state.gov oblivious of Firefox?

What happens if you are a Linux user with Firefox and have scheduled a non-immigrant visa for the U.S.A? Well, you end up unable to fill up the DS-156 visa application with your computer running Linux!

After you get your appointment date fixed (online) you are informed that you need to fill up the DS-156 form (no handwritten versions allowed). But if you go to evisaforms.state.gov and you are using anything other than IE or Netscape as your browser, you are out of luck. I used Firefox (both Debian's Iceweasel and mozilla.org's Firefox) to access the page and was warned that my browser does not meet the minimum requirements. Below you can see a screenshot of the warning window.

As a matter of fact Firefox does support 128bit encryption (actually much more than that) and I also have the Acrobat Reader plugin installed (version 7.0). The problem here is the sniffing code on their website. The code just checks for IE5.0SP2 or later and for Netscape 6 or later. There is absolutely no sniffing going on for Firefox (neither Windows nor Linux) which is used by more than 10% of web surfing users (> 15% in the USA). The Acrobat plugin code is written in such a way that it will never say that your Firefox has the plugin installed.

If you carry on and fill up the DS-156 form, you will be taken back to main page without any of your form data being processed for the final pdf file. I tried to fill the form twice thinking that the first time there might be some session time limit which I over ran. Finally, I had to borrow someone's laptop with Windows OS on it and used Internet Explorer to get the form in pdf!

The result of the low quality code used for the site results in Firefox users not being able to get the .pdf for DS-156 after filling up the form. Windows users can still use Internet Explorer but Linux users are left completely helpless. How is it that US Department of State is oblivious of the existence of Firefox and that there are other operating systems than Windows too?

I wonder if Matt Frei used Firefox to setup his visa renewal appointment.

Addon of the Week

In an effort to increase the awareness of Firefox Addons, Addon of the Week has been started. There are already a couple of addons featured on AOTW. Initial plans are to have one addon of the week featured on AOTW. Smaller addons can be featured in between the regular AOTW publishing cycle. If anyone wants to write an article for AOTW, signup there and leave a comment.

Google changes search interface?

Google changed its interface? The new look is only on the google.com site for now. The .ca, .fr, .co.uk, etc. are the usual blue bands. Update: The new interface is due to their combining of various search types they had e.g. web, images, news, etc. They are also supporting a toolbar at the top for various services.

Its so polished that it looks too shiny to me. The shiny bar gives a very Web2.0 feel than the earlier more pleasing colours. Blue band felt plain and simple.

Digg makes HD DVD key famous

Digg did something they probably thought would be a one time thing and removed some story someone submitted on their system. But hey, they kind of forgot that Digg is basically a site which is powered by user submitted content. And after a while they have every chicken raising its head and speaking out some weird number in decimal, hexadecimal, binary, and other formats. The topic has become so popular on Digg that 8 of their Top 10 in Technology stories are about the hot topic. The other two are about Joost and the beautiful Posh Suicide. Screen capture added for your convenience. Update: While writing the post, Joost and dear Posh's stories have fallen from 5th and 6th to 7th and 8th position respectively. Update2: Withing half an hour after writing this post, all top 10 are about the same topic! New screen capture added.

So what I can gather from this is that Digg itself is making the HD DVD key famous. So much for taking out a story due to what ever reasons they had for doing that!

Update: Whole of front page is full of stories about the newly famous hex combination. The whole thing has snow balled into stories with header like Jesus has "the key",Digg deleted my hard drive for posting the HD-DVD KEY!, and the most hilarious one is Secret Code To Remove Lara Craft's Clothes in Tomb Radier Legends!. Very ingenious titles to get user's attention.

09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

Is this is prime number? Looks like one.

09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

Just a simple string ;)

Update: this story was dugg more than 180 times and now has been axed off Digg system!! Didn't last for even a couple of hours on Digg.

Debian on MacBook Pro - Docs

The first draft of the procedure for installing Debian on a USB disk connected to a MacBook Pro is up. You can find it here. Leave a comment for improvements and pointers.

I haven't had the time to setup the hardware e.g. mousepad, wireless, backlight, etc. to work in Debian yet. But that information can easily be found on wiki.d.o. The page will be updated as I try the tricks.

Debian/Lenny on MacBook Pro USB

I had been trying to install Linux on a 1GB USB flash drive connected to my MacBook Pro (MBP) since the past few months. Although there are several places describing how to do it using either Boot Camp or by resizing the hard disk partitions, my sole requirement was no changes to the Mac OS X installed on the hard disk.

Boot Camp was out of question as its main aim is to help install Windows by providing drivers for the Mac hardware. The other option was using rEFIt and resizing the hard disk. I had tried this earlier with mactel-linux patches for the kernel and was able to get a login prompt but no video. That process involved several steps using debootstrap and compiling the kernel with the patches.

However, with the release of Debian 4.0 (Etch), the debian-installer also got a lot of attention and installs a relatively new 2.6.18 kernel. So armed with a netinstall d-i CD (23 April build, 26th doesn't recognize network card) I was able to install Debian Testing (Lenny) on the USB disk with XFCE4 as the desktop environment with 130MB of swap space partition and 157MB to spare after installing dillo web browser.

The installation of Lenny on the USB flash disk has not required any change on the internal MBP hard disk and the Mac OS X installation is completely oblivious of the Debian install. If I don't press the "Option" button at boot time, Mac OS X boots up, otherwise with the USB connected it asks which OS to boot.

Next post gives the link for installation steps. The process was based on information gathered mainly from the Debian wiki's Macbook and Macbook Pro pages, and also here.

Basilica de Notre Dame

Merry Springmas

Current forecast shows light snow and so does the view in my window. And it is 16th of April today! Merry Springmas™ everyone.

Historical data says that maximum and minimum temperatures in April are 11°C and 1°C with a mean of 6°C. The current deviation in temperature isn't huge then. However, on the snow and rain front the weatherman says that there will be around 10-15cm of snow and 10-15cm of rain from Sunday overnight to Monday overnight! Historically, 10cm of more rain happens in April for only 2 days whereas no day sees more than 5cm of snow in April. In 2007, there will be at least 1 day recorded with around 10cm of snow.

Checking Firefox Version

I am trying to write a script in Javascript* which would inform a visitor's using Firefox if they are running an older version. Although Firefox does automatically check if there is an update and informs the user, I have seen visitors with versions like 0.8, 1.0.x, 1.5.y (y<11),>

Automatic updates are helpful for home users at least as corporate users might not have the rights to upgrade their software without administrator access. However, informing them with a visual warning on a web page could help in avoiding potential problems of using vulnerable versions.

Presently, the script checks the CVS branch tag i.e. rv: value with a hard coded value and prints a warning for users with older versions. Is there any way that the hard coded value(s) can be acquired automatically from say mozilla.org server and checked with visitor's user agent information? I don't know much about AJAX but would it be helpful in this case? No AJAX compatibility issues as the only browser we are checking is Firefox.

* - using Javascript because it runs client side, is available to all Firefox users and those who have disabled Javascript would most likely not need the warning to know it.

Its Out!

After a delay of about 5months, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 codenamed Etch has finally been released. This release comes 22 months after Sarge was released. Other major happenings in the Debian world were the Sarge update 3.1r6 and electing of Sam as the new Debian Project Leader. Now the craziness begins as updates with new packages will fall in to unstable and testing branches.

I will be continuing my Debian party when this finishes.

Colours

Colours at one of the many customs preceding a traditional wedding.

"The" Butterfly

I saw this on Inkscape.org where they had a news snippet about Juan Miguel Ramirez who wrote an article in the Spanish version of Linux magazine. From the GPL stick and the 4 colored butterfly I got and idea and the result was as show above, the tux trying to save Suse from the "butterfly".

Original idea of artwork: Juan Miguel Ramirez

Browser Stats

Glazou started this. Here are the browser statistics for 2007 (till today) on my dynamic DNS host:

1. Gecko ----- 56.2%
2. MSIE ------ 31.4%
3. KHTML --- 8.1% (Safari 7.1%)
4. Opera ----- 2.6%

This just reflects the distribution of visitors on the dynamic host and should not be considered for browser popularity calculations. Higher percentage of Gecko is due to most of the stuff being about Mozilla and GNU/Linux. Safari's ratio is probably due to the a few desktop background images I put up for free download. But I noticed that IE 7 already has an update with version number 7.0.5730.11. Seems that the IE team is really working on it now ;)

Google: Canada's Not a Real Country Anyway

We must blame them and cause a fuss
Before somebody thinks of blaming us!

Did you ever hear about the South Park song called "Blame Canada"? You can find some details about it on wikipedia or even viewtube™ the song as performed by Robin Williams during the Academy Awards ceremony.

The Know All Google seems to have heard this song too and did some of its part for the blame game. If you go to Google Maps and try to search for a country called Canada, all you get is a flattened out map of earth! Does Google even know where Canada is? I think it is just trying to prove the line in the lyrics that "They're not even a real country anyway" because it cannot find Canada on Earth!

It can find other regular countries like Britain, Germany, France, India, etc. So why not Canada? Is it time to blame Google instead of Canada ;)

Halloween

I know its not Halloween season, but I found this lovely picture which I took last year. This is the Halloween decorations at a bakery nearby. Enjoy.

Up, Up and Away

This is a common sight when we have clouds. The building at PVM goes beyond the limits and into the clouds while the IBM, CGI, and CSC building stand there staring at it!

Typepad hinders Typing!!

I usually love to rant about features in blogger making life difficult for users, but this post is different. Today I compared a feature on blogger with a similar one on typepad and guess which one sucked!

In this age of spam bots find different ways to put link spam in any place they can find, one commonly used technique to avoid them is the captcha technology. With this technology, a user trying to fill and submit a form is asked to fill in another field in the form with characters displayed in the corresponding image. The server generates a new image every time the page is loaded and most of the spam bots are incapable of deciphering the images. So as most of the spam bots cannot read the image, they can't fill in the verification and hence the post cannot be submitted. It is a pretty simple technique and has achieved a lot of success.

However, the technology has its flaws or should I say unintended captchas. Today I set out to log a comment on a typedpad blog post. It was a simple two line response which should have taken just a minute or so. However, I ended up trying to get the response submitted for about 10minutes! Their word verification captcha asked me to fill in the characters from the image. But the person who wrote the code for their captcha implementation probably didn't know how much to obscure the characters and has several random lines on it making it really hard to read even by a human let alone a bot! It took me 6 tries to get the verification done.

Not only they have made the verification task so confusing, but they don't give the user any other choice e.g. an audio clip! Wait, the audio clip should be there regardless as a visitor could be visually impaired and might not be able to decipher even an unobscured image. Blogger is much better in this respect as their image is clean (although the characters can be a bit jagged) and they also offer audio help (hasn't worked on Linux for me though). For TypePad it is a serious accessibility problem and is a big show stopper for me at least. So from now on, typepad comments are probably not going to happen let alone getting an account on typepad!

Update: June contacted Typepad and they told her that they are working on it. I hope they get it sorted out soon.

Woolmer Update: MURDER

My first instinct made me very suspicious about Bob Woolmer's death in his hotel room following Pakistan's cricket teams loss to minnows Ireland and making them impossible to go to the second round. The Jamaican police has been tight lipped about any details about his death but finally a more sinister picture is emerging. BBC is reporting that medical reports say Woolmer died due to manual strangulation. The plot thickens as they haven't found any evidence of struggle indicating he knew the murder(s). With the scene changing from death due to a stroke to a murder, it is possible that the team's return trip might also be delayed.

Cricket is played with a passion in South Asia and there have been several matches which have been disrupted due to lackluster performance of a team inciting violent behaviour. A famous example is the India-Sri Lanka match at Eden Gardens during the 1996 World Cup which Sri Lanka won by default due the crowd's unruly behaviour. It is common for an inquiry commission to be setup after a series after one of the countries have played well below their potential. But this is a first that someone has every murdered a cricket team's coach and that too in a World Cup! I guess sending the elite commando units for the security of the Indian contingent was the right decision.

Bob Woolmer Dies following loss

The very next morning after Pakistan's cricket team lost to Ireland and were ousted from ICC World Cup 2007, their coach Bob Woolmer, was found unconscious in his hotel room and was pronounced dead after an hour of attempts to revive him at the hospital. This is sad news and medical reports are awaited for the exact cause of death. Pakistan team's spokesperson Pervez Mir said that the third gave with Zimbabwe will be played as scheduled.

Very sad to see Woolmer go like this. He had coached South Africa in the 90s and they had reached the semi finals in the World Cups.

ICC World Cup: Big Upsets

So the end result of day 5 of the ICC World Cup(WC) was: 2 Big Upsets. Bangladesh played some wonderful cricket and stunned India in their WC opener. Bangladesh won by 5 wickets. While in Jamaica, it was the day of Green. Ireland not only beat Pakistan but knocked them out of the tournament no matter what the result of Pakistan's third group game.

For both India and Pakistan's teams my friend had an advice: If you can't show consistency in your game, stay at home and just do commercials. That way you have to perform only once, and its just a reply after that.

St. Patrick's Day Possible Upset

With the recent uplift of the Irish team's confidence with the tied match with Zimbabwe in the ICC World Cup being held in the Windies, they are looking for a bigger upset on St. Patrick's Day. Pakistan's team is reeling at 68 for the loss of 5 wickets after 20 overs. Update: 73/6.

If the Irish follow up on this advantage and register a win, this would be the biggest upset of this World Cup and definitely the best St. Patrick's Day gift for them. Pakistan on the other hand is very strong in the bowling department and do have ability to topple wickets like dominoes. It is one day cricket, one never knows what will happen, and anything can happen. We will just have to wait and see...

These two teams make the cricket ground the greenest ever! Happy St. Patrick's Day to all.

No Water :(

Unfortunately one of our building's water pumps decided to die today leaving most of the upper floor residents without any water supply. I didn't have any water stored barring two half litre water bottles which were good for drinking but nothing to wash hands or for the bathroom. Normally if they shut down the supply it is usually back on by around 5 or 6pm. However, the supply didn't return till late in the evening. A call to the janitor confirmed my fears that the pump wasn't fixed and the water supply will be back to normal only tomorrow.

So down I went to the basement to fetch water with the only bucket I have. On the way back up it occurred to me that I could fill up a plastic bin that I have for clothes. That could hold around 5-6 buckets. That made all my water scarcity worries go to rest as there is now water to drink in the filter, for washing hands and for the bathroom.

I just hope that they get the pump working by tomorrow evening as if they don't, it won't be a good weekend.

Dell and Linux ? Hmm...

Just a quick note: Dell seems to be moving towards the idea of offering pre-installed Linux on notebooks and desktops. They are asking users interested in having Linux pre-installed to fill up a survey so that they can prioritize what they can offer. Go submit the survey and wait for Linux to be offered as a option for the installed OS on your next purchase.

Dell and Linux seems to good to be true. But hey, sometimes dreams come true too ;)

Mac OS, SSH, Dashboad?

I can't seem to figure out which part of the process is the problem. If someone has any clues as to how to go about triaging the problem, please leave a comment.

When I am transferring something to the Macbook Pro from my Debian box using Konqueror (yep, with its wonderful fish:// protocol), if dashboard is enabled on the MBP, the ssh transfer comes to a halt. The problem goes away as soon as I get dashboard out of the way. The problem is reproducible using the above setup at will.

No Words

Current weather conditions! Brrrr.....

Blogger Login

Blogger, oh blogger. Please give us a better login page so that users don't have to to click twice just to bring the cursor to the username field. And it is worse for those like me who try to keep the use of the mouse to a bare minimum. To be able to get to the username field, I have to invoke the Find function of the browser to find the "New Blogger" link and then use the Tab button 3 times to get to the username field. If you want any ideas on how to make a login page, please check out Yahoo! Mail or even your own Google Mail where the caret lands in the username field automatically after the page loads!!

Linux for Everyone?

I have a strong feeling that we are getting very close to the point where Linux can be considered desktop ready for everyone. Even though I have seen things work flawlessly with Ubuntu installs on friends' laptops, my latest experience just made me WOW Linux ;)

I got a USB multimedia headset by Microsoft, the LX-3000. They are getting dirt cheap these days. I picked this one up for just $19.99+tx. Cheap, aren't they? Back on topic: although I wanted it to work with the Macbook Pro as it does not have a jack for a microphone and only a line-in, I thought why not try it with Linux too. I plugged it a USB port of my Linux box (Debian/sid) and tried playing some audio using XMMS but the sound came through the external speakers. Next thing was to check the /var/log/messages to see if Linux detected it or not. And....it did detect it. So I went into the XMMS's preferences, and I just had to select the proper device (indicated by messages in log) and it started to blast music immediately. I was pleasantly amazed when the mic also recorded sound like a normal mic. Perfect. Linux simply ROCKS!!

Watering the Sun

Biella writes about a humourous piece from a book by John Morreal. I was reminded of a similar story from times long long ago.

"Nanak’s teachings are best understood against the backdrop of bhakti, the devotional movement which was then sweeping north and western India, and in the context of the ossification of both Hinduism and Islam into religious faiths which inculcated blind beliefs in their followers. During the course of his travels, Nanak reached Hardwar, where he encountered Brahmins who, while standing in the Ganga, were throwing water towards the sun to appease the souls of their ancestors. It is reported that Nanak bent down and began throwing water in the opposite direction, and when asked what he was doing, he replied that he was watering his fields in the Punjab. When his reply was met with derision, Nanak reportedly told the Brahmins that if the water they were sprinkling could reach the sun, then doubtless the water could also reach his fields, which were merely a few hundred miles away."

c.f. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Religions/gurus/GNanak.html

Grip Rocks

I had an old audio CD which wasn't playing too well, so I thought of ripping it and burning a new one. Yesterday I ripped tracks 1 to 7, and the 8th track took around 3hrs. I started ripping of the 9th track around 15hours ago, and it is 41% done. I am using Grip to rip the CD and it has been chugging along bit-by-bit literally. I won't mind waiting another 24hours to get the 9th track ripped. Grip hasn't quit on the CD yet, so all I can say for it is that simply rocks.

Update: Finally, Grip has finished ripping the track taking about 38hours in all. I have the complete .wav file. Yippeeee :)

Movie: Amu

Last night I went to see the movie Amu at a special screening at the Forum. Partly due to the weather conditions, there were only about 600 people at the multiplex watching the movies; 200 of them were watching Amu!

Amu is a movie[imdb.com] about a young American-Indian girl who goes to India to know about herself and her roots. She finds India very interesting but something disturbs here and she can't pinpoint the reason. But the tenacious girl keeps digging and finally ends confronting her own family about her real roots.

The director, Shonali Bose, has done a great job at portraying the what happened during the 1984 riots in Delhi, for which none of the main perpetrators has been brought to justice till now! The movie has been censored in India by the film board CBFC and also given an adult certificate (R rating). Censored dialogs can be found on Amu's website. Just like a pen can be stronger than a sword, silence can be more effective than words. Silence has been used for the censored parts and it goes great lengths into explaining the extent of the cover up even 23 years after the incident! A great effort by the director who has met with threats during the making of the movie. A must see.

The movie starts Friday, February 23 in the AMC Forum 22 in Montreal. Shonali Bose will be present during the release weekend for any questions you have about the movie. In Toronto the movie starts February 16 and Vancouver will be able to see it from February 23rd. The movie is English with a few dialogs in Bangla and Punjabi (subtitles are provided).

PS: The foreword from the report on the 1984 pogrom of Sikhs can be downloaded from here.

-20°C and Fire

A fire happen to break out in the adjacent block. The fire fighters spent hours trying to contain the fire. No one died but there were a couple of shops/restaurants that were completely brought to rubbles and the adjacent restaurants and businesses were damaged by water/fire.

I was amazed to see the fire fighters out there with a temperature of around -20°C (would be even lower if you consider the windchill factor). My fingers were actually freezing while holding the camera and I had to put my hands in my pockets after every few pictures. Below you can see a few of the images which catch they eye and depict the extent of the fire and hard work by the firemen.

Doesn't that look like a staircase?

Brave firemen fighting the fire

Fire on back of the building and ice on the front! Isn't that an antithetical situation?

More pictures here.

Windows Vista

This is completely hilarious and ingenious:

My father heard about Vista coming on the news. Since he was interested in getting it, he asked me to obtain it and install it on his computer and he would give some cash in return. I told him I was going to do that, but instead I burned an Ubuntu CD and installed it.

Later, when he came home from work, I showed him his new "Vista" install, complete with the latest Office and Solitaire.

Well, it's been a few days since that and now he says Bill Gates is better than Steve Jobs and brags about how OS X on my iMac is obsolete compared to Vista on his PC.

I will continue with the prank for some weeks, after which I'll tell him the truth and give him back his money.

ref: http://www.degredo.net.

Invitation

You are cordially invited to enjoy the sunny days we are having ;). Unfortunately one has to be brave enough to get their fingers out even to take a picture (provided the battery doesn't die in those few seconds).

Genuine Linux

I run a genuine copy of Linux. Do you?

Dear Yahoo! [Mac]

I wonder why doesn't your Yahoo! News item work on my Safari browser! Clicking on a video news item does indeed open a new window with a list of other news items on the bottom and a little description of the news item on the right side. However, there is no video! Also, I didn't find any indication that my browser lacks a plugin or something and I should install it to view the news item.

If one looks around on the page, there is a Settings button on the top, so I went there hoping to get things sorted out by changing some settings. The settings page tells me that Yahoo! already has selected a media player (none as far as I can see) and a connection speed too (no indicator as to what is the present setting). A user cannot select a media player if it is not in the list, and selecting the speed without the media player is kind of redundant. Oh and when you click on the Help link on the page, it takes the user to a generic Yahoo! Help page. Why couldn't you have put a link which went straight to information about video news items on Yahoo! News?

So, Yahoo! please fix your news media player application so that Mac users can also enjoy the content on Yahoo! News.

CSS Oddity

Lesson: Thou shalt not use CSS to obscure unpredictable text for ye users.

Skin deep advantage of CSS is that it can be used to make web pages beautiful and possibly perform some tricks without other tools like Javascript. However, when one doesn't know what the content of the page will be, CSS might actually end up obscuring that part of the page. An example is the occurence of heading tags h1, h2, etc. in people's blog posts on Planet Debian. For the planet, date is a level 1 heading, each person's name is a level 2 heading and title for each post is a level 3 heading. When a post contains either of the h1 or h2 level headings, it looks like the image shown below. Notice that the circled heading (h1) is hardly readable while the post's matter is!

This happens because tje CSS for the planet makes the h1 and h2 to have a letter-spacing of -2 pixels due to h1 and div.channel h2 selector definitions. The problem starts when a person's post contains either a level 1 or level 2 heading. The div.content h* selector (where * = 1,2,...6) makes all of them to have a font-size of 100% and the reduced letter spacing in addition to the default bold font-weight of headings make them almost unreadable (Firefox, IE6, Konqueror). The reason behind this is that the letter-spacing: -2px definition is being applied to all h1 headings and all descendant h2 headings of div.channel selector. If we remove the letter-spacing in the level 2 heading in the post(shown above), it should look as shown below.

In such cases where the content is not predictable, CSS rules should take into account both the static and variables parts separately. A style sheet which took care of the static part using child selectors and separate selectors for content styling would have suited Planet Debian more. Using the suggested separation method, a child selector e.g. div.channel>h2 would not make the div.content h2 to be with reduced letter spacing and thus leaving headings in posts to be more easily legible as show by the second image above.

So although using CSS gives many advantages, using it without giving a real consideration to the actual content of the page, however unpredictable it may be, one can end up with difficult to read content due to misused CSS rules.

This post will help me with a visual example of the different between descendant and child selectors. I hope it serves useful purpose to others too. Have fun CSSifying your pages.

After Effects of Snow

Snow Snow Snow.... finally

As promised yesterday, here are a couple of scenes from yesterday's wonderful nature show. To view larger versions of these images, click on image.

Snow Snow Snow

Ahhhh.....finally. And that too several inches of it. I'm happy that winter is here.

time to go to sleep now. No this isn't a dream, the snow was for real. Few pictures tomorrow if it stays.

Rules of Slashdot

As read on slashdot.org:

Post

• We love Apple (especially when they do something just like Microsoft, and even more if their product is vaporware).
• We hate Microsoft (especially when they do something just like Apple, and even more when their product is vaporware).
• Steve Jobs can do no wrong (especially when he does the same as Bill Gates).
• Bill Gates can do no right (especially when he does the same as Steve Jobs).
• Any story that is positive about Bill Gates or Microsoft will get tagged "fud" or "troll".
• Any story that is negative about Steve Jobs or Apple will get tagged "fud" or "troll".
• "One Laptop Per Child" is the second coming of Christ.
• Nicholas Negroponte is Christ.
• We ignore Sun (especially when they dominate any specific industry).
• We adore Java (even though it was developed by Sun).
• It has been "The Year That Linux Takes Over the Desktop" for about 8 years.
• It has been "The Year That Microsoft Dies" for about 15 years.
• It has been "The Year That Apple Overtakes Microsoft" for about 10 years.
• Ubuntu is God's chosen Linux distribution.
• All other distributions of Linux are wannabes...especially the ones that have been around longer than Ubuntu.

That was hilarious :)

PlanetPlanet & Blogger

I just noticed something and I can't find out where the fault is. Is planetplanet doing something wrong? Or does the new blogger have a bug?

This installation of planetplanet says that a feed(blogger) has a new post if there is comment. For example if there was a blog posted on 8th Jan, and someone commented on it today, planetplanet reads the feeds (every hour) and shows the post made on the 8th as today's post! Imagine someone comments on a 6month old post! That does mess up things a bit and the planetplanet readers do raise an eyebrow.

I have a feeling that it is blogger which is playing tricks. In the new blogger comment feeds are also available, but it shouldn't really send a new time for the main feed. I think I will ask around on the planetplanet mailing list as to who is the culprit.

Update: It has to do with planetplanet because I just noticed that the same thing happens with typepad.com feeds too. Looks like blogger only.

Etch: Two digit level RC Bugs

I have been checking the number of RC bugs in Etch since Nov'06 and had expected them to fall below 100 around first week of December. But then they kept hovering around 115 and never went down till the first week of January.

Hmm... it seems it was not only me who was waiting to see the RC bugs for Etch go down to two digit level i.e. <100. Sam put up the perfect picture to celebrate this. Etch seems to be a lot closer with the number of bugs falling below 100.

Changing the Template

They said that the new blogger has new and better features, so I tried to play with the template as well. This is the template I chose to play with the new blogger template features. It is called Mr. Moto and was done by Monsieur Zeldman. I have seen and read quite a bit of his work and he is awesome.

I have just played with blogger's GUI system for setting up the template and page elements. The only change I made by hand was decreasing the size of date and increasing the size of post title. Before I start doing more digging in the template manually, I want to say that blogger's template system is pretty impressive. One can even move elements by a simple drag and drop. If you haven't tried it, do try and I'm sure you will be happy that you did.

One thing I missed is selective font size/family settings. The present font settings apply to the whole page. It would be wonderful to have per-element font settings.

PS: I wonder how it works on other browsers e.g. Safari and Opera.

Fire Alarms

It was surprise to me when I learned yesterday that our fire alarm was not connected to the fire station system. I would have expected that so that the fire people know automatically when there is an alarm. It doesn't happen to be the case for this building though.

Details:

Yesterday around 5:00pm I was feeling drowsy because of a late full lunch, so I though of taking a half-hour nap. Just after 5 minutes of lying down, I heard an alarm which sounded like one of our alarm clocks but as if it was in the other room. I waited for about 5 seconds and then got up to turn it off. But the sound was coming from a different direction: the hallway! Then it hit me it was a fire alarm.

So I went out and tried to sniff in the hallway and then from the windows: no smoke. Relieved, I picked up my laptop and put it in its bag, disconnected my hard disk (which contains nightly backups) and put it in the same bag. I was going down the stairs after picking my SLR's bag.

On reaching down I saw the usual scene: everyone was in the entrance hall - blocking the entry!! When will they learn?

I went out and tried to scan for distant fire truck alarms. Nothing! I waited for about 5 minutes and still nothing. So I finally decided to go around the corner (fire station is in the same block) and ask the gentlemen in the fire station if it was a holiday ;). One of the fire men opened and asked what I wanted. I told him that there was a fire alarm and it was going on since the last 10 minutes. He calmly jotted down the address and told someone on this communication device about it too.

About 2 minutes after I gave them the information, I saw the first fire truck rushing towards us, and within another minute they had 3 more standing in front of our building.

In the end, it turned out that there was no fire but probably a prank! But one thing I will keep in mind is call 911 in case of a fire alarm even if the fire system is connected to theirs. Secondly, I was really surprised that none of the other residents though of calling 911 before going down the stairway.

Testing 1...2....3

Testing the move to new blogger beta .

Update: I need to redo the template to make use of features from the new version of blogger.

Saddam Hanging: (Immediate) Consequences

Unfortunate consequences of the publicizing of Saddam's hanging:

• Girl hangs herself over Saddam's execution
• Boy hangs himself while re-enacting Saddam's execution
• Boy hangs himself after watching Saddam
  

Blame: irresponsible authorities handling the execution, and irresponsible media people airing the video for short-time fame.

k9copy

I was searching for a software to convert a DVD9 to a DVD5 just like DVDShrink does. It didn't take long before I saw k9copy which does exactly what I wanted.

The idea was to backup my original DVDs which are usually DVD9 to DVD+R discs which are replaceable. I tried one of the DVD9 and the process took around half an hour or so. However, the result wasn't as fabulous as one would get with DVDShrink. The picture was all pixelated even though the camera wasn't moving during a shot. Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to change some settings before I start using it?

I hope k9copy gets better at this so as to at least give as good a quality as DVDShrink does.

Edgy Eft install for Friend

A friend's system crashed a few days ago. He had to reinstall Windows and also resized his partitions to suit his needs.

• Installing Windows: 70minutes


• Number of reboots for install and post-install drivers, etc : several times


• Reconfiguring Windows install to previous one: 120minutes


• Installing Ubuntu with single reboot: 40minutes


• Ubuntu automatically telling you your mouse needs to be recharged: priceless

And a Happy New Year to all.

Barbara Walters: Heaven

Heaven: Where is it? How do we get there? was re-telecast last night on ABC. I still remember that they showed the same program last year and that too just before Xmas or the holiday season (whatever you prefer). I don't understand why they aired the program again? It wasn't any different than the one shown before! Had they done more research in finding Heaven by traveling to a another dozen places around the earth, it would still be understandable. So I'm still baffled.

What I do know is that one can't find Heaven by asking questions to well known people in a dramatic and sensational way!

Is Winter Here? Finally?

I see a few snow flakes flying around in the wind. Looks like winter is coming here! Or is it? Will have to wait and see.

/me goes to get my winter jacket and boots out in anticipation :)

Bad Vista

Follow the link to get enlightened Bad Vista.

Sleep Patterns

I'm glad to know that its normal to have weird sleep patterns after long flights. Joey is having trouble getting back his sleep patterns after his flight back from Germany. For me the distance was almost double but I'm glad that I don't feel to sleep longer than normal.

I have been going to bed early, and by early I mean really early i.e. around 2100hrs. I start feeling sleepy around 2000hrs but I do drag on for another hour or so. Then I end up waking up after 6 to 7 hours. The major problem I had was trying to keep awake while watching Casino Royale last night. The movie was good and probably the only reason I was able to keep my eyes open. In the end, I was tired of keeping my eyes open and just fell on my bed on reaching home.

On the brighter note, I think working in the early morning might be a bit more productive than late night. I have to test that more and if it is really the case, I will have to stick to a new schedule as I have always been more of an owl than an early riser.

PS: One thing I learnt this time during the flight -> drink lots and lots of liquids during flight. Keeps you hydrated and keeps the digestive system normal too.

Protest: µsoft-Nowell

Ken Hughes (GNU/Linux Debian):

Hey guys you remember Novell. The tall leggy blonde that stayed up at the buffet in every man's face? You knew she was for sell....standing there with all her Yast hanging out! I am glad we stayed away from her! She has caught Mono from a contact with Microsoft! The payback will be greater than she can bare......she will be back to cry on each man's shoulder. Just kick her to the curb. Oh, me? I have a excellent girl named Debian. We just hang out with our friends and work it! Where is my copy of GPLv3 do you know?

Read to be informed and Protest the µsoft-Nowell patent agreement.

Beta is Beta afterall

Blogger Beta has been here for some months now and users are given the option to move over to the new beta if they wish (transitions seem to come for a few users at a time and not all). I have resisted the temptation of using the new features and I think I'm glad that I have waited. I have noticed users not able to publish images sometimes, and often the result is all jumbled up because blogger lost an image while publishing!! The most recent problem I noticed is not being able to comment (for a bigpanda ;) ) and as comment system does not recognize the username and password! Surprising that it is allowing me to post here, but not post a comment :(

On the brighter side, the planetplanet installation I maintain is able to display images users upload to blogger.

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.

Web Photo Scams Across the Ocean

Just read Daniel's post about aigars.co.uk and web shop scams, particularly in the photo camera world. Nice find Daniel. Photo retailer web scams have been a problem on this side of the Atlantic and haven't heard much about this practice in the EU.

As an example of similar stuff going on especially in NY, check this news report[annoying NYT advert] about the PriceRitePhoto.com scandal. Mr. Don Wiss has been taking snapshots of these dealers' stores and puts them on a web page dedicated just them. The last time I saw a major scam come to lime light was when Thomas Hawk had a brush with PriceRitePhoto.com.

In light of this I tend to buy my photo equipment by going to the store in person :)

Long web pages and mousewheel

Long web pages are very common in this age of planets and forums and it becomes annoying to scroll the mouse wheel multiple times to go up and down these pages. Firefox does not have the extravagant preferences interface as its venerable big brother to change the number of lines the mouse wheel scrolls on a page. In case you want to change/increase the number of lines scrolled with the mouse wheel all you need to do is to change the following settings in Firefox's about:config.

mousewheel.withnokey.numlines -> 5
mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines -> false

The first option controls the number of lines scrolled by one mouse wheel scroll event (default is 1). The second option tells Firefox to use the system's number of lines scrolled by the mouse wheel scroll event. So to remove the dependency on the system settings, I changed it to false (default is true). After these changes, try scrolling a long web page and see the decrease in amount of effort it takes to go down the the bottom of the page.

Happy scrolling :)

PS: Bought a basic optical Microsoft wireless mouse on a deal for $9.99 as a replacement for the last roller-ball mouse on my music server.

The "Debzilla Affair" - II

Following up on my last post about the Debian-Mozilla affair which is still making the news. It has been going on since around March 2004 when Debian contacted Mozilla regarding trademark issues. Much has happened between then and now, and still continues to happen. I had followed the issue a couple of times when Gerv was representing Mozilla.org. More recently the communication has been going on between Debian and MoCo. As it is difficult to keep track of what taken place in this long ongoing process, I cooked up a page on the main highlights of the affair. You can find it here. Add to comments if I missed something to keep the chain of events intact.

Comments should be kept on topic i.e. regarding the chronology of the ongoing matter. This is not a place to give ideas about what either side should/must do get a resolution.

The "Debzilla Affair"

Documenting the chronology of the Debian-Mozilla affair which is (unfortunately still) going on. More on this later.

Release Marathon

It has been a marathon week for different release of open source software. Tuesday, the 24th of October, saw the release of the shiny new Firefox 2.0 and the newest offering of the Fedora Project, Fedora Core 6 (Zod). Today is the birthday of our small but strong new candidate, the Edgy Eft. Edgy Eft is the latest release of Ubuntu Linux featuring lots of improvements in addition to a brand new GNOME 2.16, new artistic artwork, curvy window corners, the new upstart init system, localizations for almost everyone, etc.

So get yourself a gift this fall and install Ubuntu. You can get it from the download page. Although I am still getting the 6.06 download links, the download mirrors should soon synchronise and give you the 6.10 i.e. Edgy Eft. If you use bittorrent, now is the time to take advantage of the distributed sharing technology. Download an Edgy Eft torrent and start up your client. It will ease up the load on Ubuntu's download mirrors.

I just can't wait to install Edgy Eft for a friend this weekend :)

Mozilla Confusdation™

Haa, BBC is also reporting that Firefox 2.0 has been released. Their ticker on the top says: "LATEST: A new version of popular web browser Firefox is launched". The link sends the user to the news items saying Firefox 2.0 debuts on 24Oct.

Plus BBC has a link on the right side with the text "Mozilla Foundation" but the link goes to Mozilla Corporation website. The image below shows the target link on the status bar when the mouse is hovered over Mozilla Foundation hypertext. So much for the release confusion that this post is named "Mozilla Consfusdation™".

Firefox™ 2.0

No, it has not been released officially yet. But it will be in a few hours when the website updates according to the PST. There have been announcements on popular websites about Firefox™ 2.0 builds appearing on Mozilla mirror network. And as usual people are pounding the mirrors already!

The early news being released on other websites and the detrimental effects it can have on the Mozilla mirror network has annoyed/angered the Mozilla network/release team once again. But did they really expect the ever vigilant community to not post the news the very first chance they got? If they did, they haven't learnt from the previous releases. No matter how much you tell people not to put direct ftp/mirror links, they will. Ok, maybe some won't but many will, to have the same detrimental effect. The naughty kid will always find the jar of cookies/candies unless it is locked away. So Mozilla please stop crying and deal with the 2.0 release.

The question now is not how to hide the releases till the release time, but to have a stratergy which prevents/reduces any early linking mal-effects to the mirror system. Other large OSS projects like Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. also make releases and their mirror systems are under heavy loads during the first few hours if not days. Maybe Mozilla should consult with them on how they can manage during those phases more efficiently.

That aside, I can't wait to start using the new Firefox™ 2.0 which my friend told me has a cool spell check feature and remembers the tabs across sessions.

PS: yes, I was whining about Firefox™ in the last post. But hey, this is 2.0 time now. Lets see how it works under pressure :)

PPS: I'm wondering when it will hit the debian repos? ;)

Grrr ...... Firefox™

Before closing Firefox™

~/tmp$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        775880     768184       7696          0       5660     330800
-/+ buffers/cache:     431724     344156
Swap:       979924      38612     941312
~/tmp$ ps uax | grep firefox
u1   13606  2.7 22.7 472800 176276 ?     Sl   Oct21  80:17 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin
u1   18930  0.0  0.0   1644   524 pts/7  R+   16:22   0:00 grep firefox

After closing Firefox™

~/tmp$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        775880     582932     192948          0       5900     329048
-/+ buffers/cache:     247984     527896
Swap:       979924      38612     941312

Wow! Closing Firefox released about 210MB of RAM! Ksysguard was showing a memory usage of about 450MB for the firefox-bin process! That explains why it acts like a drunk homeless guy if you run it for more than a day.

Doing Updates

I'm finally took the plunge and started the pending updates for the MBP. I thought I should do these to have enough time to get it repaired before some travel plans which seem to be just around the corner. A friend of mine did the updates to her Macbook and ended with a blue screen of death!

Almost done now..... rebooting..... and basic updates worked fine. Now for the biggie 10.4.8

Dumb and Dumber and ...

Daniel: you will definitely need to use some French superlatives after using Dumb and Dumber for Iceweasel and Icedove. Iceeape (Seamonkey or Mozilla Suite?) and Sunbird's new avatar seem to be coming out some time in the near future.

Dumbrer is good only for the likes of Harry/Lloyd!

Introducing Icedove

This came in today:

~/$ apt-cache show icedove
Package: icedove
Priority: optional
Section: mail
Installed-Size: 30936
Maintainer: Alexander Sack
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.5.0.7-3
Replaces: mozilla-thunderbird, thunderbird, mozilla-thunderbird-offline
Provides: mail-reader, imap-client, news-reader
Depends: ...snip...
Suggests: ...snip...
Conflicts: mozilla-thunderbird (<= 1.5-2), thunderbird (>= 1.5.0.7-2), mozilla-thunderbird-offline ...
... 
Description: free/unbranded thunderbird mail client  Icedove is a
unbranded Thunderbird mail client suitable for free  distribution.
The goal of Thunderbird is to produce a cross platform stand  alone
mail application using the XUL user interface language.
Icedove/Thunderbird leaves a somewhat smaller memory footprint than
the Mozilla/Seamonkey suite.

Let the flame wars begin :p

Update: somebird would have suited better for a rename ;)

Windows XP and Ubuntu

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine told me that his laptop's hard disk seems to have died. Various efforts to revive it enough to get back the data (precious images) were unsuccessful. The hard disk was not even detected by the BIOS and was making an awfully loud noise when power ON. So it was time for a new hard disk (the warranty expired a week before the carsh!!).

The hard disk was delivered pretty quickly by newegg.com. My friend wanted a trustworthy installation and so I suggested dual-booting it with Ubuntu and using Windows only when needed. He agreed :)

Out of the 80GiB hard disk, he used 55GB for Windows and left the rest for Ubuntu. I walked him through the installation, over phone - about 2hrs, and the results were awesome. His Intel 2915 wireless chipset was automatically detected and he just had to put in his hex key to start using the uni's internet! After that I asked him to install ssh server and I was able to logon remotely to his machine. I installed other small packages e.g. flashplayer, acroread, etc. and it was all ready to be used. The whole process of installation of Ubuntu required only 1 reboot, and another one only to use a newer kernel. Everything was working: sound, video, wireless, Fn+ buttons for volume, brightness, etc.

After that I told him that everything is done and he can freely use Ubuntu. Then he asked me to double check if everything was installed on the Windows partition too. The Windwos XP installation had already required atleast 3reboots, and then it required a reboot after he installed the antivirus, wireless drivers, graphics drivers, etc. And then a few more reboots for windows updates!!

I'm amazed at the state Linux has reached especially Ubuntu and Debian that it can be installed by someone with almost zero knowledge about Linux, some help via telephone, and that most of the drivers are automatically installed. Kudos to Ubuntu and Debian too.

Urban Flying Training

The last time I saw a helicopter hovering near my building, I found out it was due to the shooting. So obviously I was surprised to see them hovering over downtown again. I can still see 1 of the helicopter just hovering at a distance and (at least) two fast helicopters doing rounds over downtown. Update:There was a public service annoucement regarding this practice.

It turns out that the armed forces are doing some kind of urban flying training. That is good to hear but I have noticed that people on the streets are looking upwards as I was and look surprised. I hope people driving vehicles are looking straight ahead!

PS: Will get some pics up here soon.

xserver-xorg

Note to self: If X fails to start on boot, and the console does not show any log for X; check if xserver-xorg is installed or not before anything else!

New Game at IHT

The International Herald Tribune offers more than just news. They haven't publicised their latest trick game (which is very hard to win) yet! Wanna play?

Go to the news item Google posts court ruling on Belgian website and go to the second page. You just need to do a mouse click on the right most column on the news item and it will take you to the second page. Here is where the game starts; there is a link to Google Belgium website on that page. Try to click on the link and see if you can view the linked website. Good luck ;)

Apple Store today

Apple Store is currently offline right now and they say "We are busy updating the store for you and will be back within the hour". But I ask them "Is it being updated for me/us really? Or is it that you are trying to get back the sales of iPods at the same level (11.8m) you had in the first quarter of 2006?

Whatever the reason, the result will be new goodies being available in the store soooooooon... go fetch.

Update: We are Back - Just checked Apple Store again and the website seems to be chugging along slowly(now fine, must have been initial rush). No wonder everybody is rushing to www.apple.com after Steve Jobs' annoucements of new goodies. News in the iPod Nano section: colors (for teenagers?), 24 hour battery life, brighter screen, strong Aluminium build, 8GB Nano - yes, that's something. The Al+8GB features are tempting me to have one of those in black :( From the images on the website the news Nanos looks a lot like the Mini! Am I right or my eyes are betraying me?

Update II: iPod Nano 8GB = iPod 30GB = US$249 = CA$299 ..... Interesting.

iBook in a Museum Already!

In Canadian Museum of Civilization if you go to the Postal Museum, you will will find among other things an old typwriter (Underwood), weighing scales, pencils, etc. Those are things that one might expect to be there, but I was surprised to find that they have an Apple iBook there too! Yes, the Macbooks with Intel processors have replaced the iBook league but didn't they just come out a few years ago?

Seemed interesting so I had to take a snap. The next time I happen to be there I will definitely take the picture of the HP palm top which they have already confined to the back alleys of the museum.

Relegating the flashy iBook to the museum might give an indication that Postes Canada are very advanced and use the cutting edge technology. But are they?

Lifehacker and RAM

Yesterday, Lifehacker had an article by Adam Pash about adding more RAM to a Macbook Pro. They also setup a the whole experiment along with some playing with a camera to film the whole process and provide a video. Nice setup Adam.

I agree with Adam and some of the commenters who commented that upgrading RAM is a user-installable component but not 100%. My only and the biggest concern is that the process was presented without informing the readers about the most important precaution - discharging yourself off any static electricity. Several components in a laptop (especially RAM modules) are sensitive to static charge and if care is not taken, you could end up hosing your system or the brand-spanking-new RAM modules. I haven't seen a RAM module till date whose manufacturer offers replacement of fried-RAM modules due to static.

So, Lifehacker and others who want to upgrade their laptop/PC with new RAM, do your homework and take proper precautions before you open your computer. If you are still not confident enough, ask an experienced friend or even pay a technician to do it rather than frying something in your system and ending up spending more than you saved!

PS: This post is here because there is no easy way to comment on the original post on Lifehacker and I don't want to request an invitation to comment.

Wonderful Gift

Yesterday had a surprise for me. It finally reached me, and it is absolutely wonderful. Want to see how it looks like? Here is a smaller version of the image for you, click on it to go to flickr page and view a larger size.

This is a sleeve for my MBP that a dear friend made for me. It is hand made and one-of-a-kind rather than being one of the run-of-the-mill laptop sleeves you can get online. The black part is a coarse silk cloth; used in order to make it more durable. Inner lining is soft and is padded for safety of the laptop. It will be the obvious choice to carry the laptop to the café around the corner rather than the huge bag I use right now. And the best thing is that the older backpack I use for the laptop will take in the laptop along with the sleeve. Niceee :).

I know it is a macbook pro I will have in the sleeve, but still I'm planning to put a nice logo on the sleeve's front side. Here is a mockup of what it might look if I get around to have that logo on it.

Yes, you guessed it, its the oh, so dependable swirl.

Apple Background Images

After a lot of delay, I have finally put the apple background images online. Download and use them if you like them. The background images have been resized to match the optimal resolutions on a Macbook or a Macbook Pro. The ones above are only 2 of the 6 available for download.

Enjoy

What is a mainframe?

A bunch of hilarious videos by IBM(?). Whoever made those deserves a mainframe

1. Mainframe - The Art of the Sale
2. The Mainframe - Its a metaphor
3. The Mainframe - Its a factory

Warning: flashplayer required to view videos

VLC misbehaved!

VLC is a swiss knife when it comes to playing or streaming audio/video files. I have been all praise for it till now, but I had to pluck one feather off its cap due to unruly behaviour today.

I wanted to test a video created using imagemagick and ffmpeg on my Macbook Pro(MBP). I started up VLC and tried to play the file in it. As I had expected (due to possible unavailability of codecs) it showed me an error that the file is not supported. So I just closed the window thinking I will get back to using a different codec and test later. I leave the laptop with around 87% battery life remaining and went to make a sandwich. After around 15minutes, I was surprised to see the screen still showing the desktop instead of the MBP going to sleep in 5minutes. The battery life remaining showed only 47% remaining!

Started up the good old terminal and checked what the problem was using top. It showed me that a certain process VLC was using up 99.9% of the CPU! KILL, KILL, Terminate was my reaction using another terminal which lead to normal functioning of the MBP. Need to do some bug searching to see if this has been reported.

Moral: Do not leave your MBP/MB around with VLC running. Quit VLC after you end using it.

Air Travel Instructions

Instructions for air travel year 2006 and possibly beyond:

• Absolutely no liquids allowed. Better pee before you go through the security check.
• No lipsticks allowed. You can't fool anyone by putting on makeup, your age and other details are on the passport already.
• Leave laptops at home. If taken along, laptops have to be in checked-in baggage with no guarantee of being returned when you reach your destination. So much for the nights you spent preparing the presentation for the brand new product.
• DO NOT PLAY with your cellular phones. The in-flight US marshals don't like kids playing with their cell phones while they are on-duty.
• If you fit the following profile: teenager or older, male, restless/cannot sit still, like to fiddle with gadgets e.g. cell phone, ipods, camera, etc. that you have all the time, are of Asian origin, and follow a certain religion; just don't travel as you will tend to be a possible cause of flight delays and rigourous questioning/interrogation. Sample questions are: How much did you pay for your iPod? What frequencies does your cellphone use? Does your mp3 player play OGG files, etc.
• Be Alert and not paranoid about a nervous fellow passengers. Nervousness is not exclusivly demonstrated by "dangerous elements"!

Wishing you a happy and safe journey...

401 East driver

Thanks to a person for giving me company on the 401 East bound today. I don't know who the person was, but it was a brand new white Impala car going at the speed of around 140kmph (in a 120kmph zone). It was due to him/her that I enjoyed the drive cruising between 135 and 150 kmph. I seldom see people who drive that fast and still observe all the other traffic rules.

And hey, I should thank the 2-door Monte Carlo under me for the ride too. It never complains even if you floor it.

Passengers Banned from Passenger Flights

Just couldn't resist to post a link to this post. Hilarious, intersting and disturbing at the same time.

I wish it was real!

Error 404: Not found

Debugging Google Adsense CSS

Google as it turns out to be can mistakes too. These mistakes are common in the programming world and are commonly called "bugs". I ended up finding one of these so called "bugs" in Google Adsense style sheets. It is something that one won't expect from a CSS expert, but there are some days when these kind of things don't come under the radar. In order to see the buggy behaviour(if they haven't patched the system yet - not till 5Aug 12:00pm EDT) you need a google adsense account. If you don't have one, you will have to make do with the screen captures provided below.

Google Adsense control panel has a tabbed interface implemented using CSS which looks good when viewed in Firefox at default text zoom (Ctrl+Zero). But just when you increase the text zoom level even by a single step, text and other elements under the tabs are shifted to the right giving them a left margin equal to width of the tabs above it.

The problem comes from the fact that the anchor links in the inline list of the tabs are floated left and hence when we zoom in with Ctrl++, the anchor element's size increases so that it overlaps the div element under it which is in normal flow. Now as the div element under the tabs is not cleared left, its content is shifted to the right equal to the width of the tabs above it.(cf. Floats)

A quick hack to solve the problematic behaviour would be a clear: left rule added to the div element below the tabs. In the other more elegant(and longer) method, the use of the float behaviour can be dropped as the anchors are already in their list element boxes. Positioning and other properties can be applied to the list elements instread to achive a better implementation of the tabs using CSS.

Screenshots for the problem and results after adding clear property:

• Behaviour is as expected without any text zoom
• Text zoom 1 step, left size of window
• Text zoom 1 step, right size of window
• Anchor element box overlaps div box
• Our quick hack solves the problem...albeit partially
• Artifacts of the problem due to float remain and can only be removed by changing the implementation method of tabs

Google, where is my reward for the above explanation and solution?

unpredictable as the weather

Weather has been suprisingly wierd this summer. Just yesterday the temperatures were in the lower 40s with humidex (yes the units are in Centigrade). When I was coming out of a Presse Cafe, a senior lady entered the cafe along with her small dog. No sonner had they entered the cafe that she exclaimed how hot and humid it was outside. The heat and humidity not only affected the lady but also her dog who had laid on the floor seconds after then entered the control atmosphere of the cafe.

So just after a hot and humid afternoon, the gods of rain smiled on us around 21:00hrs. The rain didn't last long but there was some relief from the heat. It looked like it was going to be hot today too. But I was surprised to see incessant rain combined with high speed winds in the early afternoon. I had to run around 20meters to be sheltered from the rain, but the rain got me good even in that short span of time. I have never seen such rain and powerful winds here till today. It reminds me of the rainy season back home. It has been raining after that on and off with bright flashes and roaring thunder firing off the theft alarms of vehicles parked outside.

Lets see what the weather brings for us tomorrow.