Ducklings and Right of Way

Interesting. I hope other places were like this too! Where I am right now, the right of way is decided by the size of your vehicle or if same how loud your vehicle can honk!

Treasure

Keyboard shortcuts are from a whole new world when you shift to a Mac. Today, I found a very important page of documentation about Mac OS X. It will make life easier for those who want to use keyboard shortcuts while using their Macs. It's like I found a treasure today. Although there is one shortcut which I didn't find on that page: ^+Eject (Ctrl+Eject) - my find to get options for Sleep, Restart or Shutdown.

Announcing: Lenny

Just recently announced: Etch + 1 = Lenny

NB: its not a mathematical equality ;)

Italian Delight

A friend of mine, who knows I love Panettone, sent me the link for its history[wikipedia.com]. This season I will enjoy eating the delicious Panettone more than last time. Thanks.

The Name Game

Whats in a name? When the underlying code is same?

Mac + Ctrl + 2 finger scroll

An interesting observation: Earlier on my MBP when I used Ctrl+2finger scroll on the trackpad, it resulted in text size increase in Firefox. However, something changed recently (between the Firefox 1.5.0.x and 2.0 or between 10.4.7 and 10.4.8) and the behaviour results in screen zoom! Nice feature, but I liked the text size change better than the zoom which I almost never need! Anyone know how to do text size change in Firefox 2.0 using trackpad?

Update: Found the solution. Disable screen zoom from Mouse and Keyboard Preferences.

Firefox2 + Edgy Eft - branding bug?

As is common knowledge, Ubuntu's just released Edgy Eft has Firefox 2.0 in it with full official branding. I hadn't used Edgy much except installing it for a couple of friends, and I just noticed that it does not have full official branding. The window icon on the title bar (top left in default theme) is still the old generic globe/world icon (see yellow circle in image). If Edgy is supposed to have the official Firefox 2 branding, should't it be the regular Firefox logo? It seems that Edgy's fox still has some memories left over from the earlier debian based DFSG build and should be considered as a bug.

Money Stinks

In the last two days, I have seen and counted more money than I every saw at once place ever in my life. My only conclusion is: Money stinks and you better have a few bottles of antibacterial hand sanitizer before you start counting it.

Blogger Main Page on Edgy

Is it only me or does the Blogger main page´s javascript uses the processor 100% for Edgy Eft users? This machine is a running Edgy Eft on an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 2800+ with 512MB of RAM. It seems to work fine on my PIV 2.0GHz based machine with 768MB of RAM. The only difference being that here I have Firefox 2.0 whereas the other machine has Firefox 1.0.7 (Debian build).

Classic Moustache

This is Fantastic!

IE7 and CSS weirdness

I did the windows updates on one of my machines and they included the IE7 update too. As the Ie7 update was tagged as a security update, I installed it. It took a long time for it to do the cleaning, running the malware tool prior to the install, download updates for IE7 install and then the final installation. Another plus point for Firefox: takes just a few seconds to install/upgrade!

So after the install the windows update prompted me to do the customary/necessary reboot ... aah more reason to love the Tux. Rebooted the machine and then thought about testing IE7. I couldn't do the testing for long as the very first weird thing was enough for me to get me to fire up the fox and continue a normal weblife. The weirdness was as follows: The best feature in Firefox and Opera (and other modern browsers) is the ability to zoom. This feature was very limited in IE 6.0. I tested it in IE7 and was delighted that they offered more levels than 6.0. But when you zoom out (<100%) you will notice something quirky on some pages e.g. google.com. Rather than the page to simple shrink i.e. zoom out, IE7 also makes it to go to the left. The page content is supposed to be in the center due to the <center> tag. Firefox and others behave as expected and just shrink the page without anything else. Why does IE7 go and do stuff differently? Is this where a browser can implement the CSS rules as it likes? Or is IE7 just ignoring CSS standards where it wants to?

PS: google could do better than using <center> tags too!

Thanks for Avesta

Did I thank you enough for introducing me to Avesta? It is one of the best restaurants I have been to in the last year or so. And it was a great evening spent with you.

Thanks again

Airplane seat belts and Passengers

Everytime I board an airplane, the captain of the aircraft always annouces the following (or a varation thereof):

(seat belt indicator lights turn on) This is the captain speaking. We are almost at the end of our flight and will be starting to decend in a couple of minutes. The weather is ....weather report.. Please put your seat belts on and keep them fastened untill the seat belts indicator light turn off.

The indicator lights only turn off after the plane has halted on the terminal and the gangway has been connected. However, the passengers never forget to take off their seat belts as soon as the plane lands and and starts to go slowly towards the terminal.

Why is it that they cannot understand the clear instructions given by the captain? (the instructions are usually given in languages spoken at the ports of takeoff and landing). A clear and draconian solution to this is a master switch which controls the opening of all the seat belts once they have been fastened just before landing. This way the passenger safety can be guaranteed with no mishaps in case there is a big bump while on the way to the terminal.

PS: Yes, I'm mean ;)

Bye-Bye American Express

Dealing with Amex has never been a pleasure and this time it was just too much.

To the Amex Management: Hanging up on a customer when they call in to activate a renewal card is rude. You just lost whatever business you got from me.