Had an amazing experience this weekend at Karjat where we, as a team, volunteered for Habitat for Humanity foundation. Considering we were on a team outing, this was an excellent team building exercise where teams from Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune help build houses for the poor (people below the poverty line).

We started our journey on Friday morning. The bus was to pick us up at 8.30 am but it was delayed as other guys travelling from Hyderabad reached late. Our accommodation was handled by Prakruti Farms which is 80kms drive from Mumbai. The place is surrounded by hills and beautiful landscaped gardens. We relaxed ourselves at the farm and immediately headed for the site visit to a village. The village was a site to see. I had never seen a village so beautiful, so pure and so clean, surrounded by picturesque landscapes and skyscapes. The villagers were very welcoming. One of my collegue Debabrata mentioned during our team interaction that in our normal life, the poeple from far off villages come to city and builds houses for us, but this one was a different experience. This time around, the guys from the city were going to the villages to build houses for the poor.

I must say, the village was so clean with no filth around. It looked as if it was some kind of a set erected for some film shooting. I also had some opportunity to try my hands on photography and was quite happy with the results.

In all, it was a wonderful experience. My sincere thanks to Habitat for making villages a better place to live.

View the photographs from the visit

I had heard that the next major version of Firefox – The Gran Paradiso will support offline applications. Though it still is in aplha mode, Google has already started to embrace this feature in their recent release of Google Gears which, as per Google is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Google Gears will enable you to read the most recent messages from Gmail while offline or to edit your documents in Google Docs even without a network connection.

Google Reader is the first Google application powered by Gears. To enter the offline mode, just click on the small arrow and all the recent feed items are downloaded to your computer. You can disconnect from the Internet or click on “work offline” in your browser and you will still be able to read your favorite feeds in Google Reader. Like in any feed reader installed on your computer. Well, almost, because Google Reader doesn’t download images or other multimedia files embedded in the posts.

Talk of offline support for web applications in browers? It’s right here!!!

A 9 page full-featured guide for those who are interested into becoming full fledge CSS developers.

It’s a free resource for budding web designers looking to take the step into the future of modern web design. Throughout the guide, you will be shown cunning CSS techniques used to keep loadtime to a minimum and to organize and fine tune your content so it is presented in the best possible way.