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?

Application cache (appcache) is a powerful feature in HTML5. However, it does come with baggage. Many (see links below) advocated ferociously against it due to tricky issues it comes with. For someone who is just testing waters, these issues may throw them off grid. Knowing them before hand helps reduce some unpredictable effects.

Over the last weekend, I evaluated DisQus commenting platform. I saw compelling reasons why Blogger's default commenting is primitive in comparison. Today I am launching DisQus on this blog. Here are 3 most important reasons that made this decision easy.

Eclipse's new release Indigo (3.7) comes pre installed with Mylyn. And unlike previous installations Mylyn is tightly integrated with Eclipse platform package. The "installed features" does not show it as a separate feature to uninstall. It appears as if it cannot be uninstalled at all.

Acer released the Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS, aka 4.0) update on Apr 27th 2012, for its A50x line of tablets. The owners were ecstatic about the news. Nevertheless, the process of deployment for Acer and the installation for the end-users was nothing short of a disastrous saga .

Some times you need to copy only table structures across databases. This article describes two ways of doing it. If the whole database schema need to be exported, mysqldump is very effective. A --nodata flag will dump all tables' schema. Like this. mysqldump --nodata -p -u username databaseName But if you want to copy a specific table, individually, you could use "create table like" feature. You could create it even from a different database. However it must be on the same mysqld instance. Like this. create table newtable like oldtable; --Or from a table in other database create table mytable like otherdatabase.tablename;

To develop Chrome extensions, crx is the best way. But the user scripts that are developed in general for Greasemonkey can also be delivered for Chrome, if a few easy rules are followed. 1. @required and @resource don't work. By default, atleast for now, These two Userscript metatags donot work on Chrome. If you need to load a js file, instead of using @required - try to use document.createElement. Similarly with @resource. 2. Some GreaseMonkey helper methods don't work or are restricted. Methods with GM_ prefix from userscript api may not work. Particularly, unsafeWindow, GM_registerMenuCommand, GM_setValue, or GM_getValue are not supported. GM_xmlhttpRequest will work but not only on the same domain. 3. @include s are not shown while installing. This may not be a deal breaker for developers, but sure is for users. The patterns used in @include is not shown while installing. Instead a generic message is shown as below. This message may scare the users away. ...

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 .

UserScripts are fun, useful and often productive . A lot of sites have small improvements you think could add a lot of value. And just because you are not the author of the site, you need not give up. With some basic javascript skills, you could write a userscript, install it on your browser, and make the site behave.

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?

Are you one of those people who don't  have Gingerbread on your captivate. Still with Éclair, because you don't want to *root* your phone or scared about voiding the warranty? You are in luck, Samsung released its AT&T stock update to froyo. You have to get this using Samsung's "Kies Mini" program. Kies is a windows application that will safely (no warranty voids here) flash your phone. You are still recommended to save ALL your data before you do anything with the phone. Unfortunately, there is no love for Linux/mac users.

IE9 has some really cool tech upgrades .Here are a few errant UI features that makes IE9 less than perfect. It almost gives the impression that the UI engineers did not do a stellar job. or IE9 UI is a half baked cake.

If you administer a bunch of identical Linux boxes, and have to run same commands on all of them, say like manual deployments, restarts etc. – you probably log in to each of them manually and run commands. Or at best you would have a script looping through them and executing an ssh on each. However there are times when you need to be interactive on each box, yet run the same and/or series of commands. In those cases, cssh on Unix (with X) and PuTTYCS on windows are a godsend for any administrator.

When you suspend Windows, you expect it to live in the slumber. And only act when you command it to wake up. However, Sometimes, Windows wakes up, apparently for various reasons. And it wont tell you why, like most other things it wont tell. But if you are wearing one of those investigator hats today, get to the bottom of it. Using Windows Event Viewer. To fire up Event Viewer, available in Control Panel > Administrative tools. You can apply filters to the events displayed, by using the controls on the right. You could use Event Sources (look for power*, for spurious wake ups), and/or keywords. Or you could manually go through all of the logs.

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.

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

You have MySQL database. And want to move either all, or some of the data into MongoDB. There is no direct way to do it, as such, It can be done in two steps. (If you are here because you have a csv file instead (or directly) move on to Step 2.) Step 1. Export all of your MySQL data as a CSV file. select columns INTO OUTFILE ' /path/to/csv ' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' from table [ where clause ] Step 2. Import the CSV into MongoDB. Assuming you have MongoDB running (on local, defaults) run the following command mongoimport -d dbname -c collname -type csv -f fields-sep-by-coma --drop /path/to/csv if your csv file has a header row add --headerline . p.s.: for more options on mongoimport look here More tips on mongodb, coming