Turning 27 today

Turning 27 today

Well, it’s the day in every year, when you have to get loads of scraps in Orkut and wall postings in Facebook, emails from forums which you have registered with a couple of years back, phone calls right from 12 in the night and your phone keeps beeping about the new SMS. Yes today is my birthday and I am turning 27 this year ;)

Thanks guys for all the scraps, wall postings, emails, tweets, phone calls and SMSes. You all really made it my day today. :)

So like all these years, I am going to eagerly wait to face the surprises which life is planning to throw at my way. :)

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Free online course on developing android applications using Java

Free online course on developing android applications using Java

O’Reilly Training is conducting a 6-week online course which will help you to get started developing Android Applications with Java. The following is the official description

This free 6-week online course will get you started developing Android Applications with Java. You’ll learn hands on how to build actual working apps with Eclipse and the Android SDK, as well as the ins and outs of Android’s features

This online course if free if you watch it live, otherwise you may have to purchase it. You can check out the schedule in the official course page.

I check out the agenda and it seems to cover most of the basic things that you need to learn to develop applications using the Android platform. If you are interested then you register for the course at the official course page.

Posted in Android | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Facebook knows where to look for me ;)

Facebook knows where to look for me ;)

I was doing an ego search on Google and you can imagine my surprise when I found this ad as one of the sponsored result. :)

sudar-muthu-facebook

I know I am famous but was humbled to know that even Facebook knows about it. ;)

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Using WordPress as a platform

Using WordPress as a platform

I just gave a talk in Bangalore PHP Meetup about ways in which we can use WordPress as a platform. The following is the slide I used and a little write up about the talk.

Okay, we have seen various tutorials, blog posts etc about using WordPress as this, WordPress as that and even a definite guide to using WordPress as a CMS ;)

What I am going to talk about is how we can use WordPress as a platform to develop PHP applications on top of it.

There are basically two ways in which we can write apps using WordPress.

  • As a Plugin or a Theme
  • As a standalone app

As a Plugin or a Theme

This is the most common way of writing apps using WordPress. You basically write a Plugin or a Theme that uses WordPress API. (This is how RoloPress is developed)

Check out the slide for some examples apps using this technique.

As a standalone app

In this technique, we can make use of our knowledge about WordPress functions and API in our non-standard WordPress PHP-based web applications. The easiest way to use this technique is to use BackPress.

BackPress

So what is BackPress. Here is the official definition

BackPress is a PHP library of core functionality for web applications. It grew out of the immensely popular WordPress project, and is also the core of the bbPress and GlotPress sister-projects.

Using BackPress, you can include the necessary files and you will get the WordPress utility functions. My most favourites are the security functions. In additions to using the utility functions, you will also be able to get the following features.

  • User role management
  • Complete Plugin API
  • XML-RPC Server and Client
  • Object Caching
  • Database Abstraction
  • Pseudo-cron functionality
  • Full HTTP library
  • KSES: Full security filtering for HTML content

You can see the full list in the BackPress documentation.

I also go about discussing the scenarios where it is advantages and where it is not so advantages to use BackPress. (You can see those in the slides)

So in a nutshell, if you are a WordPress developer and want to use the familiar WordPress functions in a non-WordPress PHP-based web application that you are developing, then you can use BackPress to get those familiar functions.

I am going to use BackPress in a couple of projects, which I am going to start and so stay tuned. :)

Posted in Events/Camps, RoloPress, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

WordPress MU merge has begun

WordPress MU merge has begun

Sometime back, I wrote about Matt’s announcement of merging WordPress and WordPress MU codebase together.

Now the wait is over, the actual merge process has started and this is going to be really exciting. :)

This will also mean that we will be able to run BuddyPress on single user WordPress installations, which is kind of cool. Eagerly waiting for WordPress 3.0 :)

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

[Poll] – RoloPress Importer

[Poll] – RoloPress Importer

With the maintenance release out, we are planning to work on importers, which will allow you to import contact data from other programs.

I want you to help me to choose which importer I should work on first, which will be released in for the next version of RoloPress.

So please cast your vote and we will work on the importer which receives the most number of votes.

(You can cast your vote here directly, if you are not able to see the poll widget or if you are reading this post from a feed reader)

Thanks :)

Posted in RoloPress | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Look back – 2009

Look back – 2009

Well, without much delay (just 18 days compared with last year’s 56 days ;) ), here is my year end stats and review post for the year 2009.

Highlights of 2009

2009 has been a year of rollercoaster for me and a year full of changes both at the personal side as well as professional side.

I started the year with a trip to the operation theatre :) and then to Bangalore for attending Yahoo hack day, started having a crush on Google Wave, then changed job and moved to Bangalore and then changed my host ;) , participated in WordPress Plugin competition and then released a couple of Plugins (for which I got an excellent review from Ozh), and then had a break-up with TV (which turned out to be a very good thing) and then visited US on a business trip and then finally ended the year, by releasing RoloPress. ;)

Okay enough of self-bragging and time for some stats. :)

Number of Posts

total number of posts by year

Thanks to my break-up with TV, I got more time to spend with my blog, which can be seen from the increase in the total number of posts. The number of posts slowed down a bit towards the end of the year due to my travel and RoloPress, but on the whole, I am happy with the results :)

Number of comments

total number of comments by year

More than the number of posts, the one which gave me more satisfaction, is the number of comments. Last year, I said that I will try to engage more user activity in my blog and one look at the graph should say that I succeeded. ;)

Thanks to all those who commented, you really bought a smile on my face. :)

Average number of characters in posts

average length of posts by year

There is a slight increase when compared with the previous years and since things have worked out well so far, I am planning to continue the same this year too.

Total number of characters in all posts

total length of all posts by year

I have almost written (okay typed ;) ) almost double the amount of characters in 2009 when compared with 2008. This is really good and I hope to continue the same next year too. :)

What’s in for this year?

So for this year, I am planning to concentrate more on my WordPress Plugins and RoloPress and also planning to learn a couple of languages like Haskel, Scala and R. Let’s see how things turn out :)

<shameless self promotion>I have created these wonderful graphs using my year end stats WordPress Plugin. If you run a WordPress blog then you can also generate these graphs by downloading my year end stats WordPress Plugin.</shameless self promotion>

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

RoloPress 1.1

RoloPress 1.1

As promised RoloPress, the WordPress based contact Manger was released at the beginning of this year.

Now the first maintenance release (version 1.1) has been released with a couple of bug fixes and some enhancements. You can read the full list of changes in the announcement post.

You can download the latest version from the homepage and if you are interested, you can check out the source code at github.

Try it out and if you have any feedback, please post it here or in the forums.

Posted in RoloPress | Tagged , | 3 Comments

US through my eyes

US through my eyes

Finally after 3 weeks of stay in Sunnyvale CA, I am back in India. :)

Whomever I met after my visit, asked me the same question. How was my experience out there? So instead of explaining to each of them separately, I am going to point this blog post to them.

I am not going to get into the cultural/lifestyle or economical aspect at all, instead I am going to just describe the subtle things which you will notice in your everyday life.

Right hand driving

The first thing that got my attention after getting down at SFO airport is that people drive in the right side of the road. Even though I know about it before, it took me quite some time to get used to it (especially while taking turns)

No metric system

The second thing which I noticed was that the metric system (km, kg, litre, Celsius etc) is not used. Instead they use the British system (miles, pounds, gallons, Fahrenheit etc). I was always trying to do the conversion internally when doing calculations.

No ground floor in elevators

This one was a real surprise. After landing in my hotel, I realized that the elevators don’t have ground floor. So the ground floor becomes first floor and the first floor becomes second floor. Luckily I went in the elevator the first time instead of taking the steps. Otherwise I would have reached 4th floor instead of 3rd floor. :)

More automation

I was not sure whether it was because of shortage of manual labour or for cost-cutting. Most of the places like shops, petrol (okay okay gas) stations, super markets etc were automated. Vending machines have replaced manual labour in all these places.

Access for everyone

This one was really a good thing. In almost all places, there were separate accessible paths/doors for disabled people. Every parking lot had separate places for disabled people.

On the whole, experienced a lot of new things in my 3 weeks stay and have taken some tons of photos. Keep an eye on my flickr page; I will be uploading them soon after doing some post processing.

PS: Wish you all a happy and prosperous 2010.

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Travelling to US

Travelling to US

Well guys, got an quick update for you all.

I am leaving to Sunnyvale CA tomorrow morning for a business trip and will be back just before Christmas. Since it is a business trip, I would be busy during the weekdays and should be free only during the weekends. I haven’t made any plans for the weekends yet, but let’s see how things turn out to be.

This is my first international travel and I am pretty excited about it. Got any tips for the first time traveller? :)

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , | 7 Comments