Testing. Testing. Captain can you hear me?

Posted: October 15th, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , | 2 Comments »

Here’s what wave looks like when you first enter.

Google Wave

There’s not much you can do with it at the moment, but I guess you could leave your comments below (if you have a wave account).

[wave id=”googlewave.com!w+i_FejqpYA” bgcolor=”white” color=”black” font=”Helvetica”]


Open Source on the Desktop

Posted: September 10th, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , , | Comments Off on Open Source on the Desktop

The desktop wars have been heating up since the arrival of ubuntu on the scene. There’s been many articles stating that Linux has arrived on the desktop and so on. But last month while at an open source conference I realized that aside from ideological battles, balance is what’s needed. My friend had a laptop running the latest version of Ubuntu, he quickly ran into trouble when doing something as simple as a hibernate and ended up having to reinstall the OS to fix the problem.

So what do I want to say here? Well, to me where open source makes sense is in the enterprise. A place where the cost of software is minimized and the benefits of open source are quickly realized. But on the desktop, where I don’t have time to deal with unsupported hardware or small issues it makes no difference! So at this moment, the deciding factor should be what runs what I need to run painlessly and seamlessly…


iPhone 2.2 Jailbroken

Posted: December 2nd, 2008 | Author: | Tags: , | No Comments »

This weekend I finally manage to jailbreak my iphone. The process is pretty painless, and is well documented on various sites; here, and here, for example.

The best part of doing this is that I can now unlock features of the iphone that would normally be closed to me. I can now record video with the phone, tether the phone to a laptop, and most importantly and ridiculously I can use the native terminal on the system. And a very cool side-effect is that I can now ssh to a remote host from my cell phone!

cydia - alternate app storecydia - 2terminal

Dec 16, 2008 Update:I added a nicer screenshot of the terminal app to the above shots.


The World of Desktop Widgets – Part 1

Posted: October 13th, 2008 | Author: | Tags: , , , | Comments Off on The World of Desktop Widgets – Part 1

Back in 2003 when I still had enough time to follow up on the latest Linux applications, there was a new tool (or toolkit) developed called Karamba. It aimed to bring desktop widget functionality to KDE on Linux. Soon there was a new application called Superkaramba that improved on the old application and got a lot of attention. Curious as I was, I downloaded it, compiled it and was soon running it on my desktop.

Looks like the idea of using desktop widgets was catching on at the time. At the same time there was an application called Konfabulator (which got bought out by Yahoo and is now called Yahoo! Widgets). When I started working and was forced back on Windows, I started using konfabulator and liked it quite a lot. At around the same time Mac OS X had an application called Dashboard, which did all the things the other two were aiming for. With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft entered the field and released native widgets called Gadgets. The final development – as far as my exposure lets me believe – was the development of Plasma in the new version KDE. There is also one other player in this game that introduced its own version of widgets. Google created the desktop search back in 2004, and soon after added a sidebar with gadgets and other plugins. As one would guess, these gadgets performed the same general tasks as all the other flavours and aimed to provide the same solutions.

I this article I will try and review each of these implementations both from a user perspective. Part 2 will carry reviews from a developer’s point of view.

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Graphics

Posted: August 13th, 2004 | Author: | No Comments »

and here’s my Raytracer project that I did for graphics. It is by no means complete, and I really want to make it into a really nice application.
Today was spent playing soccer, passing out on a friends couch after a good meal of pizza and wings, waking up shortly and playing networked computer games in a dingy basement!

Long live student life!!!


Linux Installation Story

Posted: February 28th, 2004 | Author: | Tags: , | No Comments »

I have been using GNU/Linux since 2000, and have tried to educate myself on the operating system and the programs usually distributed with it as much as possible. I’ve slowly grown fond of it, and at times have become somewhat of a zealot!

At some points I have had to ask myself whether it made sense to use Linux as a primary operating system. After all, I could just do what most other students do, and keep a dual boot system – with Windows as the first option.

This past month, the motherboard on my computer died and gave me an excuse to reformat my computer while fixing this small problem. My experiences in doing yet another Linux install – this time after almost a year – made me think about some issues I had with this Operating System, that I will try to convery here.

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