Wifi has penetrated lot of cities in US and other countries but it is still not everywhere and there are times when you have to be content with not being connected to the Internet. It happens on roads, some hotels, public places, cafeterias etc.

If you are a road warrior and have the need to be always connected then you should try mobile broadband cards or your cell phones. These cards fit into your laptop’s PCMCIA slots or USB slots and connect to the wireless carriers network to provide you with Internet connectivity. Cell phones can be hooked onto laptops and used to connect to the Internet.

Some options which you have in US are:

1. Sprint’s Mobile Broadband Card: providing download speeds upto 600 kbps
2. Cingular’s LaptopConnect—Wireless Laptop Solutions: features laptop connect cards and some laptops with the card built into them.
3. Verizon’s BroadbandAccess PC Card or BroadbandAccess Built-in or BroadbandAccess Connect: get a card and plug it into your laptop or buy a laptop with access built in or connect your phone to your laptop to get to the net.

If you are traveling to India, there is a similar option available:

1. Reliance NetConnect: PCMCIA card or USB option to connect to the large Reliance CDMA network.
2. Mobile Broadband Cards: you can use with carriers like Airtel and Hutch. According to discussion threads EDGE cards have better speeds than Reliance Card.

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What is a tag cloud?

A tag cloud is a weighted list of words used on a website. The font size of the tags vary from largest (most frequently used tags) to smallest (least frequently used tags). Tags can be arranged in any order but they are generally arranged alphabetically. They aid in navigation and clicking a tag in the tag cloud will lead in general to a collection of items or information associated with that tag e.g:

(A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2.0, Source: Wikipedia)

 What are the uses for a tag cloud?

• As a visualization tool for most important words/phrases on a website
• As navigation menu
• As search terms

What tools are available to create a tag cloud?

• ZoomClouds: create a tag cloud using any RSS feed. Using a small snippet code embed the cloud on any web page (e.g. TechCrunch tag cloud). It has its API using which you can have better control over the cloud you create and also build powerful mashups.
• Tagline Generator: a simple PHP codebase that lets you generate chronological tag clouds from simple text data sources (e.g: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud)
• TagCrowd: web-based tag cloud generator. Manually enter text or upload a text file to create a tag cloud.
• IBM Many Eyes: The Many Eyes tag cloud can show one of two kinds of data: free text, or a two-column table of tags and numbers.
• ToCloud: It has a page to cloud tool which takes a URL and creates a tag cloud from it. I tried one for technacular which can be found here.
• ZoomTags: you can put small (or large) tag clouds on your web page and earn revenue from your web site
• Cloud Control for ASP.NET
• Ultimate Tag Warrior 3: for Wordpress

Some interesting tag clouds

• U.S. presidential speeches as tag clouds
• Tag clouds for Oreilly Books
• Tag cloud of words and phrases most frequently searched by NYTimes.com readers
• Microsoft at CES: The view from the tag cloud
• Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell: Keynote Tag Clouds
• Quintura: cloud based search engine

Tag clouds have gained momentum with the Web 2.0 sites and are effective means of data visualization.

(Via)

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I recently ran across two tools which give a monetary value for any blog. They give a dollar figure on how much the blog is worth. I am sure this value does not capture the actual worthiness of your blog but these are fun tools to try out.

dnScoop gives lot of valuable information about any url, one of them being the value of the site in monetary terms. According to them: this value is calculated based on several factors shown above, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web. They provide an embeddable widget.

There is a utility tool on pingoat which gives the monetary value of a blog based on Technorati rank. It also provides a widget to embed the value on your blog.

I decided to use these tools to figure out the monetary value of some famous blogs which I frequently visit. Here are the results (in no particular order):

• Techcrunch: $16,428,000 (dnScoop); $80,581.37 (pingoat)
• Mashable: $2,660,600 (dnScoop); $20,472.12 (pingoat)
• GigaOm: $7,327,200 (dnScoop); $25,398.16 (pingoat)
• ReadWriteWeb: $1,788,000 (dnScoop);  $18,987.64 (pingoat)
• Lifehacker: $24,154,400 (dnScoop); $67,200.43 (pingoat)
• Engadget: $28,548,000 (dnScoop);$386,086.65 (pingoat)
• Gizmodo: $28,674,000 (dnScoop); $137,974.46 (pingoat)
• Problogger: $8,091,720 (dnScoop); $20,018.96 (pingoat)
• ShoeMoney:$462,150 (dnScoop); $15,572.14 (pingoat)
• Ajaxian: $266,400 (dnScoop); $9048.41 (pingoat)
• Digital Inspirations: $73,700 (dnScoop); (did not return results, some bug with blogger blogs?) (pingoat)

Graphical representation of the same data (click on the images to enlarge):

DNSCOOP

PINGOAT

Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Engadget and Techcrunch seem to do well with the dnScoop numbers and are close to each other but Engadget seems to be way beyond others in pingoat numbers.

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I use Netvibes as my RSS reader and was very happy with it till I decided to feed it one of the Yahoo pipes aggregated feeds (feed can be found here) . It gave me an error:

looks like this feed is not valid or currently not responding

I went back to Yahoo pipes page and ran the pipe and it worked fine, so I decided to try some other RSS aggregators with this feed. I tried to add this feed as a gadget in Google homepages and it came up fine. Then, I tried Pageflakes and again it worked fine.

I submitted a bug report to Netvibes and got the following reply from them:

The feed is very big that’s why there is some problems under Netvibes.

I checked the feed as per their suggestion using the w3.org feed validator and it gave the following message:

Unable to validate, due to hardcoded resource limits (feed length > 200000 bytes)

There indeed seems to be an issue with this feed but as a end user, this feed is very valuable to me and I can only ask Netvibes as to if Google and Pageflakes can do it then why not they?

The customer service from Netvibes is looking into this issue and I hope to get a reply from them soon.

This got me thinking and I decided to modify the Yahoo pipe mentioned above. I added a truncate block to it to reduce it to top 25 posts only. The modified pipe can be found here. That solved the problem with Netvibes. I would suggest everyone using Yahoo pipes for creating aggregated feeds (or any feed which is large) to put a truncate block so that the feed size is limited.

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Google declared in a posting that the Google Summer of Code 2007 is on and they will be accepting application in March.

Google Summer of Code^TM is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,000 students with over 100 open source projects, to create hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its third year, following on from a very successful 2006.

The extent of reach of this program can be judged from the fact that in the year 2006 Google funded over 600 students in 93 countries to work with 100 open source groups.

More details about the program can be obtained from their FAQ page.

Here is an article One student’s experience with Google’s Summer of Code which should give students a feel of the kind of work involved.

In this posting Schultmc of the Gallery open source project sheds some light on the work done by students as part of SOC 2006.

This program sure is a good way for students to pick up on their skills working with some of the best open source projects and brains out there and that too while earning money. Programs like this foster confidence and sense of belonging in the students towards open source projects, which helps the global community.

Good job Google!.

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In this very well written article on How to fix a bug, Tim Hastings lays out a detailed step by step procedure to successfully squash the bugs.

Beginning with a definition of bug, he goes on to classify bugs as Logical Bugs and System Bugs. He then elaborate on 3 steps required to fix a bug:

1. Recreate the problem: Hunt for clues, visit the crime scene, wait for acts of randomness, mirror like live
• Prioritize the Bugs: Class A, class B, class C
2. Locate the bug: Tracking it down, assert your assumptions
3. Fix the bug: how to fix a logical and a system bug, beware of side-effects, testing the fix, version control for source code.

He further mentions that the more experienced you are fixing bugs the better you get at it. I totally agree with you Tim, but I would also like to add that people who are very persistence and do not let go have higher success rates (talking from my experience!)

Source: How to fix a bug

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The movie Master Plan, came out as  part of Bachelor’s thesis at the University of Applied Sciences Ulm, Germany. It has been directed and produced by Ozan Halici and Jurgen Mayer and is inspired by ‘What Barry Says” by Simon Robson and “The Google Story” by David Wise.

The story goes over the following topics:

1. Search Engine
2. PageRank
3. Advertising
4. Access to information
5. Products
6. Googleware
7. Collecting
8. Dossiers
9. Total control
10. Genetics

It is available for online viewing or can be downloaded in QuickTime, Windows Media Player, PlayStation Portable and even iPod compatible format.

The small 3 min 15 seconds movie gives you a summary of what Google has done so far, what they are strong at and insight into what might be in store.

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Jefferson Y. Han, a research scientist at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences,  has come up with a cost effective multi-touch, multi-point computer screen, which he demonstrated to thousand or so attendees on the first day of TED 2006, the annual technology, entertainment, and design conference in Monterey, California

Here is a video of his demonstration at TED:

Apple’s new iPhone also supports multi-touch display.

Link to Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Technorati Tags: Jeff-Han, - multi-touch, - TED-2006, - multi-point, - multi-user

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