Gspace firefox extension - Gmail as your storage device

After series of wild click stream,I found myself on firefox addons page and like every time I was wondering/gaping at the versatility of the firefox platform. The plugins architecture, means to build those et al.Anyways I found Gspace which helps you convert your gmail account into a online file system,now I knew of such utilities on windows but I seldom use windows and hence moved on.Being able to do so from a browser truly is Web 2.0 and pwnage of Desktop as platform.You'll need to install the add on like any other add on and restart your firefox upon which you see the status pop up window icon in the status bar. You can register your gmail accounts with Gspace from manage accounts and create directories (This does not actually create a directory on gmail server, rather its a internal way to simulate filesystem using subject field of the emails). After dealing with account registration you move on to Tools->Gspace which should open a new Window (can also be reached by typing chrome://gspace/content/gspaceWindow.xul on ff2) here you can upload files to the simulated directories which after complete transfer appear in your gmail account as a mail from yourself, Its best to filter these mails and apply a label to it.
Other cool features include ability to stream music from your gmail account right into browser using the google flash player, also you can view photos. This you choose in File Transfer Mode in tools->Gspace.

Tips And Tricks:

• Do not upload more than 500 files a day, may result in temporary ban from google, which can be upto 24 hrs
• Its best to create a new gmail account to keep all your files at one place, also in case you DO suffer a ban, it doesn't block your daily mails and primary gmail id
• I have already mentioned filtering Gspace Mails eh ?
• Do not even try to store files weighing more than 20 megs, you are wasting your bandwidth, google bounce mails with attachment over 20 mbs
• Share account with trusted friends to save network resources (like in case of music)
  

Disclaimer : Its not supported/endoresed by google but a individual innovative hack and hence do mind the 24 hrs block and check your daily transfer to google.

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Google Appengine

Google launched a application engine for web application developers to take advantage of the "Google" Infrastructure. This would mean that application programmers can now write engaging applications without worrying about hosting, responsiveness and all other maintenance related issues, Ah but there is a catch!! you qualify as a developer if you can read and write python, which is a interesting and fun to learn language but it also means that you are supposed to throw all that PHP, Perl, Java experience in trash and come unto Lord's feet. Appengine comes preloaded with django 0.96 which is a powerful python web framework quite popular for its clean implementation of MVC, but you can also upload and use a different framework best suited for your application. Appengine comes with a admin panel for each application where it shows many statistics about data transfer, url's visited, popular url's etc. Google Appengine is an attempt to answer Amazon's EC2 and S3 if at all its an attempt to answer anything. Amazon webservices on the contrary are not free but support any framework/language, where S3 is more like a data grid independent of EC2.
Some Facts and Figures About Google Appengine:

• 3 Apps per developer
• limit of 1000 files each being maximum of 1 mb although limit on overall application storage is 500 megs :P
• In and out Data transfer of 10,000 megs each per day
  
• 2000 e mails per day
• 650,000 Http Requests per day
  
• CPU limit of 200,000,000 Mega Cycles per day
  
• GQL (read SQL for Google data store) is used which do not use joins, hence is the structure of Big Table (Google Technology to store data in database) but you can do all you would want to do with joins and also get the performance which SQL joins suck out of your applications.
• User System is based only on Google Accounts, which means if someone needs to access a user specific feature, then he/she needs to authenticate with his/her google account.
• Type of Content hosted/served is bounded by Terms of Service
• Not all python libraries are supported, A full list can be found out here
  

So all get started . Well not all, but those of you who can talk python . There has been demand in past that google provide hosting on its reliable and bleeding edge infrastructure, but this was not what we expected .

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Drupal 6.0 is a beast

Drupal 6.0 was released an hour ago today and Damn !! its a beast ... Drupal 6.0 improves on theming part, allowing you to start with a HTML template of ur choice.There is a new theme developer module to assist you in theming, I have no doubt 7 will bring MVC completely and we can finally get rid of PHP and my colleague (Designer) would stop yelling for me :). Drupal 6 is super funkier with Drag and Drop menu's,book pages and lotsa jQuery.Performance and optimization is noteworthy and interesting to watch for, I am particularly looking forward to Batch API.Action triggers,one click install,security,performance,AJAX are some buzz words which will describe drupal 6.
Oh I am gonna drink to Drupal 6.0 and my time in irc's ... And post drinking will install D6 and play a little.More on Drupal 6 soon as I am lucky enough to taste it as part of my job.

BTW for a comprehensive and more authentic gene story of drupal 6 read Drupal 6 released

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Friendfeed -- Another webapp with a promise

Friend Feed is a web 2.0 aggregator which tracks your activities on social media sites,blogs and present as a single feed, You can also track what people are doing on web 2.0, subscribe to your friend's feed
and then his activities start showing up on friend feed, although you always have option to see your own isolated field at My feed.Friendfeed also have a concept of imaginary friend which you can create if you know username/id of that person on any of the services supported by friendfeed. John resig is my imaginary friend as I know his twitter username :) (Oh, yeh I am digging him lately). Friend feed create a unique url for that imaginary friend in web 2.0 space.

27 services are supported by Friend feed currently


You also can share links from friend feed page via share link widget, I normally use it to share blog links I find interesting so that appears on my blog via the friendfeed widget, which reminded me of the widget friendfeed provides to put on your website/blog so that people who read your content know whats going on with you, read your changing Gtalk messages or track you on twitter or know of your music taste on last.fm.

Friendfeed is started by 4 ex-googlers with gmail,gmap,Google reader fame and that shows the potential it has, there was a buzz in blogosphere of kevin fox ( Gmail UI designer) joining friendfeed ( Actually he has joined Friendfeed ) and thats awesome for its UI prospects. I wonder how silicon valley startups are managed, with 4 ex googlers as co founders and Gmail UI designer with them .. Thats like so much Line of Code per square feet .. I will be tracking friendfeed and its development and for the mean time you can be friends with me on friendfeed.



Type rest of the post here

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Twitter -- My current fav web 2.0 app

I've been hearing twitter/twitter for long time now, but never cared much about it as I am already fed up of orkut, facebook from social media point of view ( just interested in its developer framework now !!). So, yeh why bother myself with another blah application which forces me to login, interact ( I am antisocial, if you have not noticed ) and then login back to follow up or worse get a shit load of garbage in my e mail. I was listenin to pantera, readin this Jquery book and surfing ( Alt + tab :P ) when I came across john resig's post about how he is hooked to twitter and how he was dejected to social networks (kind of same emotions more or less, only mine r pretty much aggressive) So, I decided to check it out and Damn!! its one of the most intelligent, convenient application I have seen.
Few Things that impressed me straight away were :
> Clean And Simple design with lots of decent AJAX/Javascript ( not gaudy and jumping )
> The event notification is just fundooo !!
> The XMPP support for notification on gtalk, jabber
> I dont have to login into twitter, I can set my status/microblog from gtalk
> Or even my phone (only that its 3rs/sms :( )
> Most amazing thing is twitter tracking .. I can track keywords in twitter universe via gtalk .. It doesnt give me daily digest of web alerts ... Something google should pick up from twitter, and stop sending me those e mails but notify me on IM (or atleast gimme a option )

What I will like to see in Twitter Or atleast I dont know how to make it work :
> reply to track keywords via gtalk .. that way I make frens based on my dynamic interests and not going to a community and fan club which i join once and forget abt next day..
> More IM protocols supported, partner with yahoo prolly and release a plugin or something ..
> I don't feel the need of firefox plugin for twitter although a quick search show many .. Gtalk is much more convenient
> I still can't figure out a way to reply to twitter updates of ppl I am following, I wanted to ask john resign about his new book and give him some tips maybe [:P]
> Twitter framework is ready to increase its SNS activities as I mentioned before I could meet people with my changing interest via twitter tracker ..

All in All a great app ...

Follow me on twitter :)

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Yahoo Acquires Zimbra

Zimbra, one of the trade mark applications of web 2.0 paradigm is taken .. According to zimbra.com yahoo has bought zimbra for $350m .. neat eh ?

We are excited to announce today that Yahoo! is acquiring Zimbra to extend its email leadership to the University, Business and ISP markets.. In order to focus on this effort, the Zimbra team will report to the communications group where we will remain fully committed to the community and to our customers and partners while leveraging opportunities to enhance their current experience.

Well it maybe a great step to regain ground in mail section, which it is loosing to gmail, Also I think its a measure to counter gmail for enterprises market, Google is doing good with Google apps and yahoo needed to counter that and zimbra might actually pull that off. Zimbra is an open source framework which allows developers and enterprises to integrate their services with zimbra services, Organizations have integrated zimbra with ERP and Inventory systems.. Ask me "How open source ppl earn money" And I might have an answer for you this time :)..

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FireBug -- The Wonder Tool

For the ajaxkarma devotees [:P]:
" Firebug has been around for quite some time now and just because it is mentioned for the first time here, doesn't make it a new in the market beta tool "
For quite sometime I have been planning to write a short tutorial on how to debug javascript and basically "how to be a javascript developer and still be non suicidal", Javascript can really get to your nerves and haunt you at nights with malformed pop ups .. But then its like friction "A necessary evil" you cant make any ajax request or display creamy web widgets without javascript .. For the optimism I have in me ,I am gonna cut short the gloomy airs around JS. Joe Hewitt like a mesiah came to our rescue and made this wonder tool firebug .. Firebug is a javascript, CSS, HTML analyzer which reports almost everything you can imagine about a web page.
This 250kb extension to firefox is better than any debugger, profiler tool you would have worked on your IDE's. It allows you to change DOM in real time allowing you to see changes live, and so CSS and other property you can think of, It contains a script engine to test javascript before incorporating into your page. As I ramble on, I am realizing that nothing I say would aptly describe this tool, So you need to hear it from the man himself, Watch this excellent video which explains the ins and outs of FireBug.

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