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Vishwak – RSS Viewer Gadget

If you haven’t seen Live.com site, go check it out. It is a personalizable start page, you can add any number of available Gadgets - which are tiny AJAX applets that gives you functions like Calculator, News, Currency Converter, Games and more. There is a built RSS feed reading gadget as well that displays the contents of any RSS feeds. At Vishwak, we decided to improve the functionality of this RSS Gadget and we have come up a new RSS Viewer gadget. This gadget accepts any RSS link, displays top 5 stories, expands one abstract at a time in rotation.

You can add this gadget to your live.com page from: http://www.vishwak.com/gadgets/live.com/vishwakrssrandom.xml. For adding, click on the Add Stuff link above the Pages Tab, then on Advanced options and type the URL of the gadget in the Subscribe textbox and press subscribe. Let me know what you comments .

If you would like to write Gadgets on your own check out the Live.COM SDK here. There are differences between the Live team approved gadgets that have access to the entire page DOM and JavaScript objects; and your own (not approved) Gadgets which are run on an IFrame, which restricts it from drawing outside the Iframe area. That’s why you will notice our gadget having the Edit button not on the same line as in the title display (border) but as a seperate line (Right-aligned).

My book reading and Blink

It is rare for me to finish a book that I started till the end. Though I love to buy books (as I grow up among books – my father runs LIFCO Books) and a bookstore is a place I can spend hours, I am hardly into big fat books like novels and fictions. I am puzzled on how kids can finish the 500+ pages Harry Potter Books. I buy a book, take a snapshot, read the first few chapters in one sitting. Then the book goes into my personal library – hardly taken out again (with few exceptions). That’s why you see my posts under “Books” Category in this blog less populated – I keep waiting to finish a book before posting, but finishing never happens.

This post is about an exception. Early last year I bought the book “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. Immediately in that trip I finished the first chapter, then in few trips though I took the book I could never read more than few pages. Last two weeks due to trips to New Delhi (3 Hour Flights for each leg and then all the Airport waiting time) I re-started this book and finished it easily.

The book is about how our SubConsious mind processes informations differently than our Concious/Scientifc mind; it covers how at times this can be used for effective decision making. This book proves the statement that you might be using many times “I have a gut feeling that this works only like this“.

I will certainly recommend this book for anyone interested.