Buddy Pounce!!!

How many times, you had to ping somebody and (s)he is offline and you want to be notified when (s)he comes online so that you can continue doing what you were doing instead of keep on checking whether (s)he has come online or not!!!

My first long sentence after a loooooong time!!!

In Pidgin, you can Select a buddy and “Add Buddy Pounce…”. It gives a load of options on when you want (somebody comes online/sends message/becomes idle……….)to do what (Send a message/Popup a notification…..)

Kool feature that I liked 🙂 It helped me solve a problem that I have mentioned in one of my looooongest sentences 😀

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Gnome – Beginning of the end ???

Tags

Linux

Recently came across this info. ie. Gnome is planning to remove the middle-click paste feature. I am a big fan of this feature and I use it for multiple purposes. For quicker pasting (Usability) and to make the others (mostly windows users) wonder on what this guy is doing!! (Advertisement) 😀

Previously, nautilus changed quite a lot of stuff (removed tree view, removed status bar, added “intelligent???” search ie. as and when we start typing it searches for the file/folder) and after that I seriously started looking for an alternate file browser. As I could not find one yet, reverted to an older version of nautilus.

I don’t think, these changes are good for Gnome!!! I have heard from my colleagues who interacts with customers that “Customers are OK with using our product even if we don’t give new features. But, they hate when something that was working before doesn’t work any more.” Now, I realize, how true it is!!!

Ubuntu

Loong time… No seee…

Its time to express my frustration… I am using/trying ubuntu for a few years. (I think since 8.04 or something) Over the last couple of years, the quality has gone deep down. A simple example is: I have the whole code of our product in my laptop. Initially, I could compile all at one go. But over the past couple of versions of ubuntu, i could not. I have to keep a watch on the temperature of the processor and have to pause the compilation once the temperature goes beyond 90+ degrees. Else, my machine will shutdown. I dont think our code size have increased that much.

Thinking of moving to a different distro. Version/features seems to be indirectly proportional to quality.

Ubuntu 10.04 – Lucid Lynx

Recently, I got a lappy (short form for laptop :)) from my office. (Don’t ever ask me what I do with it ;)). Initially I had OpenSUSE 11.2 on it. I was able to connect to my office VPN with that. (I can not connect to VPN with ubuntu.) Later, I faced some issues with some other applications that I use regularly. So, I decided to go back to ubuntu. (My home PC still have ubuntu and after getting my lappy, I use it only as a data server. :D)

As I came to know that ubuntu 10.04 got recently released, I decided to install it on my lappy. Initially, I had few doubts. Whether I can go ahead and install it or not. Also, whether it is worth loosing the ability to connect to office VPN.

A few things I noticed in ubuntu:

Boot Speed:
Amazing speed. In OpenSUSE and older versions of ubuntu, it takes around a minute for me to see the login window. With this one, within one minute, I can actually start my work. ie. It just takes around 10-15 seconds MAX (From the grub menu to login screen). And even faster while shutting down. ie. It takes around 3-5 seconds MAX for shutting down.

CPU Fan Utilization:
When I was using OpenSUSE 11.2 on my lappy, after an hour or so, the machine will become hot. It cannot be called a laptop anymore. It has to be called as a boiler :(. But, after moving to ubuntu, the maximum heat I felt was a slight warmth and no more. I tried installing vmware and another linux OS on top of that. It became hot. Then I realized, my ubuntu was kool and the other OS could not handle the heat 🙂

Auto completion in bash:
I tried enabling auto-completion in bash. I thought it will just help me complete typing the parameters for a command. Then I came to know that, it can even complete the path on the remote machine when I do an scp. The following is the setup I have: For doing my unit testing, I copy files from my machine to my test machine through scp. I have written a script that does the copy. For scp keep quite (not prompt for password), I have stored my public key in my test machine’s “~/.ssh/authorized_keys” file. (The public key was generated using ssh-keygen utility.) So that, whenever I connect to my test machine, it doesn’t ask for password. When I was trying to copy a file from my machine, I accidentally pressed tab and got it completed. (This might not be ubuntu specific. But, I found it on ubuntu).

Mounting Windows shares through smb.
When I access windows shares, it mounts it as a folder inside ~/.gvfs. When you write any files there, it will be written on the remote machine. A few months back, I have tried the same (on older version of ubuntu). I tried to launch a terminal on a mounted windows share. All I got was my home directory. Nice improvement. 🙂

Verdict: I didn’t repent moving to ubuntu 🙂

30 minutes with Firefox 3.0

I was eagerly waiting for the release of Firefox 3.0. I haven’t tried the RCs so that I won’t miss excitement of the new stable release. The default theme has been drastically changed.

Some Cool features – Really Surprised me!!!

• When typing in the address bar, it searches (any part of the text) in the page titles also. Kool one!!!
• Prompting for remembering passwords, now instead of a message box, they are using a pop-up at the top. This doesn’t block the navigation too.
• There is an option to “Undo Close tab”. This opens the previously closed tab. Just by mistake if anybody closed a tab, this will be of great use.
• One more coolest thing is in the screenshot:

Really funny!!! as well as implicating the seriousness.

Recently I heard a news from bbspot that M$ is going dump IE and adopt Firefox. Later heard that this site posts some technologically interesting FAKE news. Now I feel that, M$ better do it 🙂