lunatechian (lunatech-ian) (Entries tagged as geek stuff)

perl oops

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 05:22:24 +0100

For a language which is so great, it is amazing how fscked up perl's oops is

fun with about:*

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:29:23 +0100

Mozilla family of browser supports a variety about: commands. Today I searched inside the source code to see where they have been implemented and the complete list of the commands it supports. Here is the list Firefox supports. Type these urls in your Firefox browser for countless hours of fun (for very low values of fun).

about:config
about:credits
about:plugins
about:mozilla
about:logo
about:buildconfig
about:license
about:licence
about:about
about:neterror

Link: source code

ingenious use of the HL engine

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:03:01 +0100

This looks very obvious in hindsight, but I am sure not many would have thought about this. This guy uses the HL's source engine to produced a model of the Kaufmann House by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the Source Engine, as opposed to more traditional Architectural Software, allows the use of dynamic lighting and a real-time walkthrough of the scene in high resolution.

Links: the HL map for Kaufmann House and a walk through available here

emails and IM

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 04:27:23 +0100

Dina points to "email is dead" in reference to teens by Danah Boyd

"Now, let's talk about youth. They have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there's not a lot of emotional investment over email.

That said, take away their AIM or MySpace or SMS or whatever their primary form of asynchronous messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you've ruined their life. And you have. Because you've taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It's like me taking away your access to blogs and email and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

There is a difference that I see in the way IM and emails work. On an IM, you get messages from a set of accepted people - who talk about stuff that (mostly) matters to you. On the other hand, your email account is a dropbox for a bunch of uninteresting stuff - mostly spam. However, if you think about it, email has its advantage too - it can be archived, encrypted, signed, personalized, sent across networks (i.e. your gmail.com account can send an email to yahoo.com email id, but you cannot chat with your yahoo! messenger friends from gtalk.

Maybe something equivalent to your IM-buddy list can be done for emails too. You have an email account and that accepts emails only from a whitelisted set of email-ids. Whenever you get an email from a new id, you can either add him to the buddy list or you can report the message as a spam and block the email id. Next step would be to integrate the notifications of new messages into you own desktop and an online presence indicator.

Just some food for thought .

s9y's xml-rpc interface

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:52:39 +0100

I have been playing with s9y's cml-rpc interface for a few days now. Here is a small article on how you can post to your s9y blog using the command line.

iWoz

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:25:28 +0100

If you have not yet read the book iWoz, you have to go out and get this book and read it cover to cover. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. Woz is an excellent storyteller and his tone of writing is conversational. Every engineer should read this book. It tells the stories of sleepless nights and how much they are worth. It talks about persistence and passion and how they really make a difference. One of the profound statements that Woz makes is " I chose to be happy ". The book ends with Woz's thoughts on being a great engineer:

Dont waver.
See things in gray-scale.
Work alone.
Trust your instincts.

One surprising thing in the book is the absence of any mention of the EFF, of which Woz was one of the founders.

BloGTK & tags

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:24:10 +0200

Test post to see if BloGTK can post to LJ and use tags too.

Update: As expected, that did not work

dummy post

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 10:25:37 +0200

This is a dummy post to claim my blog on bloglines.com .

dummy post

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 10:25:37 +0200

This is a dummy post to claim my blog on bloglines.com .

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 04:53:37 +0200

Firefox 2

I am Living on the edge. What about you ? .

freedom from legacy systems!!

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:58:02 +0200

Dear Manager,
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for approvimg my request to move my work desktop to a RedHat system. FreeBSD4 sucks donkey balls (as Eric Cartman would say). Linux is so super-sweet (even if it is RHEL)
Now to move my home directory.
Your sincere slave
Raj Shekhar

some thoughts on portable device

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:32:42 +0200

Almost 2 months back, I got myself an ipod shuffle. After using it for some time, I am totally in love with it. I can now understand why the Macheads sell out their souls to Apple - the bargain is well worth it .

I was thinking about why portable devices like ipod and mobile phones are so close to their owners and I came up with this list.

They are truly personal. You can customize them (think mobile wallpapers, ringtones, playlists) quite a lot.
The are small and portable (duh!)
They can serve multiple purposes. A mobile phone can also serve as a watch, address book, radio, m3 player, camera. A ipod can also be used as a memory stick, FM transmitter and it can also fit in your car's music system.
These devices become useful as soon as you buy them. You can start using a mobile phone as soon as you insert your sim card into it and you can start using your ipod as soon as you transfer music into it. Instant karma!
They have long battery life.

This list is just something to keep in mind when I am designing my Killer App (TM).

emacs registers

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:28:13 +0200

If you have not heard about emacs registers, you are missing a very powerful tool in your arsenal. Think of registers as "clipboard" on steroids. I had been using registers to store text -i.e. C-x r s a to copy region into register "a" and C-x r i a to insert text from register "a".

Today, while reading the gnu.emacs.help newsgroup, I came to know that you could save your current (emacs)frames layout to the register and then restore it back again.

`C-x r w R' Save the state of the selected frame's windows in register R (`window-configuration-to-register').
`C-x r j R' restore a window or frame configuration stored in register R.

Here is the email where I saw this.

Re: how to keep/restore my view and mode?

From: David Hansen
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
Subject: Re: how to keep/restore my view and mode?
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:13:58 +0200
References: <1158816234.643256.254090@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>
To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Mail-Followup-To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs.gnu.org>

On 20 Sep 2006 22:23:54 -0700 Leo Hou wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am not sure if I am using the right term of "view" and "mode". My
> problem is as follows:
>
> I am using C-x 3 and "follow-mode" to view my source code. Every time I
> compile, the other column becomes the result of make. I need to use a
> lot of keys to switch it back to normal: C-x o; C-x k; C-x o; M-x
> follow-mode
> Is there a better way?

C-x r w <some letter or number> to store a window layout and
C-x r j <the same number or letter> to restore it. And there
is no need to kill the compilation buffer.  It gets reused
anyway.

David

webcomics

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 22:54:05 +0200

I discover wonderful things through webcomics. Today, I was reading this comic, where I saw a mention of Miyamoto Musashi. I checked out his wikipedia entry, where a I found a link to his book The Book of Five Rings and that is what I am reading now.

Caf

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 11:14:54 +0200

One of the thinking tools that I have learned from my manager is the Caf. Caf stands for "consider all factors" and it was invented by De Bono. I have started a wikipedia page on caf . Do add more to it if you know better or if you have any links further exploring this idea.