Google unveils Wave @ Google I/O.

There are a lot of things happening @ Google I/O. First day they talked about what a big leap HTML 5 is. Second day they unveiled Wave: A brand new way of communication for this era. I just read the Techcrunch post about this and I'm blown away. Just go read it.

e-books: Devices and Formats

 

A lot of us love reading. And a little less of us are eco-conscious. How good would it be, to mix these both passions? Well, if the number of e-book readers that are flooding the market are anything go by, Pretty damn good! You gotta appreciate the USP of e-book readers here. They serve a key demographic of consumers, They are eco-friendly, They make pursuing your hobbies very simple and the business value ain’t  so ugly either.

Currently, the market has a lot of e-book readers. Here are some I came across: Kindle, Sony Reader, eSlick, BeBook. Amazon has even released an update to Kindle with a controversial “Text to Speech” feature that allows your reader to read a particular book out loud. Pretty nifty if you ask me, leaving the copyright infringement aside. You can even read e-books on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Which is my favourite by far.

Now, the problem with the whole thing is interoperability. There are as many e-book formats as there are e-book readers. And most of the time you can’t migrate your book collection to a new device or have multiple devices at the same time. There is one format though, ePub, which is an open format and most devices support it.

An avid reader needs to make an informed decision when he chooses a particular device and then a compatible format. If you buy books in epub format you can rest assured that 10 years from now, you won’t have to worry about how you can read the Harry Potter series again in the new generation devices. You are not locked into any proprietary format that might go extinct sometime in the future.

If you are in the United States, Buying a Kindle makes more sense as there is a lot of content available apart from books. People elsewhere might consider Sony Reader or some such depending on the availability of the device and compatible content. I, for one, use my iPod Touch for reading these days. Further, all the books I buy are readable on my computer albeit, by installing additional software.

For further info head to these links:

• ePub format
• List of devices and compatible formats
• e-book Reading on iPhone/iPod Touch

Some websites that allow you to buy e-Books:

• Amazon
• BooksOnBoard
• eReader
• FictionWise

Technorati Tags: ebooks,sony reader,kindle

Google OpenSource Initiatives

Technorati Tags: google,opensource

There has been slew of open source initiatives from Google lately. These are the one’s I came across.

• Protocol Buffers, Google’s own message exchange format, released under Apache Licence.
• Browser Sync: A Firefox extension that synchronizes your browser settings across computers, released under New BSD Licence.
• Google C++ Testing Framework: Google’s framework for writing C++ tests on various platforms, under New BSD Licence.

Why is this so interesting to me? Well, this will give us an insight into the tools built by Google and their programming standards etc. Personally, I will try and learn as much as possible from these various tools.

There also one more cool thing I came across lately, Google C++ Style Guide. Do check it out. It is mighty useful if you, like me, work on C++.

My favourite Firefox add-ons

Howdy! Folks.

I use Firefox for my daily browsing needs. Firefox 3.0 is the latest release of this browser. This new release of Firefox is supposedly really good. If you see the release notes on mozilla's website you would know how much work has gone into making this a better browser than Firefox 2.
One of reasons why I use Firefox is the ability to install add-ons to streamline its functionality according to our needs. So, here are some of my favourite Firefox add-ons..

• AdBlock Plus:Great tool to block all those flashy banner ads.
• Better Gmail2:A must have if you use gmail regularly
• Video DownloadHelper:Lets you download videos from sites like YouTube.
• DownThemAll:A handy download manager for firefox.
• Google Notebook:A great note taking app integrated right into firefox. If you install it, do check out the "Clip" feature.
• Google Toolbar:I just can't live without Google toolbar, don't ask me why.
• Greasemonkey:Lets you customise the appearance and behaviour of webpages by using little javascript. There are a crazy lot of scripts available on the net even if you don't know javascript.
• NoScript:You have got to install it, if you are paraniod about web security. NoScript lets you turn off javascript and flash on selective web pages.
• PDF Download:Tired of waiting for that pdf document to load in your browser? Enter "PDF Download". Choose what you want to do with that pdf link. Pretty nifty.

All the above extensions are Firefox 3.0 compatible. Do check them out and you can always uninstall them if you don't find them useful.
If you are looking for more extensions, you could head Mozilla addons website. Someone sent me this compilation of Firefox add-ons for librarians. But it's not just for librarians so, do visit that URL if you want to find out about more add-ons. They may all not be compatible with Firefox 3 though.

Firefox keyboard shortcuts

Now that Firefox 3.0 is out on the tubes, here's a short list of keyboard shortcuts I compiled. Some of these are pretty straightforward, some are redundant and some are just basic windows keyboard shortcuts, but I will list everything just for the sake of it.

• ctrl+w - close a tab (close the window if there are no tabs open).
• ctrl+e - place the cursor in the search bar.
• ctrl+r - reload page.
• ctrl+t - open a new tab.
• ctrl+u - view source of the page.
• ctrl+i - open bookmarks side bar.
• ctrl+o - open file dialog.
• ctrl+p - open print dialog.
• ctrl+a - select all.
• ctrl+s - save.
• ctrl+d - bookmark a page(opens a mini bookmark dialog)
• ctrl+shift+d - bookmark all open tabs.
  
• ctrl+f - find.
• ctrl+g - find again.
  
• ctrl+h - open history sidebar(toggle).
• ctrl+j - open downloads window.
• ctrl+k - go to firefox search bar.
• ctrl+l - go to address/location/awesome bar.
• ctrl+z - undo.
• ctrl+x - cut.
• ctrl+c - copy.
• ctrl+v - paste.
• ctrl+b - open bookmarks side bar (toggle).
• ctrl+shift+b - opens bookmark manager.
  
• ctrl+n - open new window.
• / - quick find. (that should be handy)
  
• ctrl+tab, ctrl+shift+tab - cycle through tabs forward and backward.
• ctrl+enter - adds "www" as prefix and ".com" as suffix to anything you enter in the location bar and loads that page in the current tab.
• ctrl+shift+enter - same as above but, suffixes ".org".
• use "alt" along with the above two to load the page in a new tab rather than the current one.
• ctrl+shift+delete - delete browsing history.
  

If you know any shortcuts I missed out, please write them in the comments.
And hey! If you have participated in the Firefox download day, here's how you could flaunt it. Just visit this page, key in your name and print the pdf document that loads up.

Running Windows and Linux simultaneously without virtualization

Have you ever wanted to run Windows and Linux simultaneously but thought it's too much work to install and configure a Virtualization software? Well, here's good news for you. andLinux is a Ubuntu Linux system that runs under your Windows installation parallely. Head to this article for more info and this page for andLinux download.

And by the way, if you are looking to install Ubuntu on your windows machine without actually making any changes to your existing OS, try Wubi.

Code's Worst Enemy

Stevey's Blog Rants: Code's Worst Enemy:

Want to read something fun about programming bloatware? Check the link above.

Warning: It's a looooong read. Beware.