Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

Consolidating resources to better serve users was the motto behind Google killing various services. But a seriously, Google reader? Reader is one of the first prominent services from Google. It belongs to an elite club that enjoys a loyal use base and plethora of third party apps. What's their fate. On a larger scheme, Is Google trustworthy anymore?

I picked up my Acer Iconia. A500 tablet from BestBuy yesterday. 24hrs later, the screen looks like its been used for 6 months. It's scary how these things keep you captivated. There are thousands of reviews out there, so I am not going to bore you with another "in-depth" review. Here is short and sweet account of my rendezvous with my new found love interest.

Here is one company committed to Green alternative fuels and reducing carbon foot print. Google is no less a real life research lab. Plugin Electric cars are the fastest way to remove dependency on oil. They may eventually become energy hogs (if everyone will buy these), but for the moment, they are a viable solution. Advances in renewable energy may make electric even cheaper, easy to produce - until then, its only time for ideas.. like these..

Update: Yahoo mail with new layout renders this obsolete. The newer Yahoo mail beta (neo) really is a faster UI. However, The large header with room that is unused is a let down.  This one time, it appears that, Yahoo did not take into account the importance of real estate on top of the page, hitting User Experience. Reduce Yahoo mail neo header space for more room by installing SarathOnline's " Spacier Yahoo Neo " userscript below Install YNeo UserScript by SarathOnline Before: After: The user script is fairly simple. You could install it in Firefox as a Greasemonkey script. Or install it on chrome directly. If you are new to UserScripts, follow these instructions to install them on your browser. Be assured, it has no malicious code. All it does is install a correcting css to the document. The css file is located here .  And the script itself. (function(){ var d=document,sid='__sar__yneo', fn='http://www.sarathonline.com/dyn/sfs/userscripts/y...

Want to install a userscript on your browser. Go no further. Here are simple instructions and caveats for installing Userscripts in Firefox, Opera, Chrome. If you want to author your own scripts, here is a beginner's tutorial .

For a long time this was due. Here it is, finally. If you think this site has ever been helpful, please consider installing and using the Search engine from SarathOnline on your browser. This will help us offset the maintenance cost. Thank you. Updated! May 29, faster search, with more options..

The recent news about Google App Engine has taken the developer community by a surprise. There is a lot of hue and cry. Some have claimed that they have been betrayed, lost trust. Some even thought the rug got pulled out from under them. Some have even warned this as Google's biggest mistake that could cost them dearly. But is it really that big of a deal? How much of this is a concern?

They say if you don't have Firebug you are not a developer. But Chrome developer tools, is just as sweet developers in chrome. Firebug is a very powerful tool in itself. Chrome dev tools adds a few more features that make it a pleasure to develop on chrome. Here is a quick video that may have your head turn to Chrome.

This tool is probably one of few which puts the power of Internet and Social Networks to the best use.

If you just updated your andriod devices to froyo, you are already one step behind in android releases. But With all the goodness in each update, why would you wait. Howver, if you are an early adopter, Google is not sleeping when you are waiting.

Just updated the fresh-out-the-oven Google Maps. 5.0. Simply Awesome. The 3d images of NYC buildings, tilting, rotating, much smoother zoom operations, and better offline support make it a highly recommended update

Got a new Android? This is the first place you should be looking at these tutorials . Online Search for Market Apps: If you are looking to search for market apps, and thinking that there no such online search tool? There may not be an official Google hosted online market replica, but appbrain.com gives one. Installing Apps: Most websites you browse on the laptop/computer, have what are QR codes (eg. shown below). These are like images that link to urls on other sites or market apps. So first you have to manually go to market place and search for " Barcode Scanner " and install an app by ZXing. From then, you can use the scanner to install various apps that can be looked up by QA Codes. This app can also get you product lookups (however there are specialised apps for that) Appbrains.com app: Appbrains has an app manager that can manage your apps, installing them and their updates. You create a profile online and all your installations are synced to your device. This...

Finally, AppEngine team got us the best gift of all for this holidays. AppEngine 1.4.0 , Always-On Instances and more. And Just $9 a month buys you 3 instances that can stay alive – even on low or no traffic. Those sites you want to host on spring, or even grails – which left you worried about darn bad startup times – You can host now with AppEngine worry free. Also, Channel API is a new introduction. Gives an asynchronous real-time two way communication mechanism with JavaScript enabled clients - aka Browser Push (Comet) communication. It would be interesting to see the ideas people will come up with. Google lifted/increased a few limits on different APIs  to somewhat gracious levels. These may not be significant for most apps, but will definitely free your mind of concern

This site rendered js and css (now even images) dynamically. Contents of files are stored in Google BigTable Datastore and are served by a DynServlet. The DynServlet maps the name of the file to content of the file in DB. This was slowly using up a lot of resources. Adding a layer of memcache, saved some Datastore API calls. But the memcache calls were still significant. So an ETag mechanism is introduced. A Global ETag is generated on any file posted or updated, and (G-ETag is) stored in Datastore. To save App Engine resources (which are counted to cost), the ETag header is obtained from each request checked with GDTS from backend. If it is the same a "304 – Not Modified" response is sent back, asking the client to use the local cache copy. If it is not exactly same, a the request is passed through and rendered dynamically. This guarantees all content will be served fresh after every deployment. Requests in between deployments may be served from client-side cache, because ...

Java on Google appengine has always been an matter of concern, especially with low traffic. People have expressed their anxiety with their application's performance. This site/blog runs on blogger. However the images and JavaScript are dynamically served from Google's Big table.   This site was earlier on Google appengine  - Py. A much performant environment. It has its owns issues. However, relatively it was a more worry free environment for small applications. But as an enterprise language, java was to be used for this site. The migration was finally done after three unsuccessful attempts. And eventually, with an extremely slim home grown framework – smvc, a simple mvc with dependency injection, the site is run on java.   Initially there were resource intensive cold startups. The smvc framework was an answer to it. But lately it appears that the appengine java is plaguing the site with a bunch of 500 errors, more frequently. This behavior started around Oct 27 and persi...

The new priority Inbox in Gmail is awesome for a GTD-er. However there's a small feature that is a little confusing. Assuming the three sections, Important and unread, Important and Starred are enabled. When an important mail is received, it goes in two Important and Unread. Then let the case be that the mail in question (The Mail, from here on) is worth a Star. It gets Starred. In due course, more mail comes in - Important ones. *The Mail* is now buried under. This is where its confusing. One thought begs to assume that The Mail is now shown in Starred section. But no. It is down the pile of Important mail. And NOT shown in Starred. Is that desirable? Not really? or is it?

Firefox Panorama has a unique way of organizing tabs into groups so that you can work with a loot of tabs (really lot of them). While the Side Tabs experiment is totally disjunct concept, The effective use of screen real estate is key measure in both. With just screen real estate , its still Panorama that wins the battle. Side Tabs seems turned out to be a sore experiment. For one thing, it may be designed only for netbooks. There are other considerations for developers perspective. Many a time, the height is considered variable. The width, however is counted to be under standard 800, 1024, 1600 etc, those of the video resolutions. Many fixed layouts are drafted to work on these width numbers. Free flows however do not have this issue. Now, having Side tabs in picture, it creates two sets of fixed layouts to work with. Firefox Panorama not only tackles width issue in question, also provides a organising benefit. So Which one is it? Most probably Chrome will eventually mimic Pan...

Looks like the recent video/voice chat plugin for linux is a stratergically set as a prerequisite for this big update! Now Gmail chat will have a new option to call real phones. This sounds like a HUGE competition brewing in sip world. Skype, especially, must be very worried, given the large base of gmail users. It also lacks a web client making it easier for roaming users to prefer gmail than their (might I dare say) own phone. This option requires you to have Google Voice associated with the gmail account. If you have not checked out Google Voice , its well worth the shot. Here is the preview of what it would look like

IaaS : Infrastructure as a Service eg: Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Verizon Private Cloud. PaaS : Platform as a Service eg: App Engine, Azure. SaaS : Software as a Service eg: Google Docs, Acrobat.com. Here is a collection of slideshows about IaaS, Paas and SaaS.