Nandan Nilekani’s ideas for India’s future

One of the TED talk which is of relevance to Indians. Nandan Nilekani, visionary CEO of Infosys, talks about evolution of ideas in India.

Fun with Google Suggestions

Nowadays we tell everything to Google. We think it is very safe to reveal our secrets to that tiny little search box. More or less it is true. But when it comes to the collective consciousness of the world that web represents, nothing is secret.

Here is a sample. How much fun we can have with Google suggestions?. Anyway Google suggests these words because these are the most wanted things and you may be looking for one among these. Are you?

What do you regret most?

How sad..

Words that saved me from a sea of sadness.

On 12th of August 2002, my very first girlfriend committed suicide. I was only 16 and my whole world had collapsed. I started drowning in the sea of sadness. Following are the words from a letter by my beloved teacher which saved me.

Something which is very important to us will have a unique form in our mind. Suddenly your physical senses realize that such a form is changed entirely from what it was. Your mind won’t adapt to it easily. In your mind, lots of other things are built over it.
This conflict is felt as sadness. Once you are able to resolve this conflict, sadness will disappear.

Are we in control of our own decisions?

Our power for thinking is very limited when it is compared with the complexity of the world we live in. It is evident from the mistakes we make in perception and thinking.

Here is a nice TED video titled Are we in control of our own decisions? by Dan Ariely.

The wrong map of India

Every Indian has a lovely picture of India’s map imprinted on mind. What do you feel if someone say that map is wrong?

Well, today’s most authentic public knowledge engines say it is wrong.

Following is a map of India from Google insights for a test query. See that Jammu & Kashmir.

Another one, the map of India returned from wolframalpha.com for query ‘India’

.                                                                                     

The Wikipedia image shows some more decency. But we can’t tolerate this too.

Finally, one from Google maps. They show the correct map as we say it. Why? Because Google maps is the most viewed one? so that it won’t provoke a billion people?

What we should believe? They are wrong or what our teachers taught in primary schools is wrong? Definitely it hurts a true Indian.

The funny thing about me.

After working for few extra hours, I was thinking about the previous post. I decided to get down and stepped into lift.

Pressed the door close button and resumed my thought, assuming that lift is going to ground floor. I didn’t notice anything unusual for next 15 mins. Then i noticed something wrong. Sstill I haven’t reached ground floor!  LCD showed it is still on 4th floor. May be some problem with lift? Oh shit I forgot to press floor’0′ button.

The funny thing about Governmet Job

Government expect infinite work from you. If you don’t do anything also, its fine,

Liferay- Drop down Menu Portlet

Here is my Next portlet. Hope you enjoyed the Liferay theme with multilevel dropdown menu. What if you can put that drop down menu as a portlet? Here is what I did for that.

1. Here let’s start by downloading the required files. [dropdown_menu portlet.zip]

2. Put these files in webapps\ROOT\html\portlet\ext\dropdown_menu\

3. Copy the following code to webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\portlet-ext.xml under <portlet-app> tag

<portlet>
<portlet-name>dropdown_menu</portlet-name>
 <display-name>Dropdown Menu</display-name>
<portlet-class>com.liferay.util.bridges.jsp.JSPPortlet</portlet-class>
 <init-param>
 <name>view-jsp</name>
 <value>/html/portlet/ext/dropdown_menu/view.jsp</value>
 </init-param>
 <expiration-cache>0</expiration-cache>
 <supports>
 <mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
 </supports>
 <resource-bundle>com.liferay.portlet.StrutsResourceBundle</resource-bundle>
 <security-role-ref>
 <role-name>guest</role-name>
 </security-role-ref>
 <security-role-ref>
 <role-name>power-user</role-name>
 </security-role-ref>
 <security-role-ref>
 <role-name>user</role-name>
 </security-role-ref>
 </portlet>

4. Copy the following code to webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\liferay-portlet-ext.xml under <portlets> tag

<portlet>
<portlet-name>dropdown_menu</portlet-name>
 <configuration-action-class>com.liferay.portlet.sitemap.action.ConfigurationActionImpl</configuration-action-class>
<portlet-data-handler-class>com.liferay.portlet.sitemap.lar.SitemapPortletDataHandlerImpl</portlet-data-handler-class>
 <use-default-template>true</use-default-template>
 <restore-current-view>false</restore-current-view>
 <layout-cacheable>true</layout-cacheable>
 <instanceable>true</instanceable>
<private-request-attributes>false</private-request-attributes>
<private-session-attributes>false</private-session-attributes>
 <render-weight>50</render-weight>
 <header-portlet-css>/html/portlet/ext/dropdown_menu/css.jsp</header-portlet-css>
 <css-class-wrapper>portlet-site-map</css-class-wrapper>
 <add-default-resource>true</add-default-resource>
 </portlet>

5.  Also make an entry in webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\liferay-display.xml under <category name=”category.cms”>> as follows

 <display>
 <category name="category.cms">
 ......
<portlet id="dropdown_menu" />
 </category>
 .......
 </display>

You can even customize the root folder for the  drop down menu.

Have you seen the dynamic sitemap portlet? This is a modification of that one. I applied CSS to display the sitemap portlet as a drop down menu. It works pretty well in Firefox and Ie.

WolframAlpha put to Test.

Wolfram alpha is the first step to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Wolfram announced the release of Alpha in this month. I was extreamly curious about how the world is gonna change with this. Definitely it will make your homeworks a piece of cake. What will happen to our favourite answering machine google? on the brighter side, i hope google will come up with something better than Alpha. About 6 hours back, they announced the release of much awaited Alpha in Wolfram_Alpha tweets. I jumped to Their web page. Most of the weird questions i asked lead me no where. Thogh I am impressed with the resuls when the questions was direct. Here is some questions i tried and the answers it retrieved . My exact queries are marked in red.

Liferay Dynamic Site Map Portlet

Here is my second liferay portlet. I modified the usual site map portlet to work like a  dynamic site explorer (see the screen shot).

you can download the required files here.

Download Dynamic Site Map Portlet[site_map.zip ]

to modify your current site map portlet, extract these files and overwrite over webapps\ROOT\html\portlet\site_map directory.

If you want to create a new portlet, follow these steps.

1. rename the extracted folder to sitemap_1

2. create a folder under webapps\ROOT\html\portlet\ named ext

3. copy sitemap_1 folder to ext folder

4. copy the following code to webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\portlet-ext.xml

<portlet>
<portlet-name>sitemap_1</portlet-name>
 <display-name>Site Map 1</display-name>
<portlet-class>com.liferay.util.bridges.jsp.JSPPortlet</portlet-class>
 <init-param>
 <name>view-jsp</name>
 <value>/html/portlet/ext/sitemap_1/view.jsp</value>
 </init-param>
 <expiration-cache>0</expiration-cache>
 <supports>
 <mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
 </supports>
 <resource-bundle>com.liferay.portlet.StrutsResourceBundle</resource-bundle>
 <security-role-ref>
 <role-name>guest</role-name>
 </security-role-ref>
 <security-role-ref>
 <role-name>power-user</role-name>
 </security-role-ref>
 <security-role-ref>
 <role-name>user</role-name>
 </security-role-ref>
 </portlet>

5. copy the following code to webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\liferay-portlet-ext.xml

<portlet>
<portlet-name>sitemap_1</portlet-name>
 <configuration-action-class>com.liferay.portlet.sitemap.action.ConfigurationActionImpl</configuration-action-class>
<portlet-data-handler-class>com.liferay.portlet.sitemap.lar.SitemapPortletDataHandlerImpl</portlet-data-handler-class>
 <use-default-template>true</use-default-template>
 <restore-current-view>false</restore-current-view>
 <layout-cacheable>true</layout-cacheable>
 <instanceable>true</instanceable>
<private-request-attributes>false</private-request-attributes>
<private-session-attributes>false</private-session-attributes>
 <render-weight>50</render-weight>
 <header-portlet-css>/html/portlet/ext/sitemap_1/css.jsp</header-portlet-css>
 <css-class-wrapper>portlet-site-map</css-class-wrapper>
 <add-default-resource>true</add-default-resource>
 </portlet>

6.  make an entry in webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\liferay-display.xml under <category> as follows

<category name="category.cms">
.
.
.
.
.
<portlet id="sitemap_1" />
</category>

7. Restart lifery.

you can locate your new portlet under Content Management