au revoir 2010

2010 had been one of the most "happening" year of my life. I wouldn't say the best ever, but certainly the most happening.

One thing that I did, that I can be proud of myself any day, is www.wheelofhope.co.uk, A website I did for free, for a charitable institution taking care of destitute children in Kerala.

I brought my first ever bike, and I learned to ride one, which had been my ambition since I was a kid. I also had my first ever road accident where I had to go to a hospital to get patched up. ;)

Thanks to my few good friends, I started freelancing again, this time with better scope and profits.

I brought some things that I always wanted to buy but never did, because I wanted it to be from my own making, the list includes a business phone, a casual phone, a camera and several other nick-knacks.

I've had more online friends than in real life (loser ? oh yeah!) but it certainly is a great pleasure when you actually get to meet the people you've known for years in real life. I had that pleasure this year, twice!

I realized, money is only a very effective tool, but never a metaphor for happiness, and sad as it is, I learned it the hard way.

I met Mousey Manisha, who is undoubtedly and irrevocably my favorite blogger ever! And an aspiring web-designer, who inspired me to start/resume my blogging.

I've always wanted to do this personal project of mine for a long time, this year I finally got the chance to do it as my academic project. Its codenamed Katalist and will hopefully go live in about 4 months.

The most important thing that happened in my life this year? For the first time in my life I came face to face with the Lord, my God. Several times and several places, where I felt his grace, care and love, even when I knew I least deserved it.

BSNL Night-time, connect automatically using scheduler

If you have the BSNL or any other PPPoE connection that gives you free time, like from 2 AM to 8 AM as in BSNL and you want to schedule your heavy downloads for that time, read this post.

The key idea here is to schedule using Windows Task Scheduler or Scheduled Tasks according to the version of windows you are using.

First thing to do, create a dial-up connection named BSNL in "network connections", chances are that you already have one.  If you're using auto-connection where you get net if you just turn on the modem, you should configure your modem/router to connect via PAP. To do this, type in http://192.168.1.1 in the address bar of your favorite browser (this is in a default setup, if your router is located at a different IP, enter that). You will need to enter an username and password, this is generally "admin" "admin" but can vary with the kind of router you are using. This should take you to the configuration page of your router, where you will set WAN to use PAP instead of AUTO in PPPoE.

Next thing, create a batch file in System32 (I say, System32, you could do this anywhere you want) to do this, goto Start -> Run -> type in "cmd" without quotes and hit enter

Once you have your command prompt, navigate to System32, under a default windows installation, this is what you have to do type in "CD C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\" Once you are in system32, do the following

COPY CON CONNECT.BAT
@ECHO OFF
RASDIAL BSNL USERNAME PASSWORD //Replace with your username and password
^Z  //CTRL+Z

You should type in the last line using CTRL+Z together don't literally type in ^Z. Now you made the connect.bat. Running this file should get you connected to the internet, you can test it by running connect.bat from command prompt.

Now open windows task scheduler and configure to run Connect.bat at 2:02 AM everyday.
Now using task-scheduler, you should also setup termination of connection and shutdown of machine at 8:00. You can do this either way, either you can simply disconnect the connection or shutdown the machine.

To disconnect the machine, setup a program to run at 7:58 every day. You could either run RASDIAL /DISCONNECT or to shutdown the machine, you can run SHUTDOWN.EXE /S /F /T 59

Hope that helped, if you still have any doubts, post it in the comments.

integrating facebook share or like with open graphics og tags on wordpress

There are a million different ways of adding a facebook share or like button to your wordpress site, there are plugins, there are tutorials, but those never works right.

What is the proper way of adding Facebook like button ?

More often that not, when you add the Facebook like button to your Wordpress website, the like button picks up the wrong content, the wrong image, and the wrong description and wrong link if you set it to work automatically, if you're a Wordpress developer who frequently uses premium themes like I do, there may be thumbnail images attached with the posts (sometimes you want the like button to display the first post in the page, in the home page, may be you want to display your logo) 

And if you've done enough research, you'd know that you should use the Open Graph Protocol og:tags, but og:tags works only in the header, may be the image you want to put up could be the generated within the loop, so how do you put an image that's in the loop ? Its simple, you create mulitple loops. Create a loop in the header (between the  tags) that will generate content for the meta data and then generate another one for your posts. Here's how I did it, if you're too lazy, you could copy my code.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml" xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<?php if (have_posts()):while(have_posts()):the_post();endwhile;endif;?>
<!-- Facebook Opengraph -->
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="your_app_id" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="your_admin_id" />
<meta property="og:url" content="<?php the_permalink() ?>"/>
<?php if (is_single()) { ?>
<meta property="og:title" content="<?php single_post_title(''); ?>" />
<meta property="og:description" content="<?php echo strip_tags(get_the_excerpt($post->ID)); ?>" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:image" content="<?php echo wp_get_attachment_thumb_url( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ) ) ?>" />
<?php } else { ?>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>" />
<meta property="og:description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:image" content="<?php bloginfo('template_url') ?>/path/to-your/logo.jpg" />
<?php } ?>

dear me

Dear damned and loose low waist jeans,

The best time to remind me that i'm not wearing a belt is NOT when i'm trying to cross the national highway in heavy traffic.

Sincerely,
The underwear that got all the attention today.

revival and whats new.

no, its not good bye to wordpress or my original website here at thinkaloud.co.cc. Its just that I thought I'd use blogger, I need to be able to post quickly and on the go, and I want my folks to read it. And my phone has this nice little app for blogger, do I need more reasons? All in all a good choice.

So I thought i'd just revive this blog back to life, put in some posts and stuff, only they'll be slightly technical in nature, like "my experiments with wordpress and flex" and so on, as opposed to the wanna-be funny guy rantings which is always looked upon with disdain and scorned by those elite intellectuals who can't sleep at night 'cos they're still weeping from the soap opera they secretly watched behind their own backs.

Whats new? I've been working on a couple of new projects lately, my personal pet projects including a portfolio website that'll go live pretty soon, then I'll be leading the development of a new social network engine codenamed "katalist" which is expected to go live sometime in March 2011, very innovative and easy to use networking tool, its actually my academic project but I still have high hopes for it, ( hmm thats not quite like me) I have two other major projects under development but the details of which may not be revealed for obvious reasons.

On the personal front, missus and I are still quite the happy couple, she's been attending seminars on "how to have a cute eccentric boyfriend and still be sane" which I guess is paying off in a big way, and for those who got the irony in it, yes, its also positive and I love us!

My good friend Amropali Debnath has a new blog here, which is awesome and she's been trying real hard to put it out for people to see, so here's my two cents. On a very related note, my boy Deepak Jose fondly known as DJ in feminine circles, have a wonderful portfolio setup here and anyone out there looking for a graphic designer should hire him, and even if you're not looking for one, you could still browse his portfolio and it'd be fun :)

right wrong and me

I haven't checked my blog in a long time, and what do I see ? one of the experimental themes with a (lady) friend's photo in it and some random posts, complete mayhem and junkyard feel (not the one with cool gothic/grunge effect and heavy-metal bgm, but more like a dusty, hot and sweaty kinda junkyard, so I decided to clean up...

Like i always say, sometimes its right to do the wrong thing, and right now is one of those times, so I deleted all my posts here, made it fresh and new here at www.thinkaloud.co.cc , visit, read, comment, and I don't have ads you can click, so long people!