You can read the post here on the new blog.

Note: I’m mirroring posts from my new blog for a few weeks on this (dead) blog.

Finally, I have a new blog. You can read more about it here on the new blog.

Update your feed readers to this feed – http://blog.abi.sh/feed

And, if you’re reading this from Planet Mozilla (which will update itself), you should still subscribe to the new feed because I only syndicate technical posts.

If you have any suggestions or thoughts about the new design, comment there.

The great thing about Bespin’s command system is that it’s designed to be very similar to Ubiquity’s. Hence, it’s not very tough to turn Bespin commands into Ubiquity commands. Here’s a command that just that – it lets you run Bespin commands from Ubiquity itself. One less hotkey to remember!

Initially, I tried to mimic the Bespin environment and execute it from the command sandbox but then, I figured out that I could simply execute the command using the Bespin object loaded on the Bespin page so the code is actually pretty short. But as I explain below, this also imposed some restrictions.

Get the command and test it right away. Go ahead, try “save” or “help” or “export” or anything else.

Quick Improvements

• Commands ought to be loaded dynamically so if you have custom commands in your BespinSettings project, Ubiquity would be able to load them too. But that doesn’t work currently.
• Commands should only work on the Bespin page. If you typed “save” on any other page, the Bespin command should not even show up.

A Few Notes

• Bespin’s command parser itself is very simple when compared to Ubiquity’s. For example, it is not possible to write “export tgz” to export the current project in .tgz format. You could write “export” to get it in the default format (.zip) but if you wanted it in .tgz, you have to write “export SampleProjectName tgz”. In my earlier (longer) version of the hack, this would work because I was extracting the arguments myself but now, I’m passing it directly to the Bespin parser.
• On a related note, commands are now semantic in Ubiquity 0.5 but Bespin commands aren’t. If a command has two or more arguments, I am artitaribly adding some “semantics”. “export [project] [archivetype]” becomes “export [project] to [archivetype]” (obviously, export [project] as [archivetype] would make more sense here). It would be better to individually figure out how it should be for each Bespin command. At the moment, this screws with the semantic nature of Ubiquity commands.
• Auto-completion in the Bespin command line is broken. Try writing “ex” into the command line and executing it, it will fail. But, why should it throw an error when it clearly knows what the user meant by “ex” (because export is only command that starts with “ex”)? Instead, it requires one more keystroke (TAB).
  
• Bespin should use Yip/Growl notifications and if that fails (for the millions for people who don’t have Yip yet!) revert to in-browser notifications which need to be much better than they currently are. As seen below, they obscure your content and clicking on the notification doesn’t hide them (you have to click the tiny X at the top-right).
  
• The ability to run Ubiquity commands from the Bespin command line might be handy for some who are used to the Bespin command line. “run selector-selector” and “escape HTML entities” are just two Ubiquity commands that developers might find useful.
• Bespin commands need better descriptions and help.

How can this be more useful? What other aspects of Ubiquity and Bespin can be integrated?

It’s 2009 and no browser vendor supports notifications for Webapps. The revolution begins today.

Let me first explain in Simple English: (1) Install Yip, (2) Go to Meebo.com and (3) When you receive an IM, you’ll see a notification on your screen like the one in the screenshot below. Works for Filttr.com and a whole host of other sites too.

Now for the explanation that geeks prefer – Yip is a Firefox extension that ports the Fluid and Prism notification APIs over to Firefox so you can receive Growl notifications from web applications. (or plain old Firefox notifications if you’re on Windows or Linux).

Download

The great thing about Yip is that we don’t have to be stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation. Many websites have already implemented notifications (despite the fact that no major browser has added support for it!). Some support Fluid, some support Prism and some do both. So, you can immediately start using Yip.

If you log into Meebo and you have Yip installed, the next time your friends sends you an IM, you should see a notification (obviously, Meebo should not be your focused window/tab at that point).

Apologies to my Chinese readers. I merely take screenshots and post them without reflecting on their contents.

Another cool website is Filttr which is a Twitter app that supports notifications for replies and direct messages.

A number of other Webapps also support notifications. And there are a whole slew of Greasemonkey userscripts to enable notifications for Facebook, Gmail, FriendFeed, Github, etc.

Yet another standard?

As pointed out earlier — NO, the goal of Yip is not to create a standard for notifications but to support all the existing kinds of notifications. Currently, Yip only supports Fluid and Prism which cover the large majority (100%?) of currently implemented notifications. When Gears/Chrome starts supporting notifications (which might never happen because I don’t see anyone working on the proposal), Google will no doubt add notifications to all its web apps. Then, I’ll add support for the Gears Notification API to Yip too. If you know any other API, let me know in the comments and I’ll support it.

The API

Fluid

If you want to support notifications on your website, Fluid’s API is great. The function takes a single jQuery-style argument:

window.fluid.showGrowlNotification({
title: "title",
description: "description",
onclick: callbackFunc,
icon: URL string
});

All arguments are optional. Note that Fluid/Growl also supports the priority, sticky and identifier properties which are not yet supported by Yip.

Prism

Yip also supports the Prism API. Unfortunately, this API does not support even an onclick callback so I recommend that you use window.fluid instead. But since both Prism and Yip run on XULRunner, I’ll probably add a patch to Prism soon. Here, all arguments must be specified:

window.platform.showNotification(
title,
text/description,
icon
);

Extensions

If you’re another extension, you want to use use Yip,

var yip = Components.classes['@foyrek.com/yip;1']
.createInstance(Components.interfaces.nsIYip);
yip.showGrowlNotification({...});

Code

Now, go try it! Load up a HTML page and just add some javascript code like

fluid.showGrowlNotification({title:"Yippie!", description:"Just testing Yip! It's awesome", icon: "http://www.google.com/favicon.ico"});

The code for Yip itself can be found on Github. Do whatever you want with it (it’s MIT licensed).

A bit of technical history

The challenge in this extension is to define a global property on every window object of every tab. This took me forever (6 fucking months, to be precise) to figure out because it’s a tough question to phrase and because not many people want to do this. But, eventually, I did (I’ll write a bit more about how this is done in the next post). I have to thank a bunch of people on IRC for this including mfinkle, zpao, Unfocused, Mook and dolske.

Part 2

In line with my philosophy of releasing things at every useful step, I have released Yip pretty early. But be sure that there will be no sophomore slump here. Part 2 of this project is way way more exciting. But you’ll have to wait for it. Watch this project on Github in the meantime!

And because I like LOLPuppies better than LOLCats

I used to have a puppy. It died. Photo credit to jaysonmaceo on Flickr

If something is not simple, it is nearly impossible to build.

I don’t mean simple in terms of visual design. Websites with lots of color and large illustrations are beautiful (Vimeo and Viget come to mind). Simple, minimal websites (Daring Fireball, A List Apart, etc.) can be equally stunning too. When I say simple, I’m referring to the design[1] of the application as a whole. If it’s simple, it should serve one purpose and one purpose only. Unless you start with such simplicity, it will inevitably lead nowhere.

Twitter is my (and everyone’s) favorite example.[2] What did Twitter look like initially? Say you are building it, how would you implement it? You’d throw in a textbox on the webpage and on the backend, you’d hook it up to a database with just three fields – username, tweet_content and time (plus an authentication system which would take 2 seconds to configure with any popular web framework). That’s it. No support for even replies.

The reply syntax came about thanks to the community (just individuals making use of @username to respond to someone else’s tweet) and after that, Twitter tweaked Twitter slightly to add support for reply IDs so you can see which tweet the person was replying to. Retweets and hashtags are other powerful community-initiated practices. Dave Winer complains about the lack of “native” support for retweets in Twitter. They shouldn’t listen to him. Not “supporting” (non-prevention can be construed as support perhaps?) retweet is a good thing. If retweets actually became a feature similar to “Like” on Facebook and Friendfeed, it would change the way people used Twitter. Forcing changes in already-good user behavior is generally not a good idea.[3]

The development approach that Twitter brought to prominence is simply amazing. What they did was to start with extreme simplicity, then use their own product and evolve it further based on the usage. In modern times, that’s the mantra for writing anything successful. Start simple, use a lot, evolve.

Complexity

Now, you say “Yeah man, I agree with you completely but how do complex systems exist then?”. To answer that, I refer you to Gall’s Law:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

It’s impossible to start working on a complex system no matter how well you understand it (or more likely, think you understand it). Evolution is the only way. And another characteristic of all evolution (biological evolution in particular) is this:

At every stage of your process, the end result must be useful.

This is a very good rule for anyone writing software. What you need is the patience to evolve simple systems. Success takes time. To just stop and stare at something in an attempt to figure out the whole thing is not a good idea. A better approach would be to just start working and you understand more from that approach. Paul Graham agrees. It’s easiest to get new ideas when working on something.

Personal Failures

All my personal failures have been attempting large things without quite realizing how much work they would actually require[4].

Devo was very inspired by quicksilver. Having just bought a Mac (and loved quicksilver), I desperately wanted something like quicksilver in the browser. This meant that Devo had to be more like a catalog of everything in the browser. In fact, it was initially named Catalog (yeah, I suck at picking names). So, it had to import your browser history and bookmarks which was such a pain before Places came along. I also wanted it to know the extensions installed on the user’s Firefox, etc., etc. It was going to be one huge catalog. Obviously, it failed. It was too complex.

Cliche?

Yes, most of this has been said by 37 Signals, John Gruber and a thousand others. And to some extent, everyone realizes how true the “Simple” maxim is but being humans (and even worse, programmers), they greatly misunderestimate how simple simple should be. As Hofstadter puts it eloquently,

“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

What you need is help — someone on the outside to peer into your brain and tell you if it’s too complicated. Because complicated things can’t built. Instead, start simple, use a lot, evolve.

More comments at Hacker News…

I went to high school for 4 terrible terrible years and all I got was an email. abii @ stanford . edu

So, I shall break the rule of not writing about intensely personal stuff with the hope that what follows will be useful to a future generation of slackers.

I have to thank Mr. Junot Diaz whose uber-awesomeness makes me regret my laziness in not applying to MIT and whose style (sadly, minus the cursing) I completely ripped off for this first essay. When I wrote it, I had just read his AMAZING book Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I was completely fucking inspired by it. In fact, I did thank Junot Diaz with an appropriately vulgar email.

Virtually all of Stanford’s undergraduates live on campus.  What would you want your freshman year roommate to know about you? Tell us something about you that will help your roommate and us know you better. [250 words]

Dear Future Roommate,

I am Abi and I am not a girl. Unfortunately, a lot of people mistake Abi for Abby or Abigail. But, let me tell you about what I am – an Indian geek who’s terrible at being either.

I’m the most ungeeky geek you ever met. Sure, I can write code all night. But guess what? There’s nothing I hate more than a good comic-book. I don’t speak Klingon or Elvish fluently either. I only watched The Dark Knight after a light saber-carrying Jedi friend of mine coerced me into it. In fact, Juno and Little Miss Sunshine are my favorite movies. Bluntly put, that’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger (or your favorite macho man) loving The Princess Dairies 2: Royal Engagement.

And for someone born in India, I’m less Indian than Obama (which technically isn’t a fair comparison since he isn’t Indian but even he can cook Indian food). The last Bollywood film I watched was 5 years back when I was stuck in my grandma’s house with nothing but a TV and a single VCD. My iTunes library has 2942 English songs, 3 Turkish songs and 1 almost-Punjabi song (it features Snoop Dogg). But while the origins of my un-geekiness may be mysterious, my un-Indianness can be explained easily. Everyday, for 10 years, I woke up to the sound of “Allahu Akbar” from an Indonesian mosque. In short, I grew up in the world (if the world only comprised of Indonesia, Singapore with brief trips to Thailand, Malaysia and Australia). However, I do prove my worth to my patria in one way. I love cricket and you must admit there’s something undeniably Indian about that English sport.

Now that I’ve written all this, I realize that I’m just like most people. Just another jumbled mess who’s hard to stereotype or define in a few sentences. I hope you are just as messed up.

Cheers,

Abi (with a soft “a”)

Now, you’re probably thinking “He got into Stanford with this shitty essay?!” Yeah, I know, it’s not supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and the language is admittedly rubbish (I didn’t have much time to edit on December 31st). But it’s as funny as funny can be in a college essay, considering that I fail completely at PG-rated humor. And I was adviced (several times) by my college counselor to not use certain words even though these words are so thoroughly embedded in our vernacular that some emotions cannot be expressed without them (example: fuck, shit, damn; can we please move on? everyone knows that in most sentences, fuck does not mean having sexual intercourse). On the whole, I actually think the essay’s pretty different, at the very least in the context of my school (where the majority of the populace is still writing shit like “I want to become a doctor because I want to help people blah blah blah”).

Here’s the second essay I will share, which might also help you answer the question “Why the fuck is this on Planet Mozilla?” since it’s (slightly) about Ubiquity which I happened to be working on at that time. Phrases within [] have been added post-submission.

Stanford students are widely known to possess a sense of intellectual vitality.  Tell us about an idea or an experience you have had that you find intellectually engaging. [250 words]

Ubiquity is a beautiful piece of software. With constant use, it becomes part of you. All the world’s knowledge resides in your fingers. It’s the extension of a man’s mind, the slow but inevitable fusion of the brain and the computer.

But, sitting on a soft couch at a Starbucks in central Singapore, my visions of technology are not so romantic, at least not at the moment. An “Exception: Ubquity.translate() is undefined” annoys me. As I sip the hot chocolate and ignore the constant chattering, I try not to be consumed by this error. For two years, I have written this same program but each time, I have failed by forgetting the bigger picture, by getting bogged down into the details. But it’s not that details are bad. Had Da Vinci spent all his time on the smile, would the Mona Lisa be as enigmatic? The folds of her clothing may seem insignificant but they sum up to create the overall harmony. In the same way, every line of code must be perfect.

But, right now, I just need to get past “Exception: Ubquity.translate() is undefined”. Engrossed in the screen, I look through 100s of lines of code trying to fix this issue. Is the software architecture completely faulty? Or is it just the parser module? Maybe, it’s just an undiscovered bug in the language itself. As these thoughts engulf my consciousness, I buy another cup of delicious Frapucinno.

I scratch the table in frustration.

I call my mom.

I take a toilet break.

I reply to a few emails.

And then, a couple of mind-numbing hours later, I realize that “Ubquity” is actually spelled “Ubiquity”.

How. [Fucking.] Trivial.

At exasperating times like this, I feel like screaming out loud. I absolutely hate coding. I will never program again. But even in these moments, deep down, I know that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Clarifications: When I say I’ve been working on this same program, I mean Devo of course, which for me just continued perfectly into Ubiquity. Also, geeks, please forgive my rather liberal use of words like “module” and “software architecture”. Know your audience, right?

Let me know if you really got tricked by this one. It worked fairly well for the small sample I tested it on.

However, these are not my best essays. The best one was the one sent to Cornell. Although it’s hardly political, I shall not post it just to be safe.It was merely a retelling of the story of Iwuchukwu Amara Tochi which is an extraordinary case that brought the peculiar intricacies of the Singaporean legal system to the forefont. First, to be judged guilty, there is no requirement for proof of mens rea (guilty intent). In this case, the judge noted that “There was no direct evidence that [Amara Tochi] knew the capsules contained diamorphine. There was nothing to suggest that Smith had told him they contained diamorphine, or that he had found that out of his own.” and yet the very same judge convicted him! The second inconsistency (with respect to most other legal systems and the international legal standard) in Singaporean law is mandatory sentencing which means that even if the judge thinks your degree of guilt is low (arguably, no guilt in Tochi’s case but still, in the judge’s view, it had to be a very small degree of guilt) and he wants to give you just a jail term, he cannot because the death sentence is mandatory. This is downright scary. Say you bought apples overseas and unknown to you, they had been  injected with diamorphine. From my understanding of the law,  when you bring those apples into Singapore, you’ll definitely be hanged even though you had no idea you were carrying drugs in the first place. Yeah, like I said, crazy!

But that’s that. What surprises me is that Cornell would reject me during early decision (worst mistake I ever made was to apply ED there). I have a much better application (very objectively, in fact) than the majority of people who apply there. Moreover, this is self-selecting pool of people who definitely want to go to Cornell. And Cornell ED has a acceptance rate of >35% while Stanford RD has an acceptance rate of 7.5%.

It boggles the mind but it also happened to be the best thing to ever happen ever. So, being the arrogant bastard that I am, I sent the admissions office some flowers with a note that read “Thank you for not admitting me. Your loss.”

Note: Like many people have noted below, this post isn’t about solutions or actions you can do to save the planet. Ironically, I’m just trying to “raise awareness” here about the farce that is Earth Hour. However, a post about real solutions might show up in the near future.

Poster inspired by Get Excited and Make Things.

Thomas Friedman concurs:

The amount of time, energy, and verbiage being spent on making people “aware” of the energy-climate problem, and asking people to make symbolic gestures to call attention to it, is out of all proportion to the time, energy, and effort going into designing a systemic solution. We’ve had too many Live Earth concerts and Barneys “Have a Green Holiday” Christmas catalogs and too few focused lobbying efforts to enact transformational green legislation. If the money and mobilization effort spent on Live Earth had gone into lobbying the U.S. Congress for more generous and longer-term production and investment tax credits for renewable energy, and for other green legislation, the impact would have been vastly more meaningful.

You’ll pardon me, though, if I’ve become a bit cynical about all of this. I have read or heard so many people saying,” We’re having a green revolution.” Of course, there is certainly a lot of green buzz out there. But whenever I hear that “we’re having a green revolution” line I can’t resist firing back: “Really? Really? A green revolution? Have you ever seen a revolution where no one got hurt? That’s the green revolution that we’re having.” In the green revolution we’re having, everyone’s a winner, nobody has to give up anything, and the adjective that most often modifies “green revolution” is “easy.” That’s not a revolution. That’s a party. We’re actually having a green party. And, I have to say, it’s a lot of fun. I get invited to all the parties. But in America, at least, it is mostly a costume party. It’s all about looking green–and everyone’s a winner. There are no losers.