Arjun Ram

Its been a while since I wrote about the Gurunet “my favourite info genie”. Since then I have received a couple of emails from the company providing me updates. Well they have come up with some real nice improvements! Heres whats been update

In a nutshell, we?ve made even more of our content available for free, and for the first time we?ve made it available through a web version(just visit www.gurunet.com) and through an IEtoolbar. A Mac version is due mid-June as well. An annual subscription is only$29.99 (compare that to any on-line encyclopedia, and then recall that we haveincluded over 150 dictionaries, glossaries, encyclopedias, etc in the package!)There?s an official press release, here: http://www.gurunet.com/press040524.jsp

Its nice to see that they have opened up some of their content, this basically means that this can accessed through my favourite browser FireFox. I took the time to create a search engine plugin using the  Plugin generator . Heres the source for the plugin

#———————————————————————-
# Author: Arjun Ram  <me@arjunram.com>
# Version: 0.1, Last updated: Tue Jun 15 14:41:00 EDT 2004
#———————————————————————-
# Made with Search Plugins Generator.
# Copyright (C) 2002-2003 MozillaPL Team.
# http://mozillapl.org/
#———————————————————————-

<search
 version=”7.1″
 name=”Atomica”
 description=”it’s all about answers”
 method=”get”
 action=”http://www.gurunet.com/query“
 searchForm=”http://www.gurunet.com/home.jsp“
 queryEncoding=’UTF-8′
 queryCharset=’UTF-8′
>

<input name=”s” user >
<input name=”sourceid” value=”mozilla-search”>

<interpret
 browserResultType=’result’
 resultListStart=’<b>Open Directory Categories</b>’
 resultListEnd=’</ol>’
 resultItemStart=’<li>’
 resultItemEnd=’<br>’
 charset=’UTF-8′
 >

<interpret
 browserResultType=’result’
 resultListStart=’<b>Atomica Results</b>’
 resultListEnd=’</ol>’
 resultItemStart=’<li>’
 resultItemEnd=’</small><p>’
 charset=’UTF-8′
 >

</search>

<browser
 update=”http://mycroft.mozdev.org/plugins/dmoz.src“
 updateicon=”http://www.gurunet.com/images/star.gif“
 updatecheckdays=”3″
>

All one needs to do is to add this to the searchplugin directory under the mozilla directory. Someone’s now needs to submit this to the mozdev.org search plugins directory.

The company also seems to have provided a way to add gurunet to one’s site. Not sure why someone would wanna do that. It would be much more useful if they took the time to write javascript to let users “alt click” on the web page to provide context info over a dhtml window. I would love to use something like that on my blog. Moreover as FireFox becomes popular Gurunet needs to find ways to exploit the web browser by integrating their service with the browser.

Would be cool to try out the subscription service, I dont mind trying it for free. All in all its a handy product to try out!

Its always a pleasure watching Steve Jobs demo products. As usual Apple has brought in their improvements to existing technologies. They have introduced Safari RSS which has some really neat features like length of post controlled by a slider bar, sorting and browser intergration. I expect to see some of these features immitated for Firefox and other RSS readers. RSS is really going mainstream now. It was rather disappointing to see the lack of excitement  in the crowd when Safari RSS was introduced. Wonder why?

A couple of my ex-collegues back home have started a S7Solutions, a software services company specializing in cross-platform porting & middleware technologies, financial domain, & Enterprise Software.

Its run a by a couple of fine folks, if you are in bangalore and are looking for oppurtunities be sure to check them out! You have my word, will be a blast working there.

If you are in need for Software porting, be sure to check them out as well. I wish them well..

Came across cprerez‘s offer to send one of gmail invites out.

As a gmail user I also get the privilege of inviting other users. So,
as a token of appreciation to all the readership of this blog, I’m
offering a gmail invitation to the one lucky reader who truly needs to
get his hands on this novel technology.

Now please, email ceperez AT gmail DOT com with your name and email and I’ll send the lucky winner an invitation.

So, I took a chance and sent him my sob story(more to come on that in the next entry)

Alrite, let me tell u sob story and see if that works . I had to
delete sent emails which contained my resume copies as I was running
out of space on my email account. I also had copies of my resume on my
hard disk, which crashed over the weekend So im now left without a
copy of my resume. Having a gmail account would have sure saved my rear
end. Getting one would make my day and make me get over the loss of my
hard disk crash.

This morning, i recieved an email with the invite

Clearly that qualifies as someone who truly needs this service. Arjun have fun with your new tool!

Really neat! Thanks mate! Its been a while since I won something Well its good to be back in Blogsphere!

Update: Please look out for this space for a free gmail invite as soon I get to send out one.