For the last few decades we were living in a dream. We started watching incredible things happen around us. Was it just a dream or was it reality? We cannot really identify because a man with a half bitten apple, Steve Jobs took over the whole world and put it in his dreams. We were living our lives in his dream.

Like every single person his life also came to an end. He said goodbye to the world and left us a few weeks back.His influence on us has been so much that though physically he may not be present with us now,the man with the midas touch has made us felt and his magic everywhere.

What made Steve Jobs stand aside from all other CEO’s in the world? It is nothing but his PASSION. His aim was not for making money, not for beating his competitors and make his company the top. His passion was to make the lives of people better for making the world a better place. He truly believed in his passion and lived with it.He always stood for the people and not just for his benefits and that’s why we love him the most. We can feel that passion in every apple product; its magical.

Here are a few principles in Steve’s life which made him unique.

• Do what you love to do

Always do what you love to do. Never ever try to do what others tell us to do. When you start doing something you love ,you will make incredible things happen. Once Steve was fired from Apple, the company which he  started. But he never ga ve up, he then found another company NEXT and did what he wanted to create in Apple. After some years apple bought NEXT and Steve came back to apple and converted his project in NEXT to Apple computers.Apple was 65 days from bankruptcy when Steve joined back and within 10 years he made it the world’s most valuable company.He truly was a legend.

• Live As If You Are Going To Die Tomorrow

Steve jobs was a pancreatic cancer patient. Once the doctor told him that he was going to die soon. He started to think that if he was going to die tomorrow the what was the thing that he wanted to do in life? At that time he realized that he want to do something better something great that could change the world. His two master products – iphone and ipad were launched after his surgery and his come back. His message was to stop living someone else’s life and start living yours.

• Perfectionism

Steve’s laser like focus and his perfection in work is famous.He would pay attention to even the minute works. He even used to check the tiles used in apples retail outlet. One of his patent is an example for that. Steve Jobs holds two patents regarding the glass staircase. Patent D478,999 from 2003 granted the ornamental design to Steve Jobs and others. A trip to the major Apple locations would in fact allow you to walk through one of Steve’s most iconic ideas.

• Making Impossible To “Its Possible”

It was very hard or impossible saying no to steve. When he got the spark of iphone he told his engineers to create a phone having only one button. The engineers and Apple’s board of directors told him that it was not humanly possible but he didn’t pay any heed to anyone until he got his iphone. His vision was incredible.

• Making Useful Innovations

All the technologies used by Apple are not invented by them. But they could convert the technology into usable products. If iphone and other devices were not released these touch phones and technology used would still remain in labs only.

Look back to what Steve has achieved in this world.He started his company in a garage at the age of 21 and made it the world’s most dream company. He added value to the human life like none other can. His products emerged just like a perfect dream – elegant, perfect and easy to use devices.

What made Steve Jobs so special is that he existed in a level above his company and its products. Though we respect what he had built, we love what he stood for.

He did what he wanted to do.He changed the world we live in. He changed our lives and added value to it. We are and will always be thankful to the man who left us leaving a half bitten apple. May his soul rest in peace.

Let’s go deep by taking the example of twitter. If you have a twitter account and you want to tweet using a third party application, then that application must be authorised to send tweets. You have to give your username and password to the third party application for sending tweets from your account. Giving away your username and password to a third party is not a good practice. Yeah, you can spot some security vulnerabilities here.

OAuth is the new way of doing this. You can share your data under a service provider to a third party without sharing your username and password.  You can allow a third party application to access your twitter account. Then that application can send tweets and read updates without using your twitter username and password.

Working

Before understanding the OAuth workflow you must be familiar with the following terms. These terms are used in almost all OAuth tutorials.

Service Provider: A web application that allows access via OAuth.

User: An individual who has an account with the Service Provider.

Consumer: A website or application that uses OAuth to access the Service Provider on behalf of the User.

I’m dividing the whole process into three parts. The second part is doing the authorisation process and the process is divided into four steps.

Part 1

The initial step of registering the application is included in this part. First you have to create an application using any OAuth library. Then you have to setup your application (Consumer) in the Service Provider website.  This process will give you a consumer key and consumer secret key. These two keys are unique to your application, and the secret key must be kept securely.

OAuth authentication diagram

Part 2

Here the user is going to authorise the application. To the User this appears to be just clicking on a link. But several requests and responses are happening in the background. This authorisation process is divided into four steps.

Step1: User access the application. Application making an HTTP request to the Service Provider asking for a Request Token.

Step2: Service provider passing the request token and Request Token Secret key to the application. Application will create an authorisation link using the request token. The Request Token Secret key is used by the service provider to identify the consumer (application) . Link is then displayed to the user.

Step3: User authorises the application by clicking on the link. Service provider prompts the user to allow the application. If user allows then service provider redirect the user to the application using callback.

Step4:OAuth callback pass Access Token and Access Token Secret while redirecting to the application. The combination of these keys is used to access user account. So we can save these keys in a database for future use.

Auth authentication process detailed diagram

Part3

Using the user tokens we can start making requests to API. Before submitting each request OAuth system signs the request by taking the consumer and user tokens.

This is how the OAuth system works. Implementing OAuth using any programming language is the next step. I will explain this in another post.

All the banned passwords are coded in the sign-up page of twitter. You can see the banned passwords by checking the source of the twitter sign-up page.

You can access the complete list of 370 banned passwords from here as a .txt file.

Mozilla declared a Design Challenge for Firefox 4 ‘Home Tab’. UI changes in the Firefox 4 had been revealed earlier this week. The challenge is based on a UI change. In Firefox 4 the ‘Home Page’ in the older Firefox will be replaced with a ‘Home Tab’ which is residing in the browser itself. The page can access browser — history, add-ons, bookmarks etc.. since it is not leaving the browser.
Mozilla is expecting designs like  My Yahoo, iGoogle etc… it is an explicit non-goal of this challenge.

How to participate

If you want to participate in this challenge, just answer the question “The Home Tab – What are some interesting uses of a Firefox-hosted start page?” in video form. Mozilla expecting some creative solutions for this question. You can explain your ideas using mockups. A couple of templates are given in the Mozilla site itself. For more details check out the official site here.

Important Dates

• December 2009 – Launch of The Home Tab – Winter ‘09 Design Challenge
• February 14th, 2010 – Submission Deadline
• February 15th, 2010 – People’s Choice Voting starts
• March 1st, 2010 – People’s Choice Voting ends
• March 15th, 2010 – Best in Class honors are announced

Impotent Links

Design challenge official site

Submission form

Concept series forum

Stephen Horlander, a Firefox developer has posted a mockup of Firefox 4’s User Interface in his blog. He pointed out five UI changes coming in the new Firefox version. The new UI changes borrowing some design elements from Google Chrome and Microsoft Office. Five UI changes in new Firefox are listed below

1. App Button

‘Menu bar’ in the old firefox is replaced with an ‘App button’. App button is similar to the single menu approach in MS Office, Paint etc..

2.Tool bar
Forward, Back, Address Bar, Refresh are coming in the toolbar. Design of these elemets will be changed.

3.Location Bar
Location bar is the address bar itself. The redesign will let you ‘reevaluating site identity’

4.Separate Search Bar
There will be a seperate search bar in new version, unlike one in google chrome. Horlander says that it will increase the functionality.

5.Bookmarks Widget
The Bookmarks Toolbar will be hidden by default and the Bookmarks Widget placed in the Navigation Toolbar.

Firefox 4 and Firefox 3.5 Comparison

Ref: chromaticpixel

Ubuntu 9.10 CD Cover

Canonical released the final version of Ubuntu 9.10. ‘Karmic Koala’ is the code name for this latest Ubuntu. Lots of new features are loaded with this version. The old Add/Remove in the application menu is replaced with Ubuntu Software Center. Ubuntu 9.10 comes with a redesigned boot sequence and login screen. Audio revamp in new Ubuntu will allow sound control across multiple applications. File and contact synchronization is another feature. These services are comes under an online service  called ‘Ubuntu One’ which were released in beta in May 2009. About the file system, Karmic Koala is the first Ubuntu release to use the ext4 file system by default. There is lots of other features too. Check it out yourself, its free.

Well, this is the second Operating system release in this month. Windows launched windows7 on october 22nd. Today on 29th we are witnessing another major OS release. Let’s wait and see which is gonna Rule.

Ubuntu 9.10 Software Centre

Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition Highlights

• Faster, simplified, better-looking boot experience for most users
• Ubuntu software center for package management which replaces the traditional GNOME Add/Remove tool.
• Audio revamp allowing improved sound control across multiple applications
• Firefox 3.5: latest, fastest, most secure web browser yet from Mozilla
• Default ext4 file system

Useful Links

Download Ubuntu 9.10

Ubuntu One

The new feature tour with screen shots

GeoCities was founded in 1994. In those times it was third most visited domain. Geocities offered everyone some web space. People uploaded their web pages and populate it using GeoCities. Yahoo then bought GeoCities for $3.65 billion then it become Yahoo GeoCities. In recent years social networking platforms, blogging platforms and other free hosting services came into the front row of internet. All theses new age web 2.0 services put an end to GeoCities. Good bye old friend!!!

Hardware requirements for Windows 7

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver