Azeem Azeez Go Home

I mounted my camera on a tripod and strapped it in the passengers seat and programmed the camera to take a photo every 3 seconds for 35 minutes while driving around Dubai. You can see the Mall of the Emirates (at 00:25) and the Burj Dubai on the right (at around 00:34).

Boston.com and The Wall Street Journal both keep really impressive photo-blogs that document current world events. There are several other websites that do this, but of these sites do a wholesome job of giving you a better idea on how things look like up-close.

A boy and a girl stand next to a makeshift tent at a camp for Internally Displaced People, on the outskirts of Mogadishu on May 21, 2009. The lives of more than 50,000 severely malnourished children are at risk after Islamist militants looted medical and relief stocks in a town in central Somalia, UNICEF said this week.(from Boston.com)		Girls covered their faces to avoid being photographed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Friday. U.S.-led coalition forces killed 35 militants and wounded 13 others during a clash in southern Afghanistan, where insurgents killed eight truck drivers ferrying supplies for foreign troops, officials said Friday. (from wsj.com)

Something I’ve noticed a lot recently is that some websites use fixed-widths while creating tabs in a navigation system using CSS. Although this would work as a temporary fix, setting fixed-widths can be a hassle when the text in your tabs has to change. Every time you change the text, you will have to change the widths accordingly. And since the widths are fixed, you either have to alter the widths of each tab separately (by setting an ID like #tab-1, #tab-2 etc for each tab) or change the widths of all the tabs globally. Since each tab will have the exact same width when changing globally, some tabs will have more room than the other. The CSS for a menu system that uses the same fixed-width for all tabs would look something like this:

• #menu li {
•   border:1px solid #999;
•   border-bottom:none;
•   width:120px;
•   height:24px;
•   line-height:24px;
•   text-align:center;
•   …
• }

If you take a closer look, you will notice that since the second tab has more text, all the other tabs have to be as wide as the second tab, otherwise some of the text of the second tab will be hidden. We could fix this by setting a unique ID for each tab(like I said, by setting an ID like #tab-1, #tab-2 etc for each tab) and then setting a width for each tab, but that just seems even more complicated. Also notice how we have to set a ‘line-height’ for the text in the tabs to align in the center vertically, and ‘text-align’ to center it horizontally.

A better way to do this is, is to NOT to use a width at all. Setting a width is like setting a limit to how much text you have inside the tab. The trick is to use paddings. You basically put text inside the tab, and push the tab from the inside from the left and right sides. This way, no matter how many letters each tab has, the tab will keep pushing to the sides to fit the text. So now, our CSS should look like this:

• #menu li {
•  border:1px solid #999;
•  border-bottom:none;
•  padding:6px 10px 6px 10px;
•  …
• }

This way, no matter how much text you have, the tabs will look fluid and less constrained. An easy fix that will save you a lot of trouble down the road.

For most people, the Blackberry is an essential part of everyday life. After browsing around for hours, looking for handy apps for my blackberry, I realized I had been to over a dozen sites to find my top picks scattered all around the place. So I decided to post a nifty list of my fave blackberry apps:

• Viigo – An amazing RSS reader that lets you keep in touch with the latest news, stock quotes, weather, sports and even flight information. A definite necessity for any blackberry user.
• Google Maps – Lets you look up maps on your blackberry and also gives you directions, uses cellular towers to triangulate your position and find locations by voice.
• Yahoo! Go – If you have a Yahoo! email account or use Flickr, you will find this app very useful. Also includes weather reports, maps, local listings, sports and a lot more with a very clean-cut interface.
• Google Sync – Probably the most important application on my Blackberry. Lets you sync your Blackberry Calendar with your Gmail Calendar. The newer version also lets you sync your contacts. Very helpful in case you lose your phone or need to bulk-edit your contacts.
• Twitterberry – Small little app that lets you twitter right from your berry. Also lets you post your photos from your blackberry to twitpic and then twitter about the photo you took.
• Sudoku – The Blackberry can be a very serious and daunting piece of equipment and thats why we need some entertainment to lighten the mood. Sudoku from Magmic.com is excellent while you are on transit or waiting in line. For something a little challenging, try the “Genius” level.

I hope you enjoyed my short list. If you have an essential app you can’t live without, drop me a comment.

wget is a small, yet amazing program originally created for linux, which lets you download files via HTTP and FTP with the facility to resume aborted downloads. It has some other nifty features including the option to mirror websites and directories among other things.

wget is also available for windows. Even though there are other programs out there that let you resume downloads using a GUI like Download Accelerator Plus, the best part about wget is the simplicity of the program. If you are comfortable with the command line, it is extremely easy to use. A sample command to download a file in windows would look something like this:

wget -c http://domain.com/app.exe -P c:apps

Lets break that command down:

• wget – starts the wget program
• -c – checks to see if this file has been downloaded before and resumes the download if possible.
• http://domain.com/app.exe – name of the file to download
• -P – lets you specify where you want wget to download this file on your computer
• c:apps – path to where you want to save the downloaded file

You can find more commands under the GNU Wget Manual

One of the first things I learned when I started learning HTML was how to link one page to another by using the <a> tag. For example <a href=“http://google.com”>Google</a> links the text “Google” to http://google.com. Another piece of code you could add to the <a> tag was “mailto” which would make the link open up a window in your email client (like Outlook, Thunderbird etc) so that you could start typing an email.

But I have to wonder: with the majority of people nowadays using webmail based email applications (like Gmail, Hotmail etc) instead of applications like Outlook, is the mailto tag a thing of the past? Also remember that spambots can pick up email addresses that are embedded in the mailto tags making it another reason why most people don’t use mailto tags anymore.

But if the mailto tag is in the past, what is the future?

Recently on Twitter :

• current playlist: arctic monkeys, modest mouse, interpol, chemical brothers, pharcyde, death cab 4 cutie, dr dre, fiction plane, the streets
• worked on projects in php, python and asp all in the same day. that was fun. circus in an elevator kinda fun
• watching three cheesy halloween movies back-to-back-to-back
• i love it when people make up words in their songs and call it “poetic license”
• just finished reading an amazing book called “the translator” http://tinyurl.com/6bgm8u

With web applications popping everywhere, there is an interesting trend going on that I find surprising. Most of these applications have trial accounts where you can sign up and use a limited version of their program for free. When you need more options, you pay a fee and these companies make money when people start signing up for their paid plans. To get people to sign up for the paid plans, they limit the free accounts to just the basics so that the user gets hooked into using the program. Simple right?

The thing that surprises me is when these companies think that security is something that needs to be an extra feature. Most of these companies offer SSL security when you use their application. SSL helps to protect the data you send from your computer to their servers. It kinda makes sense if the trial accounts don’t include SSL security. But some of these companies don’t offer SSL security unless you upgrade to a “premium” plan and not just any paid plan. If I am paying a company money to use their services, I think it only makes sense if they take the extra step to secure my data. SSL certificates are not expensive if you are charging your customers, so why be greedy?

Just think of the most popular online applications online. From what I found, a lot of these companies follow this trend. I think providing all your accounts with SSL security is a good way of saying, “we will do everything we can to make sure your data is safe with us”. Who wouldn’t love hearing that?

This is why I have never been a fan of Facebook. I started to get 5-6 of those requests from people to join a group or add an application and eventually i started ignoring them. Last night I logged in and this is what I found. (click on the image for the full version)

I was driving around town yesterday when I got stuck behind an elderly woman driving 20mph in a 40mph zone on a single lane road. While waiting to pass her, I noticed that the rear turn signal light on her minivan was red. Now, the standard for most cars is to have three different sets of lights on the back of the car with their respective colors. One for the brakes, which is usually red. The turn lights, which is usually orange (and sometimes red) and of course the reverse lights, which is white in color.

But why do car manufacturers think that using the color red for the brake lights and the turn signals is a good idea? I know that its easy to figure out that the blinking light probably means that the car is about to turn left or right, but doesn’t it just make sense to use the standard color that people usually associate turn signals with?

It’s these small design-standards that make tiny differences. When its raining cats and dogs and you can barely see the car in front of you, it just might make a difference to know if the car in front of you is slowing down or making a turn into your lane.