Joy Dutta’s blog

[RANT]
Social networking sites are getting harder to trust these days. Orkut seemed to be somewhat better and reliable while sites like hi5, friendster, gazzag and many others had quickly found their place in my list of the most irritating and crappy sites of the internet. Oh and not to mention myspace - the sewer of the internet where every young guy and girl must be logged in. And finally the microsoft backed ASP achitecture of orkut.com crapped on me today. Refreshed my profile page today morning hoping to see some new scraps (which are merely timepass and excuse for people to not send a few lines of email), and there it was, a whole nice page in spanish, and my name was of a spanish female from Angola ! I also found my scrap counts were quickly decreasing with each refresh. Nice. Tried to change language to english. Didn’t work. Excellent website programming I must say. My google.com account settings page was also in spanish which kinda freaked me out. Luckily I could at least change my password, and complete the request to delete my orkut account immediately.

Anyone out there reading this - here is my 2 cents - orkut is not worth the time spent visiting it. Heck it still allows people to scrap arbitrary javascript (XSS attacks) stealing cookies and what not and as usual a piece of shit code from microsoft does not, or I think, can not take care of common security issues like this.
[/RANT]

I have been using javascript extensively at work for over 2 years, and YUI for the most part of it. Even a few days back I didn’t know about jQuery. I was building my professional photography website and was discussing designs with my good friend and photographer Francesco. When I was done, our sites resembled a lot and Francesco suddenly got the urge to renovate his professional portfolio. He had been using jQuery at work, and in just a day he put up a gallery with top-of-the-line look and feel with soothing effects. I could not believe something existed that was much better than YUI so we compared code fragments. The conciseness and power of jQuery language blew me over, especially the $() selector. I added some cool effects on my site in a very short time and realized I could not do that with such simplicity had I used YUI.

I did not stop at that. I renovated my main website last Sunday, with a few hours of labor, mostly spent in GIMP to make some cool icons to go hand in hand with the magic of jQuery. I am very happy with it now and planning to do more changes to the site soon.

Big thanks to Francesco for opening this wonderful javascript world to me.

Have been contemplating switching to flickr for some time, ofcourse due to its excellent user interface, slideshow, ease of uploading and management.

But it lacks a very important functionality needed by serious photographers. A hobby photographer has to have some means to refer to the large archive of high res photos from the web-sized one he/she puts in a gallery. Put any image in pbase.com, say _dsc1234.jpg and then change its caption. When you try to download or right-click->view-image, you see the filename right away. Makes life a hell lot easy to find that pic from the 200gb external harddisk. Same with fotopic.net. But no such luck with flickr. Put some snap there and forget the original filename forever, for it gets a totally new image sequence number and the original filename serves temporarily as the caption placeholder.

What were the flickr guyz thinking ?

Unless there is a way to do this, I have to use it only for snapshots and not “photographs”.

Pbase.com looks old school, but has a professional look and got the basics right from the beginning. I got to stick with it for a while.

Yeah, it seems like the emerging JSON format makes much more sense than having XML as the data-interchange format. In today’s data saturated world, web-programmers would be blissfully happy if the data doesn’t need some complex parsing. And JSON does just that. Consider a fragment of structured data that many “Ajax-ed” application of today could be receiving over the web:

firstname = Velma, lastname = Kelly

While the xml version could be (that needs parsing):

<name>
  <firstname>Velma</firstname>
  <lastname>Kelly</lastname>
</name>

JSON is:

{'firstname':'Velma', 'lastname':'Kelly'}

which doesn’t need parsing at all. The json data as a string can be converted to a javascript object and used like this:

var jsonObj = eval ( '(' + jsonObjAsString + ')' );
var fname = jsonObj.firstname; // or jsonObj['firstname']

Useful, right ? And consider how much less space and effort it takes to handle JSON. Clearly the preferred data interchange format for the dynamic web applications, many of which can’t even use XHR (XmlHttpRequest) because of crossdomain security issue of browsers. The solution is using dynamic script elements and using JSON just makes the whole effort a lot easier.

Here is Douglas Crockford’s interesting blog post.

Finished processing the rest of the pictures today at office on my own laptop.

Pics: S2S The Epic Ride - 05-06

What more to say about my luck ? Not only that my wife Priti loves to be a passenger on my motorcycle, of late she has started trekking like a professional and her skills in photography has grown by leaps and bounds.

I miss her so much. We enjoyed so many motorcycle trips in south India and now I realize how rare it is to have a life partner who actually enjoys long trips on two wheels. I am riding a motorcycle in the USA now and can’t wait to have her here to join me. Unfortunately this wait is going to be a long one, maybe 2 years till she finishes her PhD from IISc, Bangalore.

She has recently done a long trek along Sakleshpur railway tracks and taken some pictures that made me thinking “isn’t it time she checks out a real camera, like a film SLR ?”. I really liked the way she composed several of her pictures. But she needs to learn how to present a gallery of selected frames that makes viewing them even more pleasurable. Here is her writeup with pictures link:
http://phansia.blogspot.com/2006/01/sakleshpur-track-trek.html

Ja was telling me for some time that I must make some kind of virtual “red-pin-on-map” to show my route. She showed me some reply from a forum she asked the question, and that led me to the google map API.

It didn’t take me more than hour to get a customized, embedded map up on the route page of my upcoming cross country epic ride. I could put markers on all the points of planned possible night halts that look like red pins. A click on them would reveal some information about the town name and what I plan do there.

Bravo Google, what a simple yet powerful API !!! way to go !!!

Check out my trip route page and Google Maps API

UPDATE: Many of my friends complained that the map is not showing properly in IE (damn you, Microsoft, you are nothing but a pain in everything !!!), so I disabled the map for a while. Will probably put it up again after my trip, with the actual route I will take.

finally the d-day, the d-moment for me !!!

the index page for my very own domain is up and running. lost count of how many hours of labor and brainstorming has gone into the design of my online identity, one that sums me up as clearly as possible.

it feels really good now. still lot more work remains, but having the index page ready is unlike anything else…