Last weekend I was fortunate to be a technical evaluator of an hackathon. Yes, I’m trying to be vague here, as my company sponsored this event at a most reputed university of our state,  this post is just my view.

TDD (Test Driven Development) was introduced to me around 2006 with PHPUnit. As a naive, I couldn’t see the benefits, eg., I saw the pattern of code has been updated very often (growing organically) and frequent failing test. I was like, Why should I write unit test to test my own code? with the same data I used for manual testing? As they say I was seeing the forest for the trees. I failed to realize the failing test is actually the benefit of practicing TDD.

Project planning is always a difficult task for me. I could do anything to skip the project planning because for following reasons:

Update (2016-01-20): The app is now available on Mac App store.

Additional menu clock for your Mac. A minimalist clock to display time of different timezone of your choice.

Not many of my ideas are converted to a project, this one has seen its light last week. Though I haven’t completed all the UI and features of my original vision, it is better to have one working idea than nothing.

One of my long time wish to write a Chrome extension completed last week. It all started when my answer was down-voted at apple.stackexchange.com, the original answer was based on my experience sometime ago I was searching to migrate my links between my Instapaper accounts.

Update: I recently found this site called diawi.com which allows you to distribute the app similar to file-sharing sites, drag and drop ipa file and share the link to the testers.

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Recently I was in need of generating sample images for no. of products in my db. I really hate to create a copy of image for each products in my db.

Are you someone like me who is looking for an SVN command that exports the files updated between two revisions? Until now, I used to say that there is no such command available in SVN by default, or maybe now they have a feature to build in the next release.

• Webkit as rendering engine like Safari
• Tabstyles are from Flock
• Startup page similar to Opera speed-dial and Flock myhome page
• Paste and go in the address bar like Opera
• No menu bar like IE 7
• Tab-to-window and vice versa from Opera/Safari
• Incognito browsing similar to Private Browsing
• Create Application Shortcuts like Mozilla Prism

What’s new in Google Chrome

• No two separate textboxes for URL and for Search
• Every tab is a separate process
• Innovative Search, composite of Tortoise Merge (any Textdiff app), Firefox’s (Highlight All) findbox positioned similar to Safari
• Built-in support for Google Gears
• Above all its from the giant Google

In one of our recent project, we were looking for an automated script that update the working copy of our dev server as soon as someone commit the changes to the SVN.

Script speaks louder than words. Please go through the following links

PHP Gd based Sticky script

Jquery UI based Sticky page

Not working anymore, but you are free to explore the code. Updates are welcome.

I have completed alternative way to view YouTube videos with FLV player of your choice (JW FLV player in this case). The flv files will not be download to the server, it streams directly from YouTube .

I’m overwhelmed with happiness after I saw my Google analytics report today. This blog and the new tool which I wrote xTamil - English to Tamil convertor (Unicode) are linked in a Tamil portal site Tamil.net. They also list numerous no. of phonetic English to Tamil Unicode convertor, I promise you all that my tool will be unique after the completion (will take a month or two).

Atlast, I finished my first verison of English to Tamil unicode convertor(Transliterater). What I planned to do was bit different than the one which is available now. Hope I will get the time to upgrade my unicode convertor( or Transliterater) to unique tool within a month.

Today, I have uploaded my second Greasemonkey scripts to userscripts, Yahoo webmail++ . This will remove (hide) the advertisements in your yahoo webmail, the one at the top and the small ads on the left side. Initially I was trying to do something similar to Gmail Airskin, but unfortunately yahoo uses lot of tables, which I find difficult to finish the script, at this stage it will remove only the advertisements and I will try to update the script soon.

Finally Apple offers Safari for Windows, I am on my Safari now!. But there are bugs in Windows version of Safari, please go through the Techrunch link. Here is my own list (Though! I am newbie to Safari), First thing I did was searching webdeveloper plugins for Safari, I tried HTML Tidy extension for Safari!, Safari crashed after downloading. Second, I can’t able to browse Yahoo mail beta (it says it can’t open https link, that is weird), Gmail compose message page doesn’t look good as it does in IE/Mozilla.

I don’t find an alternative title. Like anyone out there, I envy Textmate features where it is present in all the screencasts for PHP & RoR out there. So, I started looking for a Textmate alternate on windows, and came to this post Textmate envy. I tried the font Monaco (Textmate’s default), which looked beautiful in Firebug but not in Dreamweaver. Filled with dissapointment, I google again for a download for the font Monaco, then, eureka! I found this link, Programmers font. Which means, I am not alone, there are more people out there looking for the suitable replacement to Courier New (isn’t it time to change?). I have tried a few Monaca, Dejavu, Bitstream Vera.