Monthly Archive for November, 2010

Downloading All GTalk Chats

Published on 1 year, 3 months ago in Tech. 0 Comments

There might be various reasons why one would want to download all of their gtalk/gmail chats. Google does not provide any api to do so. So quite naturally, I googled my problem and found a workaround.

Log into your gmail account from Google Chrome. Create a filter that labels all the chats.

Click on the Create Filter link which can be found beside the Search Mail box. For the search criteria, use Chat With text in the Subject text area. For the action set, you may just choose to have all these filtered mails to be labeled as LOGS. Make sure to have the filter applied to all the previous mails as well.

Now that we have filtered out all the chats, we need to have them downloaded. Go to Settings->Offline and toggle on the option. Since we are only interested in chats, choose only the LOGS label for downloading. Wait for all the chats to get downloaded. It may take a while.

Google chrome has a local folder where all the gears files are stored. The location at which our file can be found is:

%AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Plugin Data\Google Gears\mail.google.com\https_443

We are only interested in the main database file. You can identify it by the following name:

.com-GoogleMail#database

Copy this file to a convenient location, say the Desktop. Rename the file to candorz.

Next a couple of scripts need to be downloaded. They can be found at extract.7z and sql4.7z. Extract these two files to the same location as above. Double click on the sql4 script and watch as a new folder called msgs is created and populated with all the chats. The extracted chats are in xml format.

Popularity: 4% [?]

The Problem With Twitter Allowing Name Changes

Published on 1 year, 3 months ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

In twitter, you can always change your username. One can be XYZ today, and YZX the next day. While some people may think this gives them an extra luxury of changing the username to suit a mood/tweet/occasion/whatever, but I see it otherwise.

The problem I am referring to is this:

Say I have a friend XYZ. I mentioned him in my tweet saying – Hey @XYZ, how are ya? Now suppose XYZ changes his username to YZX. The impact this has is that all the tweets which have mentioned him as @XYZ now point to a nonexistent user! Now this is ridiculous.

This problem can be easily solved, or at least I suppose so. For one, twitter could decide to change all the name tags to match the new name. A simple search and back propagation of the change will do this. I am not sure how the third party applications will make the same modification though.

Another solution would be to assign unique user id’s to every user and have all his name tags point to that user id. Say the user XYZ had an id of twttr01. So we have a hashed map in which XYZ is associated with twttr01. Now if XYZ changes his name to YZX, the hash map will be updated to point both XYZ and YZX to user id twttr01. This will solve another problem – the problem of identity theft.

Say I had been using the username XYZ before making a temporary switch to YZX. When I make the switch, the username XYZ becomes free and available for others to use. Anyone else can claim the username XYZ and all my earlier mentions will be redirected to this new user! I do not think you would be wanting such a behavior in your system, ever!

In fact, I do not really see any point in allowing username changes at all. It is one feature which should be done away with.

Popularity: 1% [?]

China to Taiwan

Published on 1 year, 3 months ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

Apparently, swimming 165 kms across the Pacific is how one gets to Taiwan!

China to Taiwan6

Popularity: 1% [?]

I Loved Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Movie Part I

Published on 1 year, 3 months ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

A little background first. My brother and I are crazy about the Harry Potter series. We would line up outside Walden to buy the book on the first day itself and then tussle over who gets to read the book first. The fight would always end with both of us reading the book together.

Since we were so passionate about the story, any deviation from it in the movies would disappoint us. For instance, in the third movie, the director simply cut out the part where Sirius and Remus recount their days with James. I liked that part. It explains how good a friend they were. The Goblet of Fire was made unnecessarily menacing by adding special effects the storyline could do without.

But this time around, with the decision taken to split up the story into two parts, the director had enough time to stick to Rowlings’ story line. There are little deviations and the pace of the movie matches the pace of the book. The script touches all the important points as I remember – getting Harry to the Burrow, their leaving after the wedding, Ron deserting his friends, visit to Godrics Hollow, the return of Ron, visit to Luna Lovegood’s dad, Harry wrestling away the wand from Draco and finally Dobby’s death.

The only missing part was Dumbledores’ story. Perhaps that will be covered in the second movie. I am already looking to watching the last of the series. It should be awesome!

Popularity: 2% [?]

In Search Of A Book Recommendation Engine

Published on 1 year, 3 months ago in Miscel. 3 Comments

When I started listening to English music I stumbled across last.fm, a radio cum music recommendation engine. A world of music with lots of artists and genres was opened up for me. I could search artists that played symphonic metal, and also look up artists similar to Dream Theatre. Last.fm is the only reason I have known and listened to so many artists.

I want to rekindle my love for books and reading. When I was a kid I used to read Enid Blyton, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and a few more. Later I started reading fiction stories and drama. Now I want to read up books on psychology and human behavior by authors who use story instead of scientific experiments to make their point. The problem is that I do not know which authors should I read! You see, I have not found any good site like last.fm for books which could recommend me artists like Paulo Coelho.

The sites like Shelfari allows one to create their reading history but fail to recommend books based on the same. Others have a recommendation engine but are similar to jinni.com – recommendation based on parameters such as mood, tempo, theme etc., instead of reading history. I need a combination of the two.

The idea is pretty simple actually. Infact, last.fm could almost use the same code and put one up. The main functionality of the site would be to allow people to create their reading history and suggest books based on that. To account for the changing interests, there could be an option to assign higher weights to later history than the earlier ones. Of course, the books and authors need to be tagged first. But then sites life Shelfari and others already have a lot of tag data. And then once people start using the site, they’ll start tagging themselves.

For now I am having to rely on my googling skills to find books with similar subject. I would love to discover a book recommendation engine similar to last.fm.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Mac As A Personal Laptop

Published on 1 year, 3 months ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

I do not have one yet, but I am sure I want one – strictly as a personal laptop though. I admire their attention towards achieving aesthetic excellence.

The other day I was watching the Apple Keynote video dated 20th October, 2010 (I have not watched the video completely at the time of writing).  The Mac sales statistics are incredible! Apparently a customer sale study has put the ratio of Macs to the rest at 20%, which means that 1 in every 5 computer is a Mac! And if this does not impress you enough, then consider the iLife product that has been demoed next. I saw the iPhoto and iVideo applications and will write about them.

iPhotos does way more than any other photo software I have used till date. It has a nice full-screen feature which lets you focus completely on the task at hand – arranging your photos or making a collage or choosing the next facebook profile photo or making a photo album of the last adventure trip you had. The photos, if tagged properly, can be shown on a map at their locations. Apple has put in themes that allow you to quickly make a picture slideshow. One of the theme goes thus -

A globe is shown to start with. Then the app zooms into the city and photo pins start appearing on the neat map. Then using the time data from the photo, the app transitions from one photo to another. And while all this is happening, a soothing tune will be played in the background.

Say you now want to print these photos into an album and show them to your parents. iPhoto picks up your photos and chooses an appropriate cover. Inside, few pages contain single photos and the rest are collage. The single photos are those that have been rated higher, while the lower rated ones will be used as thumbnails in the collage. But this does not mean you are restricted by this default choice. You can just drag and drop photos to swap them or reorder the collection. The whole thing is so intuitive, you do not need a tutorial to make the first album. Just drag and drop.

iVideo was even more mesmerizing. One can now also apply effects on sounds, let alone the video. And the best feature was making trailers. iVideo comes with a few inbuilt trailer themes and it is very easy to get the hang of it. In fact, through the demo of making a trailer, was shown another feature which I loved the most – applying face recognition to videos. Say you want all the clips in which only one person appears. Just set a filter and voila! Watch the keynote video and you’ll appreciate the brilliance too.

There must be more to it than just this, but as I haven’t watched the complete video yet I’ll rather not comment. Now, your manager probably might not get impressed with the amazing slide transitions in your presentation, but your girl friend will definitely enjoy those lovely themes using which you can make a picture album in just a few minutes. Even without having used one, I do recommend a Mac for home use.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Firefox Beta 4 Screwing Up My Display Driver

Published on 1 year, 3 months ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

Ever since I upgraded to the 4b6 of Firefox, my screen occasionally goes blank for a few seconds and then I get a message telling me that my display driver had stopped working. It ultimately led me to revert back to Firefox 3. An updated beta, the 4b7, was released yesterday and I was optimistic that the problem might have been solved. However to my dismay, the issue remains.

nVidia_firefoxBeta_error

A quick search threw up results of forums where people have complained about the nVidia driver crashing because of Firefox 4. Some suspect it may be because of the Direct2D feature newly implemented in the upcoming Firefox. There were suggestions to update the nVidia graphics driver to solve the problem. But unfortunately, even that does not help.

I think I’ll keep using the beta so long as the crashes are infrequent and Firefox is able to recover from them. Otherwise I will be forced to use the Firefox 3 until a more stable beta has been released.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Last.fm Video Scrobbling

Published on 1 year, 3 months ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

Awesome ! I did not know it. I mean, very recently the client updated itself, but I had no idea about this new feature. It was accidental that I came to know this. I was playing a few video songs in Windows Media Player when I opened my last.fm page, and to my surprise the songs had been listed! Then I checked my client and it was indeed scrobbling the songs. I haven’t tested if this is a wmp only feature or if it works the same with winamp or itunes.

Whatever, but the feature of scrobbling video songs is cool. I like it. :)

On the sad part however, last.fm has declared that they’ll be discontinuing the loved tracks and my playlist radios from the 17th of November. I’ll miss the loved tracks radio a lot.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I Hate Stingy People

Published on 1 year, 3 months ago in Anu. 1 Comment

Sometimes it drives me nuts to see how stingy a person can get. It irritates me more when people earning 50′s of thousands, clearly enough to allow them a luxurious life while having no dependents, refuse to dish out a few extra bucks. I have always maintained that a person who becomes a slave to his money will never be able to spend it freely. I hope my friends understand it as well!

I have come across only 2 people who were ever ready to spend 500 for a burger – Atit Parikh and Gaurav Bubna. I spent the first couple of months in Bangalore with them and we would go out almost every night. Those were good days. I miss them now.

Popularity: 3% [?]