Tynker has raised $3.25 million in funding. For a product that seems a direct rip-off of Scratch that’s come out of MIT (specifically its Lifelong Kindergarten group led by the talented and awesome Mitch Resnick) in 2006, I had to wonder what was going on in the heads of those who agreed back up Tynker.

Delving deeper, it’s clear that it’s not the product, it’s the implementation that is different. Having it hosted on cloud and providing teachers (or groups led by educators) tools to create lessons, track progress, etc. as premium services is probably where Tynker hopes to find its sweet spot.

However, if Tynker is based on Scratch, there are bunch of other cool ‘derivatives’ that are inspired by it too: Berkeley’s Snap! and Google’s Blockly immediately come to mind. And then there are new and upcoming products like Hopsctotch which is aimed at iPad.

Interestingly, Scratch’s wiki actually lists out a bunch of alternatives to Scratch including paid variants like Stencyl.

I am sure that there will be a sort of “gold rush” to adopting this BYOB approach to create children-focused tools and software to teach them computing skill. And if Tynker offers any clue, with the real hard-work of core framework already done and in place thanks to Scratch and its community, it’s going to be relatively easy for others to follow suit and provide alternative and maybe even better implementations since the money is largely in the hands of educators who’ll use those tools to prepare their courses and curriculum.

What’s cool and a possible area of innovation for some future start-ups is marriage of BYOB approach of Scratch with robotics kits. A working model of that is already in place in LEGO WeDo, perhaps thanks to Mitch’s previous work with LEGO MindStorms.

Then there are some refreshing approaches like Code Spells which teaches children Java code by letting them create spells written in the language, and could very well become the “missing link” between BYOB approach of Scratch and the more traditional CLI or IDE-based programming.

Can two people stay happy together?

Here’s what I had written back.

It’s not easy. Look, the best thing you can do is to find a person who loves you for exactly who you are — good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, this habit, that habit — the right person will always think you’re the best in the world, no matter what.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the good in other person because you’re so involved with what you are thinking, because you are focusing on what you are feeling more than you remember how much you love the other person. At times like these, you might even get into a fight with the other person, and even think that the love is gone.

You have to remember that LOVE is not about how the other person makes you feel — it’s about how you make the other person feel no matter if the other person even acknowledges your love. It’s a one-sided affair — from your heart to the person you love. The lucky ones get loved back. Don’t insult your love by expecting a return — it’s not a bank account, it’s love!

Notice the date on which it was written. Ancient, huh? And yes, we did write the markup in CAPS back then.

HTML Image Maps Tutorial for Beginners
Written on Tue, 30 Dec 1997 01:55:49

When we use image maps, we are essentially defining areas of a picture as “hotspots” and the action to take when that “hotspot” is activated.

Let’s take an example. A car. You want it to be that when you click on the glass, it takes you to the page giving finer details of glass and when you click on the rest of the body, it takes you to finer details of how the car was painted. For this, we are going to “map” the image to different “HREF” links. How?

The standard, minimum recommended image tag is:

When we want the image to use a map, we add a "usemap" attribute. So, the image tag becomes:
<IMG SRC="car.jpg" ALT="A car" WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=50 usemap="name">

Now, we are telling the image to use a map. But where is the map? We have to define it first. How do we do it? We use the <MAP> tag. We also have to give it a name which we will specify in the “usemap” attribute. Let’s see what I mean:

<MAP NAME="CAR">
</MAP>

So, the image tag will be:
<IMG SRC="car.jpg" ALT="A car" WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=50 usemap="#car">

As you might know, we use the “#” to tell the browser that the what we just referenced to exists in the same HTML document somewhere (usually people put the maps near the end of the document). So, it turns out that we use the “name” attribute in the “MAP” tag to bookmark the map and we can put a reference to this bookmark just as we would to any other standard <A NAME=”name”> bookmark in a HTML file. Notice something? The procedure remains the same. Only, since the content of the bookmark are mapping directions, we use <MAP> & </MAP> instead of the usual <A> & </A>. Easy till now? It gets simpler.

So now we know how to set a bookmark to mapping directions and we know how to call it for an image. Now we see how to “program” these directions for an image. Fine?

What comes between the <MAP NAME=”name”> & </MAP>? There is only one thing that can be used here – the <AREA> tag which defines areas on the image which refers to the map. Then we tell it which shape to use and what the coordinates,etc are for that shape. Then we specify what action to take. If no action is given, no action will be taken as a default. See? It’s simple.

Now you know it as well as I do that we can specify parts of an image like that only by addressing actual pixel values of the image. Let’s use our example here.

Remember the car image above? Its width is 100 pixels and height is 50 pixels. Let’s define two equal vertical bands. We do it by defining two rectangles using the “RECT” shape. The “COORDS” attribute is specified as left-x,top-y,right-x,down-y. Here is the map. See for yourself:

<MAP NAME="car">
  <AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="1,1,50,50" HREF="front.html">
  <AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="51,1,100,50" HREF="back.html">
</MAP>

Get it upto here? Let’s do it across now:

<MAP NAME="car">
  <AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="1,1,100,25" HREF="top.html">
  <AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="1,26,100,50" HREF="bottom.html">
</MAP>

<MAP NAME="sample">
  ...
  <AREA SHAPE="CIRCLE" COORDS="10,10,10" HREF="abc.html">
  ...
</MAP>

But what if you don’t want a rectangle or a circle but a triangle? To overcome this, the shape tag of “POLY” is used. It’s COORDS use pairs of x-y positions to form any shape you want.

For example, to make a diamond in our car and then to make is clickable, we use the map:

<MAP NAME="car">
  <AREA SHAPE="POLY" COORDS="50,1,1,25,50,50,100,25" HREF="abc.html">
</MAP>

The first pair, “50,1″ means: 50 to the left (middle of the image) and pixel line 1 (the top of the image). The second pair, “1,25″ means: 1 to the right (the extreme left of image) and 25 down (the middle of the image). And so on…

And if two areas overlap, the first defined takes preference. For example, if we were to make the flag of Japan clickable, we could use a map like this:

<MAP NAME="JAPAN">
  <AREA SHAPE="CIRCLE" COORDS="50,25,20" HREF="red.html">
  <AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="1,1,100,50" HREF="white.html">
</MAP>

Since we defined the circle first, on clicking that area, the action it specifies is taken.

Have fun!

India is setting up a polling booth in Ladhakh for just 10 people!

Yes, there are only 10 registered voters in this booth (No. 10) at Sunudo in Nobra frontier region, making it the smallest polling station in these elections, perhaps even the smallest ever in an Indian election.

This TOI story on polling preparations in J&K has some other interesting statistics.

I started giving a little more than a passing attention to reports on him after I read a story about him putting sycophants in Congress in their place. Compared to the near militant politics that is currently prevalent in most parts of the country by young, aspiring politicians, I have found his views and style to be far more restrained, mature, and generally sensible.

The fact that he is touring India in unannounced, almost secretive trips to understand her people better and is undoubtedly a future Prime Minister only bodes well for the general masses.

What prompted me into writing this? Rahul’s answer to why Afzal’s sentence hasn’t been carried out yet. He almost manages to sound like a regular guy.

• LinkedIn: It’s perhaps the only serious social network for professionals.
• Orkut: It’s very popular in India and almost everybody I know outside work is on there.
• Facebook: I have only recently started taking it seriously. However, it’s a good ‘missing-link’ between a ‘meant-for-professionals’ LinkedIn and totally-bindass Orkut.

Aside: I have also started Tweeting. Follow me.

Back in 1932, it was today that 6 young men (Subroto Mukerjee, HC Sirkar, AB Awan, Bhupendra Singh, Amerjeet Singh, and ‘Tich’ Tandon) were commissioned into the service after having trained at RAF College in Cranwell. With 19 ‘hawai sepoys’ and 4 Westland Wapiti IIA biplanes operating out of Drigh Road in Karachi, they flew on their maiden flight on April 1, 1933 (a day chosen by British to coincide with RAF’s birth).

It is now the fourth largest air force in the world.

I consider this a fatal flaw in the software since it leads to loss of data (at least in a visual sense) and might end up causing very weird formatting problems of a thread being viewed, at times distorting the information beyond comprehension.

For example, if somebody were to write “Could you put this in a <h1> tag. More text.” it would show as “Could you put this in a

tag. More text.

“. What a mess, huh? And this is a very benign example. I’ve seen people posting HTML code of forms in posts and comments!

Most people I have seen get confused. They don’t realise immediately that there is a <h1> tag there which is messing things up. They only see “Could you put this in a tag.” and go: Which tag? Why is “tag” in big and bold? And so forth… And yes, sometimes, even experienced ‘web people’ are surprised by this initially because of this unexpected behaviour. That’s bad user experience.

So whenever you see weird formatting next to text that doesn’t seem to make sense, remember: There is probably a HTML tag in there causing the problem.

The solution: Look at the HTML source. The content is right there, dutifully regurgitated by Basecamp, unfortunately un-escaped, and thus rendered by browser.

Tip: There are browser plugins that allow you to make a selection and view the source of only that part of the page. Using them will make it extremely easy for you to home in on the content you’re interested in.

Another thing to remember is that Basecamp also uses Textile for text formatting. So there could be additional HTML formatting inserted in the comment which might not belong there. It’s usually easy to figure that out though. If that doesn’t work, you can always ask the person who made the post to clarify and try to be careful next time.

Again.

The most profound one is my marriage in September to a wonderful girl from Jallandhar. I took 2 weeks off and we went south to the picturesque Lakshadweep islands where even my phone wasn’t working. Going there (we put up at Agatti) at beginning of the season turned out to be a boon in disguise. There were hardly any tourists there and we had a whale of a time doting on each other, walking along the white sand beaches, turtle watching, snorkelling, and doing about a dozen other different things.

Married life is certainly very different from the one before. What’s incredible is the psychological change that comes from within by itself, altering one’s perception of just about everything, including how one spends time… and where. And I’ll leave that at that.