To enable Adobe Flash on demand in Google Chrome browser, you do not have to install any plugin like FlashBlock. Chrome has built-in support to ‘Click to Play’. Follow the steps to enable flash just on demand :-

1. Open a blank new tab
2. Type ‘about:flags’ into the address bar and hit enter
3. Scroll down to the botton and enable ‘Click to play’
4. Restart your browser
5. Now click the wrench menu > Options > Under the hood > Content setting > Plug-ins
6. Select ‘Click to play’ from the right hand side
7. Further, you can even use the Exception button to whitelist specific domains like Youtube etc.

Thanks to Mushaf for the Tip.

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I stumbled upon a gem of an iPhone app – MoneyStrands – today. It is an Online financial application,  with a notable exception that it works with majority of banks in India (ICICI Bank in my case) The previous one which I tried -  Mint (Web and iPhone apps) does not have support for Indian financial institutions. The other one which supports – Buxfer (with an iPhone Web App)  – unfortunately does not have a native iPhone app.

I could successfully aggregate my Savings, Credit and Loan accounts with MoneyStrands. You can even unify accounts from different financial institutions. They support over 8000 of them.

MoneyStrands ICICI Dashboard

The Interactive Charts are great to use too.

MoneyStrands Interactive Charts

MoneyStrands even supports allocating/tracking a Budget and Alerts for Balance.

MoneyStrands various Tabs

MoneyStrands iPhone application (iTunes Link) is free, just like their web offering.

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The following list is being updated at the Google Wave Developer Preview (Sandbox). Reproducing here for everyone’s reference.

Google wave Extension List

Robots

(To use robots, add them as a contact, then add the robot-contact to a wave)

Chatbots

• Eliza – ogenex@appspot.com – An implementation of the Eliza chatbot borrowed from the NLTK.
• Elize – elizarobot@appspot.com – Is one of the first robots that was created by non Googler and is very useful if you are feeling alone in your Google Wave client.
• Rude chatbot – notatory@appspot.com – An obnoxious chatbot borrowed from the Natural Language Processing Toolkit.
• TooAngel Wave – In Progress – tooangel-wave@appspot.com – A self learning robot, that will respond to a reply in a more humanoid way

Conversion

• BotURL – boturl@appspot.com – A URL Linker that replaces full URLs with hyperlinks.
• Calcbot – calcbot@appspot.com – This bot will do in place calculations for simple mathematical expressions and allow you to use user defined variables.
• Cartoony – cartoonybot@appspot.com – Replaces the text of every submitted blip with a cartoon balloon that contains the text instead. Colors the balloons based on username.
• Dice Bot – dice-bot@appspot.com – Dice-rolling bot. Dice Bot will replace XdY (X is the number of dice; Y is the number of sides) with the results of those rolls.
• Flippy – flippy-wave@appspot.com – Turns text upside-down.
• Fnordlinky – fnordlinks@appspot.com – Replaces “PMID <number>” with article information from PubMed.
• Hearty Emobot – hearty-emobot@appspot.com – Replaces ASCII art with wingding characters.
• i-cron – i-cron@appspot.com – Evaluates Python expressions. Looks at blips in event, searches for CALC() macros and executes Python code using exec().
• Insulty – megabytemb123@appspot.com – Information Needed
• IPA Bot – ipa-bot@appspot.com – Changes normal letters into special characters used for phonetics.
• Piratify – piratify@appspot.com – Turns whatever you type into “Pirate Speak” .. Arrrr.
• Plotzie – plotzie@appspot.com – Plots sparklines from your data.
• Shortee – Wish – Change “c u l8r” to “see you later” etc.
• Swedish Chef – borkforceone@appspot.com – Changes english into Swedish-Chef Speak. Bork! Bork!
• Syntaxy – kasyntaxy@appspot.com – Syntaxy does blip-by-blip syntax highlighting for a variety of languages including Python, Java, C, C++, html, css and javascript.
• Watexy – watexy@appspot.com – Use LaTeX mathematical language in your Waves!
• Wikify – wikifier@appspot.com – Replaces specific marked up text with a link to Wikipedia or a description relevant to the marked text.

Games

• Hangman – wavehangman@appspot.com – Play Hangman.
• Roshambo – roshambowave@appspot.com – Play Roshambo (Rock / Paper / Scissors).
• Speedy – Wish – Track the words per minute of all participants, competitive typing!

Groups

• Groupy – groupy-robot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.
• Groupy – groupy-the-bot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.

Integration

• drop.io – mikeswaverobot@appspot.com – Creates a drop and puts the info into the wave whenever the robot is added as a participant.
• OpenAustrailia - In Progress – A robot to allow interaction with the OpenAustralia web site.
• PlonieBot – In Progress – ploniebot@appspot.com – Brings wave document editing capabilities to the Plone CMS
• Poppy - In Progress – poppywave@appspot.com – Helps bridge Google Wave conversations to email users outside the Wave.
• Rssybot – rssybot@appspot.com – Turn google wave into an RSS reader!
• Starify – starifybot@appspot.com – Lets you star waves, in sort of bookmarking style.
• Tweety the Twitbot – tweety-wave@appspot.com – You can access your Twitter account.
• Twiliobot – twiliobot@appspot.com – Transforms phone numbers into click-to-call links. If user clicks a link, a call is placed to his phone and to the number in the link. The call can be transcribed and inserted into the wave as text with a link to the audio.
• Wave-Email – In Progress – wave-email@appspot.com – Provide an extension to Google Wave which will allow the integration of both sending and receiving emails.
• Wave Live Messenger – wavelivemessenger@appspot.com – Allows you to chat to your windows live messenger contacts from inside a wave.

Language

• PhilBot – Wish – A suggested solution to the problem of waves with languages you can’t read.
• Rosy Etta – rosy@wavesandbox.com – Translator (40 Languages).

Polling

• Polly the Pollster - polly-wave@appspot.com – Poll Bot.

Search / Aggregation

• Dr Maps – dr-maps@appspot.com – Updates a wave by inserting a map associated to an address.
• Dr Weather – shiny-sky@appspot.com – Gives the weather for a City
• Embedded Search Results – wave-sandbox@appspot.com – Web and Image searches inline.
• FML Blipper – fmlblipper@appspot.com – displays random FML story from www.fmylife.com
• Grauniady – grauniady@appspot.com – Searches the latest items from The Guardian for a given phrase.
• Stocky – stocky-wave@appspot.com – Detects stock symbols from a wave and updates it with the live stock price.
• Wavethingy – wavethingy@appspot.com – Searches Amazon for DVDs and books, and gives the author a cut of any purchases made off the links.
• Yelpy – yelpful@appspot.com - Searches Yelp with a user defined location and category.

Utilities

• AmazonBot – amazon-withwaves-com@appspot.com – Enables social product research and shopping on Amazon.com. Wave participants can share products & reviews with contacts in real-time thanks to automatic queries by the AmazonBot against conversation keywords. The AmazonBot gadget can detect products and return inline product links or a custom full product browser.
• Bloggy – blog-wave@appspot.com – Information Needed
• Bit.ly Bot – bitly-bot@appspot.com – Shortens the url using bitly.
• Botty – Wish - Will automatically add a set of useful bots to a wave according to a collection of bots (so they don’t have to individually be added when you use them all the time.
• CountColon – countcolon@appspot.com – Adds text statistics to your blips (words, lines, etc.)
• Companion Sphere – companionsphere@appspot.com – Collection of geek utils, first working verb is “lookup” for wikipedia/wiktionary one-line descriptions.
• Databot – Wish – Will start as soon as the GData interface is published.
• Emoticony – emoticonbot@appspot.com – Replaces text representations of emoticons with the relevant image.
• JBREAKOUT BOT ADDED – jbreakout@appspot.com – Debug utility that reports event triggers.
• Maison – maison@appspot.com – Makes blips public at http://maison.appspot.com.
• Multi – multi-wave@appspot.com – A quote collector. Reply a blip you want to quote with ‘quote this’ and randomly display a quote with ‘quote <wave@account.com>’. The bot is still being under development but you can try playing with it.
• Natural Language Processing – knowledge-books@appspot.com – Adds blips with NLP analysis.
• Nokar – lab2market@appspot.com – Has many features such as translations, image insertion, insert last tweets etc.
• Posterous-robot – posterous-robot@appspot.com – A robot for posterous.com user to post blog in Google Wave. Here is how to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous.
• Publisher – wave-publisher@appspot.com – Information Needed
• Skimmy – wave-skimmy@appspot.com – Converts text emoticons, from : ) to img. Has a bookmarklet which creates a popup menu to insert emoticons for which the code is unknown.
• Smiley – smiley-bot@appspot.com – Changes the smiley symbols to smiley images.
• Smiley - In Progress – smiley-robot@appspot.com - Changes the smiley symbols to smiley images.
• Style Chart Robot – stylechart@appspot.com – Inserts a chart into a wave.

Wave Management

• Bouncy – bouncy-wave@appspot.com – Allows you to remove robots from a wave. Doesn’t seem to work on real people though, and laughs if you try to ask it to kick itself out. To get it to kick a bot out, type “bounce:name@domain.com”
• Linear – Wish – Enforce all replies to be to the main wave. If a user replies to a reply, remove it and place it as a reply to the main wavelet.
• Read Onlie – readonliebot@appspot.com – Records the original wave content. Whenever it’s edited, the content is replaced with the original. Simple as that.
• Seekdroid – seekdroid@appspot.com – You can list Robots, add them and find them out, easy to use. In continuous development. Website with all the information seekdroid.appspot.com.
• Sweepy – sweepy-wave@appspot.com – Remove empty, whitespace-only blips.
• Taggy – taggy-wave@appspot.com – Recognize #hashtags and add them as tags to the wave.
• Tocgen – tocgen@appspot.com – Table of Contents auto-generated and updated based on the h1,h2,h3,h4 in a wave.
• Twitusernames – twitusernames@appspot.com – Replaces all Twitter @username with links to the Twitter accounts.

Gadgets

(To use gadgets, once editing a blip, just click on the green puzzle piece,  and enter the url into the bottom text box)

Utilities

• Ajax Animator Gadget – In Progress – http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/wave/manifest.xml – A fully integrated multi-user web based vector graphic animation authoring environment.
• AmazonBot Gadgett – http://amazon-withwaves-com.appspot.com/gadgets/AmazonProductList.xml - The AmazonBot gadget can detect products and return inline product links or a custom full product browser.
• Bidder – http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/bidder.xml – Simple Auction.
• Checky – http://wave-gadgets.appspot.com/checky.xml – Basecamp-like checklists with drag-and-drop.
• Click me – http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/hellowave.xml – Shows a button with a counter. Each time the button gets clicked, the counter is incremented by one. Shows off how the state interaction works.
• HTML- http://wave-ide.appspot.com/html.xml – Embed any HTML into a wave.
• <iframe> – http://wave-ide.appspot.com/iframe.xml – Embed any web page (as <iframe>) into a wave.
• iWave – http://gadget.wave.to/iWave/iWave.xml – Allows you to create a profile on wave to make wave just a little more personal. Uses facebook connect to retrieve your details if you sign in.
• Licensing – In Progress – http://wave-license.appspot.com/license_gadget.xml – Creative Commons RDF Embedding – Planning Stage.
• Maps – http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/101415471413908368316/mappy.xml -Embed Google Map.
• Napkin – http://my-wave-gadgets.appspot.com/wave/NapkinGadget.xml – Example of Flash/Flex Wave Gadget, similar to Whiteboard gadget above – source on Google Code.
• QuakeBot – In Progress – Server information on the Quake 3 protocol.
• Raffly – http://raffly.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/sandbox/raffly-xml1/raffly.xml – Insert this gadget to select a random participant from your wave to be the winner. The winner of what? Well that’s up to you :-)
• Ratings – http://google-wave-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/extensions/gadgets/ratings/ratings.xml – Lets participants rate and review a topic (movie, restaurant, etc) in a wave and shows a tally of the result.
• Slashdot Gadget – http://www.m1cr0sux0r.com/slashdot.xml – Loads latest Headlines from Slashdot.
• Troco – An experimental peer-to-peer currency –  http://troco.ourproject.org/gadget/org.ourproject.troco.client.TrocoWaveGadget.gadget.xml – Aims to provide a decentralized complementary community currency system, that is, a peer-to-peer currency system. Also you can see it as an IOU or promissory note based system. More info click here.
• Vector Editor – http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/wave/vectoreditor.xml – A cross platform collaborative real time vector graphics editor.
• Whiteboard gadget – http://vps.michaelrose.id.au/canvas.xml – Draw on a virtual whiteboard.
• Who is Coming? – http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/areyouin/gadget.xml -Show a list of all people that have said whether they will come or not.

Games

• Backgammon – Wish – Remove all of one’s own checkers from the board before one’s opponent can do the same. [Wikipedia]
• Battleship – Wish – Displays different board based on user.
• Boxes – In Progress – Connect lines to make boxes and win.
• Cards – http://wave-cards.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cards.xml – Play card games.
• Chess – http://gerculanum.appspot.com/gadgets/com.example.chessgadget.client.ChessGadget.gadget.xml – Play chess.
• Connect 4/Four-in-a-row – In Progress – sdunster@wavesandbox.com – http://www.sdunster.com/wave/four.xml – 2 users + observers, turn locking, just waiting to write win-detection code.
• Floodit – http://gadget.wave.to/floodit/game.xml – 2 player race to fill a board with colors.
• Magnetic Poetry – http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107558585548952247431/fridge-11.xml – Re-arrange random words to form poetry.
• Match them colors! – In Progress – Match 3 / gem matching game.
• Othello – Wish – Play Reversi.
• Sudoku – http://blah.appspot.com/wave/sudoku/sudoku.xml – Play Sudoku.
• The Button – http://hyperthese.net/wave-gadgets/the-button.xml – A useless (I mean USELESS) game.

Hooks

• CVS integration – Wish – CVS history can be converted into a wave with playback.
• GIT integration – Wish - GIT history can be imported and played back (dffs).
• SVN integration – Wish - SVN History can be converted into a wave with playback.

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So You were fortunate enough to be invited to the Google Wave first party!. Once you login you will see a Welcome wave which has links to installing various Google Wave extensions. Here are two ways I found to embed Twitter functionality within Google Wave.

Using Tweety-Wave

Add “tweety-wave@appspot.com” in to your Contacts. Then create a new Wave and drag and drop Tweety-Wave in to the Wave. Then the Gadget will be automatically be opened within the Wave content box. Please remember to enable popup(s) for the Wave webpage. A Twitter oAuth page will appear asking you to authorize Tweety-Wave app to publish Tweets on your behalf. Now you can tweet directly from this wave.

Through TwitterGadget

Create a new private wave. Click on the “Add Gadgets by URL” and enter the values as “http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml”

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While hosting this blog over the last few years, I’ve had short and long-term stints with a variety of web hosting providers. And I changed my Webhost just recently once again!. Selecting a Web hosting provider who suits your real needs are never an easy task. You usually don’t get a chance to try before buy – as many of them does not provide a trial-period.

Free and Forever option

If you want your blog to live ‘forever’, without requiring you to make payments etc, the best option is to go for hosted blogging services like WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr. The advantage with these providers are that, you don’t have to pay for the storage and maintenance of your site. Moreover if you want to use a specific top level domain as your Web address, they support them too. The disadvantage being lesser options to customize the look n Feel and functionality of your blog. Sometimes providers like WordPress deny you placing ads on such blogs to monetize your content. I started blogging at BlogSpot and Jroller. Presently I maintain a Posterous and Tumblr Log.

Shared Web Hosting

Here you will be provided a virtual workspace to deploy and manage your blog software (like WordPress, Drupal etc). To assist, you are mostly given a easy to use control panel. In this type of hosting, you are essentially sharing the computing resources with others, in a not-so-isolated fashion. The advantages are better scalability, good support and cheap rates. If you are unlucky to share the resources with a high-load blog/site, you will ultimately suffer!. Sometimes, these providers despite offering unlimited bandwidth and storage restrict you with storage-file-types(for e.g. only text/html files) and CPU utilization. If you happen to exceed these limits (e.g If you are SlashDotted or Dugg), there is no option to increase the capacity on demand. I have used BlueHost and SiteGround earlier.

Grid Hosting

This is a newer trend propagated by the enthusiasm around ‘Cloud Computing’. Most of their mechanics are similar to Shared Web Hosting, but the differentiator is “On Demand Scalability”. To make your blog highly available and scalable, the backend-databases (e.g MySQL) here are mostly deployed as hot swappable instances / clusters. The ‘elastic behavior’ of the service makes it a popular choice these days. I have used MediaTemple earlier.

Slice / VPS Hosting

This requires you to completely manage the virtual hardware infrastructure provisioned to you over Zen / VMWare etc. You are responsible for everything on this. You may have to start by setting up a firewall itself – as the provisioned image/slice is just a raw one. Some providers gives you an option to bake your favorite Linux / BSD distribution on creation. Usually such slices have limited storage and non-shared exclusive but limited RAM (e.g 256 MB). This is an excellent solution if you have good Linux/Unix experience – as there is not really a limit to what you can do with the slice (e.g Run Java Server, Proxy Service etc). Backups are provided mostly as simple scheduled clone of your virtual instance/ slice. Dynamically resizing the storage and RAM are supported mostly. You are experiencing this blog on a Slice with SliceHost!

Who are the Vendors?

Word of the mouth (or Twitter!) is a big factor in estimating the popularity of the Vendors in the above Web Hosting Categories. You may search through Twitter or Ask your friends ( or Me!) to get an opinion. There are specialized services on the Web (recommended) like WebHostingGeeks who keeps updated ranked lists of Vendors with real customer reviews and ratings. They regularly have vendors with shared hosting to those who provide a high-end dedicated server.

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.mac is an online storage and sync service offered by Apple. If you are an OS X user, .mac could be seen tightly integrated with the operating system. The service costs a slightly heap $99 annual fee. No more!.. with the DotMac opensource project, you can host your own .Mac service.

Currently DotMac supports:-

• Data synchronization for any application that supports .mac (iCal, Address Book, notes, etc…)
• iDisk/iDisk Sync
• iWeb Publishing
• Backup

This is a work in progress and expect to see a lot of improvements further.

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Google Docs can be easily transformed to a Daily Journal with the following easy steps:-

1. Create a “New Document” called “Daily Journal”
2. Insert a “Comment” or press Ctrl-M
3. Make your Journal entries above the Comment.
4. Do steps 2 & 3 – Everyday!

Since Google Docs can make use of Google Gears offline storage capabilities, you can even make journal entries without an Internet connection. All your entries will be saved and synced once you go online next time. Simple yet effective!

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If you like the TaskPaper way of GTD – which is nothing but a plain text file – , you might be interested in the following developments too:-TaskPaper for Windows – ToDoPaper - ToDoPaper is inspired by HogBay’s to-do application for the Mac ( See the comments section for author email id)                   TaskPaper online – This is an online task management tool crafted just like TaskPaper.            So – Do it!

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You may have seen Jaiku – the nanoblogging platform which is somewhat similar to Twitter. The Twitter is very simplistic in what it does. But not so fun. It’s pretty bland to state ‘What you are doing?’ and archive it as a life stream of events. Jaiku takes off from there..

You can do all of your twittering things with Jaiku too. Plus, You have IRC style channels on various topics – you may even create one. All of my blog feeds can be aggregated over to my life stream. All Jaikus are now wrapped into a widget and is placed on to the sidebar of this blog. The SMS, eMail and IM notifications feature works pretty well. The lack of status feature is what I liked more about Jaiku – talk about some change in philosophy! ;). I prefer to use my Facebook status more – if at all. MobileJuhu is an interesting native Jaiku client for iPhone which I’m using.

Let me know if you want to join me on Jaiku  – in the comments section.

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The Asus P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n motherboard has a special boot sequence (ExpressGate,SplashTop) which loads an embedded Linux Operating system with Firefox and Skype pre-configured. The system will be up and running in quick 5 seconds. Quite handy when you quickly want to browse the Internet or grant a guest access for someone to your PC.

Hopefully, this technology would become cheaper soon. I would definitely want this feature on my next Laptop.

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