The Shifting Goalpost

I am not in touch with IT/Software students in school/colleges currently. But Yahoo! Developer Network, Google Code (especially Google Summer of Code, which brings together students and mentors from the industry every year and pays substantial stipend for each project selected for development), Mozilla Labs, IBM developerWorks Open Source, Sun Developer Network provide an ample learning opportunity for aspiring students. And of course, so does getting involved in one of the many Open Source projects hosted at SourceForge.net. But the frameworks, APIs, tools, and hosting platforms provided by the above companies can help students to get started quickly and make decisions between choosing ideas faster.

I was able to create and publish a Yahoo! pipe called foup that takes an email id registered with Flickr and returns the photosets created and the details of each photo in the photoset. The XML formatted pipe output can then be used to form the URL of each image and display the photos on your site [I will update the post soon with a simple html/script that does that].

Users need to be aware of the Flickr Community Guidelines before using Flickr images on their site.

There are a lot of ideas for the project - depends on how much time can be devoted.

Next post will be about Yahoo! Developer Network, Google Labs, Mozilla Labs and how IT/Software students can benefit from them.

Firstly, Yahoo! do not brand it as Yahoo! pipes - just plain pipes.

I have been dabbling with Yahoo! pipes for a couple of days. It has been quite some time since I did any coding, so I can’t add much value right now other than directing you to this informative presentation (5.4MB).

But I have an idea - a WordPress plugin that picks keywords from the blog post and outputs news results, blog search results, Wikipedia entries, or something similar. Any takers?

I received the Mahabharata, a complete 3 volume hardbound set of Amar Chitra Katha comics and am very impressed with the details of the epic that these comics go through.

The story is told as it’s first recital in public - by Vyasa’s disciple Vaishampayana in the presence of King Janamejaya, the great-grandson of Vyasa’s grandson.

The set is made up of 41 comics totaling more than 1300 pages. For anybody who wishes to dwell in the great literature that is Mahabharata, these comics should certainly be considered as a first step.

Here are some pictures to check how the set looks.