Hi guys,

Another short post. I went to a small group hosted by techtalks (my former boss was one of the co-organizers) in IT Park. I met a lot of interesting people there, and there were quite a number of foreigners too (having their startups, some in the process of making a startup, etc)!

In short, this was a great experience because I for one dream to make a startup of my own too (poor programmer, no funds to do it – but the stuff I found there was educational to say the least).

Anyways, I saw a team of young guys (from the looks of it, new graduates, or even maybe in college), who have a startup company named Spelldial. Well, I maybe an old fart, but I when I see enthusiasm, especially from youth, of course, as heck, I get impressed.

What is SpellDial? From their website, it says:

SpellDial is a technology that allows you to dial names instead of numbers. This is applicable only for those who have setup a spelldial account. Once you have checked the availability of your username you can register it to point to a specific number. So instead of dialing a number, you dial their username.

They have a webapp that you can point your android or iphone to, but nevertheless, when you point that url to your desktop browser, it doesn’t work (obvious reasons).

I then took a quick peek at their api, and made a php wrapper class for it in about an hour (so that you won’t need to think about the details of calling the api). It’s as simple as doing these lines of code:


include "spelldial.php";
$spell = new Spelldial();
$result = $spell->get_info("us.example");
print_r($result);
?>


I know, the api yet is apparently in their very early stages (some of their api functions return nothing), but considering they are all young guys, it’s a great start for them

Get my spelldial class here. I might in the future make an actionscript class (for flash users) and maybe even a java class for this one, but no promises.

Here’s the spelldial class in action (it’s a quick hack, so I’m sorry it’s ugly)

I’m trying a different approach here… I’m finding that this blog seems to be getting a bit popular…

I am curious what topics you want discussed. I am familiar with programming stuff, open source stuff, android, etc. Coding in wordpress, even wine (Windows is Not an Emulator), linux stuff.

What do you want for me to discuss guys?

Also, if any of you needs IT consultancy services (or programming jobs), I’m glad to help out.

Just a short post…

I just happened to watch a youtube video of the Android mascot dancing to a spiffy beat. I don’t know about you, but I found this awesome!

Enjoy the vid below:

Finally got myself a month ago an android phone, a cheapo commtiva z71 variant (cherry mobile nova)

Thoughts about it? Really cool, but android by itself is somewhat unpolished compared to iOS, or even Symbian for that matter.

Stay tuned for more.

Posted from android.

From the Durian/Sintel Site:

So! exciting times here at the Blender Institute, today is our very-really-thistimeforsure last rendering day, next to some color grade we need to do still, but then is time to grab those big .EXR files and convert them into friendly DPX’s for the guys at Cineco to do magic with it and turn them into 21312 stills of 35mm chemical glory.

That means we’re getting close to our (real!) Premiere, so in order to help us make some noise, 3D World is widely covering Blender topics on October’s issue, Sintel will be on cover + interview time with Ton (Producer), Colin (Director), and William (Animator), and even BBB got a column in “A list of the all the Best CG shorts out there”

In addition to this, I decided to make some unofficial wallpapers for all of you to enjoy – just click on the links below.

The current economic situation has somehow affected all of us one way or another, myself included (in a way).

So what’s a developer got to do on the lean months?

Accepting odd programming jobs for friends is one way to keep the old noggin active. Learning new skillsets is another thing that you can do as well.

One thing which always helps a lot is coding for open source projects. Why is that?

1. It helps you learn new technologies along the way.
2. Gets you to meet new people and friends.
3. You can add these experiences to your resume

Since many companies are leveraging open source technologies and the demand for these products are increasing, you can have the advantage of being adept and knowledgeable in these departments.

Here’s something that you don’t see anyday:

This will definitely make the news!

Interestingly, The embedded videos which still ran properly, a while ago, now do crash (flash app is still loading though):

Arora is a Qt browser that uses webkit (rendering engine used in google chrome and safari) as it’s html engine. It’s small, and fast too.

The current version of the windows build of arora (0.10.0) is not the latest version.

Presenting the windows build of arora 0.10.2 – git build version as of march 24, 2010. I myself have compiled it under Qt 4.6.1

Get the installer at the ostalks ibiblio site

Ok, ok… you might wonder, what’s a blog post about William Shatner making a social network doing here?

See the tag line of my site? “Open Source, Operating Systems, Offtopic Stuff!”. This definitely counts as “Offtopic Stuff!”. And I’m a big Star Trek fan – well, TOS and NG, as well as some other non Startrek stuff like SG-1, starring mostly my favorite actor in the first few seasons Richard Dean Anderson – the “MacGyver” guy.

Well, it’s not a social networking site (http://www.myouterspace.com) per se, for me, it looks like Mambo/Joomla with a custom template and social networking module tacked in (hey, it’s an open source CMS, at least we got the “open source” aspect in!), it is a site more geared with getting people with an interest of creating sci-fi films and games together into one site. This isn’t a site just for Trekkie (or Trekker) people… it’s more of a sci-fi community.

I’d like to think of it as a deviantart site for sci-fi people. Or CGTalk.

I’m more inclined to think that the Shat would like to look into opportunities for making sci-fi films or ventures in the future. Well, I’m all for hoping that I’ll never see a scene again where Spock, Mccoy and Kirk sing row row row your boat over a campfire again. Just a joke, I’m wishing him all the best, after all, he’s my all time favorite Star Trek captain (although I prefer Spock or Scotty as my favorite TOS character).

Come on, who could ever refuse Kirk inviting guys to join in the site in a futuristic, cheesy, red spaceship?

Another one of those very very short posts. If you have moblin installed on your netbook, and want to develop rpms on it, you can type in this command:

sudo yum groupinstall “Development Tools”

It should install all tools necessary for basic Moblin development. Ciao.