Grow Island!

'Grow Island' is an awesome Flash game with the objective of developing an island with the different flavors of engineering. The basic idea here is to prioritize engineering like Civil, Applied Chemistry, etc and in the process of prioritizing these fields of knowledge endeavor to create a perfect society. Following the correct order of things will lead to a society where men and women get along happily, the environment is protected and technology is harnessed to discover the secrets of the universe. Try to maximize the levels of all engineering.

To play the game, click here.

Other Grow series games :

• The Original Grow
• Grow Cube
• Grow Nano
• Grow Tower

-- Varun

Firefox 3.5!

Here are some of the interesting features I like in Firefox 3.5:

'Location Aware Browsing'

Now, Firefox can tell your location to the web site and with that they can offer us some location based services. It was quite difficult for me to get the user's location when I was working on Stat Engine for my blog. Now that Firefox has brought in this feature, I am hoping that others will try to make it soon. If you are a service provider and wanted to get the location information about your users, refer to this.

Support for HTML 5

Firefox 3.5 supports some of the interesting elements of HTML5 like video, audio, etc. Also, it has got a good support for canvas elements and css font-faces. Now, I can improve the VComment tool which I developed for my blog. Attaching a sample video here. You need to have Firefox 3.5 to view this. Remember, this doesn't use any flash player here.

--Varun

Code Kata, To become a better developer!

'Code Kata', a term coined by Dave Thomas, is an initiative to improve the design skills of the developers. He has come up with a set of common real world problems which we might face in day-to-day programming life. The idea here is that we have to come up with the best possible solutions for the known problems. There are 21 Katas published so far. All the them are really interesting. With the tag line 'How to Become a Better Developer", 'Code Kata' will definitely be of some help to you in becoming a better developer.

How to start?

• Check out the background of Code Kata here.
• Choose a Kata. For beginners, I would suggest Kata Nine - A checkout problem.
  
• Form a group of 4-5 active contributors.
• Come up with a solution for the Kata and discuss the solution across the group and tweak it . There will be many solutions for the given problem. So, this is the trickiest part.
  

-- Varun

July 02!

From this...

... to this

Happy batch day Softies 2K3! Sweet memories!! :-)

-- Varun

Switch the side!

Switch the frogs to the other side.

Source : http://funstufftosee.com/frogleaptest.html

--Varun

Reason me out!!

Code:
public class Foo {
   public Foo() { System.out.println("constructor called"); }

   static { System.out.println("static initializer called"); }

   { System.out.println("instance initializer called"); }
}

Execute :
new Foo();
new Foo();

Output:
static initializer called
instance initializer called
constructor called
instance initializer called
constructor called

--Varun

Google Apps Script - Macros for Google Docs!

Google has been trying hard to grab more users for its online office applications (Google Docs). As part of that, it has recently launched "Google Apps Script" which allows users to write custom scripts to control Google Products. These scripts come in handy when we are trying to automate certain tasks. So, we no longer need to employ GreaseMonkey scripts to perform some additional tasks for us. These scripts are available only as part of Google Apps for your domain. This feature can be accessed on invitation basis. I have requested access for the same using my domain and just today I got the chance to play around with it.

Though writing custom functions in spreadsheet seems to be the primary use case, there are many more to it. Technically, these scripts are nothing but javascripts and are executed on the server-side (Google's cloud). By that, Google is trying to provide restricted access to javascript and hoping to prevent from client-side javascript security vulnerabilities. Some of the use cases quoted by Google are :

• Creating custom spreadsheet functions .
• Automating repetitive tasks.
• Link with multiple Google Products (Google Cal, GMail, etc). There are APIs provided for this.

Till date, only a limited set of APIs are available (for mail, calendar, user info, etc). A separate Script editor has also been packaged along with this feature. That editor again is in its infant stage. Lets watch out from Google for more. Here is my Hello, World! script.

To summarize, I would say it as the macros for Google Docs. Hope it is used in the right sense. Thanks Google! :-)

-- Varun