Using google webmaster tools for your blog/website

For those of you who have made new wordpress blogs/websites and want to make sure that Google’s search engine sees your blogs/site follow these steps:

1>Make a google account if you don’t have one.
2>Go to login webmaster tools
3>Add your blog/site .To verify add a page in your blog with the google verification code as page title.It is not necessary to write anything on that.You can see that on my blog.
eg. http://varunthacker.wordpress.com/google5f7e6c733c94181ahtml/
3>Once verified you need to submit a sitemap.This is important for google to be able to crawl all pages.For this in the google webmaster tools dashboard click sitemap and just add /sitemap.xml after your url and click submit sitemap.
4>so by now your blog is registered on google webmaster tools and you have submitted your sitemap.
5>Depending on the number of hits your site gets statistics will start showing up for your blog!

P.S-if you have a website you can follow these steps but you need to make a sitemap of your web site here and make sure to save it such that it comes up as yourwebsite.com/sitemaps.xml.This feature wordpress offers by default on your blog.

Do comment if you face problems.

Google page on my blog

Well for those of you are wondering on what “google5f7e6c733c94181a.html” this page is ,It is simple a page that i was told to add by google to let it verify my blog for it to start indexing my blog.

In my following post next week I shall be writing more on SEO for your wordpress blog(being hosted on wordpress or not) and a compilation of tips and tricks which is part of a talk that me and my friend Manu Gupta are holding in college.

World of Goo is so cool

Well I happened to get a copy of this game called World of Goo from my friend .At first I was apprehensive about the game then I played it and now after finishing the game I say this is one of the better games I have come across .Games don’t need to be 20gb(gta IV) in size to be good.I say the 60+ Mb World of Goo game has enthralled everyone.

These are the reviews available at gamespot and ign respectively.

About 2D Boy
“2D Boy is a brave new indie game studio based in San Francisco, making games the old fashioned way – a team of two, no money, and a whole lot of “love”. Our goal is to make games that everyone can play, with gameplay nobody has seen before.”

For more information and to purchase a copy of the game click here

Everyone please do try out the game if you haven’t heard of it.Its available on Linux too!

ascii vs unicode

ANSI is an organization that standardizes various areas, both public and private. It is an acronym for American National Standards Institute. ANSI has standardized many areas of computing. One of the standards in computers was the character set (letters, numbers, and symbols) that a computer uses. This standard was called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). This standard provided 256 different symbols that a computer can use. It was quick, efficient, and easy to implement. All modern operating systems fully understand ASCII.

As history as shown us that 640K ought to be enough for anybody…NOT(in this case 256 characters) thus the need for more characters led to Unicode which allowed for up to 65,536 different characters.

Interesting Fact:
So the question now becomes, if Windows NT supports both ASCII and Unicode, why do Unicode programs run faster. To answer this you have to understand Windows NT itself. All operating systems have what is called a “kernel.” The kernel is the heart of the OS; In Windows NT the kernel is written in Unicode, and therefore only understands Unicode. When an ANSI program runs on Windows NT, the OS must convert the strings from ASCII to Unicode. This takes both time to convert everything, and memory to store both copies (ASCII and Unicode). Whereas a Unicode program has straight access to the kernel and is faster.

The modern implementation of Unicode are:
Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java,JavaScript, LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML,python,etc. and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products.

Setting up google app engine

I would like to start off by saying what is google app engine?
Google App Engine is a platform for building and hosting web applications on Google Web Servers
To know all about app engine click here
So now if you are interested in making an application without the hassels of setting up servers or bothering about security issues and just want to concentrate on your code then you can get started by downloading the sdk from here
App engine is platform independent and after downloading this you can get started by testing your application on a local web server(apache) and then hosting it up on Google servers .

On Windows:
First of all you will need a python interpreter installed v2.5 and above .So if you don’t have it installed download it from here.
After downloading the msi file just let it install.I am assuming that it is installed on d:\\Program Files\Google\google_appengine
Now open command prompt and cd to that directory.Once you are in that directory all you need to type in is python dev_appserver.py demos\guestbook\
Now you will a message and the demo application provided is open on your localhost on port 8080.Now open your browser and type in http://localhost:8080/
The application should be running.Now you are all set to make your own application.

On Linux:
Just download the zip file and extract to any directory suppose Desktop.Open terminal and
cd Desktop/google_appengine/
python dev_appserver.py demos/guestbook/
Now you will a message and the demo application provided is open on your localhost on port 8080.Now open your browser and type in http://localhost:8080/
The application should be running.Now you are all set to make your own application.

A developers guide is available here.

A smart way to read your pdf’s

If you hate reading pdfs on adobe reader because it is too slow try Foxit reader.Its fast,very!

This is a freeware and packs in only essential features thereby making it way faster.
There are a few addons available here.It also mentions how to install Foxit firefox plugin.

One smart feature which I love is that when reading e-books i hate searching for the page where i was last time.So all you need to do after installing is go to Edit->Preferences>General->History and tick the Restore last view settings when reopening check box.So the next time you open the same pdf file it opens up where you left it.

Make your linux system look like a mac

Well frankly who doesn’t like a Macs!The only thing that goes against me buying one is money.When i see a dell with better configuration for the same money…i think twice(the ironic part is that i am stuck with a thinkpad provided by my college ).I put in linux onto my laptop.First Ubuntu and then Fedora.I am not going into my experiences with both as of now.Perhaps later on when i have a more complete knowledge before commenting.So now i want it to look like a Mac.

This is what you need to download.

It is well documented.Just download this pdf

This guide is for Ubuntu users.If you are using any other distro then you shouldn’t have any problems either.Even if they do crop up just leave a comment or google it.

Exporting your own firefox profile from windows to linux

When i first installed Ubuntu I wanted my entire mozilla firefox profile including all saved passwords,bookmarks,addons,settings to linux without manually having to do it again.SO here is a simple way in which u can transfer the entire firefox profile from windows to Linux.

The profile folder in windows is located under
C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

inside this there is a .default folder like 5jgv87h1.default

all you have to do is copy all contents of this file and copy paste in to this directory in linux
press ctrl and h to show all hidden files
/home/Account Name/.mozilla

this is the file where the firefox profile is located.
just copy the contents into a similar 5jgv87h1.default folder(The 8 character folder name is randomly generated by firefox)
Replace all the files when asked and your firefox has all the settings,addons,bookmarks,saved passwords etc. with the same theme in linux..

The alarm clock

This is one of the applications i have made for nokia phones with symbian s60 OS. If you are one of those people who have troubles waking up in the morning try this application….

The Working…

The alarm clock plays an alarm sound at the time specified and simultaneously displays a randomly generated string. The user has to enter that verification code exactly to deactivate the alarm. The alarm does not deactivate till the user enters the correct verification code

The Priority Table…

Low->5 character long string
Medium->7 character long string
You Will Wake Up->10 character long string and sms to a friend

Now all you have to do is download the source code from the posted link and change the extension from .doc to .py and volla….That is the source code.Just run it on your phone.

the source code

Hello world!

Welcome to  Varun Thacker’s Blog.Doesn’t the title sound like the first program you wrote when you learn a new language….Well for me be it blogging….