Mar
19
Filed Under (Technology) by Thejesh GN on 19-03-2008

http://feeds.feedburner.com/aamirkhan
I am scrapping the html of Aamir Khan’s blog to create feed. I am using feedburner to reduce the load on my server. The scrapping script isn’t perfect yet. It doesn’t show date properly and doesn’t show number of comments. I am working on it will fix it very soon.

As of now its a partial content feed. It will remain partial until Aamir makes his blog creative commons compliant. The scrapping script runs once per day. I will increase the frequency once it becomes almost perfect :)

Update May 16 2008 : Fixed a small bug.



Jan
27
Filed Under (Technology) by Thejesh GN on 27-01-2008

Got inspired by Twittervision mapping your tweets on Google Map. They don’t have a widget to put the map on your blog. Nevertheless I wouldn’t have used their widgets as they slow down the site. I hacked a piece of code in php/js to achieve the same on my site.

Geo microformat L:lat,lan is used to represent the position data. It takes 21 characters to represent my geo location accurately. 21 characters out of 140 characters is high but its worth when you are traveling. Its very interesting to see tweets of your travel time on map.

As of now it shows only the latest tweet on the map1. My next idea is to show multiple tweets on the map. Allow user to choose the number of tweets. That will be cool when I am traveling specially after buying this gps logger (Thanks to Sunish).

I am also using hashtags to tag my tweets which will help me to fetch the tweets related to a context. So using hashtags I can map related tweets on the map. Think of looking at all my missionkk tweets on the map. That will be great right?

The project is called WWW- When Where What and the url is http://thejeshgn.com/www/. Have a look and let me know.

[1] If a tweet doesn’t have geo info it will pointed to my home.



Jan
12
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Thejesh GN on 12-01-2008

I recently got a Reliance Netconnect USB based CDMA modem. By default Reliance does not support Linux. I did few searches on the net for a ppp connection setting and other details on net. I got an hoe to on the Reliance Forums. The following worked for me on Ubuntu Intel but should work for all the distros. I am reproducing the how-to with my own comments. Read the rest of this entry »



Sep
14
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by Thejesh GN on 14-09-2007

I usually code my html/javascript in a simple text editor like notepad++. I usually open it in IE ( Internet Explorer) or FF to test it. Firefox doesn’t have any problems in opening the local files. But IE doesnt belive my local files. Everytime I open a local html file using IE I will get a warning.
ie_warning_msg1.jpg
I need to unblock it for IE to execute javascript. I found a simple solution to fix this when working offline. Add the this line to top of your html file
<!-- saved from url=(0013)about:internet -->This line will allow IE bypass the security warning and execute the javascript.
For more information on this go to microsoft technet.



Sep
05
Filed Under (Life) by Thejesh GN on 05-09-2007

twitter.pngLast few days me and my friends where trying to setup a twitter channel for our group. We wanted this one to be personal sms chat group. All group members will get the tweets posted to this channel.They will also be able to post tweets to group. And as far as possible outsider should not be able to get any tweets. And 100% no spamming by outsider. Yesterday we finalized our solution. This may not be the best way to do it. But it works (it has its own problems too). In this solution we use twitter and third party services but we have not coded a single line of code. And hence it is for non geeks too. Here are the steps:

  • Setup a twitter account and make tweets private. This is our channel tweet from whom we will be getting tweets.
  • Get the direct message atom feed. This is not straight you need to use their api url. You can get the feed using the url below. Note the password and userid are part of url. Not the safest way but it works. http://userid:password@twitter.com/direct_messages.atom
  • Now feed this to twitterfeed.com to msg to channel as soon as possible. TwitterFeed is a service which takes a feed and posts the title and content as tweet to a given id.
  • To get the messages from the channel follow the channel.
  • To post the messages you need to send a direct message to channel and for that channel should be following you. So ask the admin of channel to add you as a friend.
  • Now just send a d channel message to send the message to the group

Known problems:

  • Messages are delayed by half an hour because twitterfeed wakes up only at half an hour interval.
  • The broadcast messages does not have the senders id. So the sender has to identify himself seaparately.
  • May not be the safest way to implement a channel

What next:
Use the twitter Apis and write your own mashup do the same in a better way. Thanks to anarahari for the implementation and testing. wesleyneo and prsn for all the brainstorming tweets.

Further read:
Refer Twitter Fan Wiki for other API implementations and projects and here is the proposal for the twitter channel tag.