Harsh J

Google's displayed logo

Notice those weird lines below Google’s logo while you search? Like this first example.

It only appears on the web search for me, the image search’s logo appears fine.

Its only cause the actual complete logo, the one you get when you dig into it, is this one.

Google's full logo image

Smart cause it reduces the number of image requests sent to the server, assuming Google’s chopping this one out for use all over the search result pages. But this could also be a small browser FAIL.

Maybe its been there for quite a while before, but I never noticed it until now, when Flock started displaying those odd lines below the logo. I think its done ever since SearchWiki got implemented. I’ve yet to put that feature to use, cause I got this liking for vanilla google results. I never miss getting what I’m searching for. Google’s far better in its relevancy than Yahoo, or even Live if we are allowed to compare.

ThinkDigit.com, the online presence of one of the best selling Technology magazines Digit, has quite recently upgraded the website and its features and have added quite a lot to it. Previously, they only had a forum and a few additional magazine related links. Now, they’ve extended it with new sections like:

• Product Reviews, where the team posts various new product reviews and test results.
• Blog Watch, where you can find links to some of the best blogs online related to various topics of technology.
• Tech Q&A, a more interactive version of the discussion forums which helps solving all technical questions and answers.

And also a few others, and enough content to launch them smoothly into the new age of the Internet media.

The discussion forum is one of the most active in India and has a lot of great members who are ready to answer and troubleshoot any technical queries or problems a member might have. Apart from this, they also have a great off-topic and debate sections that have posts definitely worth reading in them. All this supported and moderated by a great team of administrators and moderators.

About something new in this re-invention of their web-presence, the free classified ads section is surely something very much welcomed by the community they have gathered online. It allows people to post free classified ads related to buying/selling of technology products, services and even jobs.

Along with this free service there does exist a paid option too; using which a company can publish to a 125×125 pixels banner that will appear in the Classifieds section of the ThinkDigit website. This costs 5,000/- INR and an additional 3,000/- INR could get you this and a 6×9 cm block in the digit magazine under the same classifieds or the web watch sections (Which is for online businesses). This is pretty low cost for a very good coverage of the Indian technology community.

This new site is a good start to expanding the Digit magazine’s online presence.

Last time I’d used Flock browser was back when it was 1.0 or something above it. It worked nice then too, and the not-so-recent version maintains that with even more features.

Around 15 minutes of starting the browser, I had over 8 services integrated with Flock with just simple logins on the sites of each, ranging from this Blog (This’s posted by Flock) to Facebook (A service I’ve just started to use).

Twitter works well with it and so does the Flickr and YouTube media browser implementations. Things I miss are very few actually, one being Google Reader integration. Mozilla’s feed-reader Liferea was supposed to have gotten that by now (GSOC), so I’ll check that soon.

But what overshadows all its feature and gloss is its ability to work smooth even when its all loaded up with services and other enable-able things. Its clearly built for this, one can have no doubts. Firefox loaded with a couple of extensions on the other hand works much slower and the drastically long close-times proves that well. The optimizations are well seen in Flock.

Currently am using it without any of the Flock branding, thus named ‘Minefield’ like my Firefox is named ‘Gran Paradiso’. Managing so many Web-2.0 accounts can’t get easier than this over a browser!

I’m loving the MVC pattern that Django offers. I’ve been reading Googler Ayman Hourieh’s book ‘Learning Website Development with Django’. Its a quite old book now and the approach to web development via MVC in it is very nice.

Ayman Hourieh's Book

I’m mainly looking at Django to build a custom CMS (Reinventing the wheel, blah blah) to serve some needs of mine. And also possibly, a replacement to this blog here. WordPress is lovely but having something written from scratch by yourself is a different level of satisfaction altogether. Plus, I got lots of free time coming up.

I’ve never written so much of HTML before in my life, and its pretty fun writing the tags in the Template files of my django project. Till this my thought on web development was plainly – boring.

Since the book is rather old now, compared to the amount of Django improvements that followed it, there is one small change to the registration/login.html file example provided in the book. Instead of the code {% if form.has_errors %} it must simply be {% if form.errors %} if you are using any recent version of Django.

Django Website | Documentation

Also am working on adding several language options to a much-more pretty Tinge theme (For gedit / gtksourceview 2). You can expect the new version to it soon, with more pretty colors. Rich colored yet simple syntax highlighting is bliss!

Combine the power of such high inflation rates with the power of large prime numbers as prices of various products and you might just have the best mathematicians coming from Zimbabwe soon. “That’ll be the 1565927th prime or 24999983 dollars please.”

Why do they do this?

Of course, Somalia would need more focus first. That country badly needs prosperity if it is to have any citizens left over the next few years. The plight of these countries sometimes makes me think colonialism is not bad at all. War, poverty, hunger, gah.