Best Software Essays of 2004

Joel Spolsky is editing a new book on the best software essays of 2004. He is asking for nominations here. I hope this book, to be published by APress, is reprinted in India too.

Madhu’s Shiok far eastern restaurant in bangalore

All those who know me, realize very well how much food excites me. I am passionate about (eating) it, though. But there are some people like Madhu Menon, who takes really shows what being passionate about somethings in life is all about. Madhu left his IT job about an year back and opened up his own restaurant in Bangalore, specializing in far-eastern cuisine. Now those are two things I truly admire - the strength to do things in life which you really really like, and of course being involved in the food art business.

A world without TV ads?

This cartoon strip of Rudy Park today, in some way brings out the revolution in TV watching that TiVo has pioneered. Yes, we have all been pissed out with watching too much TV ads throughout the day. In India, there is still no no-ads subscription based cable TV service - even HBO. Star Movies is one of the nice guys, showing non-stop movies after midnight - no ads at all! Some channels like Sony AXN show more frequent, shorter durations ads, while others do the opposite.

Fixing annoyances in Wordpress 1.2

Havent used trackbacks much, but apparently WordPress 1.2 has an annoying trackback bug. Thanks to IoZBlog for documenting the fix to it (disclaimer: This post should prove whether trackbacks are working in the first place ;) ). Also, got my first comment spam today. Hell, this spammers dont even let lonely blogs like this in peace. A quick search at the WordPress wiki, revealed Mark Ghosh’s WP plugin for the same.

Tables are passe. CSS is here!

Eric Meyer writes that the Microsoft web site has been redesigned to use a mostly CSS based design as compared to the old table based one. The subsequent page size decrease was 75%+!! There is no denying the fact that CSS driven web page layouts are the future. All those web designers who still use Dreamweaver and Golive, wake up, and give us web programmers cleaner web pages to work on!

Instant Messenger Smileys Compared

I found this neat web page, which shows the various instant messenger smiley icons side-by-side. The result “obviously” shows how Yahoo’s smileys look the least “tacky”. update (2018): The link above no longer works. Sorry. 😞

QR-Codes, now machines have their own language

Boing Boing talks about QR Codes - the latest and hottest fad among mobile users in Japan. While machine readable languages have been here since the beginning of computing, this is the first time that they are also a statement of “art”. QR codes are graphical equivalent of any text that you want, something similar to barcodes in purpose. But while barcodes were one dimensional (vertical lines of variable thickness), QR codes are two dimensional - (like the image on the right).

(Word) Pressing the site!

Over the years I have tried various software to manage the content on my personal home page. From hand edited HTML, to a bunch of my own PHP scripts, to some *nuke software, and finally to Drupal. So why did I finally shift over to WordPress? The answer is simple - if all you would really be doing on your site is blog … get a blogging software. The blog module of Drupal is good, but: