SPADE for Developers

A "Single Page Application and Development Environment" (Spade) is a Spa application with an integrated development environment, all fitting onto a single web page. Popular among SPADE apps is Tiddlywiki, a wiki implemented in a single page. With Google Gears in place, a wide range of applications can sprout up with a little effort only.

Truth alone Triumphs

Here is a famous Sanskrit saying to which I'd like to add my perspective.

Sanskrit Verse: "Satyam eva Jayate"
Meaning: Truth alone Triumphs

The phrase 'Truth' in this context refers to righteousness, integrity, and morality. No matter what, Dharma will finally be achieved. Even when the dark forces seem to take over the world, a new hope will rise from nowhere and restore the law of dharma. I'm sure StarWars fans will completely agree with me...

Remember Kurukshetra (the war between Good and Bad)... The Kauravas had an incredibly huge army. But, they lost to Pandavas. Here is a possible fictional conversation~

Kauravas: Hey... Our army is freaking huge & mighty. We have 100,000...0 knights, warriors and soldiers with us. What do you have? Huh!
Pandavas: We have the God himself with us!

The path to victory is never easy. Being on the path of righteousness alone is not enough. A display of courage, discipline, perseverance and hard work is needed to be a winner in Life.

We may lose any number of battles, but we should win the war. Life is certainly full of ups and downs. Every trough in one's life can be regarded as losing a battle. We should learn from our mistakes, and get ready to face the world again. Eventually, we will be a winner in LIFE.

We often ask the question to ourselves... Why does god give so much wealth and goodness to bad people? I remember a popular dialog by the Superstar Rajinikanth in the movie Badshah. Here is what he often says~

God may give a lot to bad people, but will leave them halfway.
God may not give much to good people, but will hold their hand forever.

Open Web Standards unify internet

Here is a note on some open standards that are intended to provide greater collaboration among websites, and create a unified Internet for the user. Instead of rephrasing the concepts, I'll borrow excerpts from Wikipedia to display clarity & correctness.

You may also checkout Videntity's social network that combines three recent web technologies: OpenID, XFN, and FOAF.

• OpenID allows people to login to a website using a global identity.
• XFN describes a standard set of relationships and a mechanism for embedding them into links in a web page.
• FOAF provides an RDF/XML format for downloading profile and relationship data.
  

OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using your openID account. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites. How do I use my OpenID? Look for sites with sign in forms that look like this:



XHTML Friends Network (XFN) is an HTML microformat that provides a simple way to represent human relationships using links. It puts a human face on linking. XFN enables web authors to indicate relationships to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding one or more keywords as the 'rel' attribute to their links, as in this markup example:
<a href="http://jeff.example.org/" rel="friend met">...</a>

FOAF is a project under the umbrella of Semantic Web. The semantic web is an evolving extension of the internet in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents to find, share and integrate information more easily. A popular application of the semantic web is Friend of a Friend (or FoaF), which describes relationships among people and other agents in terms of RDF.

If you are interested in open standards, you may also want to check out Broadband Mechanics. The Broadband Mechanics’ strategy is to help change the world by providing the software and open standards necessary to inter-connect disparate social networks and blogging tools together.

GTD works for me!

Ofcourse, I've been making TO-DO lists ever since I was a child. But not all lists are in one place. My ToDo list usually contains discrete items placed out of context, and poorly organized. The much hyped concept of GTD (Getting Things Done) is actually working well for me. Just out of curiosity, I was exploring the various GTD tools on the net... and soon I fell in love with the concept.

Its dead simple and to my surprise, it proved effective. GTD is just a minor tweak to the way we write ToDo lists. In this, a context, project, and an optional timeline can be associated with the tasks. This way, we can brain-dump all our tasks and focus on executing them.

Here are a few resources I found useful...
Massive GTD Resource List, 50 Essential GTD Resources.

I found the following tools impressive...
Offline: Next Action; Online: Tracks (Hosted), SimpleGTD

Web2.0 for traditional Web companies

I came across this slide-show at Wat-Consult, and wanted to share with you all. The content is well aggregated and presented to the reader. I especially liked the classification of web2.0 apps, that you can find in the initial few slides.

Gigya - A great addon for webapps

When I read about Gigya on Techcrunch last week, I knew my wait was over. It allows one click posting of specific content to blogs and other social media. This widget provides a great value to social webapps and user-generated sites. Last weekend, I incorporated the widget into my webapps Stuff-a-Blog and Saywit. The implementation was a breeze! This will sure encourage users to participate and contribute content to web2.0 sites.

Me too Micro-Blogging!

Yesterday, I started using micro-blogging & nano-blogging! Oh... I just mean Tumblr and Pownce. Very soon, I fell in love with the simplicity of Tumblelogs. They are too cool, easy and addictive! Check out my shoutings at My Tumblr. Pownce is pretty good too. It makes more sense than the Twitter service. Catch me powncing here...

Relevant pics from Flickr



Related News
Micro-blogging on the rise - CTV.ca
How the LAFD Keeps Us Connected: An Interview with Brian Humphrey - LAist
Personalizing the Internet - Richmond Times Dispatch

Nice revolutionary services! Long live Web2.0

Powered by StuffaBlog

Practical means to become creative

Being creative is as simple as thinking/doing anything outside the usual. If you are flaky or a wit-loving person, you are already well packed and bundled with creativity. Life is so much fun with a pinch of ingenuity in our daily routine.

How can we improve creativity? Simple! Just by practicing to be creative in our thoughts & deeds. Here are a few techniques proved to be effective by several psychologists and scientists. These are grouped by the subject of focus.

(Some points are borrowed from Brian Hunt, filtered for practicality, and grouped)

HEALTH!
1. Exercise regularly. This will improve the blood flow to your brain.

2. Make sure that you get enough rest. Every hour of sleep lost leads to a drop of one IQ point.

CHANGE!
3. Get rid of the rules you don't need in your life or at work. Start learning to break non-essential rules.

4. Change your ambiance; Try to find ideas in a different environment. Go for a stroll, enjoy nature, change places, etc.

5. Change your routines. Creativity comes from seeing things that others overlook and from questioning what we are seeing and why. For example, take a different route to work once in a week.

THINK!
6. Make time for reflection and daydreaming - give your ideas time to form.

7. Brainstorm first! Go for quantity of ideas first, and then look for the good ones. Each idea will spark another one.

8. Look for ways to make a problem even worse - then turning these ideas around can lead you to the solution. For every good idea there’s an opposite one.

9. Write metaphors, similes, poetry and jokes to use your imaging right brain. This can help you see an object in a different viewpoint.

10. Practice creative thinking each day. Exercise your mind with daily puzzles.

11. Enumerate unexpected uses of familiar products.

12. Consider yourself to be a dialog writer for a movie, and construct imaginary dialogs. This technique was first introduced in the best-selling book by Napoleon Hill, "Think and Grow Rich".

COLLABORATE!
13. Get a different perspective by discussing your ideas with someone else. Organizing your thoughts to describe them to others can help you find gaps and things you've overlooked. Creativity arises from the differences of opinions and perspectives between people.

JUST DO IT!
14. Take up creative writing. Write a blog or a diary, and empty your thoughts in it.

Making it easy for you! Check out Saywit, a web2.0 app that lets you practice techniques 6 - 13 in an organized collaborative manner. It aims to bring up your creative abilities naturally, and makes it fun all the way!

To read an analysis on creativity, check out the article 'Introduction to Creative thinking' by Robert Harris.

Self-made Entrepreneurs

If you now do what others don't, you can later do what others can't. I read this line in one of the entrepreneur blogs, and started to realize what it takes to be a self-made entrepreneur. In my best effort to become one, I created a few webapps on weekends just by myself. The works of my personal heroes Markus Frind (Founder, PlentyOfFish.com) & James Hong (Co-Founder, HotorNot.com), and several entrepreneurial blog posts motivate me.

Creating a webapp in one's garage, and selling it for a few million dollars has become hip now-a-days. Check out the article by Markus Frind that outlines how creators of self-initiated projects can make as much money as VC-backed founders do. In one of the recent events, Guy Kawasaki moderated a panel of 5 self-made entrepreneurs who provided many good insights into starting and funding a company today. You can download the MP3 from Guy's blog.

Also do checkout this amazing book that will interest young individuals aspiring to become entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

The success stories of several entrepreneurs, bundled with wisdom and lessons learnt from their startup days is packaged in the form of a book titled "Founders at Work". As Guy puts it, "It’s a gold mine for great stories about entrepreneurship". I recently purchased this book as a gift for my friend's b'day, and he loved it. Someday, I will buy one for myself too...

If my dreams can come true, my name will appear in the second edition of this book ;)