Dirisala.Net - Cogito, ergo sum

I am a big fan of Project Euler and solved all the problems as of Problem 376 and got the (Perfection) award which is the result of 3 yrs of dedicated effort in my spare time (usually nights after my 3yr old son goes to sleep :)). Prior to discovering Project Euler, I used to occassionally solve the monthly IBM puzzles. I happened to solve just a handful of these puzzles. I would love to involve in a few other programming contexts but need to draw line between being a responsible dad and having fun :). So, for now I will be sticking with just Project Euler and nothing else.

In addition to start working on Project Euler in 2009 I have developed another hobby, hd video shooting and editing thanks to my son Atharv. I bought a 27" iMac with Core i7 quadcore (hyper technology and turbo-boost) and 16GB RAM, the most powerful computer I have used so far either at home or work :). While I used to use Linux in the past, I am absolutely thrilled with my Mac experience. I use iMovie to edit my hd videos and love the workflow. I am hoping to see a version of iMovie that is multi-core enabled. The first app my son knew as a toddler was Tux Paint. Even though he wasn't speaking at that time, he could tell me that he wants to see me drawing with it by dragging me to our computer and making the sound the program makes when quitting (naa-na-nna). It's a great application to teach kids drawing, shapes, colors and introduce them to computers and I highly recommend it to all parents.

I enjoy the images from NASA Image Of The Day. Some of their high resolution images are stunning. However, viewing them in a browser that doesn't fit the entire image in full size is painful. So, I have decided to provide the capability to pan and zoom these spectacular NASA images from their image archive. You can also access NASA Image Of The Day to pan and zoom. Uses javascript, dhtml, css and perl. This is done using my Image Panning & Zooming javascript library.

During dotcom days, I started a personal project I code named as Wortal. It's a personal portal written using a programming language I liked called WebL (WebL + Portal = Wortal). Back in those days, RSS and Atom feeds were non-existent. So, content aggregation required scraping the web pages and WebL was the best tool to do it. Here is another attempt at news and blog aggregation called The DIN & The Buzz. Uses perl, HTML::WebLL (a WebL Like module that I wrote a while back in Perl) and AJAX.

One of the most complex projects of mine is XML Schema driven XML editing (iXML) that is very generic and requiring nothing more than an XML Schema to create the UI. Uses Servlets, JSP and JavaScript. Using this, I created Visual Schema, a website that provides visual representation of XML Schema based open standards for non technical users. A perl based crawler is written to provide the static HTML. My first experience with XML generation is with OAGIS BODs back in 2000 when developing Purchase Order orchestration for Oracle Exchange. Also, when developing the PunchOut/PunchIn capabilities for Oracle Exchange. Those were the days of DTDs transitioning into XSDs. GDSN based Item data synchronization is the other exposure I had where XSDs were made use of.

Since 2006, I have been paying attention to the whole concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and other Web Master tricks, tools and trades. My Domain Tools page provides reference to a few handy tools to do some research on a domain/website such as Google PageRank, # of pages indexed, # of inbound links, tag clouds and del.icio.us bookmarks. In this internet age, a good website can really make or break a business idea!

Once I needed to generate a magic quadrant on the fly based on the data for a web application. Most charting applications either did not provide this type of chart or are too bulky for my need. So, I ended up coding a simple servlet that generated the magic quadrant using Java Swing API. However, I have noticed that these days people are doing graphics and charting using Javascript itself! For one of my recent web article, I needed a magic quadrant. So, I have tried doing it in javascript. You can see the javascript magic quadrant in action in the article how many types of amazon affiliates? Subsequently I used this in the Product Magic Quadrants generated from the Amazon Associate Web Services data.

giftpickr (like stockpickr and flickr :)) is my experiment with creating a reasonably functional product catalog with lots of features and good performance (50K+ SKUs searchable in less than 3 seconds on average on a shared hosting!). I will do some writeup sometime on how I did this. One thing though, there are only 3 SQLs executed for the entire catalog search results page! If you figured out how I did that, shoot me an email. Well, actually I had to make it 4 SQLs when someone visits from a search engine or a keyword search is performed. It's all part of the SEO strategy. Read Taming The Search's Long Tail article for some information on the SEO strategy.