Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

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

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

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 ...

Mark Shuttleworth recently announced that Ubuntu will do away with GNOME, The good old, desktop environment – as the default. Making Unity, (which is the current default for netbook version) THE default. The switch was barely absorbed by ubunters and is now followed by another announcement of replacing the X.org server with a newer, minimalist X server - Wayland. Wayland is still in alpha. So, for the pessimists this announcement and the switch is a little cavalier. For the optimists, this is a huge step towards a better GUI. To put simply, Wayland is different from X.org in that it (Wayland) leverages the newer kernel's ability to do much of the work X.org's complex layers do. It natively uses 2D and 3D support from OpenGL.Technically – Quoting Wikipedia Wayland uses existing technologies in the Linux kernel such as the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), kernel mode-setting (KMS) and the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) batchbuffer in order to provide a minimal display ser...

  The site paperbecause.com, is from domat, a paper manufacturer, promoting the use of paper. For one consideration, they claim paper is physical and associates it with a emotions, features and relatively subtle nuances that cannot be attributed to electronic media counterparts.   Tree Huggers, Green advocates, on the contrary, try to reduce the use of paper. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. For once, however, the use case of paper seemed to be apt. It is true that opening a paper card is much more thrilling than opening an e-card. Paper well hold well for physical and free-expressive mode of holding thoughts or expression. They press on the idea of how paper makes it easy to annotate, carry around with you – campaigning against campaigns like " Don't Print this ".   They also claim, paper ads make a better marketing tool than emails or online campaigns. This is a little far-fetched argument, if not absurd. Google would not have made so much money if not for online ca...