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Daily Motion’s Another Bubble Rich Man on the Internet »

Here is a very funny video from Daily Motion.

New OS from Google – Google Chrome OS »

The web is the platform! Google is introducing a new OS based on the Linux kernel, primarily “designed for the web”. And you are wrong, if you think that we are talking about Android here.

Google is launching a new OS, called Google Chrome OS and this is not targeted at the mobile market. Well, we all know that Google is pretty obsessed in moving our applications to the web. And what else could be a better way than building an OS, that is specifically designed for the web?

Google Chrome OS, from ground up, is built to be secure and fast. Aren’t there times where checking for new emails is quicker and easier on a mobile phone than booting up your laptop? Well, that’s what Google seems to be addressing with Google Chrome OS. It wants to keep the OS lightweighted, so that the boot process does not take too much time.

Before you start wondering on where to download, note that it is not yet PC ready. Google plans to open source the OS later in this year and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Well…I do like this development. I am sure I will set up a boot loader, which will boot the Google Chrome OS as the default option. This will make all web based things easy and quick to load. If I really want to load Windows, I could do that too, but it would then be as often as I go to the BIOS…only when I really need to go there!

Sending data between JavaScript and PHP using CodeIgniter, jQuery and JSON »

I am sure you would have had many situations, where you had to pass large amounts of data from PHP to JavaScript. This is a very common need, especially when you are using Ajax. I have seen code where developers would send a comma separated string and parse it out in JavaScript. While it works, the code looks ugly and you can run into many issues if the data you are passing uses the delimiter (comma). A more cleaner approach, of course, is to send data through XML. But parsing XML on the client side might be an overkill for mundane tasks. A quick, clean and simpler approach is to pass data in JSON format.

If you wonder what JSON is, here is what the JSON website says, “JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate.“.

The bottom line is that it is easy for ever one!

Making an Ajax request:
jQuery comes with JSON support and even lets you use it with Ajax calls. Let us say, you have an onblur event which makes an Ajax call to get data for the rest of the fields, you would do the following in your onblur event:

url = “http://www.domain.com/mycontroller/” + isbn;
$.getJSON(url, function(json){
document.book_form.publisher.value = json.publisher;
});

For those of you, who have used jQuery before, the above code looks plausible. For the rest, the above function is making an Ajax call to the URL and the second argument, function(json) is a callback function, that gets kicked off when the browser receives the response.

JSON can pack multi dimensional arrays too; the above example is just returning a row of data back to the client.

Now, coming to CodeIgniter, here is a simple PHP function inside a CodeIgniter controller.

function addRecruiter() {
$count = $this->mrecruiter->checkDuplicate($email);
if($count > 0) {
$data['MTYPE'] = “ERROR”;
$data['MESSAGE'] = “The email address already exsists, please try a different one”;
} else {
$this->mrecruiter->addRecruiter();
$data['MTYPE'] = “SUCCESS”;
$data['MESSAGE'] = “Recruiter added successfully!”;
}
echo json_encode($data);
}
In the example above, we are echoing the encoded json data for an Ajax call from the browser. Let us know if you would like a more detailed example, we will publish it at the earliest.

Check out iVirtual at Silicon India Start Up Event on June 6th 2009 »

Please do stop by at the iVirtual Stall on June 6th, 2009 at the Silicon India Start Up Event. iVirtual is getting good response from Engineering college principals at Vizag.

To know more about iVirtual, click here.

iVirtual is going live on June 3rd, 2009 »

iVirtual is getting launched on 3rd, June 2009. With internet connections getting speedier and speedier every few months, video based solutions will be more prevalent. iVirtual is the Indian version of the American product, VIP Advantage. iVirtual is a video based, virtual interview program that hopes to transform the way Employers, Recruiters and Job Seekers interact.

iVirtual uses Windows Media Services and is built on Microsoft technologies. Check out iVirtual at http://www.ivirtual.in.

iVirtual is a Unosoft Technologies product.

The most secure OS on the planet »

Microsoft COO, Kevin Turner thinks that Microsoft Vista, post SP2, is the most secure OS on the planet. I am not sure of the name of the planet he is referring to, but Vista does not mean much to me. Then why, you wonder, I picked up this news for my blog?

Interestingly, that statement reminded me of two things:
1. An old Apple’s Get a Mac Ad – (It needs quicktime).
2. Charlie Anna’s statement in Roadside Romeo – I am so dangerous that sometimes, I get scared of myself.

Anyway, security is good and if they believe that Vista is the safest product they ever launched, thats even better. They are trying their best, whether you and I use it or not.

Proxies can be a bigger pain »

If you think that setting up a “transparent proxy” is a pain (setting up ACLs, iptables redirect etc), you now have a compelling reason not to use proxy at all

As per Associated Press article, US is considering stiffer sentences for using proxies in a crime, even the common ones we use today. But proxies, just like routers, are so common these days that many of the users don’t even know if they are using a proxy or not. What concerns me is that if a user does some thing unknowingly, even because of some malicious software, this new guideline might cause more pain. You can read the article here.