My Two Cents
Open fun
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Was installing Cygwin a few days back. Surprised to see the % completion indicator while it was in progress. It completed at about 340% !! [Click on image to enlarge]
More on compiz themes – the blank title bar problem
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If the latest dist-upgrade made your compiz title bar “blank”, just invoke compiz theme application, click on edit on the bottom, go to general tab and select one of the options from Title-bar object Layout. Your title-bar contents including the buttons should reappear. I am wondering why the developers did not make one of these options the default. This may confuse many a newbie. For the solution to a similar problem, read my previous post.
Microsoft gives away Virtual PC 2004 for free!!
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Used to cost about 100 bucks. While the practical use could be limited (since it runs only on windows), the ability to quickly run different OSs as guests could be a blessing for web designers and enthusiasts who want to try some new OS before committing it to the hard drive.
Digg V3 Has Been Released
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Long awaited digg v3 has gone live. First thing that put me off was the large text add on top of the web page. There seems to be lot of test ads thrown around.
Apart from that, I liked the new categorical organization of the stories. For once, I liked the new Gaming category. Now, I won’t see some silly Super Mario stories on the front page. There are plenty of new features. Instead of going through multiple links/sorting etc., I can now easily see the upcoming stories by just clicking on a link. A direct link to “Bury Story” is also a welcome change, which is a kind of undigg. There are plenty of other small improvements, check out for yourself.
I also hope to see all the outsourcing slams discussed only in the “World and Business” section than the technology section.
Ubuntu Install Log 4: Awesome graphics on the Linux desktop using AIGLX and Compiz (better than Vista and OS X)
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Another fad with Linux enthusiasts these days is the Compiz Window manager. Coupled with an X Server architecture like the Xgl or AIGLX, you can get some awesome graphic effects on the Linux desktop.
I downloaded and installed the Xgl and Compiz applications from the quinnstorms repository as given in this thread. I followed the second how-to to install it as another desktop session, so that I can revert to metacity if I want to use the normal desktop. It took almost an hour to set everything up. Once I rebooted into the new desktop, the graphics effects just blew me away. Especially impressive are the cube and the rotate plugins while the more useful ones are the Alt-Tab switching with live preview and expose kind of interface to view all your applications in one screen. Compiz uses plugins to achieve different individual graphics effects. Currently, there are so many number of plugins available like the Wobbly, cube, rotate, miniwin, dock, fade, minimize, zoom, scale etc., I could not get a good screenshot of the cube or rotate plugins, so I am not posting them here, but the following from linuxedge.org could give you an idea.
The major problem with Xgl is that it is resource hungry and a bit buggy too. If you are using an intel based graphics adapter, AIGLX is a better option. A complete how to guide is here. So at the end of the day, I replaced XGL with AIGLX, disabled a few buggy plugins like miniwin and the dock and removed the wobbly plugin too. (Wobbly made me dizzy). All is well and fine now. I believe I can use compiz as the primary window manager after all these tweaks.
It is surprising to see that all these jazzy graphic effects work effortlessly on my integrated graphics card, intel GMA 900. Windows Vista upgrade advisor wants me to upgrade my graphics card to run aero, which effectively means that I have to buy a replacement for my 6 month old laptop in order to enjoy all the graphics effects in Vista. If compiz can do it, why not Vista? Vista in fact offers much less graphic effects compared to compiz. I see nothing but a conspiracy by the hardware vendors and Microsoft in this case.
Diagnosed with a new disease
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I was just diagnosed with a deadly disease called Neophilia, which among other side effects, could also lead to bankruptcy. Not a very good news, isn’t it? 
IBM gets processor to run at 500GHz!
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IBM and Georgia Tech have coaxed a chip to run at 500GHz, a record for a silicon-based device, by dropping the temperature to minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit. This is just 8 degrees below absolute minimum.
Runnning at room temperature, this cheap can reach speeds of 300-350 GHz which is way ahead than today’s industrial standards. Terahertz is just around the corner!
Posting to Blogs from Microsoft Word 2007
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Most people who tried Office 2007 are surprised by the new features and changes to the suite. It is now a common opinion on the internet that while Vista is a heavily bloated OS, Office 2007 brings in a refreshing and welcome change (I am yet to test Vista Beta 2, so my opinion may be different. I am waiting for that one mail from Microsoft). One of the new features in Word 2007 is posting to the blog service providers directly from within Word. The following service providers are supported in the beta – MSN Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint and any other blog which supports Atom or MetaWebLog api. So all you do is select New -> New Blog Entry. The first time when you do this, you are asked a few questions on your account details like user id, password
and URL to upload your images. For blogger, image upload is not supported. Click on publish once you are done with editing! The advantages of using Word for posting to blogs are obvious: Built-in spell check, ability to post to multiple blogs easily, variety of formatting options, ability to work off-line for large posts etc., I wish I had this tool when I wrote the largest post in this blog: My Krome iQ 700 review.
Beta quirks: This seems to be a late-breaking feature in the beta. It is almost unusable if you try to upload images. Several times I enountered a mysterious dialog box asking for my user-id and password for the blog. Even if you give details, it strangely reappears, leaving you with the only option of killing Word through task manager.
PS: The default font in Office 2007 seems to be Calibri. Looks gorgeous.
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