trk's weblog

Browse Indian News Stories on your IPhone

2008-11-01T13:47:02Z

I developed a website that you can browse to get the top News Stories from India. Here is the description that I added when I submitted the app to Apple:

The site offers you top news stories from a variety of News Sources from India covering topics such as General News, Sports, Cinema, Finance and Technology.

Unique features:
1. Ability to vote for a particular news article:
If you like a particular news item, you can approve of it by clicking on the up arrow next to he article and that would be counted as a vote for the article.

2. Top Stories
Interested in knowing which articles in a particular category are popular (lots of votes)? Then look at the Top Stories section and you will find it there.

3. Free
The site is free to use and was mainly constructed because I was not really impressed with the other apps/sites offering this kind of service and decided to design my own site for personal use. Now I am opening it up for everyone who feels the same about the lack of decent Indian News site for IPhone users.

The site can be accessed here: http://trk7.com/mob/

Kuselan - Review

2008-08-03T03:00:56Z

Here is the Review that I posted as a comment here: http://www.cinereviews.in/kuselan/

A movie that most people will enjoy. Rajini appears in a few crucial scenes and excels in those.

Most people would probably know about the story, so I am not going to elaborate on that. In a few words; The Movies is about two friends, one Rich and famous, while the other poor and struggling and how they end up meeting each other after a long time.Especially enjoyed the first part of the movie.It was very funny and went very fast for me.

I enjoyed the Soundtracks, they were very pleasant. Tamil movies have come a long way in using Graphical Effects in movies and you can see that making a big impact in this movie. Especially, loved the vibrant color that was draping all the scenes. The way the scenes were shot was a bit different, from the many movies that I had seen recently, most scenes were close ups of the actors and emphasized the theme of the movie: it is all about the people/relationships, nothing fancy or complicated in the story-line.

Santhanam and Vadivelu were great in their roles as comedians. Nayanthara was looking good.Sadly no real role for her in the movie. Certainly at-least one song (Nayan dancing in the rain) could have been avoided.

Meena as Pasupathy’s was looking great!

Pasupathy did an excellent job in the movie and was able to extract a lot of empathy through his portrayal as a struggling, but, righteous Barber. It is definitely HIS movie.My only problem is that Pasupathy - in-spite of his wonderful portrayal - is not getting the coverage that he deserves and all the limelight seems to be on Rajini.

Oh, well, hope the mainstream media tones down the hype that they attach with Rajini and move the focus towards Pasupathy, even Rajini would agree with that!

Movie News

2007-12-12T08:09:06Z

news2u.in is a place to read interesting happenings in Tamil Cinema World.

Tamil Movie reviews site.

2007-11-16T14:46:58Z

Finally, you have a site where, at a glance, one gets to read multiple tamil movie reviews. Very cool!

Check it out at http://www.cinereviews.in/.

Getting visitor location in PHP.

2007-11-07T13:54:25Z

I had been trying to track the location of visitors based on their IP addresses. I ran into problems earlier while trying to acheive that and gave up. Today, I Finally managed to do that. Thanks to the geodb availablehere. I hacked up a function that would accept an IP address as a parameter and return an array with location info.

The code for the function is:

function getIpInfo($ip){
$ipa=explode(".",$ip);
$ipnum=256*256*256*$ipa[0]+256*256*$ipa[1]+256*$ipa[2]+$ipa[3];
 //download the Geo DB file from http://software77.net/geoip-software.htm
$handle = fopen("IpToCountry.txt", "r");
$userinfo=NULL;
while (!feof($handle)){
 list ($start, $finish, $a1,$a2,$a3,$a4,$a5) = explode("\t",fgets($handle));
   if(($start<=$ipnum)&&($ipnum<=$finish)) {$userinfo=array($a3,$a4,$a5); break; }
}
fclose($handle);
if(!$userinfo) $userinfo=array('Cannot Trace the Ip address','Cannot Trace the Ip address','Cannot Trace the Ip address');
return $userinfo;
}

One just needs to change the name of the file (in my case ‘IpToCountry.txt’) to the one that they have downloaded.The array returns (’2 Digit Country Code’, ‘3 Digit Country Code’, ‘Full Country Name’), and, you can use it to display location or use it in your script as a variable. Make sure you do ip validation befor passing the IP address (ip2long()). A demo of it is available here. For a list of Other PHP/Javascript Demos please go to here.

Pagination issue in Pligg

2007-11-05T12:13:14Z

—-This post is part of my effort to document issues that I face while using Pligg.—-
As the number of posts increase at ShopDeals.in (I have got nothing else to do!), I noticed something that was not right (which I kinda ignored before). As the number of posts became greater that the number of posts that were meant to be one page, I expected a link down at the bottom of the page that would have directed me to older submissions (pagination). That did not occur, after some searching, I came across a Post in the Pligg forum that directed me to download the Admin Total Plugin, that kind of regenerates the total no of pages ;submitted, queued and discarded. after installing and clicking on Regenerate Totals link twice, I was able to fix the issue. If you are unable to see page links in Pligg and have

 do_pages($rows, $page_size, "published");

uncommented in index_center.tpl , then defintely download the plugin and give it a try.

Shopping Deals in India

2007-11-04T10:17:35Z

I am currently involved with Shopdeals.in, a site where Indian Shoppers can; submit a shopping deal that they have come across in their city, vote and comment on deals submitted by others.Also I have developed a facebook app based on Shopdeals.in which is accessible here.