Lets see where do we stand in the massive Web of Internet. There are total 3,109,827,840 IPv4 addresses issued worldwide. India owns merely 0.6% (19,267,224) of them. We hold world’s 17.6% population and only 0.6% of internet is hosted/used inside India! On the other side, with 19% of world’s population China has 7.2% of IPv4 addresses becoming the third after USA (48%), UK (8%).

You may argue that I should have measured by # of Internet users, but there are not exact figures to support it. Some agencies say 40M Indians have touched Internet while other say 80M. Whatever, I feel # of IP addresses gives pretty accurate measure of a country’s Web presence (web-servers hosted) as well as usage (ISPs).

India comes at 15th in owning total 0.51% of all ccTLDs. China is at 5th with 3.36% of all ccTLDs (after US – 64%, Germany – 5%, UK – 3.7% and Canada – 3.6%). Where is the awareness for country specific domain names? Why are we still running for .com?

There is big gap between no of people who use internet vs no of people who know there is a Internet. Obviously, education is a must to get into this. But not everyone can get English education. The Internet has accepted, they cannot bring the whole world in one language, then why do we want to push English? I am sure there are 100 times more pages in Chinese than a total of Hindi/Marathi/Punjabi/Gujarati/Tamil/etc in Google index.

Apart from cheaper equipment and tariff, the other factor behind mobile revolution in India is the support for local languages (Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, etc;) in handsets. We need the same for Internet. Not everyone can speak and understand English. Even ICANN has accepted this after a long time. Why IRCTC is not available in Hindi? Why Indian social networks like Bharatstudent.com, Bigadda.com, Hi5.com are not available in regional languages. There Wikipedia, BBC, Facebook & Orkut are available in Indian regional languages and gaining popularity. Why not Linux community provides free OS in Hindi? Besides, there is a Hindi keyboard layout, tools available for easy typing in Hindi/Gujarati/Tamil. And thanks to Google for Transliteration.

I am waiting for a day when our government shall issue a law/guidelines for website owners for enabling Internet for disabled people. I am waiting for a day when an Indian web-hosting giant opens up a data center in US/UK (for cost cutting bcoz their cooler climate and cheaper bandwidth) instead of collaborating with existing foreign providers. Today preliminary knowledge is almost free over Internet. I am waiting for a day when every member of our society has access to such information free and a child does not necessarily need to buy a book. I am waiting for a day when free internet kiosks will be available roadside and we can access Wikipedia, maps/routes and information will be a hand apart for the poorest guy in my country.

- Ankit

Ref:
* Country wise IP count as of 2009-12-19
* ICANN Wiki and Country-wise Total Domains Data as of 2009-12-14
* Second source for IP stats http://www.ip2location.com/ip2location-internet-ip-address-2010-report.aspx . Here too India is at 19th, and China at 3rd.

Thanks Vineet !

Problem: While surfing around, I came across a website whose content encoding is not being supported with my latest Firefox v3.5.4 showed me unsupported compression error.

Content Encoding Error
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.
* Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Solution: As per my knowledge web-servers generally use GZ compression and Firefox well supports that. Then what’s wrong here? Digging a bit into Firefox’s ‘about:config‘, I did a search for ‘gz’. The setting network.http.accept-encoding was set to gzip,deflate. What’s wrong? Let’s try setting it gzip,deflate,gz. And it worked!. The catch here is gzip and gz are two different extensions used for the same gzip compression. Eventually, the questions is who’s in fault, Firefox or the website?

- ankit

“computing industry is the only industry more fashion driven than woman’s fashion“

Of course, this is true. Think about the last 10 years, how many new languages introduced, how many new versions of existing languages, new frameworks are released everyday, etc; But what about the compatibility with old? Isn’t today we (as a system owner, who actually pays for software development) want to have a stable, low cost, maintenance free software. I want to install it once and be assured for rest of 5-10 years. New versions/frameworks comes with new bugs. Do you have a stable CRM/ERP that can help me in 5-10 years run?

1. Create hyper-links for few MP3 files
2. Insert following script code to your page
   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script>
3. You are done! Yahoo! Media Player will be loaded and it will make all media links clickable

Here are few of my favorite tracks. Use the play button to listen. Thanks to RadioReloaded.com.

Tere Naina, Chandi Chowk To China (2009)
Jaane Kyun Log Pyar Karte Hein, Dil Chahta Hai (2001)
Akela hoon Mein, Raeth
Gum Sum Ho Kyun, Aksar
Ye Jo Mohabbat Hai, Dil Vil Pyar Vyar (2002)
Mumma, Dasvidaniya (2008)
Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008)

How does it work?

1. Inserting the script loads swfProxy, a flash player, from Yahoo’s server (http://l.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/mus/swf/ymwp/swfproxy-2.0.31.swf).
2. The javascript detects all hyperlinks with mp3/wav as file extension. For more details about supported types refer wiki page.
3. Then a play icon/button is inserted before each supported link. This is done using em.ymp-skin CSS class.
4. The Javascript then builds user interface as interactive sidebar. All images in the player are loaded by extracting small parts (using CSS) from single image.
5. When you click play button, the media file URL is passed to swfProxy object that actually plays the file. One thing is still wondering to me is how do they track mouse click event on these hyperlinks?

Certainly, a great idea and smart implementation!

- ankit

[Edited: 15 Feb, 09: Clarification for the fifth point under 'How it works'

JavaScript best practices suggest not to use any inline event (onClick, etc) with HTML tags. For example, following is a bad practice:

<a onclick="doSomething()" href="#">Click!</a>

Instead, you should separate out JavaScript from HTML.

<a href="backuplink.html" class="doSomething">Click!</a>

In a script block associate onClick event as following:


$('a.doSomething').click( function() {
// Do something here!
alert('You did something, woo hoo!');
} );
...

]

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
src="http://beemp3.com/player/player.swf" style="width: 290px;" id="126954385" name="126954385" bgcolor="#ffffff"
quality="autohigh" wmode="transparent"
flashvars="playerID=1&amp;bg=0xCDDFF3&amp;soundFile=http://www.tdfast.com/mfiles/headroom-Happy_Birthday_.mp3&amp;autostart=yes"
allownetworking="internal" allowscriptaccess="never" width="290" height="24">


You should replace the mp3 file mentioned under soundFile variable. The autostart=yes variable causes the player to play mp3 immediately (it can be removed).

You can follow this to add jingles on your friend’s scrap book. Here is an example of a Birthday jingle

For more information about customizing refer http://www.1pixelout.net/code/audio-player-wordpress-plugin/

- ankit

[Edited: this one for Happy New Year

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
src="http://beemp3.com/player/player.swf" style="width: 290px;" id="126954385" name="126954385" bgcolor="#ffffff"
quality="autohigh" wmode="transparent"
flashvars="playerID=1&amp;bg=0xCDDFF3&amp;soundFile=http://www.electricpocket.com/ringtones/Xmas/HappyNewYear.mp3&amp;autostart=yes"
allownetworking="internal" allowscriptaccess="never" width="290" height="24">


This one is a complete hidden (prefect for a Horror show):
<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
src="http://beemp3.com/player/player.swf" style="width: 290px;" id="126954385" name="126954385" bgcolor="#ff0000" border="#H000HH"
quality="autohigh" wmode="transparent"
flashvars="playerID=1&bg=0xFFFFFF&border=0xFFFFFF&text=0xFFFFFF&slider=0xFFFFFF&loader=0xFFFFFF&lefticon=0xFFFFFF&righticon=0xFFFFFF&track=0xFFFFFF&leftbg=0xFFFFFF&rightbg=0xFFFFFF&rightbghover=0xFFFFFF&righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&soundFile=http://www.make4fun.com/download/ringtones/scary/Womans%20Scream%20Of%20Horror.mp3&autostart=yes"
allownetworking="internal" allowscriptaccess="never" width="290" height="24">

]

Tiles: The very first observation is – not whole map is fetched at once. Instead the entire map is divided into tiles and a series of Ajax requests are fired to retrieve some part of the actually map. As soon as a tile is fetched it is displayed at its position. Their position is well calculated no matter user drags the maps while requests are on the way. The benefit here is, the user interface remains responsive and it makes user eager to analyze an area of map as soon as it’s available.

Overlaying: The tiles can be considered basic unit of mapping applications. They are atomic and have minimal required information. The DHTML allows overlapping one tile (image) over another and makes development easier. Here is how.

For each type of data there exists an independent tile. The Ajax application retrieves these tiles and overlaps one above another. For example – the user requests to see map and satellite image together, and here is how the rendered image is showed.

	+
||

Tiles are Independent: Each tile is an independent unit and its request can be customized from client browser itself. For example making a request of http://kh2.google.com/kh?n=415&v=22&hl=en&t=trtssqrtqsqqtqq returns -

This is a newer image. While the request for http://kh2.google.com/kh?n=415&v=21&hl=en&t=trtssqrtqsqqtqq yields and older image for the same area.

Here the difference in the requests is of a single parameter ‘v’ and as per my guess its ‘version’. The next parameter ‘t’ seems a combination of zoom index, and the corner coordinates. For tiles of type map having some text, their language can be controlled using ‘hl=en’. Try using ‘hl=ru’ and you can see difference. So, the JavaScript executing in the client’s browser has complete control over what to display.

Ajax: Probably this needs to be the first point I should discuss. Google Maps does not use XMLHttpRequest for making Ajax calls. Instead, they have used I-FRAME (iFrame) for preloading images. When you use Firebug you won’t be also to trace any XMLHttpRequest calls. I think the reason for this would be the difficulty in using and image/jpeg response from XMLHttpRequest as an image object and display it in browser.

- ankit

I’m {PREF=”ID=cfd6bd57439bc4a9:TM=1205732323:LM=1205732323:S=tT1f1NaLxjumQJbv”}. I’m a regular Internet surfer. On an average I’m online for more than 8 hours a day and that makes me to think of a new phrase – ‘my online presence’, and somewhere it may hurt my privacy.

In Web 2.0 big companies are competing to gain as much as information about Internet users that they can show targeted contents especially ads.

The game players have already begun their game. They know about what web pages I visit, they know my friends, they know what I prefer to buy online, then know which newspaper I read frequently, which mail account I use frequently, what do I search every day, what videos I watch online, where do I live, how much time I spend on Internet, what types of ads made me to click. They have my all photographs, my daily calendar/schedule, my mails (may be your credit card statements in form of emails), and all my chat conversations. They even know what music I listen, my attitude, my behavior, and even what I’m doing currently.

They say it’s all automatic, machines (computers) read and process information giving you personalized service and there is no human interference. But reality may be different. Is all that these sufficient to protect your privacy?

Here is a bigger fear, giving all of your information in the hands on one single body! A single mistake in handling such massive information can lead to world’s biggest controversy in user’s privacy.

In short, I don’t want anybody to know the fact that the wristwatch I have given to my girl-friend for her last birthday was of just 100 bucks!

- ankit

1. http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~ashishchandra/hindi
2. http://khattarkaka.tripod.com/
3. http://hindipatrikaworld.tripod.com/
4. http://raviratlami.googlepages.com/ Remington-Krutidev-Online-Hindi-Easy-Editor.htm
5. http://www.hungamamasti.com/hindi.htm

Thankx to those who gave me back link, and a kind request to others
The worst thing here is, though they have copied content, they stick their (C) copyright message !!!

- Ankit

[Edited on Jan 27, 2007]

People who recommends this tool:

1. http://www.akshargram.com/sarvagya/index.php/How_to_Type_in_Hindi
2. http://sushilbasista.stumbleupon.com/tag/hindi/ , http://artist.stumbleupon.com/tag/hindi/
3. http://priaeducation.org/ohs.php

What I did?

I just upgraded Yahoo messenger 8.1 as requested by software

What it did?

It installed yahoo toolbar without asking
It set Yahoo.com as homepage without asking, it didn’t honored my existing homepage
It modified my preferences without asking.

Even a lot of people are complaining about the same DAMN toolbar. Here are a few:

http://wildrun.blogspot.com/2006/12/how-do-i-get-this-bleeping-yahoo.html
http://blog.forret.com/2006/10/yahoo-toolbar-is-misbehaving/

The approach yahoo is choosing to publicize its tool is against software distridution laws and should be condemned. What say?