Narcissism
I love showing off my Mac to everyone I know! So why should I hold back for the rest of the Internet 
It’s a previous generation Mac Mini mated to a 17″ Viewsonic LCD. External storage is taken care of by a 500GB Seagate HDD using an USB enclosure. The sound is taken care of by either a plain jane Creative 2.1 set or the wonderfully clear Plantronics Headset. I do my typing on a Microsoft Wireless Keyboard and the pointing too is handled by Microsoft.
TEDx in Hyderabad
A few days ago, I was pottering around on Twitter looking for….something. And lo and behold, what do I come across? A link to Hyderabad’s own TEDx event.
TEDxHitechCity is on 31st Jan 2010 at the ISB‘s Gachibowli campus. The event is actively looking for ideas, sponsors and other things that go with, so write to the organizers tedxhitechcity@gmail.com or hit the discussion group here and start contributing.
Ommwriter – Bringing Zen to Writing
When I sit down to write, all I want to do is precisely that and nothing else. But the reality is different. There are multiple pop ups, bouncing dock icons and a dozen windows all vying for your attention. It distracts me, my flow gets affected and the writing gets diluted as a result.
But over the last two and half weeks, I’ve been oblivious to that distraction, thanks to Ommwriter. It’s the latest entrant to the field of minimalist and full screen text editors on the Mac. It brings a beautiful and graceful UI to the screen, plays soothing music when you type and even recreates the clicktey-clack of an old typewriter as you pound away on the keys. All of them combine to give you an almost zen like feeling when you write, full engrossed and mindful of what’s been typed out. Sure there are more robust and mature pieces of software like WriteRoom and Ulysses, but nothing comes close to Ommwriter for it’s overall experience. Watch the video on the home page for the details.
Ommwriter is currently in beta, but you can sign up here and receive an email with the download link.
3D Effects in CSS
Holy moly! Román Cortés took a famous painting and applied some pseudo 3D effects using only CSS and HTML.
Román Cortés » CSS 3D Meninas. (via kottke.org)
Now, off I run to polish my spriting and css skills!
Google Ranks 3rd in Top Tech Places to Work For
While glassdoor.com may not be the best place to get your opinions on employee satisfaction (and that too for a large company like Google), I am not all surprised that the big G has slipped to third in the best tech company to work for category. Om Malik in his post mentions
I had expected Google to take top honors given its stock performance, not to mention what it spends on food and other amenities for its employees. I guess money really doesn’t buy happiness…
Yes, it surely doesn’t! I was with Google for three and half years and during that time, the company’s employee headcount skyrocketed. Sure, many great people were hired, but among them were absolute disasters too. You could say that the law of averages catches up some or the other but unfortunately for them, most of the disasters were hired into positions of power. Typical fresh out of school MBA middle managers who had no clue about how the real work got done. Driven by pure data around productivity, people got pushed around, broken down and eventually made miserable. I am not sure if this is how the engineering side of things worked, but sales, ops and product support of which I was a part of, was certainly this way.
Something else that started going wrong during the last year and a half. The famed culture or Googliness around the place. Instead of being fostered, things were hoisted upon. Instead of voluntarily taking satisfaction surveys, you were forced to. Instead of letting culture evolve with the comings and goings of people, it was stage managed in a very communist manner. You had pseudo culture vultures running around the place dictating things to do and activities to participate in.
Don’t get me wrong, overall, it still is probably the best place to work for for a lot of people, but that halo is dimming. And dimming fast.
What’s your favourite download for the Mac this year?
As usual, Lifehacker has a great roundup of software that’s been released this year for the Mac and they have a poll running for the best of the lot. And my vote’s gone to Picasa. One of the reasons why I held back on moving to the Mac was because I hated iPhoto and the way it went about doing things. And as soon as I found that there was a internal beta of Picasa at Google, I signed up and haven’t looked back since!
Most Popular Free Mac Downloads of 2009 – Best of 2009 – Lifehacker.
Toggle div’s in jQuery
This might be a too nerdy post for most of you, but I am doing this for my own reference later on!
I use jQuery quite a bit these days. It’s an incredibly powerful javacript library that does a lot of things, but I use it mainly to for its nifty effects. And the one I use most is the ‘toggle’ function which allows one to selectively show or hide a piece of content. And because this is jQuery, it is almost a no-brainer to implement.
First the HTML for your link
<a href="#" class="slick-toggle">Show More</a></p>
This is the <div> box containing the text you want to hide
<div class="slickbox">All the next you don't want to show</div>
And here’s the necessary javascript. Make sure you include the jquery source file first or this won’t work!
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.slickbox').hide();
$('a.slick-toggle').click(function() {
$(this).parent().next('.slickbox').slideToggle("normal");
$(this).text($(this).text() == 'Show More' ? 'Show Less' : 'Show More');
return false;
});
});
And here’s the code break up line by line
$(document).ready(function() {
Waits for the document to load fully and then initiate jQuery
$('.slickbox').hide();
.slickbox is the div we want hidden when the document is loaded
$('a.slick-toggle').click(function() {
a.slick-toggle is our link that is used to show/hide the div that has content. We now construct the click handler for this link.
$(this).parent().next('.slickbox').slideToggle("normal");
Instruct the .slickbox div to unravel itself and show the content. The slideToggle method has a few options – “slow”, “fast”, “normal”. Or you could even specific in milliseconds the duration of the effect, e.g. 500
$(this).text($(this).text() == 'Show More' ? 'Show Less' : 'Show More');
This tells our HTML link to switch its text based on the state of the toggle. So, it starts off as “Show More”, and then once you click the link, it turns to “Show Less” and so on.
return false;
});
});
And finally, you instruct the function to stop once the click’s been taken care of.
What Matters Now – An E-Book
From the incomparable Seth Godin, comes an amazing e-book, What Matters Now. Compiled with insights, musings and advice from seventy authors, it is a must read. My favourite piece comes from Jason Fried who writes
Tere’s never really a great way to apologize, but there are plenty of terrible ways.
If you’re at a coffee shop, and you spill coffee on someone by accident, what do you say? You’ll be horrified and say “Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” When you mean it you say you’re sorry – it’s a primal response. You wouldn’t say “Oh my god, I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused!” But that’s exactly how most companies respond when they make a big mistake.
Mistakes happen. How you apologize matters. Don’t bullshit people – just say “I’m sorry.” And mean it.
How true. Now go on, download it and get inspired.
Bing It On, I Say
Over a week ago, I tweeted that I was going to give up searching on Google and switch to Bing for a few days. Well, those few days are up. Verdict? I am a happy convert. For the most part, Bing’s served me well. It’s just as fast as Google and I haven’t found any noticable difference in the quality of results (and this coming from a Google Search Quality guy!).
The presentation is top notch and I really like the way suggested terms and related searches are listed on the left bar rather than on top. I also love the way Wikipedia entries are integrated into the site. I don’t have to leave Bing in order to get my info, one click on the ‘Reference’ tab does the magic for me. The integrated media panel on these pages is great too – with access to the outlines, related images and videos.
So, goodbye Google search for now!
Google’s Eating it’s Own Tail
Paul Kedorosky is bang on as usual
Google has to know this. The problem is too big and too obvious to miss. But it’s hard to know what you can do algorithmically to solve the problem. Content creators are simply using Google against itself, feeding its hungry crawlers the sort of thing that Google loves to consume, to the detriment of search results and utility.
