M.S. தோனி சொல்லப்படாத கதை - ஒரு விமர்சனம்

ஹாலிவுட் திரையுலகில் பிரபலமான ஒரு திரைநடை (genre) விளையாட்டு சார்ந்த திரைப்படங்கள்.  இந்திய திரைப்படங்களில் இது அவ்வளவாக கையாளப்படாத ஒரு விஷயமாகவே இருந்து வந்திருக்கிறது. அப்படியே எடுத்தாலும் இயக்குனரின் திறமையின்மை காரணமாக படம் ஓடாமல் போகும் (உதாரணம் - அசார்). இந்த நிலமையை மாற்றும் வண்ணம் அமைந்திருக்கும் படம் M.S. தோனி - சொல்லப்படாத கதை. A Wednesday, Baby போன்ற வெற்றிப்படங்களை தந்த நீரஜ் பாண்டேயின் இயக்கத்தில் உருவாகியுள்ள இந்த திரைப்படம் பொதுஜனங்களிடம் நல்ல வரவேற்பைப் பெற்றுள்ளது. அப்படி என்ன நன்றாக இருக்கிறது என்று கேட்கிறீர்களா? மேலே படிக்கவும்.

இந்த விமர்சனம் வித்தியாசமாக இருக்கட்டும் என்பதற்காக இந்த திரைப்படத்தையே ஒரு கிரிக்கெட் ஆட்டக்காரராக அனுமானித்துக்கொண்டு அது அடிக்கும் நான்கு ரன்கள், ஆறு ரன்கள், மற்றும் விக்கெட்குகள் என்ற வகையில் படத்தின் நிரைகுறைகளைப் பார்ப்போம். 

சிக்சர்ஸ்

தோனியின் வாழ்க்கையில் அவர் எதிர்கொண்ட தோல்விகளையும் போராட்டங்களையும் அவற்றை மீறி அவர் எப்படி வெற்றிப்படிகளில் ஏறுகிறார் என்பதையும் உணர்வுபூர்வமாக வழங்கி ஒரு ஆறு ரன்களை பெறுகிறது இப்படம். சிறுவயதில் பேட்டிங் கற்றுக்கொள்வதில் ஆசிரியர் போட்ட தடைகள் முதற்கொண்டு, 19 வயதிற்குட்பட்டவர்கள் அணியில் தேர்ச்சி அடையாதது, துலீப் டிராபியில் பங்குபெற தேர்ச்சிபெற்ற விபரம் கூட சரியான நேரத்தில் தெரியவராதது, வீட்டுநிலமை காரணமாக ரயில்வேயில் வேலைக்கு சேர்ந்து விளையாட்டில் கவனம் செலுத்தமுடியாமல் அவதிப்படுவது, காதலியின் அகால மரணம் என ‘வாழ்க்கையில் ஆயிரம் தடைக்கல்லப்பா’ என்ற பாட்டிற்கு உதாரணமாக இருந்திருக்கிறார் தோனி. அந்த சமயங்களில் அவரது நண்பர்கள் மட்டுமே அவருக்கு பண/மன உதவியாக இருந்திருக்கிறார்கள் என்று பார்க்கும்போது இந்த நாடு விளையாட்டு வீரர்களை இன்னும் எவ்வளவு ஊக்குவிக்கலாம் என்பது நிதர்சனமாகிறது.

அடுத்த ஆறு ரன்கள் படத்தின் கிளைமாக்ஸாக 2011 உலகக்கோப்பை இறுதி மேட்சை மறுபடி கண்முன் நிறுத்தி நம்மையெல்லாம் உணர்ச்சிப்பிழம்பாக ஆக்கியதற்காக. தோனியின் அம்மாவின் பூஜை, அப்பாவின் கண்ணீர், நண்பர்களின் படபடப்பு, ஒட்டுமொத்த இந்தியர்களின் BP எகிறியது, வெற்றி பெற்றபின் இந்திய அணியின் கொண்டாட்டம் எல்லாவற்றையும் மறுபடி காட்டி தோனியைப்போலவே கடைசிப்பந்தில் சிக்சர் அடித்துவிடுகிறார் இயக்குனர்.

ஃபோர்ஸ்

சுஷாந்த் தோனியைப்போலவே அமைதியான முகம், ஹெலிகாப்டர் ஷாட்கள் அடிப்பது, மேனரிசங்கள் என்று நிறைய மெனக்கெட்டிருக்கிறார். அவரை தேர்ந்தெடுத்ததற்கு ஒரு நான்கு ரன்கள் கொடுத்துவிடுவோம். இன்னும் கொஞ்சம் நடிப்பில் முதிர்ச்சி இருந்தால் ஆறே கொடுத்திருக்கலாம். தோனியின் அப்பாவாக வருகிற அனுபம் கேர் எப்போதும் போல் அபாரம். மற்றவர்களும் ஈடுகொடுத்து நடித்திருக்கிறார்கள். 

அடுத்த ஃபோர் தோனி விளையாடிய மேட்சுகளையெல்லாம் தேடிப்பிடித்து அவரது அநாயாசமான ஷாட்களை காட்டியதற்காக. நடுவில் தோனிக்கு பதிலாக சுஷாந்தை புகுத்தி கிராபிக்ஸ் வித்தை காட்டியிருப்பது அருமை. ஆனால் அவர் நடித்த விளம்பரங்களையும் மறுபடி காட்டும்போது நமக்கு ‘ஙே’ என்று ஆகிவிடுகிறது (உங்க கஷ்டம் புரியுது தயாரிப்பாளரே!)

ரன் அவுட் 

படத்தின் இரண்டாம் பாதியில் இந்திய சினிமாவின் சாபக்கேடான பாடல்கள் இரண்டு வரும்போது வேகத்தடை ஏற்பட்டு ‘மறுபடி பாட்டை போடாதீங்கடா’ என்று பக்கத்தில் இருந்தவர் புலம்பும்படி ஆகிறது. இந்த நேரத்தில் படம் ரன் அவுட் ஆகிவிடுமோ என்று பயப்படும்போது காதலியின் இறப்பு நம்மை அதிர்ச்சியில் ஆழ்த்தி படம் தப்பித்துவிடுகிறது. இரண்டாவது காதலான சாக்‌ஷியின் சீன்களும் ஹைக்கூ கவிதையாக சட்டென முடிக்கப்படுகிறது.

க்ளீன் போல்ட்

தோனியின் புகழுக்கு காரணமான அவரது சாமர்த்திய முடிவுகள் (எந்த பௌலரை எப்போது போடச்சொல்வது, டெண்டுல்கர் போன்றவர்களை திடீரென பௌலிங் போடவைத்து விக்கெட் எடுப்பது போன்றவை) படத்தில் இடம்பெறவே இல்லை என்பது க்ளீன் போல்ட் போன்றதொரு உணர்வை ஏற்படுத்துகிறது. ஏற்கனவே படம் 3 மணி நேரத்திற்கு மேல் ஓடுவதால் இதை மன்னித்து விட்டுவிடலாம் (No ball)

ஆகமொத்தத்தில் பாதி கதை தெரிந்ததே என்பதால் படம் செஞ்சுரி அடித்தது என்று சொல்லமுடியாவிட்டாலும் கண்டிப்பாக தோனியின் ஆட்டம்போல் விறுவிறுப்பாகவே இருந்தது.

நல்ல வாழ்க்கைப்படமா (biopic) இல்லையா?

சில விமர்சகர்கள் இது ஒரு நல்ல வாழ்க்கைப்படமாக இல்லை, தோனியை ஒரேயடியாக உயர்த்திக்காட்டுகிறார்கள், அவரது தவறுகளை சுட்டிக்காட்டவில்லை என்று சொல்லியிருக்கின்றனர். இது ஓரளவுக்கு உண்மைதான். அவர் 2009ல் சீனியர் ஆட்டக்காரர்களை அவர்களது வேகமின்மை காரணமாக நீக்கவேண்டும் என்று கேட்கிறமாதிரி ஒரு சீன் இடம்பெற்றிருக்கிறது. அதை மீடியா எப்படி திரித்து பேசியது என்றும் காண்பித்திருக்கிறார்கள். அவருக்கும் சேவாகுக்கும் பகை என்றால் எப்படி உலகக்கோப்பையின் போது சேவாகை மறுபடி சேர்த்துக்கொண்டார்கள்? CSK ஸ்பாட் ஃபிக்ஸிங்கில் அவர் பங்கு என்ன என்பது பற்றி எதுவும் காட்டவில்லை. என்னைக்கேட்டால் படத்தின் பெயருக்கு ஏற்றவாறு இதுவரை மீடியாவில் சொல்லப்படாத கதையை மட்டும் சொல்லியிருக்கிறார்கள். மீடியா சொல்லிய ‘கதை’களை எல்லாம் விட்டுவிட்டார்கள். எல்லாவற்றிற்கும் மேல் தோனியின் வாழ்க்கை இன்னமும் முடியவில்லை என்பதால் டெக்னிகலாக இது ஒரு வாழ்க்கைப்படம் இல்லைதான். எழுச்சியூட்டும் (inspiration) படமாக வேண்டுமானால் எடுத்துக்கொள்ளலாம்.

The missing social network in India!

With Facebook and LinkedIn being so ubiquitous, we have all the social network that we need and more, right? Think again. We are missing a social network for one of the most important communities in our lives: the neighbourhood. By neighbourhood, I don’t mean just your apartment complex. Everyone in Marathahalli or Velachery should be able to connect with each other and form a private network that they can tap into anytime. As an example, US already has a popular neighbourhood social network named Nextdoor.

Why should we care about Neighbours?

In December last year, all hell broke loose in Chennai due to heavy rains. Most of the city was flooded with some homes surrounded by upto 10 feet of water. Chennai residents who had never seen such a thing happen before, did not leave their homes before the flooding. As a result, they were stuck in their homes with no electricity and little food/water for upto 3-4 days. Amidst all this, something magical happened. Neighbours who they have never seen/talked to before started helping by providing food packets, water bottles and rescuing elderly people/kids out of their homes. I am sure several folks in chennai realized the importance of having good relationship with neighbours. Imagine what if these neighbours were already in touch via a social network. Starting from communication to collaboration, everything would have been easier.

Benefits of a neighbourhood social network

Apart from finally getting to know the people living nearby, neighbourhood networks have many other uses. This has been proved by the unicorn startup Nextdoor in US. Started in 2010, Nextdoor has millions of users in 93000 US neighbourhoods. Registered neighbours discuss about security issues/car thefts, get recommendations for good plumbers or other service providers, sell unused household items to nearby residents etc. Nextdoor even ties up with government agencies and police departments to serve their users with updates regarding their neighbourhood. 

The case for Hyperlocal classifieds

Classifieds works best when it is hyperlocal. Ask yourself, would you buy a pre-owned mobile phone from someone two streets away maybe after multiple visits or would you travel half way across the city wasting time, energy and fuel just to find out that the screen is broken? When I decided to move from US to India in June last year, I found Nextdoor very useful to sell many household items to neighbours. Even the popular classifieds platform Craigslist wasn’t very helpful because there’s too much noise there. That’s when I realized that a social network like Nextdoor would be great to have in India too. And that’s how Neighbr.in was born. Just one month after release, we have 2000+ users in Bangalore and Chennai. Our users are helping each other to find good PG or apartment, to find basketball/shuttle courts and players or to find neighbours with similar interests.

To conclude

The more you network, the more you benefit, they say. Why miss out on the neighbourhood network? Maybe you can borrow a used book or find a job opportunity from a neighbor who is in the same field as you. With some luck, you may even find a good friend or life partner! Start exploring!

Website: Neighbr.in

Office humor

Back in 2000 or so, office email was "normal". People just asked their colleagues their questions and gave technical feedback etc with an occasional thanks if the other person did something really helpful. Around 2003 or so, i started noticing a strange trend. Few people started adding Thanks at the end of many emails. This trend got picked up and soon, everyone started adding Thanks to their emails. I started doing that too because I didn't want anyone to think that I am disrespectful. But some folks started taking this too far. They added a permanent "Thanks" to their signature. Even if THEY were helping ME out, they would end up thanking me because of this. It was like, "hey thanks for giving me a chance to help you, you are so good". Some emails would be like:

Subject: Thank you!
"Ramani,
Thank you for sending me the document.
Thanks again!

Thanks,
Anil"

At some point, I got fed up thanking profusely for every silly thing. Now I only thank people who are really doing a favor to me. I just use one of the variety of Regards like Warm Regards, Best Regards or Kind Regards (whatever that means).

We all know that some people are really good technically but they can't use correct grammer in emails. one such incident. One of my previous managers sent an email to all the team members with subject "Take leave today". I seriously thought "wow such a good manager, he is asking all of us to take leave. maybe we worked so hard, wow great man!". So, I immediately took off. Only on the way home, I saw the full content of the email. It seems HE was taking the day off because he was sick. His email subject should have been "Taking leave today". many times, i had to read the email twice to even understand the english part.

Another mishap that usually happens is forgetting to attach documents. People send really long description of their document like, "this document covers this aspect, that aspect" etc and forget to send the document itself.

Even with all these, I prefer emails more than meetings because of the comedy that happens in the so-called brainstorming meetings. They would call for a meeting with numerous folks from multiple teams who have no idea what each other are doing. Just setting up this meeting with a time when everyone's calendar is free itself would be a nightmare. After struggling hard, they would book a conf room for some half hour as if the hardest problems in the world were solved in half an hour!

There will be 10 people in the attendees list and 5 of them will come late (standard 15 mins). Somebody would start drawing something on the board slowly and by the time he finishes drawing using his less-than-stellar drawing skills, there will be only 5 mins left. Nothing will be decided in that 5 mins and they will resort to emails later. This is the peaceful version. There is another World War III version where everyone will fight tooth-and-nails to get their point of view across which no-one will accept anyway. Instead of all this drama, a simple email thread is far better, right?

Facebooker Taxonomy

I joined Facebook much earlier than many others I know. Initially I allowed some random people in my friends list who I had never even met (some random gmail contacts). The moment I decided to use Facebook regularly, I removed all those folks. Also, I don't accept any work colleagues as my friends (they belong to another place - LinkedIn). I have a short and sweet list with only close relatives and friends who I can trust. In case you are wondering why I am saying all this, you will find out towards the end of this post.

In my observation, I have seen four types of Facebook users.

Silent Monks: This category belongs to those who decided to join Facebook at some point as a favor to someone who pestered them to check out Facebook. They are still cursing themselves why they did it. They only post mugshots of themselves at random times with no explanation and they never comment on or like anybody else's updates. They post cryptic one line messages mostly during travel to inform the arrival/departure to the wife and never bother to answer the comments from other friends driving them crazy. Somebody should tell them that Facebook is not supposed to be used like that and you can use simpler things like SMS or voicemail to leave messages to your wife!

Family Fanatics: This category of folks will leave Facebook if it stops supporting photos. Because all they do is posting family pictures and checking which of their friends liked the album. If you like each individual picture in the album, you can become their close friend. If you forget to register any like, they will take revenge on you by not liking your next batch of photos. How dare you? hah...

Cautious Conversers: These folks have to check the political correctness of their status updates before they can post it. What if it offends the "Onnu Vitta Maama" (distant relative) who recently joined Facebook and demanded to become his friend over phone (which he accepted with a lot of hesitation). This syndrome arises because they would have allowed anyone to become Facebook friend. When you have 500 "friends" as audience, who knows what will be offensive to whom. They will mostly post articles from the web because you know, if somebody finds fault with it, they can put the blame on the original author and escape. Off late, they are worried about NSA reading their posts and stopped posting anything related to politics.

Facebloggers: These are ex-bloggers who got bored with blogging and decided to use Facebook as a blog. They will post re-eeally long text or use Facebook like a loudspeaker to announce their opinions about various topics which they can't resist anyway. Sometimes they will comment on their own posts before others comment on it! (I belong to this category)

So, choose your friends wisely and it's not all that wrong to remove random folks from your friends list for the sake of freedom. Happy facebooking!

Apple - History repeats!

Hello there! I am reviving this blog with a new look and new name! I am planning to write my thoughts about the mobile technologies and other technology related topics. I have also enabled comments again. If you are reading this from my RSS feed, you are welcome to visit my blog and comment on the post.

History is going to repeat itself at Apple in few years from now, I think. Just as it lost the PC battle to Microsoft even though Apple pioneered the concept of PC, the smartphone pioneer may lose the battle to Google/Samsung in more ways than one. With the announcement of iPhone 5S and 5C, Apple has clearly communicated it’s intention to remain as a premium provider while lacking the speed and agility of Samsung in terms of features. I can see a few things happening as a result of this.

Market Share

Apple’s US market share may start eroding at a slow pace given that it has still not caught up on things like bigger screen, NFC etc (fingerprint scanning is not going to make a big difference because it’s not available to developers and it may actually make it harder to unlock your phone by rejecting your own fingerprint often :). When they skipped these features last year, most people (including me) assumed that they are just slow to catch up. But now, it is clear that they have something against adding these features. Like always, they are trying to force their opinions on customers. Apple fanboys won’t have a problem with that, but I am not sure about the millions of non-fanboys who started loving Apple because it gave them a great phone/tablet that they can boast about. These converts may start wondering why they are sticking with Apple. 

Global market share is never going to get better with the way iPhone 5C has been priced outside US in countries like India and China where there is no contract subsidy. People may actually start disliking the Apple brand in India because it never produces something that makes sense for the average Indian smartphone user. Apple had a great chance of doing well in India where there are numerous iPhone developers churning out iPhone apps day in and day out. The other irony is in China - the iPhone is assembled in China but Apple makes sure the Chinese can’t afford it!

Profit Margins

So far, the argument in support of Apple has been “hey, who cares how many Android phones sell but Apple has the big margins”. This could be challenged with the introduction of two phones that are more or less the same except Aluminium vs plastic and the not-so-must-have fingerprint scanning. Just think about this. iPhone 5S with a green or orange color 3rd party case will look and function pretty much like iPhone 5C :) So, why bother spending another $100 to buy 5S? How many folks are going to buy it just for the aluminium back? The profit margins may erode as well if most people start ignoring iPhone 5S. 

Developers/Apps

You know which platform the first VisiCalc and Lotus Notes were developed for? Apple II. Fast forward and now most developers are targeting Windows first. It doesn’t matter that iPhone is the first choice smartphone platform today. As high end users start moving to Android, developers will follow them with no choice. Once the tide turns against iPhone, there’s no stopping. Does Larry Page know how to monkey dance like “Developers, Developers…” because he may have to do it soon.

Let’s see what happens in the next few years. For now, I am doing two things - dumping Apple stock and decided to buy a cutting edge Android phone next time.

The Web is not ready for Chrome yet!

Most of you would have read about the new and fast browser from Google called Chrome. I have always been amazed at how Google gives its own twist to a well established application paradigm. When they announced Gmail, I wondered how I was using an email application without conversation mode so far and immediately fell in love with Gmail. This time, it is Chrome. Geeks who tested it with Javascript benchmarks are stunned by the results from benchmarks. Everyday internet users who tried Chrome are not so impressed because it's not visibly faster than IE or Firefox for most websites. And that is because the Web is not yet ready for Chrome! Let me explain why.

It is an understatement to call Chrome as a browser. It is a mini operating system for running Web applications. So far, most of the Web applications have been running on the server side and used the browser only for display. Recently, there has been a push towards Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that use your browser's advanced functionalities such as Flash, Javascript etc to deliver desktop application-like complex feature set. Zoho and Google docs are examples of popular Office applications that run in your browser. This trend has just started and is growing. Think of a photo/image editing application as complex as Adobe Photoshop but runs in a browser and allows you and your friend (living in a different state/country) to edit a photo simultaneously across the Web. Think of a Movie editing application like Windows Movie maker that runs online completely. Chrome has been designed with such complex future applications in mind and that's why we don't see its impact right now.

Let me just touch upon the features of Chrome that make it suitable for such complex applications.

Application Isolation

Any complex application will have atleast a few bugs. Imagine that you are running a Photoshop-like application in one tab of IE/Firefox and a Powerpoint-like application in another tab. If the photo application crashes because of a bug, IE/Firefox itself will die and you will lose your (potentially unsaved) work in the presentation application. This is unlike a real OS environment where PhotoShop crashing won't affect PowerPoint application. Chrome provides such isolation by restricting the failure to just one tab and all other tabs will stay alive. There are very few websites that use Javascript heavily now. So, the impact of this will only be seen in future.

Memory Management

Any good Operating System will try to avoid memory fragmentation and reclaim unused memory effectively. Chrome does this by creating a different process for each tab and using a thorough garbage collection mechanism. Chrome comic book explains this clearly if you are interested. Yes, it will take up more operating memory than Firefox due to multiple processes but then Chrome is not just a browser. It's a platform for complex applications that will require lot of memory themselves.

V8 Javascript Compiler

As you know, Javascript is the language for creating client-side Internet applications. Normal websites will only have a few lines of Javascript. But truely complex applications could have thousands of lines of js code. So far, Javascript engines have always been interpreting the javascript code whereas V8 will compile it directly to the target machine code. Anybody who has taken a basic computer course will know that interpretation is much slower than compilation. Java, when it was originally introduced, was an interpreted language and it was dead slow. Later, they implemented Just-in-time (JIT) compiler and there was dramatic improvement (I have experienced the difference myself when I was working on a JVM). Now, Chrome has given Javascript the status of an advanced programming language! This will encourage developers to build Internet applications that will run much faster. Their Javascript application will run as fast as a C++ or C# application and it will also be able to collaborate effectively across the Web.

So, the next time you see somebody ignoring Chrome as just another browser, tell them it's not. Chrome is getting ready for the future of Internet. It's just that the Web is not ready for Chrome yet.

What can Semantic web do for you?

Hello everybody! It's been a long time since I visited my own blog and I am happy that my 941 readers are still subscribed to my feed! It was one of my newly acquired interests (or should I say craze?) that brought me back here. It's called Semantic web. Some of you may have heard the term from the startups lately that claim to bring Semantic web to reality. I have been reading a lot about Semantic web until I felt enlightened! So, I plan to write a series of introductory articles so that you can also appreciate how it can evolve the World Wide Web to next level.

Semantic web was proposed by the granddaddy of WWW, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, way back in 1999. Though academics have been thriving on it since then, developing standards and writing research papers, it took so many years for business folks to assimilate his wild ideas and gather courage to start companies. So what was so wild about it? He was proposing that we should transform the web completely so that machines can browse and find answers to all sorts of complex questions like "How long will Angelina and Brad stick together?". Quite crazy, ain't it? But if you take a closer look, he isn't that crazy (I am talking about Sir Tim :)

Today's web is a large collection of documents that are linked to each other. The hyperlinks have keywords that help you find what the link is about. All he said was "Hey, let's do the same for all our data, that is, put them on the web in a machine readable form and link them together to form a Web of data". So, what can machines read and process? If you write "I am 20 years old" in your blog, only you and I can understand it. But if you use XML to represent it (for ex. <age>20</age>), a piece of software code could understand it. XML is good for representing structured data but it ain't good enough for Semantic web. Why?

Two reasons:
- XML does not clearly identify the subject and object of the fact that it is representing.
- XML does not have unique identifiers that can be used to link data from multiple websites.

To handle these shortcomings, Sir Tim and people who liked his idea proposed a standard called Resource Description Framework (RDF). Data about all kinds of resources like People, Places, Documents, Products etc can be represented in a "subject, property, object" triple format and each resource will have a unique identifier. For example, the sentence "Jane is located in Paris" can be represented by a triple (Person:Jane, location, City:Paris). Person:Jane and City:Paris are the unique identifiers. This is a fact that Jane can declare in her website using RDF.

Let's say another public service provides the mappings between cities and countries and it has the fact that "Paris is in France" (City:Paris, country, Country:France). Then a software agent that processes both RDF triples can link them together and infer that Jane is in France. This is just a simple example of linked data. There are a lot of such public data that can be represented in RDF. DBpedia is a project which extracts such data from Wikipedia and stores them in RDF and also links them to other RDF data.

RSS feed is one of the major advances in Web due to such machine readable common data format. Long gone are the days when you need to visit your favorite blogs and news sites everyday to check new content. With feeds, you are notified of all the new content in one place - your feed reader. This has been made possible because several blogging providers and webmasters agreed upon one format for syndication. That's the power of convergence that Semantic web can exploit further. Some of the semantic web software agents that you can expect in future are:

- a travel agent that can book your vacation package on your behalf by obtaining your favorite destinations, preferred dates, budget etc and automatically searching through online travel sites to pick the best deal.
- a shopping agent that you can personalize to search for products on your behalf. Once you provide your preferred brands, price range, features etc for, say, Camera, Laptop, it will search for matching products in various online shopping sites and notify you about them everyday.
- a dating agent that can help you identify your dream girl (based on matching interests, location, age etc) no matter whichever social networking site she is in.

Did I make you dream? Then, I have succeeded in my attempt :) Let me know your comments and opinions (I have re-enabled comments in my blog).

Next up: What can YOU do for Semantic web?

New look, new feature at Vibes

Vibes is back in business with a new look and a new feature. The new look is inspired by Aditya's earlier work and I thank him for that. The new feature is Integration with Google reader allowing you to easily import your shared items into Vibes. The idea is to collect interesting news/blog items shared by everyone while reading their daily dose of feeds and bring out the items liked by many. For more details about importing, please read this. Please note that the previous method of submitting blog post URLs is also supported.

If you are using Google reader for your feeds, I encourage you to try this new feature and contribute to the website. In future, I will add support for importing Bloglines/Newsgator clippings and shared items from other feed readers which support sharing. Vibes can serve as a feed sharing portal by integrating with many feed readers.

Increase your subscriber count using feedburner redirection

This is old news but I thought I will write a small post informing about this new feature in Blogger for the benefit of those who may not know about it. Even if you burn your Blogger feed to Feedburner, some percentage of your visitors may still be reading the Blogger feed. This could happen if they had provided your blog URL (instead of your feedburner feed) to their feed reader and their feed reader auto-discovered Blogger feed. The side effect of this is that your subscriber count will not be accurate.

The first useful development of Google buying Feedburner happens to be the new "Feed redirection" feature. Using this, you can redirect your Blogger feed to Feedburner feed. You can do this by going to Settings->Site Feed and providing your feedburner feed URL for redirection (as shown below).



I did this sometime back and my subscriber count increased from 700+ to 800+ the next day. You could try this too!

Bonus news: Amit informs us of another new feature - Comment Form message with which you can show a message in the Blogger comments page. I made use of it immediately!

Update about bvibes.com

Update(7/24/07): I know that the website is down again. I am working with the hosting service on this. I will always remember the last few weeks of my internet presence :)

Yesterday, the incapable people at A2 hosting started cribbing again that their server is overloaded because of bvibes.com and disabled my account. Some of you might have noticed that bvibes.com was down again. I decided to put an end to this by cancelling their service and moving bvibes.com also to Yahoo account. I have never had any problems with Yahoo for almost an year because they seem to use a server farm and are capable of handling any load. I realize now that it was a bad decision to try these novices just for the php5 support they offer. Whenever something went wrong, they kept asking me to upgrade to dedicated server as if their whole aim was to make more money.

Thanks to the great tools like mysqldump and phpmyadmin, I was able to move over the database safely to Yahoo. From now on, bvibes.com will be redirected to anniyalogam.com. But, the redirection will only work after a few hours. Until then, you can access the website at anniyalogam.com. Your account and earlier submissions are intact.

Once I am out of these hassles, I plan to implement a useful feature. The idea is to make it effortless to share your favorite posts by integrating Google reader and bvibes. You just need to click "share" for the posts that you want to share and bvibes will pick them up from the feed provided by Google Reader. This way, you can share the posts you like while you are reading the feeds, without having to visit bvibes.com. More details on this coming soon (once I get it working :)). Let me know if you have any comments about this.

bvibes.com is up

My website bvibes.com is up and running now. Please go ahead and submit your posts.

For those who reported that faded version of peekaboo posts is not working, it should work now if you follow my original instructions in this post. Those who reported non-beta peekaboo posts not working, can you try again now?

[If you are using Neo, check out Diddy's mod of Neo called EboNeo. Nice job, Diddy]

My account has been suspended

Yes, it has happened. And they didn't even inform me before doing this. That's why bvibes.com is down and Neo template doesn't work. Neo users can pickup the entire Neo script from here, add it to your template and get your blog working. It will take some time for me to move over the bvibes database and code. So, it maybe down for a few more days.

How to get your blog posts read by 100 people?

I am glad to announce that bvibes.com has close to 200 users after about 6 weeks of it's debut. I checked the statistics of the submissions today and looks like some posts that were submitted got 80-100 pageviews. Here's the top posts that got highest pageviews (you can see this by clicking the title of the statistics module in the sidebar of bvibes.com).



For those bloggers who want to promote their posts, joining the website will prove worthwhile. At this rate, I am expecting about 2000 users after one year. The community is growing. Are you in?

Hacks broken again: here's the fix

Recently, I had relocated my script hackosphere.js. But my new account couldn't handle the load of hackosphere.js. So, peekaboo posts and other hacks won't work again. This script is used in close to 1000 blogs (my estimate) and whenever somebody accesses any page of any of these blogs, this script is accessed. That's what causes this enormous amount of traffic. Given that so many people have written about peekaboo posts in their blog and linked to my post, the traffic trend will only increase as more and more blogs start using it. My hosting provider might suspend the account if this kind of overloading continues because it's a shared server.

After thinking about it a lot, I think the only scalable and reliable solution for this is to include the script in your template itself. So, I am asking you to click here and copy all the code from that page to your template itself before the

</head>

tag. If you would prefer to upload the script to your server, use this code instead. This change is for the benefit of everybody from blogging community to make use of my hacks.

To get rid of the alert that you saw, please find and remove this line from your template (this is also important to help me retain my hosting account. thank you!).

<script src='http://www.anniyalogam.com/widgets/hackosphere.js'
type='text/javascript' />

If you are using my version of customizable recent comments widget (not Hans's), you should also goto this page and copy/paste the code before the /head tag. That should fix it.

UPDATE: Many of you have thanked me for providing a quick solution. There's a better way to say "Thanks" by adding a link to Hackosphere in your sidebar. When i visited some of the blogs using peekaboo posts, I didn't see any link to Hackosphere. Also, check out my new blog sharing website bvibes.com (if you haven't done already) where you can promote your posts and read/vote on other blog posts (it has 200+ registered users now).

Apology for the issues with my hacks

UPDATE: This won't work anymore. You have to copy the script to your template as described in a later post.

I realized the real popularity of my hacks today when my new hosting service said it cannot handle the load generated by numerous requests to hackosphere.js. Here's the email I got from them:

"Currently your site hackosphere.bvibes.com (aka anniyalogam.com) is using too many resources on our server:
Excessive HTTP daemons due to high traffic
...
Your public_html directory has had permissions changed to 0000. Please do not re-enable it without first contacting us with a mitigation plan for your domain. Continued overusage of resources will lead to the suspension of your account.

A shared server will not handle the amount of traffic to one domain which your site is currently drawing without severely impacting the other customers. A Dedicated or Semi-dedicated hosting package will be required if this traffic pattern is normal for your domain."

This is something I never expected. Somehow Yahoo small business account could handle it without any issue. Since this new account was also a small business plan, I thought they could handle it but poor folks couldn't handle it. They have disabled the directory which contains all the scripts. Dedicated hosting costs 70-80 dollars per month and I can't afford it. Now, there are two ways you can get my hacks working again:

1. I have uploaded hackosphere.js to my googlepages account. So, you can add this line

<script src="http://rarunach.googlepages.com/hackosphere.js"
type="text/javascript" />

and remove either one of these lines that you have

<script src='http://www.anniyalogam.com/widgets/hackosphere.js'
type='text/javascript' />
<script src='http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/widgets/hackosphere.js'
type='text/javascript' />

2. Or you can copy/paste the javascript code directly to your template. The code is in http://rarunach.googlepages.com/hackosphere.js.txt. Disadvantage of doing this is that whenever I add new features or fix some bugs in my script, you will have to change to your template.

I guess Neo template will not work either. You have to use this new location for neo.js.

<script src="http://rarunach.googlepages.com/neo.js"
type="text/javascript" />

instead of one of these lines that you currently have

<script language='javascript'
src='http://www.anniyalogam.com/neo/neo.js' />
<script language='javascript'
src='http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/neo/neo.js' />

My sincere apologies for all this trouble. As such I am frustrated with this downtime too. I hope you will support me by changing your template and continue to use the hacks.

Anniyalogam.com relocating...

As i had mentioned earlier, I am retaining anniyalogam.com but changing the name servers to point to the new location. I have initiated the name server change but it will take 1-2 days to propagate over the internet. I have confirmed with my hosting provider that there won't be any disruption of service during this time for those still accessing anniyalogam.com URLs. Just in case there's any issue, I have already told you what to change in your template. Once you make this change, hacks should work just fine.

For those using the fade effect...

Few of you are using the fade effect for peekaboo posts. If you are one of them, you will notice that it doesn't fade anymore (it will appear instantly). This is because I have made some code changes to support both fade and non-fade versions with the same javascript file - http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/widgets/hackosphere.js. This is part of the transition from anniyalogam.com to bvibes.com. To get back the fading effect, you just need to add one more line as shown below.

<script type='text/javascript' src=
'http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/widgets/hackosphere.js'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var fade = true;
var peekaboo_bgcolor = '#ffffff';
</script>

I believe you won't have to make any more change regarding this :)

Please read: anniyalogam.com closing down

I have decided to host all hackosphere related files in bvibes.com instead of anniyalogam.com as I don't want to pay for two hosting services. So, I have copied all the files, scripts etc from http://www.anniyalogam.com to http://bvibes.com/hackosphere. I wanted to give you all enough time to make the change in your template, so I will keep the current hosting service till the end of this month. All you need to do is goto your template and change any URL starting with http://www.anniyalogam.com/... to http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/... wherever it appears (it won't even take 5 minutes, just do ctrl-F to find and replace). If any of my hacks doesn't work properly after this change, please let me know soon. I want to resolve any issue before the end of this month. Thanks for your understanding!

Update: I plan to retain the domain "anniyalogam.com" but change the name server to point to the new location (I believe I can do this). This is because my hacks are being used in many third-party templates (like those of Protesto) and I don't want to affect the bloggers who don't read my blog regularly. But it's always a good idea for you to make this change now.

Pownce review: Messaging for web 2.0 era

Pownce is the new brainchild of Kevin Rose and a few others. I recently got invited to try it out and I did (The video that you see above was captured using Adobe Captivate). When I first read about Kevin's cryptic definition of Pownce as "IM competitor", I wondered if there's any innovation left in the "beaten to death" concept of IM. After checking it out today, I don't think it is a direct competitor to IMs but I feel there is something that Pownce has got to offer. Inspired by the sharing spirit of web 2.0 (pardon me for the cliche), Pownce promotes a new granularity of messaging - send stuff to a "group of friends".

Traditional IM clients focussed on sending instant messages/files to one contact. Recently popular Twitter focusses on broadcasting status messages to everybody. Pownce focusses on sharing messages/links/files/events to all/subset of your friends (they could be online/offline). You can divide your friends into multiple sets and send appropriate stuff to each set. For example, you can form a set of local friends to send saturday get-together invites and another set of ex-collegemates to discuss about your common interests. Other granularities such as private (messaging one particular friend), public (shoutout to everybody) are supported too (except in the case of file transfer).

Pownce is available in the form of a web application as well as a desktop application (based on the cool-looking Adobe AIR platform). All the stuff you receive from your friends will be shown in this app (with auto-refresh) and you can send stuff too. You can also check your profile in pownce website to see all your stuff (private/public) and anybody can see your public profile which will only contain public messages from you and your friends. For example, here is Kevin Rose's public profile with all sorts of messages from his big list of friends.



Pownce has support for mass distribution like Facebook. When you receive a message/file from somebody, you can forward it to your other friends. It defaults to sending to "friends who haven't seen it" in this case (clever!). Once Pownce grows and has lots of users, I can imagine hot news spreading fast with this feature (the likes of 'Paris hilton phone hacked'). It also supports RSS feeds for following public profiles of your favorites using your feed reader. Another nice feature that will come handy if you want to find something amidst the big pile of messages is the filtering feature - you can filter and see only a particular type of stuff sent by your friends such as messages only, links only etc.

To summarize, Pownce is in a space that is complementary to IMs even though it is not jaw-droppingly innovative. If you are curious enough to try it out, I have several invites to distribute. Just send an email to and I will pass on the invite to you.

Special effects for Peekaboo posts!

Yesterday, I thought my most popular hack, Peekaboo posts, needs a makeover. A while back, I received a comment that the post expands too quickly when you click "Read more" link. I thought this could be something to improve upon. How about some special effect like Fade In/Fade Out? You got it! I have integrated the popular javascript effects library script.aculo.us with our peekaboo posts. You can see it in action in my test blog. If you click on "Read more", the full post appears gradually from nowhere and it fades in nicely if you click "Summary only".

You gotta have it in your blog, right? You can have it with very few changes to your template. I spent a few hours on this and surpassed some limitations of script.aculo.us and (bugridden) IE to get this working in Firefox, IE and Opera. Just follow these steps if you have already installed peekaboo posts in your blog.

Step 1: Add these lines before the /head tag.

<script type='text/javascript' src=
'http://anniyalogam.com/scriptaculous/src/prototype.js'/>
<script type='text/javascript' src=
'http://anniyalogam.com/scriptaculous/src/scriptaculous.js?load=effects'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var fade = true;
var peekaboo_bgcolor = '#ffffff';
</script>

If your blog's background color is anything other than white, you need to change the peekaboo_bgcolor appropriately for it to work properly in IE. Since most blogs have white background, it should work as it is.

Step 2: Find this portion of code and remove the line shown in red.

   <div class='post-body'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<p><data:post.body/></p>
<b:else/>
<style>#fullpost {display:none;}</style>
 <p><data:post.body/></p>

That's it! Go ahead and impress your readers. Scriptaculous has many more effects like slide down/up, drap/drop etc which I will try to make use of in the future. If you liked this, help me spread the word about bvibes.com (which has 170+ registered users now) by adding the bvibes button to your sidebar as described here.