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 alltheseyears, I am going to eagerly wait to face the surprises which life is planning to throw at my way.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Okay enough of self-bragging and time for some stats.
Number of Posts
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
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
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
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>
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.
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.
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?
