My Mind

I have been holding the domain name `appb.in` for a long time. The idea was to host a range of web apps there. But then I was lazy and all and nothing happened with it. Until last week when I got a linode account.

This gives me an opportunity to learn some server admin stuff and most importantly freedom to install and use any technology, language I chose to. Now, this is fun!

There are only a couple of apps on appb.in for now. Will be moving few more apps in some days, and probably designing many more.

Saw a dream in a dream this morning, like in inception.
I was at my cousin’s place where all my relatives had gathered for some occasion. Uncles were in the living room, discussing what grown up men discuss. Aunts were in the dining hall & kitchen, chatting & preparing eatables for the occasion. I was there, helping them along with my cousins. I thought of tweeting about it but resisted. Dreams usually have some elements which do not exist in the real world; these make dreams discernible. One such element is the ‘super power’ I have to fly. I was flying all around the house.

Later in the night, I had to sleep in the living room all alone. There was a window right across and I could sense the branches of a tree moving to the wind. It was creepy, I felt as is someone was peeping, a thief perhaps. I woke up suddenly; frightened I looked at the window. Everything seemed fine.

And then, I woke up again, in this world.

Long time back I had a verbal fight with a friend. The fight started because he made a statement to which I did not agree. I told him my viewpoint, which he did not agree to. And we discussed for a few minutes until we realized that we both agreed with each other. Though both of us had ‘different’ views, the viewpoints were ‘right’ in their own contexts.

I’ve seen this happen so may times. In our day to day lives, when things irritate us or when we are high, we make strong statements; And when these statements go out to people without proper context, they are misunderstood.

Another reason for misunderstandings is that we assume things to be either Black or White. With least bit of reasoning, we embrace sides and talk about it vehemently. And there will be opinionated people listening who will be offended by such talk; and there will be arguments.

By nature, we are judgemental, we always look for Yes or No answers. Given a generic question, one cannot answer with a Yes or No; there will be Ifs and Buts. One has to take into consideration the specific issue at hand and the numerous limitations and problems. And when we arrive at our conclusions, we cannot just yell it out at the world; we need to give the context and reasons, because without them people cannot truly understand the conclusions.

~May the Force be with You.

I guess most of you’d know that Twitter API would be shutting down basic authentication on August 31st. What this means is that you will no longer be able to login into 3rd party twitter application by giving out your username and password. From now on, to use third party applications you will have to authorize the application using oAuth.

This is bad news for people in countries like China where twitter.com is blocked. They cannot login into 3rd party twitter applications with username/password; they cannot login via twitter.com.

Also, people who access twitter from office(where twitter.com is blocked) will not like closing down of basic auth. But this brings up an opportunity for someone to come up with a twitter web client. The idea is that a user opens an account with an app and authorizes it(to use twitter) when he is at home; later he can log into this app from office and use twitter. Although there are clients like hootsuite which do it, they are targeted at enterprise-y, business-ey people. A simple application like iTweet or dabr would be a hit among the code monkeys.

If built on google’s appengine, the app can use google auth for the user registration part. There are app engine compatible twitter libraries available on github. Build a decent & basic interface and you have your next big twitter app.  So, who’s building it?

UPDATE: dabr has done it.