Reviews – Page 44

On-demand web page archiving

I did a post yesterday at Youthpad on how popular websites looked in old days. Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine is indeed an excellent resource for this particular purpose, but its task is to keep snapshots of the Web as it grows, and not primarily as an archival service. Snapshots are made available six months after they are ‘crawled’, i.e., recorded by the Internet Archives’ automated scripts. What if you need to create on-demand snapshots of how a particular web page looks? Fortunately, there are a few web services to the rescue.

The first web service is called Iterasi. (Cool sounding name and yet unique enough – a lot like ‘Google’). What Iterasi does is that it creates an exact copy of a webpage that you are viewing, including text, images, stylesheets, JavaScript elements, et al. Using Iterasi you can create working copies of a page you come across. We often underestimate the fluid nature of websites – what may be there today may not be a valid link tomorrow. For instance, I had to link to IIT JEE rules for a blog post I did a few months ago. The thing is that if I link to it right now, it no doubt points to the correct link; however, if someone visits the same post a year down the line and clicks through to the IIT JEE site it may no longer be a valid link. By storing a copy on Iterasi, you can circumvent this potential problem. It’s not necessary to Iterasi-ize everything you link to, just a few important ones. You will need to create a free account on Iterasi to start archiving (you’ll have to hunt around a bit for the free account sign-up link). Once you have done that, you can set copies of a web page as public or private. You also get a short URL to the copy. To make the task of archiving easier, you have a bookmarklet (works on any browser; just drag and drop the link in your bookmarks toolbar) and a Firefox plugin.

The other archival or recording requirement you might have is to take a screenshot of a web page. Basically, just an image and not a ‘working’ copy as in Iterasi. Using the normal method of pressing ‘Print Screen’ key and then pasting in some image editing application, or by using a standalone screenshot application what you often get is a screenshot of just the visible portion of the web page. Aviary.com – an online image editing suite (the mind boggles at the various online image-editing utilities they have on offer) – has a free feature that allows you to take a screenshot image of the entire web page, and not just the visible area. All you need to do is this: say that you want to take a screenshot of gyaan.in, enter aviary.com/http://gyaan.in and it will take a screenshot which you can save to your PC. Just visit a webpage, and when you find one you need to take a screenshot of, enter aviary.com in front of the URL and press Enter. Aviary.com also offers a bookmarklet that you can drag to your bookmarks list, and a Firefox plugin that offers you the option to take a screenshot of whole page, visible area only, or a selected region of the page. You can then save the image to your desktop or edit it online on Aviary.com (provided you have signed up for a free account).

PS – BTW, folks in Delhi can catch up with me tomorrow at OSSCamp Delhi at NSIT Dwarka from 10am to 5pm (drop in any time you want). I’ll be giving a talk on Creative Commons licenses and conducting a quiz on open source. There are goodies to win from Adobe, Mozilla, and OSSCamp branded T-shirts.

The Last Lecture

You really must have been living under a rock in case you haven’t heard of late Randy Pausch’s eponymous last lecture. Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a pioneer in the field of virtual reality. He was also a co-founder of the Alice project (not related to that zombie movie). Randy Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was told he had barely a few months to live. The now-famous last lecture that he gave at CMU along the lines of “What would you have to say if you knew this was the last lecture that you’re going to give” is a video worth watching. (He lived for a few months after that but succumbed to his disease on.) Drop what you’re doing now and do that once – even if you have seen this earlier. And especially if you haven’t seen this ever.

Watch Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams by Randy Pausch

What I’m referring to today is the book of the same name, and not the talk that he gave. You could call this a sort of a review, but this is one review that I’m not going to give a rating to since I don’t feel it is right to ‘rate’ the last published work of a dying (now dead) man.

The book The Last Lecture was penned by Jeffrey Zaslow, a friend of Randy Pausch, from cellphone conversations that he had in the weeks leading up to his demise. The book starts off with transcript of the talk that he gave (video embedded above). The later parts of the book are devoted to reminiscences from Randy Pausch’s past – experiences that he recounts that made him who he his today. His philosophy in life, and how he tried to impart it to his students and colleagues around him. Considering that the book was written down by someone else from telephonic conversations, you’ll find that most of the ‘chapters’ are as long as the words needed to recount the experience – ranging from a few paragraphs to a few pages. There isn’t any structure as such individually but the experiences overall paint a picture of what this guy stood for. You also come across Pausch as a realist who knows he has precious few weeks left and how he tries to ensure that his family – his wife and three kids – have a smooth transition once he is dead.

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Randy Pausch and Jefferey Zaslow discussing The Last Lecture

Reading the book makes you too think of how valuable our lives and those of the ones dearest to us are. And what would our legacy be if we too were to die one day or be given a terminal diagnosis. “Would I be able to cope in the same ‘live the moment’ way that this guy did?” is what you’ll find asking yourself quite often. The anecdotes that Pausch recounts contain words of advice that would do good to many who follow them.

Do buy a copy of this book. It’s one of those titles that you can always go back to and read when you’re feeling down and out, and it still never gets old. In case you didn’t have time to watch the video (the first one), at least do read a transcript of that lecture.

Originally posted at Youthpad.