Wishing everyone at WoW a very happy and safe diwali
enjoy maadi !

iam going to use this post to gather the initial views/thoughts about this idea which iam calling GodsOwnChild .

Long time ago i did write a post about how i believed Uthavum Karangal and other similar associations are doing a wonderful job .something each one of must also be doing .it was in the same post that Honey Bee commented why she thinks they aren’t actually doing a great job .

And i think her view was fair enough ,as much as famous these instituions may be and as big and remarkable work they seem to be doing ,the truth is there are still hundreds of such organisation which are struggling to support their cause . Money hasn’t simply reached them .

Two reasons that i think could be primary reasons

1.Lack of visibility

2.Lack of network

And i believe both visibility and networking are very essential for these organisations to survive.

GodsOwnChild is a small effort to be able to highlight such organisations through the web and hopefully be a channel for people who have the heart to give will be able to connect .

Anyone who visits an orphange or a school with limited resources and needing more ,would write down a description of he situation,needs and if possible pictures/interviews/audio of the people/kids and also the contact details so that people can reach out to the needy .

My idea is not only to write about the needs or poverty but also to find stories ,rather heroes among them ,for they would be great examples and people know that with some help from all of us the organisations could possible produce more heroes .

For the moment its only me who would be writing .But i would love to see people joining in. Not necessarily people who write content.

Designers who can make a great theme for wordpress ,people who can share camera’s.people who can help people doing the interviews with travel .

Helping maintain the content quality and contribute monetarily as well .

We are just starting up so feel free to reach out to me if you have an idea/thought or would like to join in and take this idea forward .

contact : t@theyagar.com

Mobile: +91 9962550285

PS:any WP designers listening ?

our bot for twitter got listed on twitter help page ! but infortunately we are unable to run the bot ! any one ready to accomodate us ? or can help me get along with mediatemple servers ?http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=112

Taggy says:
a pretty interesting and import weekend coming up . What happens if the deal is struck ?

Uday says:
I see this as a viable competitor for Google’s Adsense/Adwords machine. Both Yahoo’s Overture based Ad machine and Microsoft’s AdCentral lack the killer technology blow that Google delivers with its keyword targetted ads.

I still believe that there is room to grow however. In-text advertisements are still catching up. They have a far way to go to be non-intrusive. Post-Video rollouts are another segment that Google could not work its magic with.

Also, user feedback based Ad technology used by the likes of Adpinion have not been absorbed into mainstream products. Truth be told, I feel that Google’s campaign management tools within Adwords suck. Then there is the facebook beacon idea which backfired for now but could be resourceful if done in a more open way.

There is so much to grow and do in this segment ! We just gotta wait and watch !

Like any premiere college in india ,NITT has its own share of successfull alumni too and what better way for students to learn than from the men who actually did it .

Ever wondered how it should be talk/interact with people who passed out a decade ago and are up their in the ladder where you aspire to be ? better if they went to the same school you are .The flow of knowledge and guidance is almost infinity !.

It is in that desire and an attempt to create such a vibrant community for NITTians ,by them and for them that we have pulled up NITTians.com

While at the outset its going to aggregate all the blog/journals of NITTians we also want to use it a platform to showcase the things that happen in the campus and the things our alumni do in the real world !

It has already arrived and yes its hosted now at my shared hosting and not sure how its going toscale up .It would be great if any our rich alumni can sponsor some good space ! .We have built this portal involving quite a few tools from python,php and memcache .We surely expect this site to pull up some bandwidth An ordinary ultracheap wont do the work ! it has to be a host thats good like the mediatemple or such hosts ! ther are surely going to be costly .But where there is a wil there is a way .

Iam sure with time we will find a solution to this as well ,dont panic if the sites goes down for a few hours ( shared hosting has it issues) and we will come out great soon,pretty soon infact !

keep watching NITTians.com .

Special thanks to alagu sundarrajan and suren for their enthusiasm,support and promised support and also the design guys who made up the logo and poster for us thank you guys

After my previous attempt at making a twitter bot resulted with a decent liking from people ,i thought i would hack up another one .

Some of my friends are addicted to yahoo and they r on it most of the days so why not a bot to help you twitter from yahoo messenger ?

However there were some fundamental problems,one of them was to maintain sessions . There was virtually no way i could keep a user logged in without having to store his/her password which i absolutely hated ! and asking on the twitter mailing lists only told me that i would have to wait until twitter adopts OAuth .

But still myself and Doniv ,making a yahoo bot for twitter was worth a try for two reasons .

• We <3 twitter
• Making a bot for yahoo was going to be a little more challenging than making ajabber bot since yahoo messenger protocol was not open like the jabber .

But thanks to Philips Tellis and his Libyahoo2 ,life was going to be much easier .

And we started with it . First we setup a page tocheck for user credentials and update his yahooid in to out database.We only store their twitter and yahoo username .

Then set about writing the bot in C/Python .

Here is how its going to be started ,its not the bot you want to use everyday because it does have a few flaws but if you are out without Gmail then you could as well use it .

After registering with the website here http://theyagar.com/twitter ,add twitterme as your friend at yahoo.

Now the most important part ,the tweet sending part .As i mentioned earlier ,we could virtually find no way of having users logging in without raw text passwords and so this ugly looking way (honestly) .

twitter_username twitter_password twiter_message is the format .for eg,

myusername mypassword hey test message to twitter

Now what happens next is it goes in to our DB and tries to match your followers with registered users and if it does then the yahooid is sent a tweet .

So while you can always send a tweet from out client ,you can recieve it only if your friends send it from yahoo bot too .

Twitter i dont think has any hook to be notified when there is a tweet although we could poll but all that for later .

This works from Gaim/Pidgin ,Meebo and Yahoo messenger Windows .Iam not sure about the other clients since all these client send out html messages and parsing out them was a headache .

Let me show you some screenshots of how this works

Sending the message from Pidgin

A follower recieving his friends tweet on his yahoo account

I will put the code up for download ,i understand if some people have problems in giving out the passwords as plain text in the IM window but we couldnt find a way out . If you know a better way to do it then please leave back a comment or mail from the contact form i would love to hear back from you .

Again as it started this bot was made purely for learning and for the fun of it .You can use it trusting us .

I will put up the source code in sometime after cleaning up the mess . Or if you dont mind having a code that can be a little difficult to understand then mail me and i would send it to you .

So please go ahead ,use out bot and tell us why it sucks .

http://theyagar.com/twitter

And yes the bot is now running from a adhoc server and it wont run on the mediatemple servers gives me a error . Is anyone willing to host our bot ? it certainly doesnt require root( I run it completely on a non root) .We would love to have it hosted in a place it can run freely .

It requires gcc and python 2.4 installed anyone willing ?

or any ideas/sugegstion/improvements ? please feel free to comment

Lesson i learnt : Necessity is the mother of all inventions

The last time i wrote about a cause for helping someone it was thamarai selvan .Today its about someone else again . Gayathri,yes thats the name .

But unlike last time i wish this one comes out successful.I know there are many stories around us like this but i am posting this because i believe somewhere someone can reach out and all of us must contribute and like i said here .Its not always the result that is important sometimes the journey itself is worth taking and if the result is good then its win win .

I would request all of you to go through the website and see if you can contribute in your own ways .

“A JOURNEY OF THOUSAND MILES MUST BEGIN WITH A SINGLE STEP

NO AMOUNT IS TOO SMALL - EVERY RUPEE COUNTS ”

Pitch in for it might be that some few rupees or dollars they have been waiting for . ..

http://www.helpgayatri.org/

http://www.caringbridge.org/cb/viewMyStory.do?method=executeInit

Lets spread the word