Month: June 2008

Two ultimate utils – Gmailit and Goosh

And yes, they are shareware. One is a firefox extension and the other is best described by experiencing.

The first is a gmail it extension. I do this a gazillion times a day – things to remember, things to blog, important phone numbers etc – I just email myself. Using this extension, just select what you want to email, right click and say gmail it. How is that for ease-of-use.

The second is goosh. For CLI (command line interface) or shell lovers, this is sure to tingle your spine. This is a shell version of the great Google itself. It is not a supported google product. It runs on the browser. And see below for a screen shot. (or) just go to goosh.org to see for yourself. Wow.

I have circled the commands that I passed. To search the web, just type web <keywords> ; to search images just type images <keywords>; for help type help. Amazing and it is blazing fast – like a good shell should be. And yes, clear, ls, and command history using up-arrow is supported. Yaay for that.

Cannot our health ministry please prioritize … ?

Gayathri has this heart-wrenching post (also named so), about her visit to the Stanley Hospital, Chennai. It is indeed gut-curling, to see the mass of humanity, who cannot afford anything more, be treated so badly. As she aptly says, rather than make media-arresting statements such as ‘stopping alcohol and smoking on screen’, could not our dear health minister (who happens to be from the same state of Tamilnadu), stop for a moment, prioritize, and see if anything could be done for our public health care system. It is going to dogs. If you read Gayathri’s post, you will see that, it is literally going to dogs.

An excerpt:

Another patient was lying down on one of the row cots that had a green sheet covering it. The sheet seemed uncared for and almost cursed. The green was just desperately clinging on to the sheet as if for mere presence. Just then, i saw a dog sleeping on the floor next to his wife and i knew it was not the sheet that was cursed.



Read the full post here.

And those readers who do own blogs, please do link to this article. Let us do our bit (however small it may be) to raise the awareness.

Server down because XBOX is missing

Public Universities are always running on a limited budget which means they sometimes come up with “innovative” solutions. A couple of years back, an X-Box with some variant of Linux installed had been put in the server room to support a subject designed to teach computer-illiterate Philosophy students how to build their own web pages. This unorthodox platform was chosen because one of the techs was a Linux enthusiast and had convinced “the powers that be” that a cheap web server solution for this subject could be implemented using an X-Box rather than a standard PC or server. Grateful to save money where they could, the project was approved.

Several years later and most of the staff in the department had moved on to bigger and better things. There was a new manager and a brand new set of helpdesk techs. The department’s Unix administrator was one of the few people left who knew what the X-Box was used for. Each year before the second semester class began he powered up the X-Box and updated its software. Few of the other staff ventured into the server room so there was little reason to wonder why an X-Box was sitting on the rack.

Five weeks into the “Web pages for Philosophy students” class the excrement encountered the rotary cooling device. The IT department’s help desk started receiving calls from Philosophy students who were unable to access their web projects.

I quote verbatim from the website, since, I do not think, I can describe it as good as the author did. Wow. ROFL. The excrement hit the rotary cooling device – brilliant way of saying the shit hit the fan !! Well, since you saw the subject of the post, you know why the website went down !

Read the full article here.