Running Commentary

This must be the silliest typo. But it was outright funny. Saw this error on Yahoo India on 25th August'08.

In my initial phase of digital photography, I was one of those who believe that editing an image is cheating the viewer. I took pride in my untouched photos and thought it was upto me to take a good shot each time I clicked the button and editing should not substitute my abilities as a photographer. To some extent, I was correct. Technology should not, actually it can not, substitute my abilities as a photographer, however it can take my photos to a higher level. And if you thought touching your photos is 'cheating', consider having an orchestra at your command but you insist on using just the synthesizer! A digital photo is like creating music, a note here, a symphony there and you come up with a completely new tune. Similarly a little deeper tint, a little brightness and your photo can become a piece of art. Composition is a very important aspect of taking a photo, one which can affect the perspective of your photo like no other. Sometimes it is not in your control to place y...

This short article describes how to upload a file using Apache Jakarta commons upload library. 1) Required downloads: Download the library from here . Keep the following JAR files in classpath: commons-fileupload-1.2.1.jar and commons-io-1.4.jar. 2) JSP/HTML code: To upload a file you need to set the encoding type in your form to multipart/form-data. Give your users a file-select box to select the file : input type="file" name="myFile" width="100" You will most probably have other form fields like textbox, radio buttons etc. We have one text field with name 'user' in this form: input maxlength="255" size="40" name="user" 3) Form data handling: Now you have sent the file and other form data, now we need to make use of this form data. Most probably you need to save the file at some location on the server. One problem that many developers face is getting a null when they try to extract the value in form fields using re...

For a moment, I thought this is the most enjoyable week of my life as far as search engines are concerned! This headline 'Yahoo Exec Makes Yuil: Looks Like Cuil, With Better Results' on WashingtonPost.com (courtesy TechCrunch) was enough to make me smile as I was thinking of writing on how easily Cuil has generated so much noise. Unfortunately 'Yuil' built by a Yahoo! engineer using Yahoo's recently release BOSS API has been now taken off the web. For those who don't know, BOSS stands for 'Build Your Own Search Service'. Yahoo recently opened its entire search technology to developers as now they can access almost all the services and functionalities given by Yahoo search. I could not use Yuil, but comments on the page and even TechCrunch report said Yuil performed better than Cuil. I am not at all surprised. Cuil is so pathetically bad at the moment that any thing will perform better and since Yuil was based on Yahoo Search, you can great results (seco...

Above is the snapshot of downloads across the world at 1.53 PM IST on June 18 2008. According to details on this page: US had 2,095, 322 downloads and India downloaded just 42,770 times. I downloaded it in my office, which has actually got a US IP address and I guess many people in India downloaded it in their offices and that counted towards US's downloads. Internet penetration in India is still very low and mostly people access net in their offices only. I am not saying that all office downloads swelled US numbers or the cause of a huge US number is due to us only, but this could be a significant number. I don't know if FF3 has created a record or not, but the fact is that record or no-record, FF3 is a better browser in all aspects!

Suddenly I saw that Google's now familiar 'G' icon has been replaced by 'g'. And it looks better actually! I don't want to read more into it but I am very sure there will be much talk about it in blogosphere.

Just saw another feature on Google search results page. I searched for LonelyPlanet and the first result which usually gives bunch of options related to a result, now shows another option: search that site from results page directly. I repeated the experiment with National Geographic and Discovery Channel and got the search box, but it didn't appear for BBC, Rediff, Hindustan Times, TCS, Animal Planet and Al Jazeera. Is it only for travel and wildlife sites?