Readability – Transform the way you read on the web !

I love reading – I read books, articles, magazines, circulars, just about anything I can lay my eyes on… Naturally, I am a voracious reader in the Internet as well – I have subscribed to a huge number of RSS feeds, and  have a constant stream of Twitter tweets on articles to read.

The problem, I face when reading on the internet is, eye fatigue – I have astigmatism and the varying fonts faces, sizes and colors is a strain – even to normal people with perfect sight ! Couple this with the increasing number of advertising on the top and on the side of articles and you have a situation where the actual content is increasingly obscured. Font sizes are getting smaller and smaller and content is getting squeezed more and more by advertising and marketing clutter.

Of late, I have been using a tool that I found on the web (I saw it on Twitter but I have unfortunately been unable to track who sent it to me ) that has literally transformed my reading experience. It was created by a company called Arc90 and is a Bookmarklet which can dragged onto your browser bookmarks. When you click on it – it  reloads the current page loaded in your browser stripped all extraneous fluff.  Simply the content of the page is shown.

As a web-developer and general internet addict , I have seen a lot of tools and gadgets and I like to think I have a good idea of what works – as soon as I saw this tool I knew this would be awesome. The concept is simple, powerful – elegant.  It is one of those things
that seem so obvious  – when you feel that way – you know you are seeing a work of genius.

What you need to do to get this gadget is  -

1. Go to the Readability installation page
2. Choose from the simple options given there how you want your content to be displayed – the options are simple and straightforward giving you a choice of reading style, font size and margin width (I chose eBook style, large size and narrow margin). A sample text is shown with the formatting you choose so you can play with the options.
3. Once you are satisfied, simply drag the big button marked “Readability” onto your bookmark toolbar (or you can right click the link and choose the bookmark option) and your done !
4. Next time you are on a web-page with a compelling article being obscured by garish ads and decorations, simply click on the Bookmarklet and the page reloads with the content formatted exactly as you want it.

When I first installed it they had fewer options and every once in awhile it would not work – but they have been going from strength to strength with new options and it’s rare to see it not work.

This tool has certainly transformed how I read on the web – I can’t recommend this tool enough!!  So what are you waiting for – go get it !!

PS: It won the NY Times Pogy award for best idea of 2009

web 2.0, software, tool, bookmarklet, font

A podcast review – Software Engineering Radio

I am a fan of podcasting.. video blogging and screen casts are fine, but in terms of convenience and bang for the megabyte – nothing beats a podcast . I have been listening to podcasts for a few years now. I am usually listening when walking home from work or doing some chores. In fact I wrote an earlier post about them along with some of my favorites (at the time).

Of late I have listened a lot to a podcast called Software Engineering Radio. Actually, I have been listening to this one for a long time now and it has grown from strength to strength. It was started by a German software consultant – Markus Voelter and is based in Europe (the details are here). There is now a team of people both creating episodes as well as supporting the website. A new episode is published every 10 days and the feed for it is available at the website.

The podcast is about the software engineering and is for professional developers (it says so in the title ).  IMHO it is the best podcast for professional developers I have come across.  Markus and his team of volunteers do a great job – the interviews are professionally done and the audio quality is great. The post production is also very well done – in fact they have put up videos about their recording and post-production process. All the recording are released as part of Creative Commons 2.5 license and I think the majority of the episodes are gems worth downloading and keeping.

The coolest thing about Software Engineering Radio and what ultimately makes it such a great resource are the subjects and the people they interview.

The subjects are for the most part about software engineering practice – but they are things that are really useful to ones growth as a software professional. Episodes range from discussions about software development methodology to software languages and tools to computer science research.  In fact there was recently a very interesting episode on the – Difference between Software Engineering and Computer Science.

The people interviewed range from professional software developers and consultants to researchers and academics. Some are giants in their field and others I haven’t heard of (admittedly thats a large percentage of them – maybe because I hadn’t heard of their field in the first place ).

Another thing I would like to mention is the format of the episodes. They are interviews and the team at SE Radio
go to great lengths to prepare and ask just the right questions to
illuminate the topic at completely and extract pearls of wisdom from
the people they interview. I think this format is better than a speech or a presentation because of the interaction between the interviewer and the interviewed.

There is sometimes a problem with the English accent – most of the team are from mainland Europe and have European accents, but it is never so bad that one cannot understand what is being said. In fact one of the things I like about the show are the various accents of people from different parts of Europe, UK and America. It makes the show more interesting to me as I try to guess at the nationalities of the interviewer and interviewed from their accents

Software Engineering, podcast, review

What is Adobe Flash,Flex and AIR?

Ever since the Internet started becoming a platform for business, people have been working on ways to enhance the limitations of HTML.  One way to do this was to get the user to download and install extensions to the basic browser platform that had the capabilities to run the code used to create regular user interfaces. Several companies introduced various different types of extension – some of the notable efforts in this space are Microsoft with ActiveX controls, Sun with Java Applets and Adobe with Flash. In this post I am going to talk a bit about Adobe’s products in this space.

Over the past couple of years Adobe has been on a platform expansion binge and have significantly added to their capabilities as a web development platform alternative to Microsoft’s .NET and Sun’s Java. So lets start at the beginning – first Adobe introduced the Flash player which was essentially an animation and video platform with some development features (Adobe Flash uses a language called Actionscript) .

As the concept of Rich Internet Applications (as these extensions came to be called) started getting more traction and mind share with the advent of AJAX based technologies – Adobe introduced the AIR platform and the Adobe Flex framework.

The AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) platform is a cross platform runtime on which one can deploy applications built using Adobe Flash, HML, AJAX or Adobe Flex on the desktop. Thus AIR is a means by which the developer of an RIA application can extend their presence on to the computers desktop and become independent of the browser.

The Adobe Flex Framework is a bit like Microsoft XAML or Mozilla XUL in that it is uses an XML based language (called MXML) that you use to describe your user interface. You can use in conjunction Actionscript to create applications Flex is an Adobe framework that leverages the Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash run-times. While the framework itself is open source (it’s not free though), the underlying run-times that it targets are proprietary (though I believe they now support the WebKit HTML engine as well which is an open source run-time). Both AIR and the Flex Framework are freely available, Adobe sells an eclipse based tool called Flex Builder that lets easily build powerful applications using the Flex Framework.

A predecessor to all these frameworks you might want to consider is OpenLaszlo.
It is open source framework I came across a couple of years back that
was already supporting flash and I believe now they support a wide
variety of platforms.

Another interesting open source project in this space is Curl which is an MIT project

The competition have not been standing still, however. Microsoft has unveiled Microsoft Silverlight and it’s open source (Mono) counterpart Moonlight, Mozilla has the Prism project and Sun has JavaFX. I don’t know much about Prism or JavaFX but I haven’ seen much traction around either of them.

Finally the HTML 5 specification got off the ground. It has started addressing some of the fundamental issues with the HTML specification and introduced elements for richer media than text like audio and video (along the same lines as image). The web-browser space has also started embracing the specification working to include support for these elements – AFAIK – Opera, Firefox’s Gecko engine and Google Chrome’s Webkit engine are neck and neck in their effort  to support HTML 5 specification with IE 8 following them.

Adobe, Flash, Flex, AIR

Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Windows 7 can get along – Seriously…

I know, I know – VS.NET 2003 is not supported on Windows Vista and above.  In fact Microsoft in their all-knowing wisdom went ahead and supported Visual Studio 6.0 on Vista, but not VS.NET 2003 !!

I don’t know if this speaks to the crappy nature of the VS.NET 2003 product or to weird resource constraints or some other theory (insert favorite MS conspiracy theory here) . The list of supported versions of the Visual Studio product line are AFAIK as follows-

• Visual Studio 6.0 – Supported on Windows 7
• Visual Studio 2002 – Not supported on Windows 7
• Visual Studio 2003 – Not supported on Windows 7
• Visual Studio 2005 SP 1- Supported on Windows 7
• Visual Studio 2008 – Supported on Windows 7

So VS.NET 2003 and Window 7 are officially not on speaking terms – but the fact remains I need VS.NET 2003 for my job. Just because MS does not support it – I can’t NOT use it so despite all the warnings we went ahead and installed the darn thing and you know what – it installs – and runs (after a fashion)!  The annoying dialog declaring that the program is not supported is easily dismissed – there is a check box allowing you to block it from appearing again.  Debugging needs you to run in administrator mode – you can set this by right-clicking the shortcut choosing properties and then the compatibility sub-tab – there is a check-box to always run the program as administrator.

The next challenge was VS.NET 2003 refused to load my web projects so I went about looking for a way to set this up…  I opened up the IIS manager and boy let me tell you the IIS manager for IIS 7 is totally different from the IIS 5.0 and IIS 6.0 managers. You can configure everything down to the individual web.config files with this thing. Luckily running ASP.NET 1.1 on IIS7 is supported even though VS.NET 2003 is not so MS provided some helpful articles on IIS.NET – I found this article whose instructions I followed. There were some further gotchas that I encountered that you might be interested in know about -

• I installed VS.NET 2003 SP1 to overcome a compilation problem. Apparently SP1 addresses these issues that occur when you have solutions with a large number of projects.
• A weird thing is that sometimes the client scripts that are installed with ASP.NET 1.1 do not get properly installed – you need to run “aspnet_regiis” utility with the “-c” option from the command line to ensure it is properly installed.
• I needed to install “Directory Browsing” from “Control Panel -> Programs -> Turn Windows Features On and Off ” and then switch on directory browsing for the main web-root (theoretically you can over-ride the web-root setting in the individual web project using the web.config files but ASP.NET 1.1 project web.config files are not supported apparently). You need directory browsing to be available in order to add the web-project to your solution from VS.NET 2003
• You need to be part of the debugger users group on your computer in order to be able to do F5 debugging of your web project.
• If you partition your hard drive, make sure you allocate at least double what you used to allocate for the system (C:) drive when you were running on windows – not only is Windows 7 bigger, it needs more RAM and consequently your pagefile is bigger as well. Not to mention you will inevitably install VS.NET 2008 as well as VS.NET 2003 (after all that is the future right) and all the other goodies you had

Once you have done all this, things are more or less OK – performance is not much better or worse than XP but that’s probably more VS.NET 2003 than Windows 7.  So despite all the warnings and recommendations to use XP in a virtual machine (with 2 GB of RAM at my disposal – yeah right!!) here I am running VS.NET 2003 on Windows 7.  Overall, I think Windows 7 is a cool OS but the experience for me is marred due to reality of having to coax it to work with VS.NET 2003. In my firm – moving everything (and there is a LOT)  to a newer version of .NET is quite understandably a low priority given the economic climate – besides by the time we discuss and negotiate and decide to move MS has already come out with a newer version of everything .

Well HTH 

Take care y’all and be good

Visual Studio.NET 2003, Windows 7

Google – The OS re-defined…

So finally after all the rumors, speculation and denials – it’s out there in black and white – Google has announced the Google Chrome OS .
This has led to a flurry of speculation of course the biggest being the impact on Microsoft (check out this cartoon by Federico Feini – )

The details are :-

1. It would be a custom version of the GNU/Linux kernel.
2. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.
3. It would initially be targeted for use in netbooks.
4. It is different from the Android Mobile OS which was designed to target various devices (and form-factors) from phones and set-top boxes to netbooks. The Google Chrome OS would be for people that spend a lot of their time on the internet and will target power computers.
5. Plan to release in the middle of 2010.
6. It would be open-source so expect code for developers to play sometime soon.

I am for one am going to follow this with much interest and keep my fingers crossed that it works out. If this is anything like Google Chrome – I would be willing to install it and give it a fair shot at becoming my default OS. that being said there is still a long way to go and quite a bit of competition too – especially given that it’s going to be a flavor of Linux, which we know does not suffer from a lack of flavors

I noted in a post at the beginning of the year that Google had pulled the plug on several projects. It was named Google hunkers down.

Well it looks like that was just a breather – a clearing of the slate for the big guns – Google is back !!

Oh and by the way – Google Apps (GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and GTalk) is out of beta This seems more to satisfy the paying customers than any new release of functionality

PPS :

Google Wave looks awesome

Check out the Google Wave – this is AWESOME stuff and when it comes out could transform your social media universe completely. You simply have to see the video (it’s a little long) to believe it – instant messaging that’s truly instant, collaboration in real-time…. here is an abridged version of the unveiling -

The application UI is written using HTML 5 (canvas element, video element, geolocation, App Cache, etc) and will render in the mordern browsers. This of course implies Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome etc

The other reason why I think it’s so cool is that Google is borrowing a page from Microsoft and involving developers. The Google Waves are extensible and the communication protocol used is open source , there are APIs available for developers as well as a sandbox environment where developers can try out their code. You can even set-up your own Google Wave server – which is really cool when you start thinking of enterprises and the possibilities of collaboration there…  It’s insane I tell you -  the only catch is – it’s not available yet.  It’s in private beta – you can sign up to be informed when it goes public – wonder when mere mortals like me can play with it.

Books Ahoy !

I am a bookworm – this is not a particular new or startling revelation to anyone who knows me. This particular love affair was fanned by my father who has a fetish for collecting things – books are one of these things Over the years I have read a lot of books… I read comics and novels and magazines and newspapers. I read encyclopedias and almanacs and a whole lot of Readers Digest – I love their condensed books. I am the type of guy who will read the backs of cans or the small print in advertisements while waiting in lines

Once I left college and entered the software industry – I became fascinated by the internet and awed  by the amount of information that was available. As my life became more and more nomadic (I was a software consultant) I found it difficult to carry around books (stupid international travel regulations restricting baggage to 30Kgs !) and buying books everywhere I went, while tempting, was way too expensive. Instead the addictive power of Google and broadband connections drew me to the flickering glow of the computer/laptop monitor.

Then suddenly blogging and RSS became mainstream and all of a sudden I was facing information overload. Bombarded by news items, article, opinions, rants, podcasts (I think podcasts a brilliant for certain situations – more here) and video blogging – there weren’t simply weren’t enough hours in the day to keep up!  I started feeling the computer and the broadband connection becoming a leash tethering me the glowing screen. I missed being able to lie on my back and or curling up on a couch with a book.  I bought a laptop and then a PDA (this was back before the iPod and way before smart-phones). Neither were satisfactory solutions – the laptop was too cumbersome, I was scared of dropping it and the battery life sucked. The PDA had more potential but had neither a big enough screen nor satisfactory software.

Last year I moved back home to Trivandrum (Kerala, India) – I looked at all the shelves lined with familiar classics from my childhood and promptly started reading them again (the lack of a reliable broadband internet connection played a part as well I admit). I found some of my colleagues at work shared my love for books and got recommendations, which I blended with my own list of books I wanted to read.   Then I went to the local bookstore and bought some books (actually I bought a whole lot of books)

It feels good to be back reading books – I have broadband but it is not un-limited so I am more picky in what I use it for (software and media downloads mostly). I think I manage to grasp and read more using a book – I think the fact that unlike the computer there are no distractions or options helps one focus more and get deeper into the experience.

The price of books in India is a pleasant surprise compared to international book prices There are few hard-covers and the books aren’t published using high quality paper but I can live with that. The only thing I miss is access to some of the comics/graphic novels I had when I was in America  I have heard of  the Kindle from Amazon and I think it’s brilliant – it is however – still a long way away from replacing a books.

PS: I have signed up for an online bookshelf called Readernaut check it out – you can signup if your are interested

PPS: I am on Shelfari as well

Darwin gets a thumbs up from the catholic church

Here is the link – Vatican buries the hatchet with Charles Darwin

It’s over a hundred years too late but then this is the Vatican – it takes them awhile to get around to things   I wonder what parents and school teachers will be telling their kids I can imagine the conversation -

Adult:  Remember that intelligent design stuff we were spouting about – turns out we were wrong after all.  My bad !
Kid: OK… Whatever you say…  Can I go and play now ?

Man, wonder what the die hard intelligent design folks will do – convert or accept the Vatican?
I’m going to grab some popcorn and watch the fireworks

A Linux for every trade…

While puttering around the internet the other day I came upon this software AptonCD and while going through it – a set of light bulbs went off in my head and I actually had an idea ! I was so excited by this that I thought I’d blog about it

I participate in the Free Software Users Group, Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum) and one if it’s main activities is making Linux available to the general populace. As part of this activity a local company Zyxware Technologies (these really cool guys BTW) put together vending machine (Freedom Toaster) which burns various Linux distributions on CD/DVD media. This proved to be a very successful project (broadband is still limited and expensive in India so downloading distributions is quite difficult).

One of my challenges as a programmer has been around setting up the development environment. All programmers have a certain toolkit that they are comfortable with. Depending on their level of  sophistication this can be as simple as a text editor to a full blown IDE…  The challenge for me was finding and setting up equivalent tools in the Linux platform to the ones I used in Windows.

It occurred to me  that the challenge I detailed above would be a common one for anyone that is using a set of software tools for their trade.  It would also be useful to people in other professions (other than programming software) that are switching to Linux from another OS platform like Windows to get a set of equivalent tools in Linux for the ones they use in Windows. In fact there are lists out there that detail Linux equivalents to Windows tools.

So here is my idea – We could leverage AptonCD to create meta-packages that people could simply install over the base Linux distribution. These packages would be prepared separately from the base Debian install (Apt is the Debian package manager) and applied after the distribution is installed.

This is not a new idea – in fact here in Kerala we already have a custom Debian distribution that is targeted for schools – IT@School .  The twist here is that while the IT@School is a custom Debian distribution what I have in mind is more in terms of meta-packages that can be installed over a base Debian distribution like Ubuntu. We can leverage the Freedom Toaster to distribute these packages for people. The packages would be created by professionals in a trade  for other professionals who want to use Linux but are not sure how to get all the tools of their trade on it. These people can simply install the OS distribution and install the meta-package for their trade and voila – they can get to work

Of course there are still challenges – Linux often has several tools for a particular task and there may be version conflicts as well. I have also not accounted for the learning curve in getting used to these tools. Nonetheless, I think this would at least give a head-start to professionals wanting to use Linux as a platform for their trade and drive adoption of Linux.

The ultimate aim IMHO is not to make everyone in the world a super-duper Linux hacker but to make people productive in Linux

Prototype It!

So I saw this post today – it’s by Paul Buchheit a former Googler (he is one of the founders of FriendFeed) and the lead developer of one of my all time favorite software applications – GMail (it was his 20% project at Google) and it’s about the concept of Communicating with code.

Paul writes (in his post) on the concept of  using prototypes  to communicate ideas and concepts. He talks about his work with GMail and how he threw together a prototype in order to show the idea of targeted ads in GMail – targeted ads was not a priority until the prototype showed how useful and interesting it could be. The post ends with a similar exercise that he has done using the Friendfeed API (it’s pretty cool – check it out ) The reason I read this post and decided to blog about it is that it talks about developer communication – a topic that I wrote about in another post .

Communicating ideas through prototypes is a great idea – I have always noticed that people get more excited about something they can play with and try out. In fact this is old news in other industries – the auto industry, for example, spends millions to make concept cars to introduce new ideas to the public and solicit feedback Architects likewise – build scale models of their ideas to present to clients. So why don’t we adopt these ideas ? After all we are always talking about “software architecture” and “software construction” and other civil engineering analogies when we talk of software development

My experience is that when the term “prototype” comes up in software development projects most people are thinking of mock-ups. This is especially true in the web-development shops where there is a separate team of graphics designers creating HTML and image pictures of the user interface while a separate team of developers get to “build” the application from the pictures I think this is a very limiting thing.Prototypes should not be limited to the user experience or to presenting and communicating new ideas. I like to make prototypes of my technical solutions to software problems. For example, if you are trying out this great new idea you had on caching data – write a prototype application – the absolute simplest application you can use to exercise your idea.  This would provide you with feedback on whether your idea is valid as well as show up gotchas or limitations in your design.  The pragmatic programmers in their seminal book – The Pragmatic Programmer refereed to these applications as “Tracer bullets”.

Sometimes the concepts or ideas themselves are large and need a lot of programming to even build the prototype(tracer bullet). In these cases I still believe one must prototype the concept – so the question remains – how do you do this ?
Well one way would be to take the approach Paul took in building the initial GMail prototype – modify some existing code. I find sitting in front of a blank file makes the task ahead seem even bigger than it is – so I start with a piece of code to modify even if it is something as simple as a “Hello World” application.  Another good place to look is in the open source forums (though this might be a problem if you are working in a  company that does not allow open source software) – usually there is some variation on your concept that you could work with there . A third option is to accumulate code, links and other resources over time that you can use to jump start your coding.

So – Happy Prototyping