1. Install User Agent Switcher addon in Firefox
2. Restart Firefox
3. Go to Options Menu > Default User Agent. Select iPhone 3.0
4. Log on to https://m.google.com/app/buzz

and you are there… Happy Buzzing!

They claim to be world’s cleanest Gola made from mineral water ice! Reach them at Fun Republic, Andheri. You may also like to visit their official website Go Gola.com or check out Go-gola at flickr.

*Bombay is the old name for the city Mumbai, India.

Personal Details

• Name: Ankit Jain
• Email: ankitasdeveloper | gmail + com
• GTalk: ankitasdeveloper | gmail + com

Project Proposal

Social networks are a medium of easier communication, bounding and bringing people together. Any effort made to achieve this is highly appreciated by the community (of users). Event management is a recently discovered feature in social networks. Implementing this in WordPress will surly bring WordPress to a new height allowing users to create/share/participate/notify events. This feature has already been a part of LinkedIn and Facebook.

Following are few possibilities that can be included in WordPress MU/BuddyPress. Looking forward for feedback and prioritizing:

1. Event Organizer: allowing users to create, edit, delete events. In addition, time zone coordination and showing time in user’s local time zone, geo-location, etc.
2. Attendance: users can mark for their attendance. (e.g. interested, may attend, attending, not attending)
3. Search for upcoming events. This can be extended as event directory allowing location specific search, tag cloud / browse by category.
4. Roles: users can indicate their role for events. E.g. organizer, participant, volunteer, promoter/sponsor, etc;
5. Revision History: this becomes important component when we want multiple users (in addition to event creator) to modify/propose event details.
6. Discussion: each event will have a forum for users’ views. For simplicity this should be a flat blog-post comment like listing (or like Twitter’s update listing).
7. Tagging: free tagging. Or categorization of event (e.g. educational, cultural, get-together/party, conference, show, outing, etc . Categorization sometimes known as controlled tagging.
8. Group integration: if implemented in Buddypress, an event can be restricted to one (or possibly more) group.
9. Blog-post integration: while writing a blog-post, users can indicate associate events. And now, these posts appear on event’s detail page as ‘blogs that talk about this event’.
10. Notifications/Reminders: sending reminder emails to all interested. This includes users who have indicated as interested, attending, may attend.
11. RDF support: This is an effort to produce semantic data as machine interpretable. Event details should be encoded as RDFa (RDF/XML) using http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfcal/ ontology.
12. Admin page: settings like to enable/disable discussions, notifications, revisions, etc;

Schedule of Deliverables / Milestones

1^st May to 31^st May: Design and Basic framework:

Before any code deliverable, it is necessary that we lay down a good foundation.

1. Brainstorming, discussion threads, design and then wireframes are required to set the project in motion and prevent unnecessary rewriting/modifications to the code. (as what I have observed on WordPress Dev Blog).

The first code-deliverable will consist of (in addition to the database backend) –

1. Event creation and edit page. (assuming an event is public and available to all)
2. Basic Upcoming events box (as widget/sidebar)
3. Event details page
4. (Optional) Event discussion: any user can post simple comments on the event page.
5. Installer script – included with the plug-in itself.

1st June to 30th June: Advanced features

I’m not finalizing what features shall be there in next milestones. It’s a community project and community’s feedback and rating priority to each feature plays an important role for deciding deliverables. In my opinion the next milestone should have –

1. Attendance (e.g. interested, may attend, attending, not attending)
2. User roles ( e.g. organizer, participant, volunteer, promoter/sponsor, etc)
3. Search and Tagging
4. Revision History
5. Blog post integration
6. RDF/XML integration

This is merely my opinion. Community’s comments and suggestions are welcomed. We (with mentor) should plan for systematic pre-releases. This will helps us in getting early feedback from WordPress community for features and code-reviews.

I do not have any commitments during this period. I have 3 months of free time starting from 1st of May.

Open Source Development Experience

I have not been a part of any open source project officially. I am willing to be a part of WP community.

Work/Internship Experience

I have 3 years of work experience in Web development (ASP.Net, PHP, WordPress and Drupal). In addition, I do freelancing work time to time to fund my studies. This includes PHP scripts and Drupal development. I have experience with version control systems too.

Academic Experience

I am currently doing M.Tech (2nd year) from IIT Kanpur. I am studying Comp Sci. and Engineering. My Research Interests includes: Software Design & Architecture, Knowledge engineering, Social Networks.

Why WordPress

WordPress is a state of art for software for blogging. Other open source CMS offers just basic blogging features. I am associated with WordPress for the last 4 years and passionate about it. My WP blog is hosted at http://ankitjain.info/ankit running v2.6.

Summer of Code is an exciting opportunity for me. For my WP blog I have done basic customizations. This includes post specific advertisements, customizations of theme file, etc. This opportunity gives me an official chance to contribute to my favorite Web application. Such open source development experience and time to time guidance from mentor will surly help me to understand and boost passion, binding with community and coding standards.

Thanks,
- ankit

I have verified and this trick works!!! Once your account is hacked, even changing the password has no effect either.

Few months back I have written a post about our online privacy. And this is an example of how worse it can happen to you. Your views are welcomed.

Note: Recently one bug in Google Search caused all results to be flagged as malware.

- ankit

1. Did you ever wish to run two instances for GTalk? This is possible and plain simple. Navigate to the shortcut that launches Google Talk (if not available, right click on C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe and select Create Shortcut). Open properties. Add /nomutex in the target textbox.
2. To keep GoogleTalk always on top: Go to the registry entry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Talk\Options, create a new DWORD show_pin and set its value to 1. Restart GTalk and you will see a pin near the minimize button.
3. To bring all GTalk windows in front press [Win] + [Esc] keys on keyboard.
4. To write in bold use *this text is bold* and for italic _this is italic_.
5. Coping someone’s avatar: Navigate to %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Google\google talk\avatars\. This directory contains all avatars cached in PNG format (rename them). Search by email in avatar.txt to find your friends avatar.

- 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

A: Almost 2-5 items a day, as I’m an avid Internet user. Let me list down where Acrobat Reader sucks:

1. The Adobe Reader 8 installer a massive 20.8MB setup to download and time consuming setup.
2. Version 5 was roughly fast whereas new versions are becoming more memory hungry and CPU intensive and version 7 is damn hungry. It takes almost 10-15 seconds to load!
3. Frankly speaking, I hate their patents listed in splash screen.
4. If a PDF file has high graphics it sucks further and application hangs for few seconds.
5. Seriously I’m looking for a replacement!

Hmmm! a serious problem that affects my efficiency directly. Let’s search for a better solution. Wow I got it as first result!

Foxit v3.0 is the answer to all my worries. It’s a free light-weight (only 2.98 MB) and amazingly fast PDF viewer and printer. A 19 MB PDF file when opened, virtual memory required by Foxit was just 10 MB against massive 23 MB for Acrobat Reader.

Even the installer is just an extractor and does not require specific permissions to install. Quite handy in cybercafe. Its user interface is same as Acrobat Reader and you won’t feel using a different viewer.

- Ankit