The Quest for Collabware

I am looking for a decent collabware that supports intuitive task management, project management, document management and knowledge-base management plus some aspects of social networking for internal employees, specifically for a small business or a startup. So, I have done a brief preliminary research and highlighted the following products for a quick peek, and then will make an informed choice. The list includes:

(more…)

October 17th, 2008  3

Nahi Samne Tu

For Once: A Hindi Song to Share. This is one of my favorite AR Rahman songs. Another AR Rahman song that closely competes with this one is: Do Kadam Aur Sahi from Meenaxi.

This song is ‘Nahi Saamne Tu’ from the movie Taal.
You can hear it here: Nahi Saamne Tu

And as usual, here are the lyrics.

dekho chhod ke kis raste wo jaate hain
saare raste vapas mere dil ko aate hain

preyasi

nahin saamne, nahin saamne ye alag baat hai
nahin saamne, nahin saamne ye alag baat hai
mere paas hai, mere paas hai tu mere paas hai
mere paas hai tu mere paas hai
mere saath hai,mere saath hai

tera naam maine liya hai yahan
mujhe yaad tune kiya hai wahan
tera naam maine liya hai yahan
mujhe yaad tune kiya hai wahan
bade zor ki aaj barsaat hai
bade zor ki aaj barsaat hai
mere paas hai tu mere paas hai,
mere paas hai tu mere paas hai
mere saath hai, mere saath hai

bichhad ke bhi mujhse juda tu nahin
khafa hai magar bewafa tu nahin
bichhad ke bhi mujhse juda tu nahin
khafa hai magar bewafa tu nahin
mere haath mein hi tera haath hai,
mere haath mein hi tera haath hai

mere paas hai tu mere paas hai,
mere paas hai tu mere paas hai
mere saath hai, mere saath hai
mere pass hai, mere pass hai
mere saath hai, mere saath hai
mere pass hai, mere pass hai

Agreed, they appear the most-deewana, sicko types; but me likes it :D


And if you have trouble understanding the romanised hindi, I can do a sicko-types translation.

Fear me, I R Evil!

July 23rd, 2008  4

Installing Wordpress & Plugins

In this series of posts I’ll share my experiences with setting up my blog using Wordpress and things to keep in mind while blogging with Wordpress.

Step 1: Installing Wordpress
There are two ways to install Wordpress: either you download it from Wordpress.org and manually upload it on your domain or you use any software installer provided by your domain manager such as Fantastico or a similar solution.

Step 2: Configuring Wordpress
This is the most time consuming process, since everythign you do after installing wordpress is included here. People generally prefer to do some configurations first, but I prefer to finsih all uploading work first and configurations later.

Step 2.1: Installing Plugins
Plugins add extra features to your basic wordpress blog and render it into a powerful publishing tool. Wordpress.org Plugins Directory has an huge list of very useful wordpress plugins.

I am using the following Plugins:

  • Ajax Comment Posting: Posts comments and validates the comment form using Ajax By regua.
  • Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. By Matt Mullenweg.
  • All in One SEO Pack: Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. By uberdose.
  • AutoMeta: Automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post. By Rich Boakes.
  • Awsom News Announcement: Allows you to post news announcements in the area above your posts on the index page (or anywhere else you want). By Harknell.
  • Broken Link Checker: Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. By Janis Elsts.
  • Cite This: Citations provider for WordPress By Yu-Jie Lin.
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith: Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.
  • In Series: Gives authors an easy way to connect posts together as a series. By Travis Snoozy.
  • Redirection: A redirection manager By John Godley.
  • StatPress: Real time stats for your blog By Daniele Lippi.
  • WP-DownloadManager: Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
  • WP-Flickr: The plugin adds a new tab to the upload panel when writing posts / pages to insert img tags from flickr By Jon Baker @ Clockwork Objects.
  • WP-Footnotes: Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. By Simon Elvery.
  • WP-PostRatings: Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
  • WP-PostViews: Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. It will not count registered member views, but that can be changed easily. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
  • WP-Print: Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
  • WP-ServerInfo: Display your host’s server PHP and MYSQL information (integrated into WordPress Admin Style) on your WordPress dashboard. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
  • WP-Smartdate: WP-Smartdate automagically resolves relative dates (e.g. “tomorrow,” “this coming Monday”) and adds the date reference in a machine-readable tag. By mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine).
  • WP Post Columns: Allows you to easily create columns within your posts for a magazine / newspaper style layout. By Sam Burdge.
  • WP YouTube: WP YouTube allows you to control all the YouTube videos at the same time. By Jens Törnell.
  • WP_HeadNFoot: WP_HeadNFoot is a free WordPress plug-in that help you to simply and easily insert code into the header and footer of a page, useful for things such as Google Analytics. The changes are theme independent allowing y0u to update or change the theme without having to remake the changes. By DCoda Ltd.

We download these from the Wordpress.org Plugins Directory and upload them in the /wp-content/plugins folder in your Wordpress install. Next up, we will be configuring these plugins to suit our use.

March 2nd, 2008  3

Inserting Google Analytics Code in Media Wiki

IMPORTANT: I do not know PHP, or for that matter any server-side scripting language. This method (described here) is a work around to successfully add your Google Analytics code in your mediawiki installation, based on the article: MediawikiEtGoogleAnalytics/En. I am using Mediawiki 1.9.3 and I don’t know if this works on previous/later versions though logically it should.

When I followed the aforementioned article to add Google Analytics (referred to as ‘gA’ henceforth) on the OSS Camp wiki that I am currently administering, I found that the code is successfully added (there was an error for the “if (!$wgUser->isSysop())” check in the addGoogleAnalytics() function which i commented), but it is nowhere near the </BODY> tag as required for gA to work correctly. So we needed some alternative method. I digged in a bit at the Media Wiki website and tried understanding the Media Wiki flow to understand how the output page is being created. I observed this in the “includes/Skin.php” file:

(around line # 691)

/**
* This gets called shortly before the \</body\> tag.
* @return String HTML-wrapped JS code to be put before \</body\>
*/
function bottomScripts() {
global $wgJsMimeType;
return “\n\t\t<script type=\”$wgJsMimeType\”>if (window.runOnloadHook) runOnloadHook();</script>\n” ;
}


I changed this to:

/**
* This gets called shortly before the \</body\> tag.
* @return String HTML-wrapped JS code to be put before \</body\>
*/
function bottomScripts() {
global $wgJsMimeType, $gStr;
$gStr = $this->addGoogleAnalytics();
return “\n\t\t<script type=\”$wgJsMimeType\”>if (window.runOnloadHook) runOnloadHook();</script>\n” . $gStr ;
}

And at the end of the document, just below the last closing brace “}”, I added the addGoogleAnalytics() function. The modified function is shown below:

(color coding this whole block was a pain and i am lazy)

function addGoogleAnalytics() {$printGoogleAnalytics = “<script src=\”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js\” type=\”text/javascript\”>\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “</script>\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “<script type=\”text/javascript\”>\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “_uacct = ” ;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “\” UA-XXXXXX-X \”" ;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “;\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “urchinTracker();\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “</script>\n”;return $printGoogleAnalytics;
}

Substitute the highlighted XXXXXX-X with your code and et voila! the code is working fine, absolutely fine!

Do leave a comment if you find this useful and I do want to credit the original author (at the aforementioned link) for his work, without which I couldn’t have found the solution.

June 18th, 2007  8

Friendly Windows Error Messages

Here I am sitting in the office, uploading PHP list on the localhost to do a custom install. The files are only 20% copied and so I have a lot of time to think and I was building on a software idea I had. Well, its out here in the open now… for I think, someone must ahve done something like it.

Ok, So here goes:

Software Design for ‘Friendly Windows Error Messages’

It happens so many times with us that we are working on our windows pc and suddenly, out of nowhere a ghoulish error message pops up in to our screen. The Software FWEM will hack a translate button on the message’s control box, that woud traslate the message into one of the following languages:

English, n00bish, Moronic, and Dummy-Bumble.

***

More to come… keep watching ;)

June 12th, 2007  No Comments

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