Entries from May 2007 ↓
May 16th, 2007 — Recommended Reading, Technology, Writing and Speaking
Writing is one of my passions. I actually started as the founder editor of India’s first ezine - MagNet (which we later converted to a software company!) Most of the people write really bad emails, let alone technical documentation, articles or reports. It’s not just the English usage, it’s not just the punctuation but it’s much more.
I was talking to someone about technical writing. Wanted to suggest some resources so that he can polish his writing style and be ready for bigger assignments. A little bit of web surfing opened may doors. If you are interested in writing, planning to write an article, or dream of authoring a book, I strongly recommend going through these resources.
I guess I too have a lot of reading to do next 
May 14th, 2007 — Personal
Went to Surat at Masi’s place for the weekend. It was a great time out. Enjoyed a lot with the family. I think I have not done such variety of things on a single outing yet.
- Bumpy rickshaw ride to home from Surat station - zig zags and passing through small lanes to avoid traffic.
- Lot of good food, and lot of sleep! Sleep is one thing I hadn’t had enough of for the last two weeks!
- Jokes and leg pulling every other minute - almost! It was a laugh riot.
- Played carom, cards, badminton and even raced
- Went shopping
- High speed ride in Chevrolet Optra, with torso out of the hood!
- Some good music, and bad chorus by us
- Read The Book of Life by J Krishnamurti. Very interesting, and deep
- Met school time buddy Piyush and Hetal - wonderful home
- Drove around the Surat city
- And of course, some good dose of ice cream
- Good discussion with Neha about relationships
- Great time with Mom, Dad & Nikita
- Did puja at Kamrej temple
- A little bit of photography here and there
- And the maddening rush of Flying Queen train on a Monday morning
Amazing! I loved the trip!
May 11th, 2007 — Flex & Flash, PHP
Vaishali told about the new Yahoo! Web messenger. And it’s all done in Flex (and PHP)! It looks good, works well, and is a good example of things to come! They have made the panels look much better with rounded corners et al, and have kept the standard Flex look for drop downs and text boxes.
Overall, it works well and looks good! I knew Yahoo! is doing a lot of things with Flex after Yahoo! Maps, but this is a good example of what’s possible.
May 9th, 2007 — PHP
We have been working on a set of scripts to grab contacts from popular email and community sites. We released it under GPL yesterday.
PHPClasses.org actually found it very interesting and flagged it as notable! Here’s what they wrote about Contact Graber:
Extensive package that can be used to grab user contact lists from the most important e-mail and social networking sites: Yahoo, Gmail, MSN Hotmail, Rediff, Orkut and MySpace.
Kudos to Vishal, Janak, Pravin and Tapan for bringing this to life! If you are building something where you want to allow people to fetch their contacts from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Rediff, Orkut or MySpace, and then use them on your site, go ahead and try this out! Feedback and contributions are welcome!
May 8th, 2007 — Recommended Reading
Found this via Braingle’s RSS feed:
We have talked about how the average short-term memory can only hold around 7 pieces of information. Here is a test to see how good your short-term memory is.
Slowly read each line once and then look away and try to recall the numbers. The first few should be easy. Once you get to 7 or 8 digits, you will start to have a very difficult time.
4 8 6
2 5 7 8
5 8 2 5 7
9 1 3 4 0 6
6 7 2 8 4 3 8
1 9 8 3 0 7 5 2
0 9 3 7 0 4 6 9 1
I could easily do upto 6 numbers, but then had to use some techniques to remember longer series. The way I normally do is visualize the numbers and repeat them out from the visual memory! This is good for short term retention! I would have to associate the numbers (rather the combination of numbers) to some funny thing for long term retention!
How far can you go?
