Recently I noticed something very weird and funny in youtube, and that is, if you append ‘&flip=1′ without the single quotes to the video url and request for that page, the entire page’s text as well as the video is flipped, as in it is completely upside down! As you can see in the following image :

What I also noticed is that this ‘&flip=1′ is appended on all the videos I browse in youtube, including the videos in my subscriptions! I was very surprised by that! Initially I thought its some kind of a joke or something, today I realized that it is something much more than just that!

If you open youtube in firefox or internet explorer, the videos have the additional ‘flip=1′ appended to the url’s and by default when you open a video link from your subscription or the youtube page you will see the weird page as shown above, whereas if your browsing using Google Chrome, that is not the case!!! Is that some cheap means of promoting or rather fooling people into thinking that the google chrome is a better browser than others? I happen to kind of believe so and consider this as a very lame and pathetic ploy to try and fooling people to say the least.

What are your opinions about this?

Hi, I am using Firestats which is a very neat plugin for Wordpress that collects all the information from the visitors on my site and builds a lot of statistical data/report on that basis. Today I was looking at this after a very long time, since my yesterday’s post Wireless Connections Priority in Ubuntu was attracting a fair amount of viewers and this is a very interesting piece of statistic that I have found :

I have been working on Ubuntu for over a year now and my experience with Ubuntu has been better than I could have ever imagined! Setting up my development environment, setting up servers for different kinds of needs as a freelancer, web designer and developer is simply ultra simple and good on my Ubuntu! Recently I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 and things have been good!

Recently me and my friends also set up a small wi-fi network at our house so that we could get rid of all the mess of the wires, and it has paid off well :). We set up the wi-fi using WPA-2 Personal using AES encryption for the key and it really has been awesome! One of my friends though using Windows XP, was not able to connect to the network and on a little troubleshooting we found out that XP (at least his installation) doesn’t support WPA!!! OMG! This made my Ubuntu look much much more cool.

In our area we also have a few public networks that are available from time to time that we connect to and use occassionally. And so instinctively I have been trying to find a way so as to be able to prioritise the network connections in Ubuntu which is rather easy to do in Windows but I haven’t found any yet. I am sure there must and should be a way so as to give priority to the network connections so as to ensure that if a certain higher priority network comes within range and is available my computer should automatically connect to that network, it is relatively simple to do in Windows XP, and also in Windows Vista and so ever since then I have been trying to find a way to do that.

I am hoping someone reading this blog would perhaps be generous enough and knowledgeable enough to direct me to something or somewhere where I could find a solution to this problem.

Recently I have been quite active on facebook and made quite a few foreign friends and hence there were always a lot of updates and messages in my facebook in foreign languages which I didn’t understand and often required to use the Google’s language tools for translation.

When I looked at the new and improved Google’s language tools section at http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=en, I saw that it had been changed since the last time I used it and now it was all using AJAX! The interface is very neat and cool as well as simple to use and also the nice feature of ’swap’ which allows quick swapping of the languages for translation from and to and hence helps a lot during conversations.

Once I noticed that its using AJAX I figured that Google must certainly have some API which would then allow me to remotely use this feature and translate messages to and from different languages using an application. When I searched in Google my thought was confirmed! Google indeed had an AJAX Language API for doing translations.

After finding that out, I was set out to get my hands dirty with AJAX (haven’t worked much with it directly) and Adobe’s AIR (a neat application development platform for developing Flex or HTML/Javascript/AJAX applications.) I started out trying to write a HTML/AJAX based application for AIR using the Adobe Flex Builder 3 but I faced a number of problems. I found that the Adobe Flex Builder 3 is optimized for developing applications based on AIR using only Flex and not for HTML/Javascript/AJAX. Hence I was a little disappointed but then I found Aptana! Aptana is a very cool IDE which has been built over Eclipse (which I really adore!) which allows for creation of Web Applications using PHP, Ruby On Rails (RoR), and has excellent support for Javascript development and debugging and comes with loads of libraries as well as sample codes and snippets to ease the process of development. Its main editor has preview feature which allows one to preview the web pages on different browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and has its own local server which is used for populating the views. In a nutshell it is simply superb!

Aptana really helped me develop the translation application for Adobe’s AIR very easily and quickly and here I am sharing it today for you along with the source. You can download the self-signed installer here - TranslateIt, and the source code here which I am distributing with a GPLv3 license - TranslateIt Source.

UPDATE: I have shared the project source code at http://code.google.com/p/translateit/ or via the SVN repository http://translateit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/TranslateIt

After I finished developing the translation application for Adobe’s AIR, I realized that since I am using AJAX, I could perhaps also develop a greasemonkey (an addon for Firefox) user script and that’s exactly what I did. You can find the userscript either at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/38825 or download/install it from here - TranslateIt Userscript.

Over the years we have gotten used to the traditional 2D gaming experience. Fez has come up with a whole new perspective for an entirely new level of gaming user experience!!!

This is one of the most incredible things I have seen!!!

It really gets amazing after 30 seconds, believe me!

Ozh has developed a very neat plugin for wordpress which converts the wordpress administration menu into a very neat and tidy drop down menu based system which makes the entire administration section much better!!!

You can find the plugin which goes by the name Admin Drop Down Menu here

In the last update there are now not only cool icons in the drop down menu but Ozh has also provided a Plugin API for other wordpress plugin developers to be able to do very neat things!

One of them for example is, being able to associate a custom icon for their own plugin options page link in the administration menu! Using the following sample code, plugin developers can now very easily add custom icons:

// Add a page like usual
add_options_page('My Plugin Settings', 'My Plugin', 10, 'myplugin', 'myplugin_do_admin_page');
 
// Add a cool icon
add_filter('ozh_adminmenu_icon', 'myplugin_icon');
function myplugin_icon($hook) {
          if ($hook == 'myplugin') return 'http://path/to/icon.png';
          return $hook;
}

Apart from this there are several other neat hooks available as well that WordPress plugin developers can make use of and achieve nice things!

Hello everyone,

I created my first wordpress plugin!! It is the simplest of plugins one can make :D.

Plugin which I call Custom Widget, is a plugin that enables you to have a simple widget for your wordpress, which using the Widgets interface you can place anywhere on your blog, in any of the sidebars and configure to have anything that you desire!

In the options of the Widget you can give the plugin title, text before the widget code, the code itself, and the text after the plugin code. The code is the main part, you can include any piece of HTML code or even simple Text, whatever you wish to and put it in and it will work.

As an example you can have a look at the Feedjit Bar widget on my blog, it is shown using this very plugin! All I had to do is get the code from their site and put it in the Code option of the widget and save! And I have the code working properly.

You can download it from here : Custom Widget

In order to use the widget, simply upload the widget to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins directory and then in your wordpress administration section go to your plugins and activate the Custom Widget plugin! After that if you go to your Design Widget section of your theme you will find the additional Custom Widget available and you can place it anywhere you like and simply config the options and input the necessary information like the Title of the widget and the Code you want to be displayed and others if you like and you are ready to go!!!

I am ecstatic at the news of Abhinav Bindra winning a Gold Medal. I am sure every Indian is!

Does anybody believe that had Abhinav Bindra been in a different country, he would probably have won the medal last time itself, with better training, better facilities and better funds?

The Indian government needs to be more proactive and promote all sports equally in a fair manner!!!

What Abhinav Bindra has acheived is heroic, and the credit goes to him for his hard work, and of course his family and coach who trained him and backed him all the way.

That’s why I say Abhinav Bindra’s Gold Medal…The medal he earned and brought for the Nation, making us all proud!!!

I upgraded my blog’s wordpress script from v2.5 to v2.6 last month and ever since I did that I have experienced a few problems that I wanted to share with you people and perhaps get a concrete solution for it.

It has happened twice now in the last month so I felt it was time enough to come to terms with the problem. Although I know how to solve the problem, but since the problem reappeared today I beleive perhaps the solution is rather a temporary one, and the problem lies much deeper.

Today when I opened my blog just to check for latest stats of visits on my blog, I found that the blog script redirects me to the wordpress installation page. No matter what page I tried to visit on my blog I got redirected to the installation page which asks for the blog title and the admin’s email address. Since I didn’t seem to have any option left to do, I decided to go ahead and test what happens if I input the title of the blog and my email address. On doing so, the wordpress installation gave me a huge list of errors that it encountered while trying to install the blog, which displayed a lot of sql queries. I noticed that all (not most, all! ) of the queries were related to the wp_options table. I realized something was wrong with the particular table and since that table is the backbone of wordpress, I reckoned there is something wrong with it. I opened my blogs phpMyAdmin interface and went straight and repaired wp_options table.

That was all that was required and as soon as it was done, when I visit my blog, it was all fine like it was yesterday. This was the second time this happened to me in the past 1 month. I believe it could have something to do with some plugins that are perhaps old and not fully compatible with the new wordpress or something inherently wrong with wordpress itself. I sure would like to know what’s wrong though…

Has anybody else out there experienced the same as I did? Were you able to sort it out in a similar fashion?
I would love to hear some replies on this one, and possibly someone to guide me to the source of the problem and perhaps even a complete solution to ensure that this doesn’t happen again in the future.

There has been a recent upsurge in the Indian Television Industry with more and more television channels producing the so-called “reality shows”.

It is no shocker that more and more such “reality shows” are being produced, since the Indian Entertainment Industry, including the Film Industry as well as the Television Industry have always been very good at getting inspiration from popular shows and concepts that emerge in other parts of the world, after all the primary (and in my belief the ONLY) drive for the Indian Entertainment Industry is to make loads and loads of money!

So if something is popular in other parts of the world, its like an already tried and tested formula! Something the Indian Industry finds too hard to resist. Who wants to go through the pains of actually being creative, when somebody, somewhere has already done the dirty work for you!!! Its just easier to do something that we already know is cool, isn’t it? Well it is so, at least for the Indian Entertainment Industry. So much so that once such a show becomes a success (which it usually does), it then spreads like fire, like a disease and that is exactly what is going on right now with the so called “reality shows”.

I do not have anything against with these so-called staged reality-shows (well if not all, most of them are). But most of them really disgust and annoy me to a great extent! Especially the so-called reality-shows of the likes of “Khatron Ki Khiladi” and several similar one’s out there which invite other television celebrities instead of actual, real people!!! It is quite obvious (at least for me) the reason behind that being the case. Although the original Fear Factor show from AXN was a great success and was indeed a really cool show, but it involved actual people from everyday life (at least that’s what I know) and in my opinion that is what made it a success more than anything else.

I wonder if the Indian Entertainment Industry will ever improve…Our movies still revolve around the same age old, tried and tested formula, with a few variations here and there and often a couple of catchy nice songs to go with them to catch the attention of the public, but if one were to really analyze the movies (majority of them) they are just plain crap! The television shows aren’t any better, there is very little variety, either there are comedy shows (which aren’t bad though, but that’s again just my opinion), or there are those “saas-bahu” shows with the very annoying and monotonous (yet a new one keeps cropping up every now and then), and then there are these reality-shows! There seems to be much less hope for the Industry from where I see it, but then again maybe my vision is clouded because I watch more international shows most of which are awesome and great successes and often within a few weeks or months there is an Indianized version of it starting up here…

Is that the best we can do? Really? Do we even want to do better? Looking forward to your opinions, do comment on it. Until then, lets just keep coding (that’s by far the best entertainment I know of!)