Lynnoox ?

My IE is slowly going insane, Firefox takes so long to open that I use IE and Flock more often, and my passwords are too many to export to Opera without spending an hour.

Plus all the stupid crap I’ve installed means that this XP installation is about to crack under the weight.

I’d tried before, and after my second terminals, I’ll try again to install linux.

Which one though?

Ubuntu and it’s derivatives (Xubuntu, kubuntu, edubuntu) sound nice. I’d have preferred Freespire (I gather it’s better out of the box – multimedia supprot etc) but Ubuntu has a tonne of community support and I hear even Freespire is moving to an Ubuntu forking, and Linspore’s awesome CNR kit is going to be available soon on Ubuntu.

Maybe one of the BSDs (FreeBSD/OpenBSD /PC-BSD) ? Naw… too hard at this point.

So probably kubuntu or xubuntu.

Though the learning curve is very flattened, and progress will be slow for me (new words, new look, new command line, new everything).

But on the upside, it comes with OpenOffice and Multimedia support now.

I guess I’ll have to be a dumb user for six months or so before I can get used to it and start the tweaking that’ll make it do what I want how I want.

But after my itsy bitsy project is done. So we’re looking at 3rd week of April, if not before.

Anyone else wanting to install Linux in April ?

I’ve done it twice before, and it’s not been a pleasant experience. RHL Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu 6.10.

Maybe it’s time I tried Ubuntu’s new beta? Or should I actually wait for it to go gold or live or whatever the new euphmism is?

Edit: Maybe I’ll wait till May Day or the last week of April. They’d have released Ubuntu 7 Feisty Fawn by April 19th and we’ll have a clear picture of bugs and such.

The machine is us/ing us

Oh my GOD why didn’t I post this earlier?

The ending… the ending… the ending…

Douglas Adams and Dell’s Ideastorm

Douglas Adams -

… 
And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form – ‘www’ – takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for) and we have yet another exciting new model. It’s a brochure. A huge, all-singing, all-dancing, hopping, beeping Flash-ridden brochure.
…
But let us take this one stage further. How often have you looked through a brochure or a catalogue and thought ‘I wish somebody would write a book about…’ or ‘If only somebody made a bicycle with a…’ Or ‘Why doesn’t somebody make a screwdriver that…’ or ‘Why don’t they make that in blue?’ A brochure can’t answer you, but the web can.

I ruined the ending.

Dell’s new site IdeaStorm …

Douglas Adams’ body of work is frighteningly accurate. Should Apple have hired him as consultant?

By the way, the number one idea out there is Preinstalled Linux.

And I know I’m a fan boy.

CS Hour: MB vs MiB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte

Learn something new

Everyday

Because that’s what makes your day enjoyable

Doing new things

Solving challenging problems

Learning new things

This Songspot widget

Heck it has just one song.

Pandora? Last.fm ?

I think WordPress had some widgets for that.

I don’t see ‘em.

Inarticulately recapping Monday and Tuesday

I’ve screwed up both papers pretty badly.

And I got into the finals of DCE’s Quiz Spectrum.

Well we finished bottom of the hill, 6th out of 6, but I’ve now gone farther than anytime before. Satisfying.

Apart from a couple of technical glitches, it was a pretty good quiz.

And yes, I reached home after midnight. My head is still spinning and I haven’t eaten anything for about 14 hours.

I do have a couple of photos, but I think I’ll post ‘em tomorrow.

digg – an endless chain of clickities

Possibly the coolest screen saver on earth… on the digg homepage links to…

Possibly the coolest screen saver on earth… [constantlythinking.com] which is linking to…

Twingly Screensaver – The RSS world is yours! [hackszine.com] which is linking to…

 Twingly blog-globe world-reader [valleywag.com] which got it from…

Visualize the Blogosphere [bizstone.com] who apparently looked it up from the source of the trouble…

The Twingly Screen Saver website [twingly.se]

Everyone followed correct behaviour here… linking to the place they got the story from.

Except, digg.com asks you to directly “link to the story” which makes it a rule violation?

Only a handful of them actually link to the original story/item. The rest are just gushing opinion pieces.

But they all were ethically doing the correct thing, right?

Something is wrong with what’s going on, despite everyone being honest and only trying to game the digg system in a minor way in order to drive traffic inwards.

The first mentioned article has….. 394 diggs! Impressive.

And the original twingly.se article has…. drumroll please… ZERO DIGGS! … tada!

What digg has done, is incited the new X prize – kind of an hourly X prize.

The me-too meme of the hour X prize

Slashdot is at least not completely ripping up everything in it’s path. /.ers are many-a-time erudite learned folk who actually know stuff and have proper well thought out opinions and positions.

digg scares the hell outta me.

Information overload has a new name. Slashdot was just it’s old name.

This site may harm your computer

Wow.

Google’s warning

When the hell did elGoog start doing this?

Search-as-you-type aka Incremental find enabling in IE all versions

Like the incremental find in Mozila based browsers like Firefox and Flock?

Wished for the same in IE?

Simply download this plugin.

The installer downloads a small component from the ookii.org server and in seconds you’re done.

Works!

Thanks to Wikipedia.

Alternatives to Yahoo, Google and MS products

Originally titled : “Things to be excited about”

YOU should be excited about THIS - A growing collection of all HHGGesque prjects.

I am excited about some Microsoft products. Yes, you heard it right. MS Products.

I won’t link the pages, because I can’t get the betas [betae?] yet. Head over to MS Connect or Live Ideas if you’re a western devil and sign in and get them if your IP is in the right ranges.

Here they are…

Windows Live Writer – Sort of a blogging app.

Windows Live Mail Desktop – Outlook v7 with old engine and new interface.

WL Desktop Search – Google Search has a limit of 100k files and indexes first 1MB per file. I’ve used this before and it’s better. But GDS has that sidebar thingy with widgets which can replace so many of my startup apps. But it’s very heavy on the RAM and the CPU and the stuff.

WL Office – wtf !

WL Domains – wtf ! !

WL Toolbar – I’ve used it and it’s pretty neat, adds tabs to IE [not very well] and lets you use other search engines like elGoog. But I used an older build. It has many addons, the most heavily touted, and indeed the heaviest is Onfolio, featured in the WL Gallery.

Though I’m suspicious about many Microsoft downloads (after that SP2 scam was unearthed where many MS domains had their IPs hardcoded into the stack and you couldn’t bypass those via any sane method and a router was the only way).

I won’t be getting WL Messenger. Or Yahoo messenger. Or Yahoo toolbar for that matter. One Gaim to rule them all, just as soon as they add Gtalk voice chats, I’m going to be very happy.

Yahoo - Guys, you synergize with your marketing team too much.

Google – You HAVE to give things a bit more customizability. (GDS at least. Gtalk’s earlier builds I could live with. Not GDS. The core is search. You’re ruining it. Crippled search = no search.)

Microsoft – WL initiative is very nice guys, but… uhh… I hope these things get leaner FAST, or I can’t use them. The world is NOT the US. Open your betas not ny region, but by some other criteria, PLEASE Goddamnit.

And I began to think: anyone wants to suggest alternative to the downloadable/online products of these guys?

So here’s the list…

IM – Gaim

Office suite – OpenOffice.org

Online Office Apps – Zoho, Zimbra, 37Signals, Ajax13, gOffice, Thinkfree

Search Toolbar – Hell I have one too, in my sidebar

Desktop search – Agent Ransack, VistaGlance, Tag2Find, Ask.com’s Desktop Search, Copernic Desktop Search [YDS = X1 DS, so I don't count that], Many other freeware apps!

Widgets/Gadgets – Samurize, Kapsules, GTK+, Qt, AveDesk

Blogging platform+host – WordPress, Terapad

Blogging tool – Performancing/ScribeFire Mozilla extension, Flock browser, the one inbuilt in your blog

Web search engine (web search, image search, local search etc) - Why would you leave Google? But there are specialty search engines. Just Google them to find them

Image edit and manage – Gimp, Paint dotNET [which needs SP2, part of MS' lock in and force to upgrade strategy], Irfanview, Faststone image viewer

Image sharing – Photobucket

Video sharing – MetaCafe, DailyMotion

Social networking – Facebook, MyYearBook

Earth mapping – NASA Worldwind [the original]

Calendar -30boxes, kiko

Mobile apps – contact your hardware/network provider

Groups/Forums/QnA – They abound on the web, try a generic search for a forum on your topic

Free web site/web page creation [googlepages] – WordPress ‘pages’ in the blog.

Online Translation – Babelfish, FreeTranslation

Online RSS Reader – My toolbar , Netvibes, Bloglines

Custom Home Page – Netvibes, Pageflakes

Trends – Alexa, compete, Comscore [dunno which is free]

Glossary (dict, thesaurus) – reference.com

and obviously… OS – Linux, BSD, Mac OS X [Apple has it's own weird lock in thing]

Browser – MS and Yahoo push IE, Google pushes IE and Firefox separately. Try Opera. Or K-meleon. Or OffByOne browser. Amaya I think was W3C’s browser?

Stuff that stands out alone – It’s nearly all Google. The tight integration of the different search types, Code search [the only other engine I know is in some stage of beta], Scholar/Paper search, Picasa online/offline integration, Related links, Sets, Custom Search Engine in Co-op, specialized searches, Patent Search etc etc.

What the big 3 are doing is invading the mobile phone space and they’ve got bigger guns than anyone else.

ThunderBird, GMail and Opera Mail

This is a sad story.

Your usual small town boy becomes big city man, forgets home, becomes a crook and dies a horrible death at the hands of Super Squirrel-l-l-l-l-l.

I’d configured GMail to allow POP access for all email and had disabled forwarding a long time back.

I ran across Portable Apps‘ Thunderbird Portable.

Sinc I recently bought a 2 GB Pen Drive ( ) I thought I should test out this stuff one by one. Big mistake.

I haven’t got to any other app yet. It’s probably not Thunderbird Portable at fault. It’s probably something in TBird itself.

What happened… 3 times after fresh installs… is… Mail retrieval yields duplicate emails.

Simple as that.

Now from what I understand, it’s a problem because of a combination of factors in TB’s features, viz., Compacting folders, Retrieving POP mail, and the fact that GMail is a pretty unique thing.

So I’m flummoxed to be honest. Stumped.

I installed a bunch of extensions ranging form Duplicate Remover to GMailUI, but nothing’s helping.

I tried solutions like deleting the Inbox’s file after emptying it into temp (because the inbox.msf index might be corrupted) to reinstalling and rebuilding the inbox from scratch.

Compact Folders options was turning useless and telling me that it can’t do anything during an update.

Apparently, the problem occurs when popstate.dat gets corrupted and is overwritten. It gets corrupted if you try to compact during mail retrieval.

Wonderful.

I’d also tried Opera Mail – the inbuilt mail client.

It’s got threaded view, which is nice, and it has some weird inbuilt labelling system.

But it can’t import/export Address Books or Contacts.

Gmail’s exported address book is ALWAYS read incorrectly by TB.

Opera has stopped at message 289 of 4144 and is not downloading anything beyond.

I’m getting very disturbed because BOTH of them download all sent messages into the inbox.

So my gripes are many, and a solution doesn’t look forthcoming. Till I can install Linux and get my hands dirty on scripts they say will work.

Plus GMail has a limit of ~300 messages for POP retrieval. So you can update only by that much per session.

So no tags support, no sent mail support, no drafts downloads, and weird limits and errors. Wowie.

I’ll add links inside the posts to the various place I got advice from later.

Oh and, this duplicate mail issue was a bug fixed in TB 1.1 I think… I have TB 1.5.0.8… It might be the portable app messing things.

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Legal Commercial Software for free!

Actually, Free Crap and Star Office

Check out the dates, and click on each to find out what crap software is offered.

Maybe you might use one of those?

Windows only.

Yahoo India’s big push

www.yahoo.com redirected me to http://in.yahoo.com

Yahoo launched (?did they? I never got news!) A redesigned site. Featuring (of all things) a NEW calendar thingy!

Wow. I’m hooked. WRONG! I don’t care about a calendar thing. Get away from me.

What the biggest draw for anyone to Yahoo! India! would be is not exactly highlighted.

SMS Backup

At the bottom of the left column under Featured Services (Calendar is top of the list).

This apparently is a Yahoo service for you to backup SMSes that you want to store and never lose, in your Yahoo inbox. Bloody Clever.

Obviously I have no use for it. But I know people who do.

And Yahoo, you’re making a big mistake NOT touting this.

Plus the Zapak ad on the home page sucks. Well it does. Plus it has a very bad pun.

I’m high on google

Just look at this

I got the search string off of WordPress’ dashboard [someone came to the story via a search!]

A very niche social networking roundup: Orkut, Yaari, Gazzag and MySpace

If you ever read this blog, you know I disapprove of the social networking phenomena such as those in the title.

I log in once a month to Orkut, and already it seems too much resources spent.

Google toolbar agrees with me.

It’s waaay too much work.

Then there’s such geniuses as….

the “good folks” (sic) promoting yaari.com

My reply (which I sent today)

The webcomedian

You always felt disconsolate. Different.

Unappreciated and misunderstood. You were a celebrity in forced hiding. And no one wanted you to come out of the exile.

They told you that you were strange. Weird and different. And all those things you saw, they were totally unrelated to the topic at hand.

You felt they were wrong. It burnt in you, the truth. How could they not see it. You felt it surge through you everytime, and everytime you bit your tongue.

But still some of the juice flowed, and they looked at you strangely. And they laughed, winking at each other in that special way that made you wince.

And you never were ‘one of them’… you always were an outcaste. You tried so hard, and it only hurt you more. That you hid your prowess, and still you were shunned.

But today. The day of days. Today marks the glorious revolution. your own coup d’État. Even if they didn’t know it then. They surely will tomorrow.

You smile. And you grinned that grin that you were trying to grin for a week. The sort of grin that would get most people locked away in a room with soft walls.

It begins tomorrow.

Content stealing and spamblogging operation uncovered

hxxp://nimish.tresblogs.com/

See that? Fvckers are stealing my content! and sticking ads to it. ><

I left a comment yesterday asking them to stop it. They deleted it.

MAJOR EDIT: Photobucket dump of everything I wrote. PLEASE DON’T VISIT THE WEBSITES I HAVEN’T PROVIDED A HYPERLINK TO. They’re spammers. Black hats of the blog world.If you go there, who knows what God-forsaken, windows-corrupting downloads will occur, who knows how much MONEY the ads that are displayed will get them!
The parent site is hxxp://tresblogs.com [and www.tresblogs.com won't work]

Notice the fact that the www domain is not working. Screwy dns? I don’t know.

Let’s move forward.

on the bottom we note that they’re running on WordPress. What does wordpress say about running spamming operation via there software? Does it ban it? Anyone who has downloaded the wordpress platform for server deployment wants to send some help over?

Let’s get back to the “nimish blog”. Notice how my content is there, my links are there, but NO credits! Not even a blogroll link! I guess the next post will be a terse copyrights notice.

Navigate the website and see that it’s just RANDOM blog text above and below MY CONTENT ! My posts surrounded by randomised containers!

Now look at the right hand side for the sidebar. There are only TWO ‘related’ links. Both are search feeds from ‘dedsearch.com’ for common Indian surnames followed by my first name. Warning. Going to dedsearch.com might destroy your browser. Please don’t go there, or don’t blame me.

I can’t see how many ads they have [AdBlockPlus]

Now for the kick in the teeth. Notice the blogroll? Now see what’s up on the right hand side of the parent site [hxxp://tresblogs.com]?

The blogroll has a small but diverse collection of blogs. Fairly standard.

But look at the right hand of the parent site! Top 10 blogs:
WHAT THE HELL! They’re all from DIFFERENT DOMAINS!

Clickity-click-click. What happens? ALL OF THEM BLOODY have the SAME FVCKING FORMAT! The same WP theme. The same stealing content from blogs and sticking under random containers. The use of ONLY one tag [the same as the subdomain name]. Need I go on?

Conclusion: They’re all owned and operated by one person/group. He/She/It/they is/are spammer(s)/spambot(s).I’m uploading screenshots to photobucket. Just in case the spamholes shut some down.

Partial list of domains they’re using…

flomega.com
galacticforum.com
flotds.org
sd-blogs.com
worldfirstpage.com
tresblogs.com
xenblogs.com
turboblogs.net
kdblogs.com
seblogs.net

And a final affirmation of spam nature.

It appears from the home page as if it’s a legit blogging service [started on 1 oct 2006, >1000 blogs on 18 oct 2006, and 13144 as of 13 Nov! Talk about exponential growth]. They even have a sign in form, and a link to the forgot-password/new-user pages. Go ahead. Try to sign up. Se which page opens up. Now try ‘forgot password’. Now try this link..

http://tresblogs.com/We-Are-Spammers-for-sure.htm

See what page opens up.

See? See?

Well till then, here’s something for you to play with.

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=tresblogs.com [crucial: Advanced search solutions]
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=seblogs.net [crucial: Advanced search solutions; crucial:Alex M Ditrich (floppysx@mail.ru), Saint-Petersburg, Russia]

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=sd-blogs.com&email=on [crucial: Antony (floppysx@mail.ru), Silverado str, Canada]

Well welly well well well….

Edit: just in case, dedsearch.com is ALSO © Advanced search solutions. Just so you know[http://feed.dedsearch.com/feed102/search.php].

Idea

I’ve been messing around, collecting linux/BSD ISO links, burning Live cds… and something hit me when I was reading up on digg about Firefox… some article said something about how Mozilla’s market share is now flattening, mainly because techie-type people have already got it. Now Mozilla wants to add some social things like tagging into it to spread it.

This post serves as a reminder to me only. I have three projects saved under “drafts” called ~Mozilla to-do notes~

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what the $|~|!7 is Logo Gazzag.com ?

www.gazzag.com… lotsa my friends keep sending messages and reminders about Gazzag.com
What is it: Another Social Networking Site
Why do I hate it: It’s social-networking, and the spamming won’t stop.
Why should you hate it: They have foto-logs, which they call “flogs“… That in itself is reason enough.

example: So dude! Check this out… at my wedding, I got the camera guy to take lotsa picktures of my wife, and I flogged ‘em. [yeowch.]

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Linux tools for windows!

two VERY VERY good tools for Windows from the world of Linux…

1. dd

This command is part of unix folklore. Why? Not a lot I know, but it saves people.
See this[macosxhints.com]

2. Explore2fs

Explore Linux ext2 and ext3 partitions. [Say thank you to Leonivek who found and blogged it]

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