SA.themepack

Be warned though, it’s huge (~89MB). It has several wallpapers, and they are as super-high-resolution as I could get. The wallpapers are all from publicly available sources, and I’ve been careful to not include any restricted content. However, remembering all the sources I’ve acquired them from is beyond my human capacity, so let’s just thank the Internets for them. If you own the rights to a wallpaper in the pack and would like me to remove it or to credit you in this post, please send me an email using the contact page, and I’ll do that in a jiffy.

Oh, and when you get to END wallpaper, please excuse me for it. You know I had to do it.

“I am going to just go back to India. I’m just not responsible enough to do anything worthwhile.”

As I stood sweating in the hot summer sun waiting for the 3PM Tom’s Creek A to arrive, I could not seem to find words degrading enough to describe myself. This was my second day in Blacksburg, Virginia. And I had concluded that I was going back to where I came from. You see, when I came here, I came with the understanding that out of everything that I possessed, there was just one thing that was critical to my presence. My passport. This understanding had been ingrained in my mind by my father’s persistence in repeating it to me, even at the cost of me mocking him every time he did so, once every couple of hours for each day of the week before I actually left India.

And so I stood there; now almost soaking wet from all the sweat in that hot, hot summer sun; trying to avoid the realization of the enormity of the fact that I had lost my passport on my second day at Virginia Tech. Earlier in the day I had found that the passport wasn’t in its natural habitat: The leather pouch in the inner pocket of the document holder I kept in my backpack. Since then, I had traced every step I took the day before. I mean that literally. I had searched the dorm room I stayed at, the laundry room of the dorms, the pavements that I had walked, all the paths on drillfield (I didn’t remember the one I had walked on), and of course, the empty apartment I was going to stay in before I lost the only document that I was not supposed to lose. I had given up on the search.

I went back to the apartment and lied down on the bare floor next to the two trolley bags, the backpack and the handbag that represented everything that I had brought with me to the States. Everything except the only thing that I wasn’t supposed to lose. I tried replaying the last day for one last time in my head. No luck. I was as doomed as Windows Me was the day it released. Well, maybe not that much.

But I digress. Having resigned to my fate, I tried to go to sleep. Now the part from here to what happened next is a gray area in my memory. But here’s what I do remember: I woke up shouting “The Bag!”. I opened the zip of the front document pocket of the larger bag. It was empty. I opened the zip of the front document pocket of the smaller trolley bag. There, at the bottom of the pocket, my fingers touched the leathery material that makes up the cover of all passports issued by the Indian Republic.

The next few moments are hard to describe. So I won’t. Suffice to say, I really was the happiest person on the planet for those moments.

This is what had happened: When I had arrived in Blacksburg, my baggage didn’t arrive with me – it had been lost in one of the 547 transfers you need to make when coming to Roanoke Regional Airport from anywhere else in the world. Fortunately, the airlines found my bags soon enough. On the evening the day before, the airlines had called me and told me that they were sending the bags at the apartment. When I received the bags, I had to show the personnel my ID. The only ID I had on me was my passport. So I took it out of its natural habitat to show it to the personnel. They gave me the bags and went away.

Now these were heavy bags, filled beyond their legal limits. One person couldn’t lift them both together. Ideally, I should have taken them in one by one. But having lived in big Indian cities for all 25 years of my life, my brain was conditioned to believe that you never leave anything unattended. Anywhere.

So I had to pull in the two trolley bags together, one in each hand. But I was holding the passport in one of my hands. I could keep it in one of the pockets of my Jeans, but that might bend it. This was the most important document in my possession, I couldn’t let it be bent. Umm, wait, I’ll keep it in the front pocket of one of these bags. It’ll be safe there. Later, I’ll take it out and put it in its natural habitat. And then, something happened. I went in, and completely forgot about taking the passport out of the bag. Hell, I even forgot I put it there.

Well, now that this trauma was over, that night I went out of the apartment to the nearby park to watch the stars in the sky. I come from Delhi – I’m blown away whenever I can see anything more than the moon in the night sky. As I was watching the stars, I thought to myself – lesson well learnt. In the future, I would not let magical moments dictate my life, and no matter what happens, I would always keep documents where they belong.

Now, you must be thinking – “I read through this whole post just to read that? I mean, that’s a pretty bland story.” To which let me respond by saying that its less bland than watching kittens sleep for three minutes in a YouTube video – an activity I’m sure you’ve indulged in before. But anyways, the story doesn’t end there. I wish, oh god I wish, that it did. But it doesn’t. In the course of the next two years, I managed to (really) lose my passport once, and my I-20 twice. Over the course of these mishaps, my sense of self-deprecation has mellowed, and I’ve come to accept things for what they really are. Today, as I get ready to finish up with my degree and get started with the next chapter of my life, I still remember vividly that second day in Blacksburg, and often think of the real moral of my story – “Shit happens.”

This post from Maison Bisson described the process of editing the files for a previous version. The good news is, for the latest Wordpress releases (I’ve checked 2.7.0 and 2.7.1), the data model has been changed to remove the “static” post status for pages (They now have the same status codes as posts), which means that no changes are required to the update fundtion; and a field called post_type now stores information about the kind of post (blog post, page, attachment).

So, essentially, here’s all you need to do to magically get the list of latest posts AND pages on your blogging client:

Modify this query in wp_includes/post.php:

 $sql = "SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = 'post' ORDER BY post_date DESC $limit";

to this:

 $sql = "SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = 'post' OR post_type = 'page' ORDER BY post_date DESC $limit";

This is a scotch-tape solution that’s worked well for me so far. Try it at your own risk. Also, remember that when you update your Wordpress installation, these changes might get overwritten.

UPDATE: This works for 2.9.1 too, see comments below.

And that’s the thing about the web and social applications, which is not necessarily bad, but its something that not everyone understands. It’s hard to remove your footprints.

Which brings me to what I really wanted to share in this post. It’s an imaginary scenario that popped into my head the day I installed Twitkut on my Orkut profile. (Disclaimer: The author of the app is my younger brother. I am giving his app free publicity here in the hope that he’ll stop asking me for a MacBook for Christmas.) It’s an app that shows my tweets on my orkut profile and in my orkut update stream. As soon as I installed the app, I realized that it wasn’t the smartest idea in the world. You see, I post a lot of stuff on twitter that I expect only a small set of people to read. I know any one can read all of my posts by simply going to my twitter home, but I don’t expect them to care enough to go there, or to even know enough about me to go there. I certainly don’t expect my mom to go there. And I know she never will. She’s a normal person who uses a computer only for utilitarian purposes that include email, skype and browsing photos. That’s it. And Twitter, as a smart person I know once said, Twitter is still this underground movement in the whole scheme of things, and sometimes its surprising to the ‘tweeter’, as it may, when a more mainstream audience gets access to and comments on the tweet.

Now, Orkut is a social network that is becoming increasingly and scarily mainstream in India. I have school friends, ex-bosses, cousins, relatives and even past teachers as friends on Orkut. (I have my advisor as a friend on Twitter, but that’s another story) And my tweets aren’t meant to be read by all of these people. Especially the relatives. Because that brings them from the online social domain to the very active Ahuja family network domain. Here’s a potential scenario:

I’m willing to be my guinea pig and wait for this to happen some day. When it does, I promise to report in full detail. Till then, enjoy tweeting and friend-feeding, and remember to keep forgetting to keep those wild party pics private. It’s so much more fun to browse through photos when you know you are not meant to see them.

If the cowards’ intention was to cause fear; then my city was a wrong choice, is a wrong choice, and always will be a wrong choice. We’ll be distraught, angry, strained, even broken. But not afraid. That’s just not how we roll. What they should really be praying for, is that they don’t fall into the hands of one of us.

The other way to do these recommendations could be to match people based on their application sets (or better still, their activity sets. If app = Microsoft Word, then Activity = word processing); and then provide recommendations based on what other people who have similar appication/activity sets are using, that the current user isn’t.

Anyways, Wakoopa does provide a simple API to accessing its data, and that is a great thing to do. That’s something that RescueTime hasn’t done yet, but they promise to do the same soon on their site. RescueTime has a unique approach to this whole domain. They aren’t building a social network (at least till yet), and this is how they track your apps: If you are using a standard application, the RescueTime tracker records its usage as any other tracker. If, however, you are on a browser, the tracker records the website that you’re visiting as an ‘application’, which makes some sense in this era of online applications. You can then go to the website and assign ‘tags’ to applications. These can later be visualized to see how much time, for example, you spend ‘Watching Videos Online’.

So anyways, I’ve been itching to use the incredibly simple to use GChart APIs with an interesting enough data-set, and Wakoopa stats are sortof interesting (at least for me…), so last weekend I cooked up a script to make a pie chart of my recent application usage. Its available here, and at the point of writing this post, this is how my stats looked:

Which, I suppose, is a pretty reasonable graph. Half of what we do on our computers these days is more or less on the web (50% of which is on YouTube, which is, IMHO, the greatest time sink ever invented). Mail takes about 20%, and the actual work takes the rest. (Source after the jump)

The source code for the vis is pretty simple. All it does is load the XML API URL, parse through to generate a Google Chart compatible format, and call the image URL for Pie Charts:

$request_url = "http://api.wakoopa.com/sameer/most_used.xml";


//App names
$names = "";
//Usage values
$values = "";
//For calculations
$total = 0;

$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);

//Computing total
foreach($xml->software as $sw){
   $total += intval($sw->{'active-seconds'});
}
//Computing values in GChart-compatible format. Have a look at this: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/#pie_charts
foreach($xml->software as $sw){
       $names = $names."|".$sw->name;
       $values = $values.",".(round(intval($sw->{'active-seconds'})*100/$total, 1));
    }

//That's it! Load the image.
echo '<br><img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
cht=p&chco=3587DCFF,99E142FF,993C99FF,90A4E5FF,DAD52EFF,C95854FF,AE4496FF&
chd=t:'.trim($values, ",").'&chs=450x300&chl='.trim($names,"|").'">';

As I was browsing through them, I enjoyed some more than the others, and that led me to wonder if I can setup an experiment to rate them. That’s pretty difficult though. If providing a “higher insight” is considered as the ultimate goal of a visualization, then it becomes rather hard to rate them. Insights are a function of so many things that even an experimental setup may find it hard to extract the “Interface driven insight” part of them. Especially when the visualizations themselves are about such diverse subjects. However, what attracts me to visualizations is the fact that they are so much like works of art, and hence, some of them just stand apart.

The stand apart for me was the Hans Rosling talk at TED. You’ve got to watch it.

• Wordpress 2.1, for some evil reason, eats up all the line breaks one puts in the comment, and replaces it by the standard <p></p> combination. So as a stop-gap solution to having all the paragraphs in a comment mashed up together, I’ve increased the margin in their CSS for a feeling of visual separation.
• You can now subscribe to the future comments on a post that you comment on. All that you need to do, is to click the checkbox in the commenting form that says “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”.
• Gravatars!
• If you’d like to quote someone’s comment, there’s a ‘Quote’ link in each comment’s header, that you can click to auto-fill that comment’s content as a quote within your comment. Or, if you’d like to quote some text from the post or from within a long comment, select the text, go to the comment field and click the link that says “quote selected text”. You can DOO it! (Yes, Rob Schneider is my favorite actor.)
• You’d notice, while commenting, that there’s a live preview just above the form that starts filling in as you type, providing a quick way to know what your comment would look like. This isn’t perfect yet- it recognizes line breaks and doesn’t render quotes as it should – but I’m working on it, and it’s good enough to give you a reasonable idea as to what your comment might look like.

 Have an idea as to how commenting can be made more intuitive? Comment on..

Now in all this – perhaps the most popular type of feeds that we syndicate to are blog posts. And typically, they support commenting. In fact, commenting is an integral part of the blogging experience. The discussion adds mass to the content of the original post, sometimes even surpassing it in meaningful content. Or, it can go completely haywire and spread out into several branches of context. Either ways, it’s something without which blogging won’t be blogging.

So my rue is this – I would like to participate in the discussions on a blog post right from my newsreader. That implies two things-

• I want to view the stream of comments along with the post. This isn’t hard to achieve, given that almost all blogging platforms provide RSS feeds for comments to posts, and a couple of newsreaders that support the display of those comments.
• I want to be able to comment right from my newsreader. This is important because it makes the whole process of ‘participating’ with the said blog or news site much more intuitive for me, and, the newsreader can then keep track of my comments and conversations in a more organized way than I do currently through coComment or commentful. They’re really good tools, both of them, but they sporadically don’t work. coComment, for instance, is a very nice tool that integrates with a lot of social sites apart from just blogging platforms, but somehow for me it isn’t able to update the latest comments on a lot of them.

The second feature requires the website to publish an XML-RPC API (Here’s what XML-RPC means) similar to the ones that allow people to be able to post to their blog from desktop applications. Wordpress is the only blogging platform that I’ve worked with, and I’ve checked – it doesn’t have one. There is an XMLRPC for traceback, but nothing for commenting.

Is this something that just hasn’t been implemented because no one thought of it, or is it just that no one wants to have this – for fear for people not coming to the blog’s website for commenting? Or is the concern related to additional spam?

I think lack of visitors is a self-countering argument – While there may be lesser people visiting to comment on the site’s interface, there would actually be more people commenting and being active on the site – and the positive effect of that should balance out the concerns. I’m not sure if spam is a factor either – sure, the spammer now has one URL to attack – but the post id (That I suppose would be a parameter in the call to such a service) is still dynamic. And in any case, the interface just as secure as the rest of the site is to spammers. I’m not sure how captchas can be implemented in such a service – but I’m sure they can be.

Reading this on a newsreader? Click the post title, wait for the page to load, scroll to the bottom for my cute little commenting interface, and fill in your thoughts!