shyam's blog

Drupal does not ship with an RSS feed that will show you the latest comments posted on the site. There is a module called Comment RSS that does the same thing, but I have had some issues with it and did not want the overhead of using another module for something as simple as that. Instead, you can use the Views module to generate the RSS feed. I am posting here the one that I am using. Just import it into your feed and use it.

When 2009 kicked in, one of the first things I did was to cut down on my absolutely horrendous volume of information consumed. As laid out earlier, this entailed drastic cuts in the number (feeds and people) and the volume (items and tweets) of sources and information consumed through them, over and above the rather drastic step of being almost off instant messaging itself. Those measures have helped quite a bit and I will detail them out in a later post, but that is not what I wanted to say with this post.

On Saturday morning I headed out with my girlfriend to Bikaner. It is a nice little town about 490-520 kilometers (depending on which road you choose to take) away from Delhi. I had intended to use the trip also to test out a new GPS service provider for my Nokia E71 - the Wayfinder and Mapmyindia combo. In a rather interesting twist of fate Airtel had decided, on their own, that they should disable my domestic roaming while they were carrying out my instructions to disable only international roaming.

This had an unintended consequence of my phone being pretty much useless once we crossed the telecom circle from Airtel NCR, to Airtel Haryana. Unfortunately, all of the phone-based GPS units need a working GPRS connection to get going and that meant I could not test the unit out. The shorter version of the story is that I could not be online or be reached easily for most of the 24th, following which I had decided to really get as much as possible off the grid. The only exceptions were a couple of tweets to broadcast where I was and a handful of absolutely necessary phone calls and messages.

When my Nokia E71's Nokia Maps subscription ended I wanted to look around for better options. Nokia Maps work pretty well, at least within Delhi when I tested it, but I wanted to see what other options were out there for me. So the first product I decided to try was MapmyIndia's Navigator.

Actually, MapmyIndia is only providing the data for the application, the application itself is co-branded from the Wayfinder stable of navigation applications. Subscription to the service involves buying it online at MapmyIndia. The key delivery, though, is not instant and takes about a day or two, following which you can download the software from Wayfinder's mobile site.

One major downside to the product is that it requires you to register online, which is not required with Nokia Maps and it will log you on every time you want to use the software. This may just be a major downside for anyone who is hung up on the privacy implications.

For the couple of days I have used it, the maps are considerably more detailed than Nokia Maps. At least on the face of it, it looks to be marginally more accurate too, but I will use it for some more time before I can say that for sure.

I will be heading out of town over the weekend to Rajasthan and it should be a good test of which one provides better service in terms of both details and accuracy, though I have heard that Nokia Maps start showing their weakness once you are out of the urban centers.

The last time I tried Firefox 3.1, or even the trusted latest, greatest Firefox 3.0.x install, I had walked away feeling very disappointed by the performance I could get from them. The main reason for wanting to use Firefox 3.1 was Tracemonkey, which is a considerably more optimized and faster version of Spidermonkey, ideally resulting in better performance with heavily AJAX-ed applications like Gmail, Google Reader and Google Docs.

That time, Firefox 3.1, with Tracemonkey enabled, was breaking Google Apps (Spreadsheets, to be more specific), which is a complete deal-breaker for me. The Firefox 3.0 installs and the Minefield nightlys that I used to run otherwise were gobbling up about half a gigabyte of RAM, with the extensions enabled and on a Macbook with just a gigabyte of RAM, which too was a deal-breaker. Thus, I wound up in bed with Camino.

With Firefox 3.1 now getting very close to the release candidate stage, I decided it was time now give it another spin. This time without any of the extensions and with a brand new profile. And I am happy to report that it has been a nice experience till now. Google Docs no longer break even when Tracemonkey is enabled and what even more heartening is that enabling it has led to a reduction in RAM usage.

I always keep Gmail, Google Reader and Google Docs open in my browser and the lowest I have ever seen on browser, in terms of RAM usage, for the same is at 110 MB. After I enabled Tracemonkey and slapped the Google Gears extension, RAM usage has dipped to around 104 MB, often dipping under 100 MB. Now, THAT is what I call a performance boost.

One of the first things I did as 2009 rolled into view was to delete all my RSS feeds and start all over again. Okay, to be honest, I did back them up as OPML first before I did the act. Which was soon followed by a massive Twitter follow purge that saw my follow count drop by almost half.

I have never been someone who has had problems consuming a lot of information. In fact, if anything, I have always thrived being snowed under a mountain of information, stowing them away in the recesses of the mind till I can put two-and-two together to form a larger picture at a later time.

But, of late, I have had trouble keeping up. I have multiple "to-read" lists littered in my browser and various text files, a pile of text documents, presentations and PDFs that I have not had the time to read. No matter how much I optimized my workflow, those lists never seemed to get smaller.

And then there was this telling statistic:

According to Google Reader, from a 30-day sample, I had 176 subscriptions, from which I had read 7,827 items. Assuming that I was consuming 50 words per items it meant that I was reading almost 13045 words ((7827/30)*50) in a day. Add Twitter to the mix where a 24 hour sample for me was stretching into 40 pages, which, at 20 tweets per page results in about 800 tweets being sent my way. Assuming that an average tweet word count is 10 per tweet, that adds another 8000 words that I am following per day.

Those two numbers alone meant that I was doing roughly 21,000 words in a day. And I have not accounted for emails, other correspondence and any other form of reading in that number, even without which it is scary. Yes, it is true that you don't actually 'read' those 21k words, but all those cost me attention of varying magnitudes and even after chopping it down to 15k to account for things I may have overlooked, it still is a big number.