I have been pretty quiet on this blog for quite some time. It’s mainly because of my new addictions. First addiction is physical computing (more about it later). The other one is that, I have started roaming around the city with my new bike
New Bike
Ever since I moved to Bangalore, I was planning to get a new bike, instead of bringing my old bike from Chennai. As with anything I buy, I started my research and finally settled on two. Bajaj Pulsar 220 and Yamaha FZ-S. I test drive both and both were pretty good, but in the end Yamaha FZ-S won on the basics of exclusivity.
If you go to any parking lot, you can see hundreds of Pulsars, but only a few FZ-S and I liked my bike to be unique.
Yamaha FZ-S
Specs
You can check out the full specs of the bike from the manufactures site.
From my experiences so far
Pros
The bike is designed for being exclusive and to attract people – and it does it very well.
Complete digital display
Awesome road grip
Has an excellent self-starter. I have not faced any problem with it in the last 20+ days.
Cons
Mileage – If you want a bike which gives good mileage, then this bike is not for you. I am hardly getting around 35 Km/Litre of petrol.
Because of the shape of the tank, if you try to push the bike forward while sitting on it with your legs, you might hurt yourself.
Apart from it, I really like the bike and it has so far held up to its tagline – Smart way to rule the streets
I waited for this update for long time and updated my mobile last week. Thought of sharing the process here so that it is useful for others.
Preparing for the update
The Android 2.1 update consists of two updates. First update prepares your phone and the second update is the actual OS update. Both are OTA (over the air) updates and so you don’t need to download anything to your computer.
When you connect to the internet (either through wifi or through gprs/edge) you will get a prompt which will ask you whether you want to download the upload. If you for some reason clicked later, there is a nice trick to get the prompt again. The trick is to change the data and you will get the prompt immediately.
The first update is around 5 MB. Once the update is done, your firmware build number would be updated. If you have the same build and kernel numbers like the screenshot below then your update has just went fine.
Actual update
As I said before, the first update will prepare your phone for the OS update. In addition to the preparation part, it will update your Youtube player and will also add a new update menu to your phone settings menu, through which you can download the second update.
You can access this menu item by going to Settings->About phone->System Software Updates
Click the check button and it will show the below prompt.
Click Ok, to download the update.
This update is around 80 MB. If you don’t have a decent GPRS/Edge plan, then it would good if you could update when you are connected through wifi. Otherwise your phone data bill might go over your roof.
Once you click okay, phone will download the update and will install it. Your phone might restart a couple of times and once everything is done, you HTC Hero mobile will be running the new shinny Android 2.1
Precautions
Since it is an update to the base OS, it is recommended that you follow these precautions
Even though the update will not erase your application and data, it is highly recommended that you backup your applications and data before proceeding
As I said before, the downloads are more than 80 MB in size and if you don’t have a decent GPRS/Edge connection, it is better to use wifi
It might take around an hour for the entire process to get over. So make sure that your phone’s battery is full.
Also disable the unlock patters when the update is going on, since the phone might need to restart a couple of times.
I am off to play with the new update in my HTC Hero mobile, meanwhile do let me know how your updating went. Happy updating
The new release has compatibility fixes for WordPress 3.0, in addition to some bug fixes. If you are using WordPress 3.0, then it is a mandatory update.
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.
I sat around to write about my life in the past one year and then I read about Derek’s experience.
Now, all you need to do is to replace *Sunnyvale* with *Bangalore, *Yahoo Hack Day 2008* with *Yahoo Hack Day 2009* and *Kansas City* with *Chennai* in this post and you will get my story
Thanks to everyone at Yahoo for making this past one year as one of my best years and also for Derek for saving a couple of keystrokes for me.
I found lot of people referring to CouchDB when they were talking about node.js which made to find out more about CouchDB. I read a couple of articles and then came to know that O’Reilly was having a webcast (in fact two), in which Chris Anderson, one of the core committers of CouchDB explains about it. I thought of posting the videos here, so that even you could get hooked up to CouchDB
Introduction to Apache CouchDB
This is part one of the webcast. In this webcast, Chris gives a technical overview. He also describes some of CouchDB’s existing users. This webcast also had a question and answer session where Chris answered user’s questions.
This is part two of the webcast. In this webcast, Chris shows how to hack JQuery CouchApps, which is a p2p web applications that can be deployed anywhere there’s a couch DB.
This is a talk which Chris Anderson and Jan Lehnardt gave in JSConf 2009 titled “CouchDB to the edge”. They give a nice introduction to CouchDB and also explain about how to write offline web apps that can synchronize the data once they are online.
You can view the video in blip.tv. I have embedded it below for easy viewing.
What’s new in CouchDB 0.11 and 1.0
This is an upcoming webcast (again by O’Reilly) which will happen on June 22, 2010.
In this webcast, Jan Lehnardt will be talking about the new features that will be coming up in the latest version of CouchDB like Views, Replication, Authentication, Virtual Hosts and the Rewriter etc.
Yesterday, I talked about using memcache in PHP in the Bangalore PHP meetup.
There were lot of good questions and the discussion which followed after the presentation was very good. Thanks for the organizers for putting together a great event.
I have uploaded the slides which I used for the talk to my slideshare account.
I have also embedded them below so that you can easily view them.
This week, I was not able to attend the full class due to time constraint, since I returned from a vacation on Tuesday. So my notes will not be as detailed as it used to be. I will try to provide detailed notes next week.
Getting authenticated with oAuth
So basically this week, Tony explained how to setup oAuth authentication, so that we can use the Twitter API without explicitly asking for password from the users.
In order to set it up, we have to first register for an app from Twitter. You can follow the screencast at the end of last week’s notes to do that.
Twitter4J
The next step is to include the Twitter4J jar. You can download it from the project homepage and then you have to copy it to the /lib directory of your android project. If you are using windows, then you can follow the steps given in this forum post to add Twitter4J to your android project.
As I mentioned before, Creative tech is conducting part 2 of the Developing Android App class. Like Part 1, I am planning to post my notes here so that it would be helpful for others too.
Introduction
This week, we had the Overview session by Tony (the presenter). The training started off with a brief explanation of the concepts that were covered in Part 1. Tony then explained briefly about Twitter and the explained what are the things that will be covered in the next 5 classes.
The following is the schedule for the next 5 weeks.
Week one
Getting Authenticated with Twitter
oAuth
Twitter4J
Webview and webview Client
Week two
Advanced ListView
List headers and footers
Concurrent Programming with Threads
Handlers
Week Three
Tweeting from App
Creating menus
Using AsynTask to run many Concurrent tasks
Posting tweets
Week Four
Adding style to the App
Themes
Styles
Selectors and XML Graphics
Designing for multiple screen dimensions
Week Five
Posting photos from the app
Getting photos from the library
Getting photos from the Camera
Posting photos with twitpic4J
Homework
The homework for this week is to register an application and get authentication keys to use oAuth with Twitter. This has to be done before the next week class so that you can use to try next week’s code.
Tony has created the following screencast which explains the process of registering your application with Twitter.
There are lot of really interesting things lined up and I am very excited about this course. See you next week
One of the most requested features for my Posts by Tag WordPress Plugin was the support for shortcodes. Finally I got some free time over the weekend and was able to implement it.
Shortcodes
In addition to supporting sidebar widgets and template tags, the Posts by Tag WordPress now also support shorcodes.
You can embed a list of posts from a set of tags by using the following shortcode anywhere in your post or page.
[posts-by-tag tags = “tag1, tag2”][/posts-by-tag]
In addition to using the tags attribute, you can also use other attributes that are supported by the template tag. For the full list checkout the readme file or the Plugins homepage.
Ability to sort by title
In addition to the support for shortcodes, I have also added the ability to sort by post title in this release. You can choose to sort by title in the sidebar widget or specify in the $order_by param to the template tag or as an attribute to the shortcode.
Download
You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s homepage.
Feedback
Please keep the feedback coming and if you want me to add any new features or find a bug, please leave a comment.
Stay updated
I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.
