I love TechCrunch. But every time I see one of MG Siegler’s stupid posts, I get really pissed off – like most others. Though sometimes its fun to read all the comments, mostly its just a waste of time. So I just wrote a Chrome Extension that automatically blocks MG’s posts on TechCrunch – so that we don’t have to waste our time.

As of now it blocks MG’s articles on techcrunch.com (you can still read them by clicking on the MG Blocked!!). Based on the user response I’ll implement Google Reader integration and other features. Let me know what you think of MG Block!!

You can download it from the Chrome Webstore. Enjoy MG-Free TechCrunch!!

Zen allows your to easily search & subscribe your favorite blogs and feeds through an intuitive interface. It also comes with a predefined list of popular blogs and sites in various categories like movies, business, technology, sports, etc. If you have used Flipboard or Pulse News Reader on other platforms, then am sure you’ll like it.

Features:

• Search feeds
• Subscribe/Unsubscribe to feeds
• Rearrange feeds
• Share on Facebook, Email, SMS

It has an Ad-free Tial version which you can use as long as you want with all the features. Only limitation is that, it is limited to 5 subscriptions max. You can download the app here.

GRE Buddy is designed mainly for people who are busy and want to improve their English Vocabulary in free time. Hence my primary focus has always been on usability and simplicity. It has a wordlist of over 5000 words to learn from.

Instruction to use:

• Flip through the words to learn
• Click on words to (un)hide meaning
• Star the important words
• Review starred items
• Test your preparedness by playing the newly implemented Quiz Game. This is one of the best ways to trains your mind to recall quickly.

Though this application was initially meant to help SAT/GRE/GMAT aspirants, it can be used for various other exams like GMAT, TOEFL, IELTS, MCAT, ACT, etc. You can even use it to improve your general English Vocabulary. Just carry in your pocket and learn whenever you find time.

Feel free to post comments and suggestions.

• Mail Trends
• Notes about your contact – which is editable and gets synced with your Google contacts.
• Recent Conversations
• All attachments that you have received from the contact, etc

Below is a Video showcasing some of its features.

For people who regularly deal with several documents and attachments, this tool is going to be of great help! I myself made use of MailBrowser heavily during the recruitment process in order to add notes and keep track of information regarding the candidates through multiple rounds of screening and it really saved me a good amount of time. Am sure you’ll like it.

You can download MailBrowser from http://mailbrowser.com

Do check out this blog post by Scobleizer wherein he talks about MailBrowser.

Don’t get emotional about your code

First and foremost rule about writing good code is that, you should not get emotional about your code. At any point in time, if it requires you to throw away your code because it  is not scaling up elegantly or if it has not been architected well, be ready to scrap the code and rewrite. During the initial days of programming I used to resist rewriting the code but soon I realized that the habit just screws up the project. Usually you’ll realize it after few weeks or  months when things have gone worse. I have seen the same with most newbies. Whenever I find that they are following wrong coding practices, I usually ask them to rewrite and they start resisting it by trying to fix the code there itself. Actually they are just getting emotional about their shit-code on which they have put days of effort.

Being a human, whatever you repeat again and again will become your habit. So if you don’t cleanup, it’ll become a habit for you to live in the dirt. Your choice…

Join Startups during the initial stages of your career

Startups are the best places to learn. There you’ll find the real work and also real people with the right attitude. You will have a chance to interact and learn from other smart people.

"Knowing things and ignoring them" AND "Being ignorant" are different

When you are learning something new, try to learn as much as possible at the conceptual level. Go an extra mile and find out what all are possible and what are the best practices. You don’t have to remember the coding part. But just try to remember what all exist. Then ignore things which are not required for the time being.

Learning more never hurts in a long run. If you know that something exists, you can always get back to it and learn further whenever required. You can easily get code examples online. But if you don’t even know that it exists, then that is a problem. You may end up reinventing the wheel or find a round about way which is not so good.

Note down things in a book

Whenever you are writing code or discussing something with your colleague, make it a habit to note down the points in the book and solve it point by point. Don’t rely completely on your IQ. It ditches you at wrong times. So, never go for a meeting / discussion without notebook. Note down things and get back to them later. Have a task list and put a check mark besides the completed tasks and carry over the rest for the next day.

Writing down tasks on a paper requires guts. People are scared because it reminds them again and again about what they have not done. But if you discipline yourself a bit and complete your tasks on time, that will give a lot of satisfaction and boost your confidence level.

Today MySpace has announced their “Data Availability” initiative along with data sharing partnership with Yahoo, EBay, Twitter and Photobucket. Here the key goal is to allow users to use their personal data on other networks and applications. As a simple example, one can display his MySpace profile on other networks. I will be very happy if I can change my profile info on MySpace and it gets automatically updated on LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, etc… Though it is not possible currently, it may happen in near future.

They are calling it as “Data Availability” rather than “Data Portability”. And it makes more sense as the third parties are held to strict terms of service, which prohibits them from storing / using the data once the permissions are revoked. So the data is dynamic. You fetch the data when ever it is required, use it and forget it.

It can lead to interesting applications

When it comes to the application, MySpace’s partnership with EBay can lead to some interesting features on EBay wherein once people buy a product on EBay, they can spread the word to all their friends, tell them what they feel about the product, then recommend the product to others. This will allow products to spread virally. Hmmm… Social Shopping!!.. Though this is not completely new, partnership between MySpace and EBay is going to be an interesting thing. MySpace can meet its revenue targets with this initiative. Currently as the Data Sharing is only between the partners, even EBay will be happy to pay them for this exclusivity.

As Michael Arrington says, MySpace has got a clear lead over Facebook this time.

Currently am seeing a total of 18 applications including iLike, Emote!, PhotoAttack, Horoscopes, TypeRacer, TopFriends by Slide.com, SlideTV, etc. Here is a screen shot of the application directory.

Now Orkut is allowing members to submit there applications.

Though Open Social development started as a competitor for Facebook Apps, its not getting much traction yet. Anyway, Orkut will be a bit more exiting now.

Visual Schema Designer:

Visual Schema Designer now supports zooming, printing and image export. The Schema Designer (introduced in SQLyog version 6.1) is a visual interface where tables and table structures can be defined,   displayed and manipulated.

The Schema Designer provides a convenient graphical way to perform common operations as an    alternative to the menu-based way of operation that was always supported. Also the Schema Designer provides a graphical overview of (complete or only parts of) your MySQL databases.   

Auto-complete:  Improved Auto-complete with Alias(table alias as well as column alias) support.

Performance: 10x speed improvements in many batch/bulk operations .

Some of the other features present in SQLyog are  backup and restore, object management, database synchronization, notification services, ODBC import, structure synchronization and scheduled backups.

You can get the latest version of SQLyog here.

First of all you require Silverlight 2.0 installed on your system. You can download it from here.

Download and extract the contents of Visifire Charts package into a directory in your SERVER. You can download it from here. Visifire is Open Source and free.

Visifire requires the data in the form of XML. XML for creating chart is simple and intuitive. Minimum basic XML required looks like below

<vc:Chart xmlns:vc="clr-namespace:Visifire.Charts;assembly=Visifire.Charts">

</vc:Chart>

The above tag corresponds to a chart element. But there is not data to plot. For now you need not worry about “vc:”. Just remember that you need to add “vc:” to each element.

Now let me add some data into the chart. First I’ll create a Column Chart showing Sales details for a fictitious company, for the first four months….

Then I’ll show you how easy it is to switch to other chart types just by changing One Word!

<vc:DataSeries RenderAs="Column">
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Jan" YValue="160021"/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Feb" YValue="207223"/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Mar" YValue="225542"/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Apr" YValue="248827"/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="May" YValue="273432"/>
</vc:DataSeries>

Above is the Revenue details for my company. Each value that you are required to enter is a DataPoint and a set of similar DataPoint represents a DataSeries.

Now I require a Title for Chart. So I will create a Title tag.

<vc:Title Text="Company Revenue Details"/>

And finally a Title for the AxisY.

<vc:AxisY Title="Revenue" Prefix="$">

So now I have all the data ready to create my chart. So the next thing is to put all the data in one place. So here is the final XML code.

<vc:Chart xmlns:vc="clr-namespace:Visifire.Charts;assembly=Visifire.Charts">
    <vc:Title Text="Company Revenue Details"/>
    <vc:AxisY Title="Revenue" Prefix="$">
    </vc:AxisY>
    <vc:DataSeries RenderAs="Column">
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Jan" YValue="160021"/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Feb" YValue="207223"/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Mar" YValue="225542"/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Apr" YValue="248827"/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="May" YValue="273432"/>
    </vc:DataSeries>
</vc:Chart>

I’ll save the above XML into a file and call it as “data.xml”. Now you just have to reference this XML file from within the HTML page to get a chart. So you need to add these lines of code into your HTML page. make sure you have extracted Visifire.js and Visifire.xap in the same directory as the HTML page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="Visifire.js"></script>
<div id="VisifireChart">
    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        var vChart = new Visifire("Visifire.xap",500,300); // Visifire path, width, height
        vChart.setDataUri("data.xml");//xml file path
        vChart.render("VisifireChart");// DOM element in which chart is to be rendered.
    </script>
</div>

And you are done. This is how the chart looks.

Visifire Charts Live Demo

Now you can change the RenderAs attribute in the DataSeries to Doughnut, Bar, Pie, Area and see the chart type change.

Also change the looks of the Chart by adding an attribute “Theme=Theme3″ to the Chart element.

In the next session I’ll be writing about some more cool features of Visifire.

We started working on this project when Silverlight 1.1 Alpha got released. So most of the code in this project uses Silverlight 1.1 features. But soon we are going to refactor the code to make the best use of Silverlight 2.0 features.

Currently Visifire features 14 types of charts including Column, Bar, Pie, Area, Stacked, Doughnut, etc. Soon we’ll be coming up with more varieties. You can see all available charts in the Chart Gallery.

Looks are good and it comes with 3 built in themes and a variety of ColorSets.  You can get a quick understanding of some of the best features through the Chart Designer. Though Chart Designer does not feature all the possibilities of Visifire, it can help you in creating the charts very quickly. Once you design the chart, you can get the required XML data for your chart. Chart designer also gives you the embedding script. So not much HTML knowledge is required.

Here is a video showcasing the charts available in the gallery.

Soon I’ll be writing more on this explaining many of the features , tips and tricks with Visifire.