Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

A counter-argument to doing too little on the server is doing too much on the server. Ajax is often a balancing act. A special coverage by IBM on five Ajax anti-patterns. There’s also an article on five Ajax design patterns.

The Cricket World Cup 2007 is on, so far, surrounded by strangeness. A team ranked 4th loses to an unranked team, their coach dies under suspicious circumstances, a murder, and a whole nexus of sporting corruption is on the radar.

The lid is open to the can of worms. That’s one side of the spectrum. The spectrum of the economics of a sport like Cricket, once called the “gentlemen’ game”. The other side of the spectrum, which confuses me a bit, is best illustrated with ads from Indian sponsors (like IndianOil, Hero Honda etc.) in the arena. I haven’t come across any other sporting event at a global level, exhibiting Indian sponsorship at this magnitude. And it makes sense, because its not “just a sport” in India, its a “game of business”, with some of the highest paid players in the sport, most earnings from television viewership, rich endorsements, the under-ground match fixing nexus (spanning from the middle-east to elsewhere), team selection scandals, the fans turning to vandalism on a single defeat … the list goes on. It’s not a sport anymore, a money-craved reality-show maybe, but not a sport as we once knew it to be.

In memory of Mr. Bob Woolmer (1948-2007).

A tragic victim of sporting economics perhaps, but he will always remain in our memories as a true legend.

Who doesn’t get annoyed with those unsolicited messages on mortgage, viagra and other strange medicines in their mailbox? And while, nearly two thirds of all email is spam, and while, between 2005 and 2006, the number of unsolicited e-mails increased 147 percent. And yet, while, US and Taiwan lead the spamming spree, there’s still some good news. It’s satisfying to read this on my WP dashboard …

Akismet has caught 10,133 spam for you since you first installed it.

And that’s just my blog, in a short span of 3-4 months. Even more satisfying to notice this on my hosting panel …

SpamAssassin has caught 12,590 spam in the past 60 days.

And finally, from my own research Gmail detects nearly 90% of all spam coming to my Gmail mailbox (although it still shows some false identifications). Hmm, getting there, slowly but surely.

Ok, I use IE a bit, although I’m a huge FireFox fan, simply because FF kicks some cool Greasemonkey a**. But here’s one trick (or a hack if you wanna call it; who know’s if its an easter egg) in IE which bowled me over:

Step 1: Copy this piece of JavaScript code (from start to end):

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Step 2: Visit any website, and once the page is loaded, paste the copied JS (from above) into the address location bar & hit enter. Now you have a completely editable webpage. Edit any text, move around the objects, an inline webpage editor.

Well, this has to be the collest thing I have come across for IE. Do you have something more special to share about IE?

An excellent read, and food for thought. 77 Brain Hacks to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better.