Freebase Parallax - The future of Web

Hey guys, I found this amazing project called Freebase parallax which if works as the video promotes, its gonna change the meaning of search engines. It will be the beginning of a new era of internet. Have a look at this video:


Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

This concept will be based on the idea of considering the data not as mere text but as objects with its properties and methods. These properties of different objects can be compared to make real-time analysis, graphical representations and form basic clustering. This project is still under alpha. We all will be waiting for it to be available for general usage, and the dawn of the new generation of internet, maybe Internet 2.0

Software Engineered

Yesterday, I launched my fourth blog and first official public blog: Software Engineered. Here I've quoted some of the details of the blog:

What this Blog is:

• a place filled with positive sarcasm and jokes
• closely relate to the life of a software engineer in a fun way.
• support for an employee to make the life of his employer miserable
• eyeopening patterns followed in the organisation to ruin developers life
• comparisons of college education and organisations work
• and a lot of similar stuff

What this Blog isn’t

• its not a blog with discussion on techinical stuff
• no political or economical issues’ discussions
• no educational articles
• no hacking tips and tricks
• no mergers and acquisitions of brands
• and no bad/abusive language usuage

One step ahead

Yeah, I cleared the code jam round 1 too. This time not with a good rank though(724), ya a small silly mistake cost me 15 points and around 400 ranks drop. Hopefully I'll do better in round 2, coz next time there will be less than half the people going through it.

Google Code Jam 08

This year Google Code Jam started day before yesterday (16th of July), for me it was yesterday. It was organised in a bit different way, usually they used to sponsor the contest as a event on Topcoder and contestants used their arena to develop the code. This time they applied a new approach and a better one. They opened the contest for all languages and was compiler independent. We were supposed to download input generate the output and upload it along with the source code file. So on 16th was the qualification round, 24 hr long event with 3 problems. The person submitting one solution correct was to be promoted to the next level.

Each question had two input sets: small and large. The output of small was evaluated instantly and the result was displayed. The output for large data set was submitted and the result was announced after the event.

So in all it worked out well, and yes I have qualified for the online round 1 too, with a full score of 75 and world ranking 336 :) Lets see what happens in the rounds ahead.

Launching hairyhi.info

Hey everyone, today I am officially announcing the launch of my new site hairyhi.info. Its displays my profile. So go ahead and check out the site if you want to know more bout me. It uses a beautiful accordian and has cool javascript effects. Its a better and updated version of my last site which still exist at ankit-jain.info.

Browser Based games III

Yes, I actually managed to write the third version of my browser based games tutorials. Today I am going to discuss the second type of browser games: small Animation games. Like I discussed last time, small animations games are like tetris, frogger, bricks which require moving objects but very less AI and have static backgrounds. These games require a lot of memory space to store the position and status of various objects along with the objects' properties.

There are a few points that one can consider while planning the game for development:

• Firstly, examine the game very carefully and be very clear with all the rules/ instructions of the game to be developed. This will help you decide the data structures to be used. Usually most of the data is stored in javascript Arrays. So, we need to be very careful while designing the game to optimise the utilisation of memory (try to use minimum memory space and use local variables as much as possible)
• The idea behind using Arrays is to find patterns among the objects. For example, the image objects in the frogger game which move along the road can be stored in the arrays. By finding the right quantity of those objects we can define the size of the array. By deleting the old objects which have crossed the screen and inserting new objects in those places. Similarly.. we could store the empty and filled spaces of the screen in an array in the game of Bricks.
• Moving the objects is fairly simple now.. if we have a constant speed, we could just move objects by using a set interval command, and calling a function which moves all objects on the screen.
  

  timer=setInterval("functionName()",50);//This function is called periodically after aevery 50 ms.
  function funtionName()
  {
  for(i=0;i<size;i++)
  arr[i].style.left=parseInt(arr[i].style.left)+moveRight;
  }

• This will move the array objects to the right by moveRight pixels every 50 ms. If you have to move both ways.. u might need an array to store a boolean value indicating left or right. and move accordingly.
• Similarly to detect collision both the objects coordinates have to be matched. Generally all objects could be considered as rectangles and hence they could be checked for their areas of intersection by their end points easily.

I think rest is dependent on your imagination and creativity. Just try to make game as light as possible (in complexity and memory used).. so that it could be played on low end systems as well.

Browser Based Games II

I am back with the second edition of how to develop browser based games. If you haven't read the first volume, please do it before reading this one. It will help you to understand this one.

Alright, so as I told in my previous post that there are several types of browser based games. But like last time I'll be talking about the Javascript games which are visually appealing and help you understand on how to build a game.

To start with, we first need the structure of the game. I would broadly classify the games into three categories: board games (very less animations required but high AI requirements), minor animation games (these are games like frogger, bricks, tetris where we have minor animations and have static backgrounds) and complex games (like pinball, snooker, tanks where we need to apply the collision mechanisms, trace the paths of the objects and can also have moving backgrounds plus these might require a lot of AI too).

The board games are like casino games(blackjack, slots, roulette, etc) where the main aim is to develop a proper game play mechanism, defined on a set of rules which are hard coded into the program. For instance if we are to develop the blackjack game, we know certain rules that blackjack pays 3 to 2, insurance pays 2 to 1, etc. These rules can be laid down in form of JavaScript functions which calculate the final value of a variable (Score) based on these parameters and these functions are trigger when the respective conditions occur.

AI part might be required in a multiplayer game where the opponents are all bots. For instance a game like texas hold'em poker, where we need to figure out certain parameters based the values of which the bot makes his move. These rules can be designed by carefully observing a real game play. You can figure out certain limits which define the responses of a player, and code them to create a bot player for your game.

Oh and yes, the random part like finding a card out of the deck can be done in this fashion:

function Shuffle(max){
var num=Math.random()*max;
return Math.round(num);
}

This Shuffle function would return a no. lying between 0 and max inclusive. So if you have to pick a card use the following to obtain the suit as well as cardno.:

funtion getCard()
{
var cardno=Shuffle(12)+1;
var suit=Shuffle(3)+1;
}

Where each no. from 1 to 4 can represent a suit for the card. Also for the minor animations I use this function, though it was specifically made for movement in right to left direction, but with minor tweaks, one can adjust it to work both ways:

function Animate()
{
the_style=Img.style;
the_style.left = parseFloat(the_style.left) + movLeft;
the_style.top = parseFloat(the_style.top) + movTop;
if(parseInt(the_style.top)>=lastTop&&parseInt(the_style.left)<=lastLeft&&splitting==0) { the_style.left=lastLeft; the_style.top=lastTop; animating=0; eval(afterAnim); return; } if(parseInt(the_style.top)<=lastTop&&parseInt(the_style.left)<=lastLeft&&splitting==1) { the_style.left=lastLeft; the_style.top=lastTop; animating=0; eval(afterAnim); return; } if(parseInt(the_style.top)<=lastTop&&parseInt(the_style.left)>=lastLeft&&splitting==2)
{
the_style.left=lastLeft; the_style.top=lastTop; animating=0; eval(afterAnim);
return;
}
setTimeout("Animate()",10);
}

Well that's it for this time, I'll dicuss the other 2 types of games next time.

IT is sinking, or is it?

Hello folks, you might be reading daily in the newspapers that the IT (Information Technology) sector is sinking, big losses, job cutoffs, layoffs and no recruitment. Well that might be true, infact it is, but sometimes I wonder, why doesn't it bother a few people, the elite group!

My point of writing this blog entry is to give a clear picture of what is going on in the IT sector and why. Like I said, the IT is sinking, but despite of this fact, I have got 4 job offers (2 from in-campus placement and 2 PPO offers). Why is it so, that a few people get so many jobs and a few don't land up with one god job? One might feel that I am trying to boast myself, but that's not true and the fact remains there. My cousins, engineer from reputed colleges, are still searching for job. Why is it so?

Well the reason lies in the fact that due to the fall in IT, the companies has shifted from hiring quantity of employees to hiring quality employees. So instead of hiring bulk of people they are hiring a few good and experienced people and treating them well. So despite the fall in IT, job of many people has not been affected while majority of people are into the search of jobs. This trend has let to lay-offs, cutoffs and everything. This paradigm shift has made life miserable for many people. Also the hired employees have to work for longer hours as they are doing the work which was one by 3-4 people earlier. Therefore, the employees and the unemployed are both affected in a bad way, due to this shift.

Redifining the post from the conclusion, I would say "Yes, IT is falling, and the employers are trying to compensate that . At the losing end are the employees and the people looking for jobs".

Happy Birthday to Freelancing

Hey people, its now an year that I have been working on several projects from around the world and I have gained enough experience to share with you on which projects/ works should one select and which works(though the tempting ones) should one let go off.

So, there are a few things one should take care of a few things while accepting any project.

• Firstly make sure of the person you are working with is the real client or is forwarding someone else's project. Though there isn't anything bad with working with an intermediate person(who's just forwarding a project), but usually it becomes real difficult doing work because that person may not know the exact specifications/requirements of the project. I have had a similar experience while working for a freelancing firm. They don't give you a passage for direct communication with the actual client for obvious reasons, and hence your every query is answered by the intermediate person. This results in incorrect or incomplete info and usually delays the work. So make sure you communicate with the person enough to gather all the details of the project.
• Next thing one should be clear about is the platform being used. I remember trying to work on a project which required Java. I convinced the client to use PHP over Java for some reasons and he agreed to it. But later it turned out that the project was not very feasible with PHP and had to be done in Java. So not being very comfortable with Java, I had to turn down that project. So no matter which language you code in, you should be very clear which language/platform is to be used in the work.
• And one should discuss each and every term with the customer/client and should have an exhaustive list of the requirements of the work. Usually what happens is that the project requirements keeps on increasing as one proceeds. So clearing all the terms with the customer makes it easy for you to work.
• Always leave a good impression on the customer (usually the customer have multiple works and if you have nice terms with him, he may award you more projects in future). Even if you turn down the project, you should talk it over with the customer and tell him the reason for turning it down. Maybe you could work down the stuff sometime later. I have two PPO offers because of leaving a good impression on the clients.
  
• Lastly One should be very clear of the background of the person one is working for. There are several people offering projects, very attractive and luring. But one must take care that the person one is working for is genuine. He might make lame excuses while making payments and may even won't pay at all. There are several con sitting to serve fodder to you. Talk bout the payments earlier and if possible ask them to escrow some amount (Its better to get some money less than not getting it at all).

Please remember these things when you go off for doing some work in your free time. So this was a post to celebrate the first anniversary of my freelancing work. I hope this goes on and on as I really love doing this work. And I would really recommend every programmer good or bad to atleast try freelancing work atleast once, its fun ( I have also recommended the same to a couple of my friends and they have also loved it).

Universal Developers Environment

Hey, Its a long time since last post. I am here today to discuss bout my Final year major project. It is a web based universal developers environment. I was writing the abstract of it yesterday and thought of discussing it here on my blog. Here is the abstract that I have written:

Ever wished for an application that could take care of your precious projects meanwhile helping you to access them from anywhere in whole world? Is it difficult for you to manage the versions and concurrency of your projects manually on which over hundreds of developers are working? Do you have to install the complete platform and development toolkit wherever you work on your project? Do you have to use hundreds of tools and software to develop one application?

If answer to any of these questions is “Yes”, then this application is meant for you. UNIVERSAL DEVELOPERS ENVIRONMENT (UDE) is an approach to solve all these problems with one click. UDE is one stop to CREATE, DESIGN, DEVELOP, SHARE & COLLABORATE. UDE is an online application/site where users can manage their own projects and also work on others’ projects.

CREATE

Once registered, users can create as many projects as he/she wants. When the user creates and online project, he/she is allotted some space on the web server where he can host his project. He/she can upload files, documents and create folders in the allotted space.

DESIGN

The application has a complete toolkit which could help you design the web pages with efficiency. This designing toolkit includes drag and drop features, inserting elements with one click, editing tags and features to develop standard XHTML complaint web pages.

DEVELOP

Developing the projects is the easiest part of this application. The application includes a complete real time color coded area to write your code. It provides features which are these days available in only offline/desktop applications. It also includes automatic indentation, redo-undo features and many more.

SHARE

Not only this, the projects you develop can be either made public or private. The public projects are sharable, searchable and accessible by any registered user. They can even view the project details and then contact the owner to discuss the project.

COLLABORATE

Collaboration is the best part of this project. The owners can allow other users to collaborate and work on their projects by inviting them. The users can also send a request to the administrators of the project to join and work on it. The administrators can manage the users and their access levels.

MANAGE

This application comes with a file manager from where the users of the project can view all the files and directory structure of the project. This file manager provides a complete control on the files. Here you can create new files and folders, rename, delete and move files in the folder.

CONCURRENCY CONTROL

With the inbuilt Concurrent Versioning System which contains all the details of the files modified, along with the capability of the administrators to move back to the earlier version and undo the changes done by other users in the files.

ACCESSIBILITY LEVELS

There are three levels of accessibility for any project in the application: Administrator or the Owner of Project, Moderators and Users. These three levels of accessibility provide a complete control of the project and help the owner to work on the project efficiently.

I guess this should give a fair idea of what the project is all about. So I won't go in further details this time. Do check back later for any update.

The tech guru - I got to decide!

Yesterday, I was watching a video on World's Most Powerful person in the world. So I thought why not let me decide who's the actual tech guru of all time. I'll firstly list three most eminent personalities as the nominees : Steve Jobs (Apple Inc), Bill Gates (Microsoft Inc) and Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google Inc). So I'll describe their achievements one by one and will discuss why they should be the tech guru of all times.

Starting with Bill Gates, born in Oct, 1955 is the chairman of Microsoft. I won't go much in detail which one could find anywhere, but would go straight to the point where he established Microsoft. It was the launch of Intel 8080 micorprocessor, which was the cheapest microprocessor in market which could run BASIC to be used for a PC. So at that moment he founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. Second faming moment was when they cracked a deal with IBM and delivered them the PC-DOS (which was a customised Q-DOS) and retained the rights of later known as MS-DOS. These two things laid the base for the software giant Microsoft, which is today known for its Windows operating system, whose base was obviously DOS.

Next we have Steve Jobs, chairman of Apple Inc (formerly known as Apple Computers) though has not been dedicated to one company throughout his whole life, but has been really successful. His ideas has changed the world. Apple was one of the companies that brought in the idea of commercial mouse-driven UIs. I have also always been a fan of Apple's designs and GUIs for example its Leapord's and iphone's UI. When Steve Jobs had to leave Apple Computers, he acquired and expanded Pixar Animation Studios. Later he joined back Apple as the CEO, he has never looked back since then. His works has always shown enormous creativity and forward thinking approach whether it may be Apple's Mac OS X, iPhone or Pixar's Finding Nemo, Cars, Monsters Inc, Incredibles.

Then we have Larry Page and Sergey Brin founders of Google Inc the search engine giant which revolutionised the internet. The Google's story is very famous and known to everyone, I won't discuss all the things here. The PhD scholars started the search engine(code named Backrub) as their PhD project, and tried to sell it to a few companies, disheartened started their own company. And finally they were lucky enough to get enough funds to run their business successfully. What I like bout the company is their new approach to solve problems by providing very friendly environment to the employees and their 20% projects to bring out the innovation.

So finally is the decision time, so what do you think should be crowned the tech guru of all times. Well I guess the tech guru position can not be assigned straight forward. Rather I would say that we can divide it in two parts: the Innovator and the Developers. The Innovator should be Steve Jobs, who through his creativity, innovation and forward thinking, has changed the world and will keep on doing in the years to come. Then we have the developers Guru who should be Larry Page and Sergey Brin or being the central attraction for the developers world wide and for providing such a platform for them.

Also last but not the least Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft is not among the tech guru but for me he's the biggest of the Entrepreneur in the software world. making such good decisions in the whole life has made him the richest man for over a decade. He has helped bring out PC with its Windows which still runs on more than half of the world's personal computers and has also provided many large software products for people of every domain.

Browser Based Games

The browser based games is a very interesting and still fairly unknown topic in the development world today. I have been recently involved in developing a lot of browser based games with a lot of graphics and flash-like looks and feel. Though I know the idea was not wholely mine, it was of one of the projects that I received. It was to develop a browser based game that could work on the safari browser on an iPhone. Probably it was one of the initial games developed for iPhones, coz i started the development in the second week of the launch of the iPhone. Since then, I have developed over 6 decent iPhone games.

Back to the topic, Browser Based Games. These games can be categorised in two: Text based games(usually multiplayer online games) and Graphics based games (usually single player online/offline games). The text based games maybe Role Playing Games(RPG) which are sometimes graphics based also ( a few examples can be sited at heavygames.com, rpggames4free.com) or Multiplayer online games(MPOG) like themafiaboss.com or mobsterlords.com(I have even worked for this game). The Graphics based games are quite different from these games in the context that they are usually single player and are usually Javascript based client side games and include board games, card games and sports games. The games that I have developed are also Javascript based, so I'll focusing on development of these games only.

The essence of developing these graphics lies in using javascript efficiently and effectively. As most of you might be knowing javascript is a client side language which is though very simple but has a vast potential. To develop these browser based games, usually we follow the following steps:

• Firstly, we design all the graphics of the games in parts, i.e., if we are developing a card game, we would first design all the cards, table, buttons separately (jpgs or gifs) so that they could be used as objects and can move around (animate) of required.
• Next we design the the basic layout of the game in HTML. This layout includes different screens and the proper placement of the respective objects on the screen. Usually there are around3-4 screens, for instance the games I develop have atleast 4 screens: The Loading screen(where I show the loading bar while all the images are loaded), The Menu Screen (where all the buttons to navigate around the game lies), The interstitial screen (can be an advertisement or a instructions of playing the game) and the Main Gaming screen. I align these screens widthwise(left to right) such that I hide all other screens by inserting these screens inside a DIV tag of size of one screen with a style attribute : overflow:hidden which hides all the other layers. Then during game play, I animate the screens around to fit in that DIV to be visible.
• Preloading of all the images to be used in a game is very important to give a good visual appeal to the game. If the images are loaded at the time of game play, it appears to provide jerkiness to the game. Script for preloading the images and preloading bar can be found on a lot of javascript reference sites. So I'll skip that part.
• Next comes the event triggered motion part. Usually all the buttons work in the same way, to trigger a javascript function from the button image or an anchor tag, we can use the following code:

<img src="http://www.blogger.com/images/button.gif" onclick="JSfunctionName()" />
<a onclick="JSfunctionName()">Click Here</a>

• Alright that goes for the most of the work. The only main thing left now is the animation is displaying results and scores. Both of the things are accomplished by using the DOM structure of Javascript. To select a DIV or an IMG we can use the code:

  ele=document.getElementById("IdOfTheTag")

  This element class can then be used to insert text in it by using ele.innerHTML or can be moved around by using ele.style.left, ele.style.top . One thing to note is that to animate the elements we need to define the position first by using ele.style.position="relative" or "absolute"
• For animating the objects we call a function at regular intervals which move the objects a few pixels everytime. We can use

timer=setInterval("fnname()",timeinMilliSeconds)
timer-setTimeout("fnname()",timeinMilliSeconds)

• And these timers can be reset by using

clearInterval(timer)
clearTimeout(timer)

I guess thats it for now, you can atleast start developing some games with these things in mind. I'll discuss some more facts and tweaks for getting hands on advanced graphics games development later. Till then try developing your own games and remember the first game which you develop would be the hardest, but once you start getting into the groove, you will really love developing these games.

Happenings of a not so Happening day

"The Day" turned out to be a day asking for a lot of patience from our side. A day which I was expecting to be "THE DAY", is about to end in 20 mins from now (maybe its over by the time I finish this), and has brought another week of sleepless nights.

Today, my dream company Google was supposed to visit our college to recruit students of our batch. So the day began with a lot of excitement (atleast for me, don't know bout others). I knew that there's not gonna be any interview today, but students will be shortlisted on the basis of their CVs and would be interviewed later. So here's how it all began::

Feb 8th 2008
0100 : I realised its a bit late, coz i hav to get up early in the morning so I went to bed
0400 : I checked out the time (oh its 4, and I am still awake)
0700 : mom came to my room and tried to wake me up. Usually this procedure takes approx 40-50 mins, but I think I never slept well the whole night. So I woke up instantly.
0800 : Though there was no electricity, still I managed to get ready, was getting restless. Read the newspaper, had breakfast
0845 : Left my place for college (I go via metro)
0945 : Reached college to notice nobody was there. Went to hostel to leave my luggage ( I am to shift back in hostel on Monday, when college reopens)
1000 : Went to TnP department with my frnd (who's also the coordinator there). A few ppl were already there.
1030 : The guy from Google appeared(named Nanjappa, i guess i spelled him right) in a very casual manner, he had a chat for about 15 mins in the office and then we went for the ppt.
1050 : After cracking a couple of jokes about his name, the ppt started. Went very regularly, the usual stuff we always read around about Google. Work benefits, salary package, Innovation at Work, History of Google, to name a few.
1200 : The ppt was over, without much interference.

After that he said that we need to submit our resume to TnP department and they'll forward it to Google for scrutinizing and results will be declared in a few days (these few days were not defined). The process which I thought would be completed in an hour there itself is now postponed for some appreciable amount of time. Lets see what's in the bag for me. All I can do right now is wait and spend some more sleepless nights. Looks like there's a little bit more time for my dream to get true.

You might be wondering I missed out the schedule of my rest of the 12 hrs. Well nothing much actually happened in next 12 hrs.
1215 : went to talk to a prof bout our major project
1300 : I had a chat with all my classmates who were present there today.
1430 : Back at home
1500 : Trying to make up for the sleepless night
1730 : Woke up and was really hungry, scanned for something in kitchen... had a little success there
1800 : watched tv (only scrolled channels actually)
1900 : wandered aimlessly
2000 : Chkd mails
2200 : dinner
2340 : started writing this post while chatting with 4 ppl

And the day is over. Infact its 0040 hrs here. Signing off for now..

B Tech Project

From past few days me and my friends have been discussing about what to be done as a part of our B Tech Project. Though we get a degree of Bachelor of Engineering (BE), I don't know why our final year project is known as "B Tech Project". So about the final year project: its probably the most important aspect of our four years course. Also its been given the maximum weightage in all our subjects so far. So we had to be a little serious regarding it.

So here's what we(me and two of my frnds) have planned as our final year project. Its a web based platform for applications development and compiling. We will provide a complete toolkit for online storage, development, sharing and running a project online. The actual things to develop are still under consideration, but this project will be supporting : PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS , C and C++. This is inspired by the idea of sourceforge.net to host projects + dreamweaver to design and develop pages.

I'll keep you posted of the updates and final drafting of this project. I hope we work it out well. Lets see how it goes.

Prodigy Volume 2

Well its over a month I am sitting in my home doing almost nothing. So I talked to one of my friends to get our prodigy idea started all over again, by ourselves, who knows we might end up with developing the next most famous application on the web ;) Anyways, I convinced them to start working on it. And we planned to meet one day.

Yes 29th of December 2007, this was the day of our first official meet to discuss about the prodigy work. Ya actually that's what the code name of our project now is "Prodigy". So our first official meet took place at Barista, CP. As usual I came on time, and the other two fellows (those who shall not be named, well I'll call them Prodigy1 and Prodigy2 ;) ). So we started the discussion. Much as expected I started off again with the idea and explained them what exactly we had planned (Gosh I think aliens did erase their memory of those times when discussed with them during Prodigy Challenge).

We again finalised another structure (though very much similar to the previous one), but then our discussion fell into a vicious circle. A proper conflict between feasibility and advantages of the application emerged(If we'd try to make a better application from the user end we got stuck with its feasibility and vice versa). Finally we tried to implement a very common application's structure - P2P( Yes this is the first thing that I have revealed about our Prodigy work). our application theoritically works more or less like how a P2P application works. But due to my conflicted discussions with Prodigy1 and Prodigy2 about some networking protocols, we never came to a intermediate solution satisfying all three of us.

Finally the meeting ended on a sad note and the outcome of the meeting was that we have to do a lot more homework before we start the actual work. Though I really want this application to be developed, but no serious discussion about it has been done since then and its been over a week from that discussions. Though I keep on Googling to find solutions to the problems related to it. I just hope that we atleast launch the Beta phase of this application before moving out of the college.