On June 15th I completed one year at Yahoo and Bangalore.
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. 
Posted in Google/Yahoo, Random/Personal Tagged Bangalore, HackDay, Yahoo 4 Comments
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 travel, Yahoo 6 Comments
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 travel, Yahoo 7 Comments
Well guys, got some good news for you all. I am joining Yahoo Research, Bangalore next week.
I am relocating to Bangalore and may not be available online for a couple of days, so if you have sent an email, you may have to wait for some more time for reply.
This is the first time in my entire life, I am leaving the comfort of my home and Chennai, so a little nervous about it. But I guess everything should be fine once I get settled there.
So Bangalore, here I come
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged Bangalore, Chennai, Yahoo 17 Comments
I just finished viewing John Resig’s talk titled “DOM is a mess” at Yahoo. I took some notes while watching the video and I am posting them here, so that I can refer to them at a later point of time (It is easier to search when it is not on paper ). Also it might help someone to get the outline of the talk before actually watching the video. The original video runs for more than an hour.
Also be warned that the following is my own interpretation of the video and I might have missed or could have interpreted some point differently.
As you all know John Resig is the creator of the excellent jQuery library. He works for Mozilla corporation and you can get more information about him from his blog.
This is the first thing John Resig said about DOM methods after saying that DOM is a messy
Nearly every DOM method is broken in some way, in some browser.
The following are some of the bugs in the DOM methods
IE and Old versions of Opera return elements whose name == id
.length gets overwritten in IE if an element with an ID = “length” is found
Opera doesn’t match a second specified class
Safari 3.2 can’t match uppercase characters in quirks mode.
So the moral is that almost every method in DOM is messed up.
Find out the cost/benefit ratio for supporting a browser and then pick the browsers you are going to support before writing your code.
He talked about Yahoo’s graded support and jQuery browser Support.
The following are some of the tips to escape from DOM’s mess.
So my dear readers what you think about my notes. Also let me know if you like notes for videos in this format. If there is a demand, then I can post some of my notes on other videos which I have already viewed.
Posted in Javascript/jQuery Tagged DOM, Javascript/jQuery, John Resig, jQuery, Notes, Yahoo 1 Comment
The annual Yahoo Open Hack day is back and this year it is happening in Bangalore on Feb 14th and 15th (What a way to spend the Valentines weekend )
There are two different tracks, Info Geek and Hacker Gurus. Both are free, but you need to register at the official site. You also need to support your application with some information about you (like a link to your blog etc). Hurry up, only limited seats available.
I signed up for Hacker Guru and have got my application approved. I am waiting for the clear chit from my doctor (due to my recent weight loss ) and if I get it, I will be attending.
The Taj Residency
Bangalore
India
14th and 15th Feb 2009
Official website
Facebook Group
Twitter
Let me know if any of you are attending, we can meet and also probably collaboratively hack:)
Posted in Events/Camps Tagged HackDay, hackdayindia, Yahoo 3 Comments
I was really very surprised when I found that the Yahoo Pipes team has blogged about pipesCamp, which I attended two weeks back.
Even the Yahoo Developer Network carried an article about pipesCamp. The article also mentioned the Yahoo! Pipes hack – ego Search, which I built together with Yuvi and Harish. Very nice feeling to see something which you helped build was featured by big boys like Yahoo.
It was really very nice to know that the event which was organized in less than a week was such a success. Imagine how it would have been if we had more time
Posted in Events/Camps, Google/Yahoo Tagged Events/Camps, Pipes, Yahoo Leave a comment
As planned, I attended pipesCamp yesterday and it was really worth the time spent. As planned, I took Yuvi with me and he started to click his camera on the way itself, and he got some 35 – 40 snaps before we could reach there. (Yuvi, I know that your computer has crashed, but I am waiting for your photos to appear in Flickr as soon as possible. )
I meet lot of cool people there and true to the unconference style we had a couple of presentations about Yahoo Pipes (and some slides from the official Yahoo pipes team itself) and then some open discussions about pipes and blogging in general.
Then towards the end of the day we had “hackday” kind of competition and we were given 60 minutes to design/code a pipe and then 3 minutes to demonstrate the demo. Myself, Yuvi and Harish got together and created a pipe called “Ego Search“. (Harish, thanks for the laptop )
Ego Search is a pipe for finding out how popular you are on the web, based on search results from popular search engines. The popularity chart is drawn based on the number of search results that point to your blog or domain name for your name. And if your name is say ‘xyz’, a 100 point popularity rating on the graph says that you are the most populous ‘xyz’ that the search engine knows. You can try out the pipe in this url http://pipes.yahoo.com/sudar/egosearch. We also had some great pipes like MTC Mashup created by other cool people.
On the whole the first ever pipesCamp went very well. I will post links to photos and videos once they are available.
By the way anyone planning for the first ever WordCamp in India?
Posted in API's/Mashup, Events/Camps Tagged Events/Camps, Pipes, Yahoo 4 Comments
The guys behind hover.in (more about it later) are organizing a one day unconference event called pipesCamp for Yahoo Pipes hackers and hobbyists in Chennai. Yahoo Pipes is an excellent and useful tool from Yahoo.
I am going to save some typing by copy/pasting information about Pipes from the Pipes home page.
Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.
Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:
- combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
- geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
- power widgets/badges on your web site.
- grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.
The event is taking place on December 23 and you can find more information about the event from its home page. There seems to be lot of interesting things planed for the event including a hackday type event.
So if you are Chennai then make sure that you don’t miss it. The event is taking place at
Hotel Shan Royal
85, Poonamallee High Road,
Near Koyambedu Circle, Chennai , India
And here is the place on Google Maps.
I am planning to take Yuvi with me, so you are sure to get some interesting photographs too
Happy Piping.
Posted in Events/Camps Tagged Chennai, Events/Camps, Pipes, Yahoo 3 Comments
I was viewing the score for the cricket match between India and England from Yahoo! India Cricket portal. The problem being a web programmer is that you always tend to look at each web page from the development perspective and something grabbed my attention. The web page was refreshing every 60 seconds to get the latest score and a new request/response is generated every time. (Ok so have you got what I was thinking about?) Why are they not using AJAX to refresh the scores rather than refreshing the whole page every time?
The web developer inside me got out and I immediately checked the other sites which are also offering the cricket scores. I checked Sify and Rediff. Even they are not using AJAX and are refreshing the whole page every time. But the refreshing interval was different. Here is the refreshing interval which I got by looking at their META tag.
| Rediff | 480 seconds |
| Yahoo India | 60 seconds |
| Sify | 60 seconds |
The obvious advantage in using the AJAX approach (XMLHTTP) is that the amount of data that is going to get transferred from the server is going to be less and it’s going to save the bandwidth by leaps and bounds.
I would be really happy if any one from either Sify or Rediff or Yahoo! India reads this and just gives a thought about it. And do any of you guys know how to get the raw data about the scores and the license requirement (if available). I am thinking of giving it a try and build a POC (Proof of Concept) app, if the data is available.
Oops!, by the time I could compose this post, the match has been stopped due to rain 
Posted in Javascript/jQuery Tagged AJAX, cricket, India, Rediff, Sify, XMLHttp, Yahoo 3 Comments