Sunday, December 26, 2004

Google Deskbar Shortcut

MSN Toolbar suite's Deskbar provides an excellent functionality of adding your own shortcuts. This is a naive attempt to incorporate a similar technique into google deskbar as a plugin. To use the plugin u need google deskbar and .NET runtime installed, then download the source+binary from here. Unzip and copy GoogleDeskbarShortcut.dll to C:\Program Files\Google\Plugins, and select this plugin from google deskbar menu (refer to deskbar help). A little help is given below:
To do thisEnter this in deskbarExample
open a document, program, media file or website@shortcut,[document/media file path, program name, website address]@cv,c:\cv.sxwto use this shortcut, type !cv.@n,notepad.exe to use this shortcut type !n.@g,www.google.com to use this shortcut type !g.
to delete a shortcut@shortcut@n deletes the shortcut n.
to use a shortcut!shortcut!g opens up googles site in IE.


enjoy!

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Netbeans and J2SE 5.0

I have recently started porting all my apps to J2SE 5.0 (http://java.sun.com/j2se/) with the new netbeans IDE 4.0 (http://www.netbeans.org).

The Netebans IDE is really wonderful and rocks... i use a prettly old machine 550MHz with 320 MB RAM still i find it very sturdy and useful. :)

J2SE 5.0 is also having wonderful features that almost all of the java guys might be knowing now (generics, concurrency package, math enhancements, swing ++, enums, annotations etc.)

that's the good part, but the pad part is converting the pre 5.x code is a bit painful, especially if u totally rely on java.util package. I had to convert more than 200 lines of code (of the total of 20,000+ lines) using generics ... but worth it, until i came across a package that i use (not originally written by me, but modified by me) the jedit-syntax (http://v-ganesh.tripod.com/myNewSoftware.html) which uses Hashtable which contain multiple types:

Hashtable h = (key , {Hashtable | ActionListener})

the problem is that in new J2SE 5.0 i have not yet found a way to handle such a situation, without getting warning from the compiler. if some body knows a way please tell me :)

Another problem that i encountered was that for cloning:

ArrayList a = new ArrayList;
ArrayList b = a.clone(); // or even a.getClass().cast(a.clone())
// generates a warning.

as a result i had to iterate through the elements of 'a' and copy it to 'b'.

any other solutions??

Monday, December 20, 2004

Google Quitely introduces gmail atom feeds??

i was really stunned to see the rss feed icon on firefox status bar! but it seems it didn't work well with firefox. the link refers to https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom and is a proper atom feed.

well what is it really?? any one any idea??

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Find anything, anywhere fast with MSN Toolbar Suite Beta

Find anything, anywhere fast with MSN Toolbar Suite Beta
Well, yech true, a much better tool than Google. Better integration with the desktop and easire on eyes too. The only piece where google wins the the program size. The integration and realtime search with the MSN Deskbar is also really cool. For now i am using MSN Desktop search! but i guess better has to still come with yahoo! overtunes alliance.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Google Suggest

Google Suggest
Another great tool from google! It gives you real time suggestion as well as number of search results for the key words you type in the google search box. Its really wornderful! hope this is integrated into all google search services.

Saturday, December 04, 2004

MSN Spaces

http://msn.spaces.com a blogging service from MSN looks promising... especially the integration of photo posting. i wish even blogger has this integrated service rather than make me download the picasa tool. check out my blog at MSN http://spaces.msn.com/members/werkonkani/

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Google Deskbar API's

Its cool, googlers have really eaten up my mind ! ;)
Well I a currently working on something in computational chemistry (i can't tell the details here), for which i required certain updates to be posted on web (so as i can monitor from them from my home ;)) and guess what i wrote a the "search" tool as a plugin into google deskbar with in 5 mins!! Here is the code in C#:

-----------------------------------------------------------------
// A sample Deskbar plugin which searches for GAMESS Jobs on the phi-grid
//
// Copyright V.Ganesh 2004

using System;
using System.IO;
using Google.Desktop;

public class GamessJobSearch : ICustomSearch {
public string Title() { return "Gamess Job List"; }

public OutputType GetOutputType() { return OutputType.kViewer; }

bool Match(string query, string name, string email) {
if (email.ToLower().StartsWith(query))
return true;

string[] name_words = name.Split(' ');
foreach (string w in name_words)
if (w.ToLower().StartsWith(query))
return true;

return false;
}

public string Run(string query, OutputType browser_type) {
return "[MY COMPUTE SERVER]?q=" + query;
}
}
-----------------------------------------------------------------


I have removed the URL as its a bit private, any way its fun to work with google stuff :)