(Author: Heena Rastogi)

Android.

For some time now this word had been cropping up in my discussions with people. But I never got around start learning about it. So when at office I saw an opportunity, I tried to peep into the Android app development space.
I had a simple task at hand, to create the sharing feature for an Android app. So I googled for code snippets to achieve this. Here I present my quick consolidation of the google results based approach that I tried. There are in general two ways to do it:

• Either download API’s for Twitter, MySpace and Facebook and add dozens of lines in your code to create this feature.(will write soon about this)
• OR just load the twitter,myspace and facebook sharing link in an android browser.

I am sharing the browser method or as somebody said “the web way” of doing stuff. Read more…

It become a default assumption in all new web applications (that I have worked on or read about) to have an integration with either facebook, twitter, linked in, or all the three.

Working with these on rails is no longer rocket science as the various plug-in and gems do most of the work for us. I thought it would be appropriate to create a place for my reference as well as that of others to collect some good tutorials that allow us to do these integrations.  To start off, I am adding a few good ones that I have referred to or those that have a lucid explanation and are a good read.

Read more…

HTML 5 is all over the place. I started hearing about it first when i was reading about the canvas tag about an year ago. But all the noises reached their pinnacle when the iPad was launched with HTML5 support instead of Flash.

ExtJS.com has put together a nice article explaining HMTL5 in brief (Click here for the article) while diveintohtml5.org gives a detailed explanation on the features.

As the article puts it, HTML5 is just a part of the family of  specifications that people end up calling as HTML5.

Some of the highlights of the HTML family are as follows:

• Read more…

Networking, I have been listening to this word all the time. It may be of the features to achieve success.  Have contacts, find new friends, find reason to talk to people etc etc … so that one can have a good network and it can help me in future.

Well this was or may be the idea the social networking sites came into existence. I started with Orkut, then MySpace and now Facebook. Firstly I was amazed with the concept and features provided by these sites but now it has changed.

Wow !! was my reaction when I first logged into Orkut. Within few weeks I found it pretty cool that I have 500+ friends and I can keep contact with them forever. I can see what a friend is upto or can join various fans group, create my own group, plays games and the list can go on…. Read more…

I use the Pydev plugin to develop Python programs on Eclipse. It’s a free plugin. Here I am listing down the step by step process to install and start working with Pydev.

1)      Download the Pydev plugin here

2)      Install the Pydev by just following the instructions

3)      Once the Pydev is installed open eclipse

4)      Goto Window -> Preferences -> Pydev -> Interpreter Python

5)      Click on the New Button Read more…

Might sound hypothetical but a closer look is enough to convince that the internet or the web is slowly but surely approaching towards becoming a brain.

Think of the brain as a collection of nerves, thin pipes with openings to the outside world in form of organs, the eyes, ears, skin, etc.

The internet is also a collection of network pipes with opening to the outside world in form of input devices. Read more…

Tributes to Dr Henry Edward Roberts – ‘father of the PC’ – BBC

Google brings Quake 2 to the browser with HTML5 – VentureBeat

Hands-on Review of Marvel Comics for iPad – BoingBoing

Rails 3.0: Second beta released – RubyOnRails.org

iPad apps go live in App Store - CNET news

Microsoft’s new strategy and gamble with FREE Office – CNET News

Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP – ReadWriteWeb

Chrysler to Build A Battery-Powered Electric Car by 2012 – Design News

39 Examples of Minimalist Web Designs – YouTheDesigner

Ever since I started working on Ruby on Rails I have been asked by people to help them find links of some good tutorials to learn Rails. Well, the thing about Rails is that it is best learn’t by just jumping into the code and starting out, referring the basic stuff from RubyOnRails.org.

Leaving behind this thought, we at technoticles have started started creating a compilation of some good tutorials available on the web. We will keep updating this list as and when we find more of such interesting and useful tutorials.

Rails Introduction

Rolling with Ruby on Rails – part 1 – by Curt Hibbs

Rolling with Ruby on Rails – part 2 – by Curt Hibbs

Ajax on Rails – part 3 – by Curt Hibbs

Specific Topics

Rails Migrations -  IBM developerWorks

Using Facebook Connect with Rails – by Stuart Eccles

Improving Rails Performance -  by Stefan Kaes

Deployment related

Creating single executable to distribute Rails applications – by Erik Veenstra

Deploying using Capitrano on Fedora from scratch – Tutplus.com

There are a lot of business lessons freely available in nature if we study it carefully enough.

Self organization and bottoms up systems as followed by ants and flocks of birds are already  widely documented.

Business World recently published a good article about learning from nature about how to invade into existing businesses. The article uses example ranging from Asian carp to the zebra mussel and how they create new opportunities for themselves and those that can adapt quickly enough to help exploit the way they affect things.

Read the complete article here.