Hack-a-doodle

Hey,

Twenty four hours, one laptop at hand, endless combination of cakes and chips, one Nintendo Wii at stake, and two hundred programmers hacking away at code. The last two days was just this, and it is only today that I have caught up with lost sleep. The YAHOO Hack day , Bangalore, India is finally over, but I am still dizzy with all the fun I have had. This post is a short and lazy description of the hack that I came up with, on the Hack day.
Sometime back, I had written about YAHOO India Maps, and all the time I had spent trying hack it. Though the maps teams at YAHOO and Google are struggling hard to come up with ways to show directions, nothing can ever equal a friend drawing the directions on the map. Well, that was my hack - the power of doodling over the maps, and then sharing them with friends.
Done in HTML, picking up code from the canvas painter and YDN Maps, I had to add the power to save the positions, transformations, zooming and distribution. Painting on the canvas is simple, it is the transformations and zooming that took time. Initially, I wanted to leverage the style:width and style:height to zoom and pan, but the solution did not really seem scalable. With increasing doodles, the browser seemed to get a lot slower. Luckily for me, I was drawing paths I had to use AJAX to save and retrieve the paths, just like Yahoo maps draws the images. The only optimization that I could chip in was the retrieval of surrounding paths. Finally, all I could present was a heavily simplified version of an application that I wanted to build !
You can take a look at the most basic version of the hack here (saved as a HTML), as I don't have external hosting space.



So much for a hack, lucky for me, they loved it.. They handed me that Nintendo Wii, autographed by David Filo himself !!!

Orkut on Facebook....start of social meta networking ?

Hi,

I had been toying with the idea of getting orkut to the facebook platform to quite some time now. Well, I just got an invite to a similar application today. In the words of the author,

This application brings you your very own Orkut profile to your Facebook account! You dont have to provide any login or password. All you specify is your Orkut Profile URL!

This definitely is an improvement over sites that require the google credentials. Though the UI of the application is not great, that is an easier problem to fix.
Adding this application to the Facebook lets a write scraps to other on orkut, the only point being that the scrap seems to have sent from an automated Orkut user. The last sentence however states that the identity of the one who has sent a scrap is not verified. This last sentence opens up the a host of possibilities to spam and phished scraps.
Strangely enough, it could be a simple, two step process confirm that a user really hold a particular profile.

1. The automated orkut user sends a friend request to the the profile that the user claims
2. After the user logs into the the claimed profile (which is possible only if he owns it)
3. The user then requests for a 'validation random number' that the automated orkut user sends as a message
4. The user is then requried to look up the message, and type in the code in the facebook application.
   

Though steps 1 and 2 seem sufficient, the 'validation random number' is more to stop replay attacks. Though this verifies a user, the user who receives this scrap need not necessarily trust the application. Hence we need another way where the users trust each other, without any dependency of trust on the application.
Now, that problem is more like the one that is solved by digital certificates, only that the Certificate authority in this case should be a lot simpler.
Working on this....would update when I can come up with a solution.

The Smilies in Gmail - Gtalk

Hey,

A lazy Saturday afternoon, chatting on Gmail with a couple of friends, and this interesting thing caught my attention. Strange that it had not caught my attention till now, but I decided to check out the way the smilies rotate. This is not rocket science, but I sure was impressed by the way it was done.
It is obvious that the rotation cannot be textual, and so I was looking at the presence of a GIF to do the job. However, I discovered this image replaced the actual text with this and this being the background images. The animation was achieved by using a setTimeOut and changing the -x-background-y-position style from 0 to 132 at regular intervals. Thats is how the image seems to rotate.
Now this is a pretty interesting way to achieve animation, given the fact that the animation has to be replayed when a user hovers the mouse on the smilies. Sure thing that GIFs to achieve would be a pain, specially the way animation is handled across Internet Explorer and Firefox !!