It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.

The path to wealth is not the love of money. If you want to be rich one day fall in love with a business that you own. Be passionate about its success and love it like you would a child. Don’t worry about getting rich, that is something that happens while you are not watching.

A nice reminder for myself on why I am interested in startups.

Yesterday, I woke up to a nice surprise. Cricinfo had launched a redesign of their website. I had a mixed reaction to the change. Cricinfo is the largest cricket website on the web. Below is a quick overview of the traffic statistics for Cricinfo.com

So what is good or bad about the new design?

The Good:

1. Improved navigation bar. The top navigation bar is a bit of a relief to find your way around cricinfo. Previously, these options were buried under a pile of other useless stuff, making it hard to use the website to the fullest.

2. News and video highlights. The core of the site is the instant news about the cricketing world, and they have done an excellent job in highlighting that part of the website. Making it easy to gaze over the latest news and consume it.

3. Scores. A bit mroe detailed score right on the right-hand panel. Makes my life much much easier.

4. Scorecard. Beter colors and layout. The ugly toolbar on the left is gone (woho!) and it gives the actual scorecard a bit more breathing room.

The Bad:

1. Hard to focus on certain portions of the website. I think the background gradient distracts the reader.  A boxed container to overlay the gradient would have helped a lot.

2. Scorecard. The tabbed navigation is just over used. Everything is crammed on a single page and tabs are used to organize them. Tabs within a tab ain’t good for usability. Another nifty idea, gone wrong is the commentary along with the batsmen dismissal. I think this is a neat feature but gone wrong. So far, for me, in a live game this info is always wrong.

Overall:

I think this is a positive step towards a nice redesign. I am sure they will work on some of the quirks in coming weeks and fix it up.

If you are a nerd, or a technology enthusiast, then you must have heard about Google Wave. I mean literally it was all across the web, from twitter to techcrunch (aren’t they both the same?) Anyways, if somehow you missed it here is a video that you must watch.

So what is wave? why am I talking about it? While the demo itself is simply amazing and the application looks like the next generation of Gmail evolution, what excites me more than anything is behind the scene technology.

If you are a web developer you might remember those good old days of web, when Javascript was a “client-side validation” scripting thingy. Now with the new and upcoming HTML 5 and Javascript ECMAScript5 coming to almost all browsers, we are seeing a new powerful platform. One that can help us built really high quality web applications.

So what’s all that special about HTML 5?

To get some context around this, let me recap what we currently use. Most of the websites (pretty much all of them) are currently on HTML 4 standard — which is a decade old standard. Web has evolved therefore HTML standard needed to evolve too.

So HTML 5 is being developed since 2004 and so far it is still being specd out. Which means that it will change over the next year or so before it is finalized, but the guts are out there now.

I won’t go into a lot of details about HTML5 in this post but would like to touch upon two things that really stood out for me:

1. Structure

How many times you have defined your HTML with class/id attributes structure it with header, footer, content, sidebar etc? HTML5 fixes this issue by providing new elements for representing each of these different sections. So elements like <header>, <nav>, <aside>, <article>, <footer> etc.

Makes it better for everyone to write and read the HTML code. Search engines can target your content and designers get to leverage it as well.

2. Video & Audio

We all have been embedding youtube videos for a while now. There is one in this blog post. HTML really didn’t have any way to allow embedding video and audio content easily into a website. So people had to use flash. So now in HTML5 we have an <video> and <audio> tags. Along with DOM API to manipulate and interact with the video and audio.

There is a lot more to the story. I will write in more details about the upcoming Javascript changes and what it means to us web developers. I am truly excited at the possibilities that it will bring to the web.

via 90 Percent Of Everything.

I love cool technology. Maybe it is the nerd in me that gets excited after seeing something awesome but I sure do love cool technology.

One such great technology is powered by PakTranslations.com – To see how awesome the technology is you can see the urdu version of Mazaydar.com!

So what’s this blog post all about? While I love their technology, one thing that bothered me was their UI. I think they can make the site and technology a great hit if can make users life easier. They already have a great way to do it but its sorta hidden.

So I spent about an hour or so last night, while I couldn’t sleep and came up with this small mock layout.

Some thoughts behind the layout:

1. My goal was to keep the focus on the cool technology. I certainly didn’t spend too much time on the logo, which can certainly use some work

2. The “Instant Translation” is a nifty feature. Users need to know that they can place http://www.paktranslations.com/? infront of any url to get it translated.

3. Bookmarklets are also awesome, I have been using them and they are just simply great to translate anything instantly.

I think the whole website is an amazing idea, a much needed innovation coming out of Pakistan. I am sure as they progress the technology will just keep getting better and better. But I also strongly believe that a good technology which isnt’ accessible is not worth much. People need to be able to use the technology easily to be able to provide feedback that is needed.

Note: The design is totally opensource for PakTranslations team to adapt.