Wow! Google announced launch of its much awaited Student Internship program - Google Summer of Code 2007. There are more than 30 high quality projects, including those from non-CS field. Some are from life-sciences and some from electronics field: gEDA software.
I am extremely happy to see gEDA project in the list, but I hate to miss Emacs in the list.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Creating Accounts
Lot of hype about OpenID and it's use in simplifying accounts. I greatly appreciate that. Number of web services are increasing in number everyday and I am hardly able to catch up with their use. With each service comes another account which we need to remember. OpenID comes to rescue. Even Drupal provides a sharable accounts.
Even if we leave that apart, the login creation is a big hurdle to using a service. For many it is a traumatic experience. Sites which you never heard of will be asking all your personal information, just like credit card companies. Login creation must be simple and requiring minimum information. But many times, companies ask for all sorts of information for their profiling purpose, but in the process they scare away new users.
I recently created a wiki at Wik.is and I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of login creation. Just enter site-name, email and accept their ToS and you are done. Took maybe 15 sec! Can't become easier than that. I would highly recommend them. Besides the first step, their service looks good too! Talking of wikis, another good wiki service I would recommend is WikiDot. That reminds me. Where the hell did Jotspot go? After its acquisition, they never resurfaced.
Even if we leave that apart, the login creation is a big hurdle to using a service. For many it is a traumatic experience. Sites which you never heard of will be asking all your personal information, just like credit card companies. Login creation must be simple and requiring minimum information. But many times, companies ask for all sorts of information for their profiling purpose, but in the process they scare away new users.
I recently created a wiki at Wik.is and I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of login creation. Just enter site-name, email and accept their ToS and you are done. Took maybe 15 sec! Can't become easier than that. I would highly recommend them. Besides the first step, their service looks good too! Talking of wikis, another good wiki service I would recommend is WikiDot. That reminds me. Where the hell did Jotspot go? After its acquisition, they never resurfaced.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Missing ical support in Nokia N73 phone
Today I got my brand new Nokia N73 Music Edition phone. When I switched it on and tried few things, I said Wow!. What a phone! So many things to try out! I connected it to my laptop, sent messages, played few games, listened to music and things like that.
In idle mode, the phone shows a list of items from my calendar. So, I thought to add few appointments/reminders. And hey! they do show up nicely. Then I thought that let me import my full calendar from Sunbird . So I tried to sync it to my phone. Oh my God! The PC Suite software shipped with the phone only allows sync with only 5-6 applications! That is understandable: most guys support commercial stuff (Microsoft/Lotus) programs. But what I was looking for was a way to import an ical file into the phone's calendar.
Upon a little research, I found that this is not at all supported! I am amazed that a company like Nokia can overlook such an important detail! Phones are everybody's companion. And though many people would say that Mp3 player is most often used app (apart from voice calls, of course), PIM or an organizer is the other important app in there. Nokia itself places it on the main screen, but they forgot about ical. ical is to calendars what mp3 is to music players. Nokia always boasts support for open standards, did they intentionally miss out this one?
In idle mode, the phone shows a list of items from my calendar. So, I thought to add few appointments/reminders. And hey! they do show up nicely. Then I thought that let me import my full calendar from Sunbird . So I tried to sync it to my phone. Oh my God! The PC Suite software shipped with the phone only allows sync with only 5-6 applications! That is understandable: most guys support commercial stuff (Microsoft/Lotus) programs. But what I was looking for was a way to import an ical file into the phone's calendar.
Upon a little research, I found that this is not at all supported! I am amazed that a company like Nokia can overlook such an important detail! Phones are everybody's companion. And though many people would say that Mp3 player is most often used app (apart from voice calls, of course), PIM or an organizer is the other important app in there. Nokia itself places it on the main screen, but they forgot about ical. ical is to calendars what mp3 is to music players. Nokia always boasts support for open standards, did they intentionally miss out this one?
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