Category: software

Open source – for the people and by the people

A snippet from an article in linux.com:

Recently, I wrote a review of the note-taking application Tomboy. Though I find Tomboy exceptionally useful, I had a minor issue with the inability to create new notebooks from within a note. Within hours of the review appearing on Linux.com, Boyd Timothy, one of the app’s developers mentioned in the article’s comments that my idea had merit and said he would add the feature to an upcoming build. True to his word, he did. This is a shining example of one of the most valued yet sometimes overlooked features of open source software: it really is for the people, by the people.

Read the full article here.


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.

Setting a clear type font for your cmd window on XP

If you are like me, and you use the cmd window (or the MKS Korn Shell window, or the Cygwin window, or any other command line interface), you might be interested in this. If you had noticed earlier, these terminals had very limited font changing support. You could either change it to Lucida or to Raster. Both of them are definitely not the best. Microsoft recently released a set of clear type fonts, which are much much easier on the eyes, and look a whole lot better than the clunky lucida.

(click on image to see full size. The clear type effect is best seen when you see it full size)

If you want your terminals to look like the above, jump to this link to get a step-by-step tut on how to get this done. I did this just now, and it works like a dream.

Update: One of uses of this blog is to put some of the esoteric tricks that I find here, so that I can refer them later. Today was my day of reckoning. I wanted to add my new fav font “Monaco” to the mks bash font listing. So all I did was search my blog, and voila. One thing that I would do is to put in a screen shot here.

Go to start-run-regedit. Then open up HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> software -> Microsoft -> Windows NT -> Console -> TrueTypeFont. Then right-click -> new -> string value. Add ‘000’ as the key and the new font name as the value.

monaco1

Wipro factory ?

I have always made fun of the large software houses like Wipro, TCS, Infosys in Bangalore (in good jest). I have nothing against them. They are giving more than their fair share to the GDP of the nation, and I admire that. But I always make fun of them, by calling them code factories, where thousands of engineers write code-after-code, for offshore clients. I have heard inhumane conditions of work — not physically, but conditions of work, where creativity is stymied, and routine work is admired, and gains you a promotion etc. In these factories, there are all but a few people who decide the specs, and what goes where, and the others code, code, and code … Readers who work there, please do not take offense. I am not saying these are menial jobs. It requires expertise and good software engineering skills.

Anyways, coming to the point of the post, yesterday, in one of the Wipro buses, I found this slogan. I may be missing a few words here and there, but the gist went like this:

Wipro — Innovation at its best … etc etc … We follow the factory model, resulting in 30% lesser defects and higher quality software products.

I was floored. Wow. They really follow some factory model ! Very interesting. And I went and looked up on wikipedia to see what the factory model is, and sure enough, there is something called the software factory.

And guess what, I even found the following paper in IEEE through google.

A Software Factory Model Based on ISO9000 and CMM for Chinese Small Organizations

Very interesting.

News burst about Yahoo and Microsoft

(pic courtesy: cnet:news.com)

Everyone has heard about the proposed take over of Yahoo by Microsoft. Their repeated increase of their offer price, and Yahoo not giving in. Lots of people predicted yahoo shareholders would be upset, and newspapers reported that Yahoo stock plunged – because they did not take what seemed to be a good offer etc. But did anyone do an accurate calculation, like what Kottke did ?

On Jan 31, the day before Microsoft offered $31/share for Yahoo, YHOO was at $19.18/share (market cap: $26.4 billion) and MSFT was at $32.60/share (market cap: $303.6 billion). At the close of trading today, YHOO closed at $24.37/share (market cap: $33.5 billion) and MSFT was at $29.08/share (market cap: $270.8 billion). In other words, the Microsoft offer increased the value of Yahoo! Inc. by more than $7 billion and decreased the value of Microsoft Corporation by almost $33 billion. In still other words, in attempting to take Yahoo by force, they let an amount equal to Yahoo slip through their fingers. Why isn’t anyone writing about Yahoo’s amazing stock gains and Microsoft’s plunge?

If everyone did, the whole concept of media sensationalism would die ! (and I sure wish it did, after the unfortunate incident of me watching Headline news the other day!)

Convert PDFs to … PDFs again!

Haha. Is there any use at all, to convert a PDF to a PDF? The Confessions-of-a-freeware-junkie blog writes of a fantastic use. This was discovered by accident, but a goldmine find. He had a huge color PDF of about 13 Megs in size. And he had to reduce the size. He tried several tools to reduce this size, but in vain. He then, went to print this PDF to a PDF using the free PDFCreator tool. Voila ! The file became 3 Megs. He guesses the reason to be that PDFCreator tool reduces the millions of colors PDF to a few thousands of colors. And this makes a huge difference. Wow. This is good info. He says that the output was still highly legible, and his user was happy.

That is defenitely a good hack! Kudos! Read the post here.

The dreamhost saga ?

When I read this post at MrsMicah(www.mrsmicah.com), I was like “Wow!”. This is exactly what I dread about auto-debit. While you may have much confidence on your bank, and your creditcard, and your vendors, you never
know how badly, a single digit error, during a auto-debit transaction can screw you up. The damage it did for dreamhost is a miscalculation to the tune of $7.5million.

Read it all here.

In short, there was a date mistake when one of the dreamwork staff wrongly typed December 2008 instead of December 2007 — a serious fat finger mistake! What did this do? It made each and every one of the accounts of dreamworks
overdue 11 months, and auto-debited them. It did cause some serious damage (like huge overdrafts, mortgage payments bouncing etc). Read the very angry comments.

At the end of the day, my take is — the tone with which this whole issue was reported, should have atleast been more serious and apologetic. I think it was rash, inconsiderate, and arrogant.

Followup:

1. It does look some sense descended into the owners of dreamhost, and they got out an apologetic post. Saying the joke was not intentional and it was unwarranted, and they do understand that it hurt the sentiments of a large number of people. I wonder what caused the sudden turnaround (large exodus of people threatening to leave? A class action suite threat?).

Read the aftermath here.

2. Anyways, it did not end there. Josh discovered another boo-boo in their biller system. The refunding script only refunded the money for about 25% of the folks – causing a further rage of people who commented by saying that Dreamworks is not keeping up their word of refunding.

Read the second booboo here. (very inaptly titled final update? final? really?)

I wonder how billing systems can have boo-boos. Now my respect for some of the software factories in India (WIPRO, INFOSYS, TCS, SATYAM, etc) have risen considerably. These guys do specialize in banking and billing software. The need for robust and reliable software for these kind of applications is just exemplified by such an incident.

Blue screen of death

bluescr.jpg

The blue screen of death isindeed scary. I have heard a lot about it. I have seen a couple in my friends computers. But the first time you get one, it scares the bejeezus out of you. Wow.

Any one has any idea, what this one means ?

PS: By the way, this awesome photo was shot on my new Nokia 3110 Classic. The cam is 1.3 Megapixel resolution.

Gone in 60 seconds

No, I am not going to blog about the movie (which is a brilliant movie as a matter of fact). Not only drool-ware for car-lovers, but in general, a good action movie.

I am now referring to a donation-ware software called gonein60s, which helps people recover back an application, if you inadvertantly close it. Some of thing of the order of, you are typing in a long email to your girl-friend on gmail, and you by-mistake do an alt-f4 (or click the darn x at the right end of the window).

Before you start thinking about, how they recover from the bowels of the RAM or temporary files, reset yourself. Nope, they do not fix anything fancy like that. KEEP-IT-SIMPLE-STUPID (KISS) is the policy these guys follow.

When someone closes an application, they just hide the app for 60 seconds (or any user specified time limit), and close it only after the time is up. So if you realize before the time-out time, that you have made a mistake, you click on the gonein60s icon in the system tray, and recover it.

Now that is what I call brilliance using simplicity!