dready blog v2.0

Google Gears is one of the most exciting technologies to be released IMO. It will push the web 2.0 envelope further and bring interactive web applications to the next level — offline! Well, not just offline, the whole point is that you can design your application synchronization strategy.

I’ve been experimenting with it a bit and it’s surprisingly (Javascript) developer friendly. The end product is a bookmarklet I call GearSaver. It’s really a shell that injects the gearsaver.js script hosted on my server into the current page that you’re viewing. It saves all your textareas (be it a blog post or wiki page that you’re editing, any multi-line text box in a form) into Gears.

This is pre-pre-pre alpha and is only a proof-of-concept, I haven’t tested it in IE and there isn’t a way to view the saved results yet. You can, however, use the DB query tool included in the gears samples and select the textarea table in the gearsaver database.

This is personally very useful to me because many a time I’ve lost valuable work in a textarea upon submitting a page and the network goes down. What this does is that it saves a version of each textarea found on the page, indexed by the URL and its xpath. It is also timestamped. My next enhancement would be to have a pull-down menu on each textarea to allow you to revert to older versions.

Without further ado:

Add the following bookmark and use it on any page: Launch GearSaver

Updated 20080812: bookmarklet to use version 0.4.

Just got back from another trip to Singapore and a side-trip to Malaysia. This time I was there not for my own wedding but my good friends, Aelvin and Kim’s who got married on 070707 (7th July, 2007) at the Equinox restaurant up on the 69th floor of Swissôtel The Stamford. I’ve known Aelvin for 19 years. When I first arrived in Singapore and went out with Aelvin, I was introduced to Kim. That’s how long I’ve know this sweet couple - about half my lifetime!

Aside from attending the wedding, perhaps what makes this trip so dear to my heart is that Tiff turned up at the airport when I arrived! I was totally not expecting her because despite numerous attempts at getting her to take a few days off to attend the wedding, she was quite sure that she wouldn’t be able to get any time off from work. Turns out that she tried anyway and her manager said, “Sure, babe!”

Good thing for us because that gave us the opportunity to spend some time together as well as finish off some very important business — spending time with my parents. After the wedding, we went back to Ipoh (my hometown) with my mum and spent three days with her, accompanying her to the dentist and fixed up some home electrics for her. Of course, we binged quite a bit too.

We then made our way down to Kuala Lumpur to see my dad. Dad couldn’t make it out to our wedding in Singapore due to health reasons, so it was especially important to see him as we’ve not seen him for 7 years. Not since we left for Australia. If you don’t know by now you would’ve guessed that my dad and mum were separated. So even if my dad was able to attend our wedding it would’ve been awkward since my mum vows never to see his face! Not sure how we would’ve handled that. Nevertheless, we wanted to get his blessings and so we carried out the traditional tea ceremony with him. The wedding wouldn’t have been complete without that!

So, mum and dad are both happy.

Other than the fact that Tiff and I are still living apart, I’m actually very glad to be back. I’m going to ground myself for at least 3 months.