Whats the solution to this ??

Facebook’s all about a profile wall and a newsfeed. whatever you post gets added to your wall. Your newsfeed gets populated with posts from various friend walls. Thats it!

For instance – whenever a friend tags you in a photo in there album, it creates a post on your wall. The newsfeeds of your friends pick that entry from your wall and soon everyone in your list could see that photo.

What facebook privacy controls offer now is – add attributes to a wall post entry to hide it or show it to certain people. It doesn’t stop  friends from making erroneous posts on your wall unless you block them all over from posting, which is something you never would do to him/her.

So here’s the idea– why not provide a user with a set of walls instead of single wall for all ? A user sets default walls for different people, he gives different views of himself to them.

Now suppose, I set default walls for my college friends, my work people, my family members. Whenever my college friend tags me in a photo, that goes to wall designated for him, and it appears only in newsfeeds of  my college friends, no one else. I have sandboxed friends this way! I, no more depend on people in friend list for taking care of my privacy.

Facebook already has networks for this, but these networks are very wide, they contain girls, boys, people whom I may not have acquaintances with. Hence they don’t work.

Idea is still developing, will post more as it refines…

Now you go to twitter. Some more cool content for you. Also you notice some posts from services like youtube, flickr, blog feeds duplicated(from facebook) in your feed. Uninteresting.. isn’t it?

So now comes the new thing- Google Buzz. You have already checked facebook, twitter for your daily social dose. But as its inside gmail, you ought to click it.  All that you see is– same repeated content which you have seen earlier. Nothing new.. and on top of that google buzz marks the items people comment as unread, making you check it again and again even when there’s nothing really new. Even the gtalk status updates which you see right away clearly in gmail are starting to appearing in buzz. #fail

Hope you get this redundant data problem..

When I first heard of google buzz and connected sites I was very excited. I thought it would aggregate ALL content posted by my twitter and facebook friends, apply its superb relevancy algorithms and show it inside gmail.  The google guys are clever, they will surely figure it out some day..

I am left with the Android which is making a fuss almost every day. I did try the android in its very early days of T-Mobile G1 then tried the G2 (HTC hero) but none of them proved to be compelling and the absence of multi-touch from majority of applications made me stick to iPhone. So which iPhone I am talking about? The very very very old 4GB iPhone. It still rocks my world with its simplicity and powerful basic functionality as in the iPod, the phone app and the safari browser.

Now android caught my attention again with 2 recent major developments-

• The Google maps app now has a turn by turn navigator !! something which only $50+ apps like tomtom used to have.
• The Nexus One getting multitouch in browser,maps and other apps. (more on this)

Hence I got a T-Mobile G2 back today as the Nexus One is out of my reach. Popped in my Docomo simcard and was really taken away by the amazing HTC sense UI. The first thing I do in phones is to check if I am running the latest software or not. Boom! this phone is still on 1.5 or the cupcake! I remember seeing the 2.x firmware mentioned in most of the good posts and announcements about android. I wanted to try out the other features like the facebook integration, gmail and the android marketplace.. BUT all that would go with new firmware install. My impatience was growing to install the latest firmware on my phone.

So here starts my hunt for the latest firmware for HTC hero with multitouch apps and new google maps. Initially  I go with the stable shipped  ROMs and later use them to benchmark against the custom roms. I came across the words “OTA” wherever I read about new android updates. I dug my phone for the ‘check for updates’  button, but couldn’t find any. I thought if I give this clever device a internet connection, it would automatically check for updates and prompt me to download. My belkin router malfunctioned and i had  given it for service, so I created a AD-HOC wireless network to take android to internet. But wait the adhoc wireless network just doesnot show up in android !! And I thought the blackberry and the PSP were the only devices to ignore adhoc networks Some googling led me to an article which claims to get it working, but right now I am more keen in the ROM update, Google might have fixed it in 2.x?

The HTC websites has some kinda rom update, but it asks for the serial no. etc just to download the ROM. I am not doing that. Lets search for a decent rom which is tweaked to the least..

Now I come across – Rooting the HTC Hero, installing custom recovery …  this page cleared a lot many things for me and pointed  in right direction. After reading reading and reconfirming from 2-3 sites I choose the following path for new ROM.

Stock (1.5 or HTC 1.7 software version) ->Custom Recovery Image -> HTC 2.73(rooted) -> Latest radio as here

I expected I would end up with hacked/rooted 2.0 android with latest radio.. BUT damm the phone (even though its snappier than before) is still on 1.5!!

I went to the ultimate destination for cooked roms I remembered from winmo days- the xda-developers.com They seem to have everything! even android 2.1!  Without much reading I downloaded one ROM. While it was downloading, I started to read about these android 2.1 roms. I figured out that most weren’t stable enough like the 1.5 stock, the UI looked horrible on many(I downloaded one with sense UI), camera was not able to deliver full 5mps and mms wasn’t working yet. Inspite of these I just wanted to try this 2.1 and went on to install it. My phone would take any ROM now as it had a custom recovery patch. The phone booted.. I could spot the new loading animation. After 5 mins of use, HTC Sense felt like a  non-sense! apps were crashing before I could actually explore every menu item in them. Google Goggles wasn’t there. The new google maps app, couldn’t determine my location but was able to route and offered me to try the new beta navigation feature (woot!). I couldn’t find any satellites as I was indoors. The multitouch gestures were there in browser but not swift like the iPhone’s.

Tomorrow I will take this new google maps for a ride in my locality. After that will go back to the rooted latest HTC ROM with android 1.5 and explore other features.

On other side, I have also put the  android source code for download, why not make the OS say Hello Aakash when it boots

One more thing, if you are on Windows 7, download the android drivers from softpedia. You need them to run the ADB and hence to install patched recovery image. I have read that all these changes, hacks are reversible, to go back to factory state all you need to do is– run the RUU from HTC on PC.

I will enlist a few-

1. Renders in one line and more refined customization. No more ‘you and’ being appended everytime. Differentiates between people and a person.
2. Translating or reusing the plugin never been so easy.
   
3. Compatible with popular WP Super Cache plugin. Automatically updates the cache for the post which is liked. Inform WP likes that WP Super Cache is enabled from the settings page and it will take care of rest.

I am testing the plugin right now, so far it has no problems  with WP 2.9.1. You too can try out the plugin from- http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-likes.3.0.zip . I will mark this as a stable release after a day or two of testing and consequently your wordpress will ask for plugin upgrade.

[Update]: Release time!! This is working like a breeze. If you want further tighter integration(like in Wordpress MU) or even more customization, I am offering support at a very nominal fee. Send a mail to me[at]aakash[d0t]me if you need help. Next version will have improved sidebar widget and people tracking of some form.

[Update2]: This does restore the new default CSS. You might want to backup the old css for reference. And there are some alternate like button images in plugin images folder, you might want to try them out!

As always press like if you like it. Keep the bug reports and feedback coming.

TwitVerbs- http://twitverbs.appspot.com/

It gets the verbs from your tweets and lets you know when you have been doing what! Like when you have been going out somewhere,, drinking, smoking, cooking or playing something. You will be amazed by the results. trust me. eg–

What @biz has been doing

This app is the result of my latest crave on python and the google app engine Do post feedback, if you forgot the url, here it is again- http://twitverbs.appspot.com/

So with 2.0 I tried to fulfill most of your wishes. Here are the highlights of this release-

• Finally an admin panel to tweak common settings like- whether to display on front page / posts on pages.
• It shows the stats of your most liked posts on your admin dashboard.
• You can even show the most liked posts on your blog using the sidebar widget.
• CSS editing is now under settings and translating/reusing the plugin is now even more easy as the text’s for like/unlike can be easily edited.
• A UI uplift.. hope you like it.

Next major revision will be able to track the person you liked the post as your post commenter, blog user or guest.. still digging into this and wondering how to consume gravatar here.

WP Likes 2.0-  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-likes/

Currently it allows visitors dropping by your blog to ‘like’ your posts if they find it interesting. Of  course only once, they can unlike it if the did so by mistake or just to play around with this awesome feature.

Now the big question- Can I track who liked my post?

Well yes.. if the user is a registered member of your site 0_O  // work being done on this folks, any ideas? chip in..

You can download the 1.0 beta bits of the WP likes plugin from here.

Upload the extracted zip folder to your wp-content/plugin directory of your blog. It will automatically appear in the plugin section of your Admin Panel, simply activate it from there.

In the next coming days I will work on packaging it even better and get it to the wordpress directory.

[UPDATE 1 ] The plugin is available directly from wordpress directory- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-likes/ jQuery is now fetched in its best form(minified,GZIPed, ~20kb) at lightening speed from Google servers. The jQuery dependency will fade away in future releases.

[UPDATE 2] The version 1.1 is released with a lot of critical fixes, please give it a shot again if it was failing previously.

[UPDATE 3] Just commited the 2.0 version to the svn repo. Brings you a lot of customization, dashboard stats widget and sidebar. Will make a new post soon about it, till then take it for ride and keep the feedback coming!

WP likes 2.0 features and highlights.

So LIKE this?? then jump on the link below.

Recently I moved from joyent to a dedicated server at softlayer running Windows server 08, reason being my free trial with them was over. I had already done a lot of testing with a unix based server and wanted to try out windows server and IIS7. I have also moved my opensocail app’s and almost everything over here. It boasts a 1GB  RAM and an Intel dual core processor(3GHz). Initially I had a lot problems setuping things, the server couldn’t boot up many a times after a reboot request, there were problem with ethernet drivers which caused it to go down every week.  Thanks to softlayer’s customer support the kinks were ironed out, prominently the updated ethernet driver from Intel fixed a lot of problems.

I am using IIS7 with fast-cgi to run my php, MySQL for storing data. For an inexperienced guy like me who is still poking around with unix but is using windows systems since childhood.. this server yielded a lot of good results,I was able to digg a lot deeper into bugs, and find the culprit code. I have a better view of things over here, eg- I could visualize the

mysql admin

queries being thrown on MySQL, active connections, key usage, query cache, slow queries and time taken in executing, sorting, searching and locking/unlocking tables.

LEARNING: Never use the default mysql config file thats applied after installation. This results in your perf. issues with your system resources lying used. Edit the config file to your needs, your server’s thresholds to get a boast. DO NOT  use the GUI tool to edit the config, it will mess up the settings and can prevent the MySQL from starting.. use a notepad.

You will find a lot of articles on internet for installing PHP with fast-cgi on IIS7, improving its performance.  The performance counters in Server Manager give you a lot of insight into the machine, incoming requests.

[WordPress]

This blog which runs on wordpress which inturn depends on php, mysql. The feature set, flexibility provided for wordpress is really amazing. It has a really good developer whichs provides it with numerous helpful plugins. Guess what…. now even I want to do something with it, have an idea..already started working on it

As I installed wordpress, I noticed that I couldn’t directly update my plugins,or  install new ones directly from admin panel. I had to download it manually and then put it in wp-content/plugins folder to install it. The error was “Download failed.: Could not create Temporary file“.
I googled, soon found out the solution  http://wordpress.org/support/topic/243300 as described by the guy in 4th post.

You need to go to folder wp-contents->properties->security tab and give read, write, modify permissions to user network service. I remember coming across permission errors like this quite a few times on IIS and PHP, the simillar approaches worked to fix them

So things were running fine.. and I went on to optimize wp on IIS7. Read an article which said to start user and kernel mode output caches on the IIS, could see some improvement. Installed the google gears plugin for the admin panel to fasten it.

I also came across an IIS filter called “IISxpress” which said that it would apply compression on  the IIS outputs and do a lot of optimization. I jumped on it and installed it.. but to my dismay.. my wordpress’s admin panel wasn’t opening. After 2-3 subsequent retries to load the admin panel crashed the app pool iteself. which resuled in “503: service unavailable” errors. I could guess that this time the culprit was IISxpress, uninstalled it(required a reboot!) and everything went back to normal.

LEARNING: Cache and Compression- you need to get them done the right, balanced way, else they can ruin an running app.

Again unix’s power I had seen, experienced and undoubtedly great once mastered, but as a beginner, at critical times I ended up googling unix, SUDOing, changing directories  rather than digging the root cause of an issue. Also on Windows server you can run php as well as ASP.NET both with decent performance.

If you are a student and would like to try out windows server 08, you can actually get licensed genuine version directly from Microsoft through the dreamspark program. This is what I did.. I first installed it on my local machine and after getting hold of it in few days.. went on to purchase the server on internet which costs me $100 a month!!