Author: vivek

If you are a true programmer, then at some point of time you surely would have employed the services of the command ‘man’ on your shell prompt on unix. the output produced by man is great and the help is excellent, but somehow I always felt that the interface was lacking. Today I was browsing MacOSXHints and I came across this free tool called Bwana. Quoting from the developer’s website

Bwana is a manual page viewer for your browser. It parses man pages in real time to provide the most up to date pages in an easy to read format. The pages have links to other man pages, http and email references–the way man pages should have been from the start.

I tried it out, works perfectly and you can display the output on the browser of your choice. Sweet stuff. Also in case you are curious, Bwana means ‘Mr.’ or ‘Sir’ in Swahili.

Ever wanted to create a really light weight slideshow to be displayed on your website? Powerpoint or PDF really aren’t good solutions. I came across this tool for creating slideshows. It is called S⁵. The back-end for this slidewhow is CSS, Javascript and XHTML. Believe me the slides load FAST. Wanna try it out. Check out this slideshow. Now I know how to put my slides up on the web without resorting to powerpoint.

Yippie
I discovered a bug today in the Mac OS X (10.3.6) Login Screen. Now look at the pictures below. When you click at the position indicated, Mac OS X throws an exception. I know it is not too big a bug, but surely something worth noticing.

After putting a lot of thought into it, I went ahead and purchased a bluetooth headset. Made by Logitech, this headset is touted to use what they called Windstop. They use signal processing to cut out the background noise from wind and other sources. I am happy to say that it works pretty well. I was walking down University Drive the other day and talking to my friend, and she was not able to detect that

1. I was on a headset
2. I was actually on a very noisy road.

So I think that is a 46 bucks well spent. Off late I have been using Skype to speak to my folks at home. Since my laptop has bluetooth, this headset is a perfect addition to the gizmo family. I am a happy man ;). In other related news, I succesfully completed Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Great game, had an amazing time playing it. I think I will play it next at the toughest level. Highly recommended!

I have been following the rise of Mozilla Firefox aka Firebird aka Phoenix right from its humble 0.3 release. I have installed nigtlies and used to post quite often in those forums under the pseudonym pearljam145. Firefox has reached the 1.0 PR and has become a force to reckon. On the flip side of the coin, Microsoft just announced that they would no longer update Internet Explorer for older versions of their operating system. I somehow feel that this just isn’t fair, considering the fact that Windows 2000 alone is used by 17.5% of the world’s computer users. Now when you multiply 17.5 by all the computer users in the worls, you come up with a huge number. Upgrading to XP really isn’t an option in many cases, since the high price make it quite unaffordable for a large portion of the public. Now I don’t understand why MS can’t provide the upgrades or rather bug fixes for their browser. They claim that IE is an integral part of their operating system, but this really can’t be true, and if it is then I would call it bad design. I know people who have multiple versions of IE running on their computer, so it is possible to have standalone versions of the browser. Anyway, now onwards, even though it might not make too much of a difference, I will whole heartedly support Firefox. I have managed to convert a few people myself, and I will continue to do so in the future. Go Firefox!

Deepak referred me to this website. It has some hilarious chat sessions taken from IRC. Check it out whenever you get the time. Go to the top 100 for the best of the lot. Here is a sampler

Ouroboros: lets play Pong

<Ouroboros> Ok.

<tag> |    .

<Ouroboros> .    |

<tag> |  .

<Ouroboros>    . |

<tag> | .

<Ouroboros>      | .

<Ouroboros> Whoops

————————-

<erno> hm. I’ve lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can’t figure out where in my apartment it is.

————————-

Hilarious!

Check the image out. I was installing a copy of Windows 2000 on my Virtual PC. And as usual had to go through Windows Update. Thats when I saw this . Check out the size out there. Heh.. If only it were that accurate.

I came across this hilarious video. Really funny. Make sure you keep your audio on. No pranks here.

Been a good day so far. I installled Konfabulator on my Mac today. Looks really nice. Love those widgets. The only thing that concerns me is that I don’t know how much of a draw these widgets are on my CPU. I hope they aren’t CPU hungry. I haven’t seen any increase in heat, so I am assuming that I am good for now. Anyway fact is that I have just two widgets open. One is a gmail checker and another is the weather. Not that I need the latter, but then it looks really nice.

Sushant found this really cool way to make your PC look exactly like a Mac. I think I am going to give it a shot ;). Why not I would say. I have a hyprethreaded P4 which is currently not being put to too much use, so I think it is time I make it work a bit. I am looking for a open source rss reader for the mac. Well need not be open source, but free. I know there is netnewswire lite , but then it does not allow me to archive those messages. I think I need to write myself a small app.

In related news, I am now officially preparing for the MCSD certification. I dont know how succesful I am going to be in this, but I am sure it won’t hurt. Also was looking at the Google code jam. Looks interesting, but I am not sure if I will have the time for it. Anyway lets see how it goes

To all of you out there wherever you are

Remember, the light at the end of the tunnel may be you, goodnight – Aerosmith

I just got myself a whole lot of gizmos. Here is a small list

1. A powerbook G4 1.33 GHz 15 . I love this baby. Weighing in at 5.1 lbs including the battery, it is a piece of art. Yeah Hegde, I finaly did it. I sold my old laptop on eBay. Only sad part of the entire deal is that it set me back by a huge amount, and I still don’t have enough RAM. Just bought some yesterday. 120 bucks more. Man I am broke.

2. Since my powerbook comes with bluetooth built in, I decided to buy a Logitech bluetooth mouse . Thats the MX900. Good stuff. Now I have a remote control while watching movies. Works like a charm

3. The sidekick that I owned had way too many issues. I went through three of those. Believe it or not, one of those things refused to stop vibrating. It would start vibrating suddenly and wouldn’t stop till the battery died. Got sick of it. So I sold the fourth replacement I received on eBay and got a Sony Ericsson T610. It works out fine coz now I can control my Mac from my phone. Also I managed to dial out to the net via my phone. Was agonizingly slow, but come on something is better than nothing. Quite like the phone, though the camera is kinda pointless. Doesn’t serve any purpose at all

4. Yeah there is more. I got a Canon Powershot S410. Awesome camera. Thanks to Anil for the recommendation. Been taking quite a few pictutes. Will post those online soon. Also got a 256 MB CF card to complement the camera. So now I am all set.

Whoosh, I think that was a big list. Also got myself this domain name. Thanks to the chaps at 1&1, I have it for a good price of 5.99 a year. Managed to publish my calendar online too. So all that is working out. Ok I guess that about it for now. More updates later