My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

Happened to Gimp a Wall-E poster for Ganymede poster contest. Its been voted for the fourth position. Happy

http://www.eclipse.org/ganymede/postercontest.php

You can find the original poster here.

written by Prakash G.R.

I’ve got few TinEye invites available. In case you are interested in trying out this Image Search Engine, let me know, I’ll send you an invitation.

Yup, it doesn’t cost you anything. Its absolutely free

written by Prakash G.R. \\ tags: TinEye

Got an invitation for private beta for TinEye - an image search engine. When I say image search its not by entering some keywords and searching for images, rather giving an image as reference and finding out similar images. I’ve worked on a similar product for my final year project (identifying traffic signs), I know its not an easy task. The algorithm that I’ve used, needs proper training to identify the images. But for a search like this, you don’t have a training input. You get only one chance to identify the images. Sounds pretty complex to me!

I tried this search:

And the result:

As you can see the results are accurate even thou they are cropped, added few elements etc. Sounds like a perfect target for Google to acquire

written by Prakash G.R.

Last night we went live with BaZaa beta. Download it here.

You can list items and find items, and BaZaa provides you the matches. Best of all this is that none of your queries/listings are saved in the server and that makes it very scalable. The speed and efficiency will good when there are more users and items listed. I’m not going to explain the technlogy (BTW, its patented) but just the UI, which I wrote. Here are some screenshots (Click to enlarge):

Seen all the screen shots? Now you get a picture of how to list/find right? Now close your eyes and think how many places you have the labels like “Query: [text box]“, “Price: [text box]” ? Can’t think of any? Well, there are only few places where we have labels. The UI was designed from the ground up in a way that the users will not have the web-based-form-filling feeling. When one of the demos a partner prospect from Zurich said, “for the first time I’m seeing a UI that I can use immediately without asking anyone how to use”. Oh! yeah, if you were wondering, we are neither shipping any documentation for how to use it nor having a web page for that. Keep experimenting the UI and try out yourself

Believe it or not, all the UI components are OS native components, but coded in Java! 2 months back, when I was given a demo of this for the first time, the UI was in Swing and looked pathetic. I was asked whether it can be improved. That night in the hotel I wrote the mock up as an RCP application and when I showed it to my CEO the next day, he was impressed. It was obvious that SWT & RCP is the best choice for BaZaa over Swing. Ever since that day, I worked on few hours every day for building and testing the UI and finally we are live!

As of now, we are running the servers only in US. We have purchased servers & bandwidths in other countries, soon you should see local version. Try it now and send your comments/suggestions either to me or click the feedback link in the BaZaa website.

written by Prakash G.R. \\ tags: BaZaa

If you are running Weblogic on Mac or some unsupported version of Linux, you might get OutOfMemoryError quite often (esp. if you are using the web console). To get rid of this, open the <domain root>/bin/setDomainEnv.sh file and add this line:

USER_MEM_ARGS=”-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m”

Its should be fine for the weblogic. If you have only 1GB RAM, your other apps will beg for more memory. So if you requently use weblogic and other apps simultaneously, better upgrade to 2 GB RAM.

Related:

Installing Weblogic on Mac

written by Prakash G.R.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has said that an internal build of IE 8 now passes the Acid Test. Wow! Thats an achievement. I think its the second browser after Opera to pass the test. While IE 8 is expected to be released in an year or so, Firefox 3 is close to release. Its already in Beta 2 and it rocks!

Its based on Gecko 1.9, pages now loads really fast, UI is cool, Proto theme blends well with Mac and so on. If you ask for my favourite feature, it is the auto complete feature in the location bar. No longer you have to type from the beginning. Type any character in the URL/page name you want, Firefox shows all the results. See the screen shot:

In another related news, Mozilla Prism isn’t exciting as I thought earlier. Its just creates a short cut and nothing else. I thought some nice integration such as Application Menus are on the way, but nothing of that sort. If all I want is a short cut on the desktop, I don’t need an application, all I need is the upcoming version of Google Gears!

written by Prakash G.R.

[Cross post from my Eclipse blog]

Eclipse Demo Camp is coming to Bangalore on 10th Dec. Looking at other Demo Camps, Bangalore might be the one with highest number of registration (around 50) - and its still growing. In case you wish to attend, do register here.

Yup, I’m working on a presentation on GEF. Meet you all there.

written by Prakash G.R.

It looks promising. Offline web apps are becoming more and more popular and Firefox is making a right move towards it. I’ll be writing a complete review soon, but for now, you can click here.

written by Prakash G.R.

Yup. Sonoa, my previous employer, is finally out of stealth mode

The website now lists two products - Info 2.0 and ServiceNet. Yesterday they have announced that they are working with IBM for Info 2.0, which is an appliance for creating Mashups within an Enterprise.  News is already out and spread well. That sounds really nice, except for the two points:

• It is based on IBM’s not-even-beta IBM Mashup Starter Kit
• Is there a real market for Mashups within Enterprise?

Since they have just started working, the Mashup Starter Kit should have graduated out of alphaworks, but what about the market? I’m really curious to know about the case studies and customers for that product. Lets wait and see.

written by Prakash G.R.

James Gosling has posted a video of Project Green - the one that gave birth to Java. Considering the technology was developed one and half decades back, its really amazing to see what the little hand held device can accomplish. Full touch screen, speakers (yeah, but ugly sound theme), infrared and yes smooth scrolling in the touch screen interface. Is this where iPhone copied it from?

Watch the video and decide yourself. I think if Sun had patented it, it could have sued Apple!

written by Prakash G.R.