About Flock:
Flock web browser is a social web browser, built on the open source codebase of Mozilla Firefox. This browser features tabbed browsing, social networking and a Web 2.0 featured interface. This free social browser supports all the major platforms including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Features and plus points:
Social networking is the most promising feature of Flock. While browsing through Flock, you can open your webmail accounts, connect to your friends on different social networks and access the news feed of your choice. It supports all the major social networks - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Digg and Flickr. All social networking services are managed through the “People Sidebar,” “Webmail” and “Feeds Sidebar” buttons, which open their relevant service options in a vertical sidebar on the left side of browser without interrupting the main browser window.
With the “Open Media Bar” feature, Flock gives its users a rich and interactive media experience. It is the first browser that supports media RSS, which allows users to use photos and videos like regular RSS blog posts. When a user clicks the “Open Media Bar” button, it opens a horizontal bar on the top of the browser to preview and view different online photos and videos from popular photo/video sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr.
Social bookmarking and blogging is another handy feature of Flock. It offers a separate blog writing and editing tool where one can write and publish posts to all major blogs like WordPress, Blogger, Blogsome and Typepad. For bookmarking, it offers different services called breadcrumbs (pages and tags bookmarked by users), Watchlist (users are able to monitor other users’ bookmarks) and Groups (defined groups of Flockers linking to this category).
Evolution of Web Detection:
Core to the Flock experience is the tight integration flocks provide with various online services — including social, media, blog and bookmarking services as mentioned above.
Many of these services have APIs that flock call in order to perform certain tasks, but there are some things flock must do without API support… some tasks that require them to examine the actual HTML content of the pages the user is loading up and look for certain patterns. So flock need to be able to detect when a user logs in to (or out of) a supported service, for example, since some integration features will only work when the user is logged-in. They also need to detect when there are “media streams” available from a given page so that they can allow the user to open them in the media bar.
How do they know if a user is logged in to Service X? Well generally speaking, if you’re logged in to a service then there’s a button or link on the page to allow you to log out. Spotting that button or link is a great clue for the browser to know you’re logged in. If lucky, the button has an id that makes it especially easy to spot, for instance: id=”logoutButton”
But the thing about web services is that they’re likely to change their HTML at some point. Since that “logoutButton” isn’t part of a published API, there’s nothing to stop Service X from changing it to a link, and perhaps dropping the id attribute. This is a problem for Flock, since it would break the integration. Flock would no longer be able to detect that the user had logged in to the service, and some Flock functionality would be broken or disabled as a result.
To combat this problem, Flock have developed a technology called Web Detective. Web Detective lets us specify detection “rules” in an updateable XML file for each service. So if ServiceX ever changes their HTML and breaks Flock’s integration, they can just update the serviceX.xml file and within a few hours Flock users will be running with the new rules and all will be good with the world again.
Flock Web Detective:
So Flock's Web Detective service is designed to make detection of states or information on web pages easier. It is used to detect logged-in or logged-out states for various web services, to detect media streams or person information on web pages, etc.
With Web Detective, it's possible to examine any combination of URL, Document source, DOM, Form fields and Cookies using string comparison, regular expressions and even XPath expressions. Web Detective also lets you specify special named strings, such as web service URLs that may be subject to change, in a format that makes them easy to update later.
Detection rules and named strings are defined in updateable XML files.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
March 28, 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm
About 1 months ago....
VOTE EARTH by simply switching off your lights for one hour on Saturday, March 28, 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm local time.........that was the catch line.
"Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. In 2008 the message had grown into a global sustainability movement, with 50 million people switching off their lights."
"In this year, India joins Earth Hour for the first time. New Delhi and Mumbai are among 825 cities across 80 countries and territories that have pledged their support to VOTE EARTH during Earth Hour 2009. This number is growing everyday."
I was much excited about this as I had a feeling that by some way or other we also could be a part of a good cause for Mother Earth.As Day by Day we are depriving the enormous resources of her and the time is not far away for the supply to cut..I talked to my father and mother and they were also excited to join the campaign.We completed the daily chores before 8:30 and took 3-4 chairs into the balcony to beat the heat inside....
At that time I had a feeling to check the neighbourhood to see how many of them are following this good deed.I went out and started walking and the sight I saw was very disheartening.......
Most of the houses of about 20 covered were having there full quota of lights on.Like a family was having dinner, and the lights and fans of the front guest room(no one was there) were still on(srry I had a poke...).
But the thing was there would be a ray of hope in any adverse/bad situation( or the thinking should go like that).I eventually saw a 2-3 houses who had shut down all the lights...(I think it was not the usual power cut!!!!!!!!).I dont have any bad thoughts against the other ones because most of them would be unaware of this...
I just thought of the politicians who should have been the protagonist in spreading this awareness;and what they are doing is sitting idle,attending rallies here and there and wasting the governement money.The next ones in the queue are the ordinary people,working hard to meet two ends and dont have time in the midst for such kind of activities.The general feeling of every one is like this-Wats the big deal in all this?With one's effort the whole world is not going to change.Isnt it?..
"When you change the way you look at things,the things you look at change"
The worst thing was: I didnt thought at that time to enter even one house and tell them of the campaign and make others aware of it."If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it."that should have been the case there.
But now I have a feeling that the whole campaign was a gimmick :basically for the sponsors for getting some financial aid(funding) by setting up shows and some promo activities.
VOTE EARTH by simply switching off your lights for one hour on Saturday, March 28, 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm local time.........that was the catch line.
"Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. In 2008 the message had grown into a global sustainability movement, with 50 million people switching off their lights."
"In this year, India joins Earth Hour for the first time. New Delhi and Mumbai are among 825 cities across 80 countries and territories that have pledged their support to VOTE EARTH during Earth Hour 2009. This number is growing everyday."
I was much excited about this as I had a feeling that by some way or other we also could be a part of a good cause for Mother Earth.As Day by Day we are depriving the enormous resources of her and the time is not far away for the supply to cut..I talked to my father and mother and they were also excited to join the campaign.We completed the daily chores before 8:30 and took 3-4 chairs into the balcony to beat the heat inside....
At that time I had a feeling to check the neighbourhood to see how many of them are following this good deed.I went out and started walking and the sight I saw was very disheartening.......
Most of the houses of about 20 covered were having there full quota of lights on.Like a family was having dinner, and the lights and fans of the front guest room(no one was there) were still on(srry I had a poke...).
But the thing was there would be a ray of hope in any adverse/bad situation( or the thinking should go like that).I eventually saw a 2-3 houses who had shut down all the lights...(I think it was not the usual power cut!!!!!!!!).I dont have any bad thoughts against the other ones because most of them would be unaware of this...
I just thought of the politicians who should have been the protagonist in spreading this awareness;and what they are doing is sitting idle,attending rallies here and there and wasting the governement money.The next ones in the queue are the ordinary people,working hard to meet two ends and dont have time in the midst for such kind of activities.The general feeling of every one is like this-Wats the big deal in all this?With one's effort the whole world is not going to change.Isnt it?..
"When you change the way you look at things,the things you look at change"
The worst thing was: I didnt thought at that time to enter even one house and tell them of the campaign and make others aware of it."If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it."that should have been the case there.
But now I have a feeling that the whole campaign was a gimmick :basically for the sponsors for getting some financial aid(funding) by setting up shows and some promo activities.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Head Spinning.........
Phew....Memento is the movie that made my head spin a little bit for a long time.Most of you will be aware of it as this movie has been adapted to the Bollywood and Kollywood sectors in the name of Ghajini(surya and Aamir resp).I take the word adapted as the plot is far different from what you compare with the hollywood version.But the central theme is the same although.The Indian versions(I didnt see the hindi one)are easy to understand in the first click itself.Another major difference is that there are no songs in it as compared with the desi versions....hehehehe....
A memory inside a memory, Memento is a complicated head spinning adventure.I will not delve much deeper into the plot as I am actually planning to see it for a second time and trying to find out whats lies beneath's beneath!!!!!!!.
part for techies and guys who want to be techies...............
The ironical part is that after seeing this movie,I made some googling on it.The results made my head spin little more.Look what I had found out...Theres a design pattern in the name of Memento.So tech guys this is a must see movie 4 u as u all will gain much more expertise with it.The definition goes like this.......
Without violating encapsulation, capture and externalize an object's internal state so that the object can be restored to this state later.
As I do had some sort of fist fighting with some computer technologies in the past as well as the process is going on,this made me sip three cups of tea in a stretch....and these words are still ringing in my head
remember Sammy Jankis
A memory inside a memory, Memento is a complicated head spinning adventure.I will not delve much deeper into the plot as I am actually planning to see it for a second time and trying to find out whats lies beneath's beneath!!!!!!!.
part for techies and guys who want to be techies...............
The ironical part is that after seeing this movie,I made some googling on it.The results made my head spin little more.Look what I had found out...Theres a design pattern in the name of Memento.So tech guys this is a must see movie 4 u as u all will gain much more expertise with it.The definition goes like this.......
Without violating encapsulation, capture and externalize an object's internal state so that the object can be restored to this state later.
As I do had some sort of fist fighting with some computer technologies in the past as well as the process is going on,this made me sip three cups of tea in a stretch....and these words are still ringing in my head
remember Sammy Jankis
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