YemKay

Those who think Postal Services are not meant for this generation, rethink!!!. India post has proposed to replace the age old Postal Index (PIN) code with 8 digit Postal Address Locator (PAL) code. In the past we have seen such revolutions in Telecom industry, when the number of digits in our telephone number increased from five to six and then to eight. Now we will soon see our pin codes also changing this way, but your new code is not going to be your old code prefixed with the state/city code.

As per this proposal, the new PAL code will have 8 digits. First two digits denote the state, next two digits denote either the metro or the district. For a metro locality, the fifth digit denotes its zone and the last three digits denote the locality. For a non-metro locality, the 5th digit denotes a town in the district and the last 3 digits denote the village.

For metro localities

22015248

{State}{Metro City}{Metro Zone}{Locality}

For non-metro localities

22106178

{State}{District}{Town}{village}

In third and fourth digits, the range 01 to 09 is used to denote a metro in the state and values 10 to 99 are used for districts. So, this code can accommodate 9 metros and 90 districts in a state, which is good enough even for the largest state U.P, which has 70 districts. It’s imminent that the code for state capital will be 01. Metro, in this context, doesn’t mean metropolitan cities but municipal cities. So second tier cities like Coimbatore, Pune, Surat, Mysore will be identified from each state and metro codes are assigned for them. There can be 9 such cities from a state.

If the fifth digit is between one and five, it denotes a zone in metro and other values denote a town in the district. As this system accommodates just 5 towns in a district, it’s not clear on what basis such towns are identified from districts.

At maximum, the system supports 9999 villages in a district or same number of localities in a metro. So the smallest entity identified by this code will be a village or a metro locality, regardless of whether it has a post office or not. A question arises here is that a small district in the state of Pondichery and the Mumbai city, which has a population of 2 crore, will get the same number of slots for their localities according to this design. I think, for postal department geography is more important than the demography. So Mumbai with an area comparable with that of a district will get the same number of slots for its localities. Rather I feel, by allotting single digit metro code value (01 to 09) in the third and fourth positions, they are wasting a precious digit in the PAL code. We could increase the number of locality slots for a metro by 10 fold, if just the third digit is used for the metro code and the last 5 digits are used for the localities. India post encourages citizens to send their views on the new PAL system. Note the email address - deputydgpoi at gmail.com. I’ve just sent the above suggestion to this email.

The proposal document claims that the first half of the code will be used to segregate the outgoing mails and second half will be used in delivering the incoming mails.

Another interesting aspect I noted from this document is about the increasing passion in Government organizations like India Post and BSNL. See this excerpt from a slide for popularizing the PAL system,

Launch a bold and innovative publicity campaign for 2 months before introduction that should catch the imagination of the nation like wild fire - Something like KBC or IPL

Would you have imagined this passion in a Govt. organization? Though they are far behind the private organizations in terms of liberal decision making, there are already promising signs of improvement. One should note that unlike growth in the private sector, the growth in Government sector triggers growth of the Nation by multifold.

Ever wondered why you ain’t getting the slide show output and Image tab while running an Yahoo Pipe? Well, the slide show will be shown only when the pipe has Image output. And for a Pipe to have Image output format it should have certain attributes in its output items. If your pipe consumes data from the inbuilt Flickr module, the required attributes are automatically populated. But when you are generating the list of images using some other means, for instance - by Google Search, you will have to populate the necessary attributes yourself to get slide show output for the pipes.

Following attributes and their values should be present for a Image output format,

media:group.media:content.media = image
media:group.media:content.url = URL of the image

How to populate these attributes in your Yahoo Pipe?

Let us that you have built a Pipe which generates a list of images. Open its source and place a Loop module. Connect the output of your pipe to the Loop module’s input. Drag the module “Item Builder” and drop it over the Loop module. Add the attributes mentioned above. For the URL attribute just select the attribute which has the URL of the image from your input. Choose emit all results from the Loop module and wire it to the Pipe output. Other attributes like title, link and description could be added in this manner. Finally, your pipe should look like the one below,

See this sample Yahoo pipe which shows a slide show of Google Image search results for Abhinav Bindra, the first solo Gold medal winner for India in Olympics. Click on “Edit source” to see how the required fields are constructed as mentioned above.

This is the slide show output for this pipe.

I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe to find the list the medals won by a country in the ongoing Olympics 2008. Visit the pipe, enter the country code and click on “Run”. Find the list of Country codes here.

The results are displayed as shown in this picture,

And how to create a feed for the medals won by your country’s Olympians from this Pipe? Here you go!!. This is the format of the feed url,

http://pipes.yahoo.com/yemkay/olympics2008medalfeed?_render=rss&country=XXX

Replace XXX with the country code. Open your feed reader, subscribe to this URL and be the first to know when Olympians from your country win medals. Feed for my country is still empty. Dont miss the hot ones - China and United States.

Read the related entry in Pipe Feeds

I’ve created a website, Pipe Feeds, to publicize my Yahoo Pipes. I will publish the Yahoo pipes created for my personal use on this website. Most of my pipes attempt to simplify the way you use the internet - from surfing to subscription. My objective of creating Pipes is that,
if you like a content from a particular section of a website, let the content come to you next time without you having to visit the website again. Widgetizing and embedding are some other benefits from Yahoo Pipes. This diagram depicts it more clearly.
Click to enlarge

To start with, I’ve published pipes for Cricket Quotes (from cricinfo), ThiruKural Widget and History of Tamil Cinema (from DinaThanthi).

The pipes Cartoons from Indian dailies, Cartoons from Tamil dailies and Adade Cartoons feed which were created in the past and later graduated to auto publishing sites are also listed.

The site is hosted on blogger. Each post will represent a pipe and has various links for embedding, gadget creation, feed subscription and Pipes source.

Read more about Yahoo Pipes and Pipe Feeds site. If you like to create any pipes for generating custom feeds, just drop a note.

As we become mobile, one of the biggest challenges is managing the applications and the files on different devices like personal computer, work PC and mobiles. In the era of Web 2.0, desktop applications like office suites, image editors and feed readers are getting re-engineered as online services by the Internet giants Google and Yahoo. I’m listing some of the online services one must use in day to day life.

as an online office suite

Create and store documents, spreadsheets and presentations online. It is possible to convert Google documents to MS office formats and back. Google spreadsheets provides an enhanced library of functions including import XML or HTML import and stock quotes. Documents can be shared with other users in view or collaboration mode. Document’s version history is maintained well and you can revert back to any older version of the document. A more generic use is embedding shared documents on web pages and blogs.

and as photo storage and sharing platforms

Upload, organize and share the photos online. Organize the photos by albums and give proper details like date, place and people names. Storage limit is a major drawback with both of these services. Flickr’s free edition provides unlimited storage space but allows you to access only the 200 last uploaded photos while Picasa provides 1 GB space

for sharing videos

Upload and share your videos. I use YouTube more as a storage space for my personal videos. Shared videos gain easy reachability thanks to the large user base of YouTube

for online feed subscription

Subscribe to your favorite feeds and read them online. Mark and share the favorite items with friends. For me, using Google Reader has become a routine like checking the inbox.

Google Notebook for organizing notes

Collect and organize plain text notes very easily. Notes could be organized as notebooks, sections and notes. There is a Firefox plugin to integrate notes with the browser

Delicious for managing bookmarks

Bookmark the favorite pages and manage the bookmarks online with delicious rather than marking pages as favorites in browsers of different machines. Bookmarks are centrally managed and periodically synced with the browsers. Add meaningful tags while bookmarking a page, so that it could be easily searched later. Don’t miss this firefox plugin which helps you to add bookmarks right from the browser and helps you to locate the page by typing in the tag name or page name

for managing clipped texts from favorite pages

While Delicious stores just the URL of the page and the tags, Clipmarks allows you to store the contents as well. Clipmarks comes handy when you want to clip and bookmark a part of a web page. Create an account and install a suitable clipmarks plugin for your browser from the download page. While browsing a page, just press the clipmarks button, select the content you want to clip and again press the clipmarks button to store the contents. You can make multiple selections in a page and clip them together. Just the text is stored and images are not. Clips exceeding 2000 characters can’t be shared and have to be stored privately.

Meebo for Instant Messaging

Login to the IMs of Yahoo, GTalk, MSN and AOL with a single meebo sign in. With meebo, you will be freed from installing multiple IM clients and multiple logins. Chat history is centrally located. To view a chat log, you don’t have to remember from which machine you logged on.

for task management

Create and manage your tasks with RTM. It integrates well with GMail and Google Calendar. So you can access the todo list right from your Gmail.