After four months of relatively slow development of Facebook-style Micropublisher (FBSMP), I am happy to tag the branch with 6.x-1.1 release. It might be the last release for this branch, as I would now be upgrading FBSMP to support the latest 6.x-3.x branch of Facebook-style Statuses. A lot of cool features are coming up with this release especially in the beloved link plugin, link plugin: allow users to share links to audio sharing sites such as soundcloud, 8tracks....

Do you feel passionate about any open source technology? Or you want to explore one during your summer vacations? On the top of it, if you get a mentor to guide you all along and a stipend of 5000 USD, would you be interested? Yeah! Keep reading then. [caption id=“attachment_741” align=“alignright” width=“198” caption=“GSoC 2011”] [/caption] Google announced its consecutive 7th year for Summer of Code program on January 24, 2011. Google Summer of Code program encourages students from all over the world to engage in open source project development of their choice for 3 months. Look out for the details of the program here: http://socghop.appspot.com/ and the timeline: http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline

a few videos and images for all of you this holiday season, few to giggle, few to laugh and other to ponder over. merry christmas and a happy new year. 300 years of fossil fuel in 300 seconds google shit revenge of the spider [caption id=“attachment_713” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“i remember too.”] [/caption] -- fya for those of you wondering where the heck uppercase letters went, google killed them.

After months of hard work and support from Isaac and Thomas, I am proud to announce the first stable release of Facebook-style Micropublisher (FBSMP). FBSMP allows user to share content such as links, videos, photos and documents along with their Facebook-style Statuses. It allows you to create a social networking site similar to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and others out-of-the-box. On the top, it integrates with a lot of other Drupal modules (as Activity, Trigger, Rules, Heartbeat, ImageCache, EmVideo, UserPoints, and more) which lets you do a lot more things with your website....

I worked on the module Facebook-style Micropublisher (FBSMP) for Drupal, this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code program mentored by Isaac Sukin. This module lets users publish content (links, images, videos and documents) in a stream, along with their Facebook-style Statuses (like on Facebook, or Twitter). When I say that I worked on it as part of GSoC, it would be only partly true. I started working on it around March 2010, when I was contacted by Thomas to create a Drupal module for his site which would imitate the link share feature from Facebook, Google Buzz. I wrote the small module Facebook-style Links, which worked quite well but it was then this occurred to me, “why not create a module which can publish any content, which is extensible to publish any kind of content like images, links, videos, documents, audio, etc”. Today, I am happy to say that Drupal now has a complete Micropublisher which can be used to create any kind of microblogging platform such as Facebook, Google Buzz, Twitter, etc. I will be posting the first release of the module soon, but before here is the small list of features and a few screenshots.

I am much excited about the long delayed Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in India which is now pretty much ready for arrival next month during 2nd week of November ( http://goo.gl/DuUo). I am not sure if it will be free (as it is in most of the countries, http://goo.gl/2ihz), but even if it isn’t I am expecting a lot of people would switch their mobile network operator in-spite of the few disadvantages the service will bring( http://goo.gl/w5Si). In such times, IMHO, the mobile network operators are forced to either improve their services or put lucrative offers in front of transitioning users which they are unable to resist. The former can’t be done in a day (which user won’t wait before switching) and latter brings an interesting problem from our data mining class, back in 2009.

I just came across this website ( Hotels.com), so went ahead and started playing around the website. I really liked the interface, though a little cluttered homepage, it gave a complete overview of the offers on the website. I saw the " Price Match Guarantee", so went ahead to check their rates for the hotel I stayed in Puducherry (Ginger Hotel). I was shocked to see the results for Jayaram Hotel which was Rs....

Most of the websites today have the the pre-sales chat options on their site. These chats usually do not assure you about the quality of the product/service you are going to receive but still if the sales person can convince you to buy the product and can answer all the questions you may have about the product/service, I would say that they are giving good ROI. But what if you have a bad (read horrible) experience during the pre-sales chat? Would you still pay for the product, no matter how good you have heard about it?

I discussed a little about URL encoding in my recent post Facebook: Bug with URL encoding, although it seems like the bug still exists. In this post I will discuss “how to encode a given URL before accessing it using CURL or fsockopen”. The problem with URLs is that they might contain certain disallowed characters like spaces, according to RFC 3986. Our aim is to convert these invalid characters to their percentage encoded values in a given URL , so that we can access the URL using our regular HTTP request methods. For example the URL [http://example.com/space space] should be converted to [http://example.com/space%20space] before we can access it using CURL. However, the URL [http://example.com/percents%25percent] is perfectly valid as it doesn’t contains any of the disallowed characters.