually mean putting the phone on speaker mode and interacting with a voice system.

Action	Allowed values
Speaker	true/false
IVS	post-dial string
Timeout	Number of minutes

Speaker instructs the phone to automatically set speaker mode on (true) or off(false) when calling the contact.

IVS sets a post-dial string to be called during the call. If the user separates multiple strings with the locale’s WAIT character it will dial multiple post dial strings. (The PhoneNumberUtils.WAIT static variable defines this character in Android.)

Timeout can be set to notify the user every N minutes with a message. This will help the user decide if he wants to continue with the call or hang-up.

Caveats:

The application wherever possible tries to call the existing functionality of the phone instead of trying to build it’s own. As a result the following actions will not be currently possible:

Text Messaging: The code will try to call Android’s SMS editor. This is not present in as of SDK version m5 so user will get a message indicating it’s not supported.

Email: The code will try to call Android’s email program. This is not present in as of SDK version m5 so user will get a message indicating it’s not supported.

Video Call: The code will try to call Android’s default multimedia functionality. This is not present in as of SDK version m5 so user will get a message indicating it’s not supported.

Multimedia Messaging: The code will try to call Android’s MMS editor. This is not present in as of SDK version m5 so user will get a message indicating it’s not supported.

TODO:

This application is proof of concept the following enhancements will make it much more friendly.

1. Contact Image: Right now a default image is displayed for each contact. The database and code need to be modified to allow the user to set a different image for each contact.

2. More Actions: In addition to the three default actions many more can be added. Built in actions need to be shown as a list instead of being typed in.

3. User defined actions: The user should be able to specify a custom action or application to be called during/before/after call.