I came across this interesting article which was cited by Guy Kawasaki. Titled “The Banality of Heroism”, it looks at the “hidden heros” in each one of us.

At Abu Ghraib, one photo shows two soldiers smiling before a pyramid of naked prisoners while a dozen other soldiers stand around watching passively. If you observe such abuses and don’t say, “This is wrong! Stop it!” you give tacit approval to continue. You are part of the silent majority that makes evil deeds more acceptable.

This article also reminded me of the movie, “Das Experiement“. Highly recommended!

I do most of my programming during weekends. This weekend I decided to write a WordPress plugin. I also wanted to improve my recently acquired PHP skills.

WordPress dashboard displays incoming links from Technorati. This is very useful since it lets you know who are discussing about your blog (not all have trackbacks enabled). But sometimes not all links are visible on Technorati. So I supplement it by doing a “link search” on Google Blog Search.

What if I display the Google Blog Search incoming links also on the WordPress dashboard? Hence this plugin! This plugin uses rss library of WordPress. I wanted to do Ajax, but there isn’t any “native” support for Ajax in WordPress

Do checkout Google Blog Search Preview Plugin!

Welcome to my WordPress code library. In this page,  you will find various WordPress plugins and themes created by me. You will also find various WordPress tutorials and articles written by me.

WordPress Plugins

WP Google Page Rank Display - This plugin can be used to display your Google Page Rank in the blog. The Page Rank is cached on a daily basis and hence is an improved plugin compared to other plugins out there. Page Rank display can be easily customized by using a different image set!

Google Blog Search Preview - This is a very simple plugin which shows you a preview of Google blog search links for your blog! This appears on the Dashboard at the bottom of the activity section.

Google Blog Search Preview is a simple plugin for Wordpress which displays incoming links from Google Blog Search. This is similar to Technorati incoming links and hence is displayed on the Activity tab of WordPress Dashboard.

I found that Google Blog Search sometimes shows me inbound links which are not yet detected by Technorati. Hence this plugin! This plugin uses “link:” feature of Google Blog Search to identify incoming links.

This  plugin is released under GPL license.

Important : This is tested only on WordPress 2.1+ versions. Please contact me if you came across any problems with earlier versions.

DOWNLOADING

Download Google Blog Search Preview 1.1 | Download as text file

INSTALLATION

1. Upload to your plugins folder, usually wp-content/plugins/ and unzip the file, it will create jj_gblogsearch.php file.

2. Activate the plugin on the plugin screen.

3. Go to WordPress Dashboard and verify that incoming links from Google Blog Search are displayed at the bottom of activity section.

SAMPLE SCREENSHOT

CHANGE LOG

1. Released 1.0 on 1st April 2007 (PHP 5 only)
2. Released 1.1 on 17th April 2007 (PHP 4 and PHP 5 support)

I have 3 broadband networks at home. I use BSNL 900+UL, Asianet WOW 199 and Reliance Netconnect. My main network is BSNL which is quite stable at 256kbps. Asianet is the backup which gives speeds upto 2MBPS. Reliance netconnect using USB modem is the final backup and I use it whenever I am on train or bus or on the beach thinking about hot babes like maria sharapova (don’t worry, it is a gimmick to get more traffic!).

As I have posted earlier, I recently upgraded IE 6.0 to IE 7.0. Also Firefox was upgraded to 2.0.0.3. Everything looked smooth until today.

Today being the last day of the month, I wanted to check the Asianet WOW 199 usage. The maximum I can use is 700MB/month and I just wanted to see what is left and download something (paris hilton photos perhaps?)

So I switched my Wifi connection to Asianet and clicked on the account usage link. The login screen came and I typed in user/password and clicked go. Following is the screen I got on IE 7.0.

As you can see the error is quite informative. It is as useful as a britney spears album is to a seminary (oops I did it again, the traffic bait!).

The error looked suspicious since login page and account page were served from the same server. Anyway I called up customer care and they sweared that the server is infact working!

Ok, probably IE 7.0 has some bug. So I tried the Firefox 2.0 to login, and here is what I got,

Thank god! Atleast it says there is something wrong with SSL! This error is much more useful than the IE 7.0 error. But still I have no clue what is happening. The idiots who coded this error decided that I don’t want to know how to access the site.

But I want to. Otherwise I have no other way of getting my account info. So turned to the ultimate saviour of tech problems. The Google!

Ok. Here is the true picture. IE 7.0 and Firefox 2.0 decided to support only SSL version 3.0 onwards since previous versions of SSL (1.0 and 2.0) are insecure. But luckily in IE 7.0 there is an easy way to enable SSL 2.0 (which Asianet account page is using).

1. Click on Internet Options -> Advanced.

2. Under security, check the use SSL 2.0 checkbox.

The firefox 2.0 hack to enable SSL 2.0 is bit complicated. If you are itching to know about it, search in Google!

Now this incident clearly demonstrates why many Software developers are idiots when it comes to usability. Be it microsoft or the open source community, there are many who fail to understand simple user interface/communication principles.

I guess this also explains why geeks are incapable of getting girl friends like aishwarya rai!