DP's Journal

Further blog posts will be published on my new blog at wordpress.

Please update your feedreaders to Abusive Views. You could meanwhile read as well as respond to any of the many many entries that I have already posted here. It'll take me a while to figure out the WP system.

I'm feelin...: rejuvenated
Blastin' my ears with:: Anarchy/Problems - Megadeth

well what do I say people? I certainly mean to write this to get talking to you.

When I think about it, I do want to have conversations with people reading my blog regularly. I talk (type) with my fingers and you certainly talk with your eyes when you react to every thing I gotta say. I don't mean they make somersaults, but somehow despite how snobbish it seems to be the only one speaking here, I do feel suddenly too irresponsible to have left the conversations without a word, but here's the thing. It is one thing to be just be able to talk and its another to compose articles out of conversations. Gosh, this makes me think how hard its gonna be writing these kind of 'oops i didn't write for long time, where do i resume from?' lines. But what the huck ever :P

I certainly like the idea of microblogging in a way that its easier for the quick blurb posting, but then all the times I'm thinking of compiling them for an article, but now I'm like "i've talked about em already", but I know well, that I didn't go into details as well as I could. Although it wouldn't be so hard to just open my twitter page and pick out some interesting stuff out of it and expand on them.

I'm feelin...: content

So finally I am getting down to writing the blog post about Exhibtion of Computer and Allied Products (ECAP) at Hotel Mandovi, Panjim and Software Freedom Day (SFD) at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) that i attended the previous saturday but being in vasco for saturday till sunday afternoon, I hadn't taken out time enough to finish the writing part of the post, while the design with the key points were definitely in place. Thankfully with my freemind, I don't have to worry missing out on important points and making my blog posts drag on and on aimlessly. :p

Since the SFD programme was scheduled in the evening after 1700 IST, there was lot of time in the morning to check out ECAP alongwith getting some work done at the bank within the half-day schedule that I missed. Had this weird fancy of travelling all over on bus and walking a lot. ECAP was at the top floor of hotel Mandovi just like last few years. This is the 16th year, but I can't tell how long its been held in the hotel. Some interesting products on display. Quite a few linux faces (nowadays read as Ubuntu hardy -> currently) and pretty aloof people. Y'know IT exhibitions? Your tour's not complete if every store hasn't stuffed your hands with oversized pamphlets. Here i got (n)one, like almost.

First up, I checked that the main area in the main hall, i dunno what's it called, but its the stage like area, where one of the vendors, was having the biggest display area for the tiniest of gadgets, acer aspireOne. I say tiny, since there were large projection screens there last time, which looked perfect fit for that huge area. Anyways, the vendor's the chairman of Computer Society of India - Goa Chapter (CSI - Goa). Although there were other acer laptops and desktops and acer ain't a company that I like so much and feel sad for those who 'paid' to get one, Aspire One had got me interested for one unique but obvious reason, linux, and the latest ultramobile/netbook pc form factor, powered by Intel Atom.

Quick post on upcoming events in Goa. Thought I might consider going for the saturday meet, but I was reminded that there were quite a few IT related events going on...as follows :-

1. AGILE conference (quite a costly one, so no problem if you miss that). today...yes yes!! run run!


2. SFD (Software Freedom Day) at BITS (Birla Institute of Technology & Science) is being held on Friday 26th Sept. 2008. Software Freedom Day is the grassroots level efforts by common people to spread awareness about the benefits of free software and free-ing software among people not in the know and for lots other fun activities too. Free Software is a fun concept too. No scary license agreements.


3. ECAP (Exhibition of Computer & Allied Products). I've been blogging about it in the past, here and here. This time it seems ILUG's not getting the Rampon Hall complimentarily and neither are they thinking their talks could be worth charging entry fees to sponssor the hall and presenting equipment...well even if they did, its too late to gather up enough interest to get paying audience at such short notice. So visit there for some hardware exhibition, but the real action happens on Friday, when I have a full working day :'(

UPDATE: According to a mail, that I received 3 hours ago from BITS OSUM the organisation that is making the SFD event a reality on the BITS campus, I am happy to update you on the event schedule, that it's gonna be held on Saturday 27th with a "interactive session between the GOA-LUG and the students attending this session scheduled at 5:30 PM"...and not on a Friday as I was told before. Sorry if you already reached the venue in advance. Hope this blog finds you in good health ;)
There's more reason to be visiting the venue now that it is on Saturday

I'm feelin...: calm

GTD, Project Management, To-do lists, Weekly Planner, Organizers, Reminders...no matter what way you like to address the concept, it always projects a no-doubt-about-it image of getting the most out of time. To keep your life on track to use time as efficiently as possible to be able to do as many more things as possible. But, do you think this is the only perspective that one should have from these tools? My ideas follow :)

First thing that I think of when trying out an organizer or a task reminder is to consider how much of my life's activities do I want to maintain a routine on and how much do I want to execute without deadline or duration constraints. If you organize each and every breath of your life, what exactly are you saving up time for? Its like even forgetting to reading a story book or novel for an hour would make you as guilty as missing a lecture. "oh crap! i fell asleep again!"
Another thing that one needs to have before planning to use any of these planners is faith...faith that the change in lifestyle will take time, will see some failures (but don't take that 'some' for a long ride), but will bring in some changes.

Thought of taking a second look at the labs section of Gmail to see what newer features were added. I forgot I'd enabled mouse gestures. it was so long ago and i am used to keyboard shortcuts. There was also the random quote feature that I didn't realise was a Labs feature. So this is an article on the current set of Labs features that I turned on and why I feel they would be of some use to me.
If the reasons are convincing enough, go ahead and give em bleeding edge features a try. :)

I enabled the following GMail labs features. reasons follow...

Mark as Read Button

speeds up the operation. though with better gmail2 i need to press only the comma key (,) to select unread mails in the current list and mark them all read.

Forgotten Attachment Detector

its said to be not fool-proof but i don't write that bad english that gmail wont recognize

Navbar drag and drop

kinda useless since right now i only have the labels box, so nothing to rearrange it with

Quote selected text

speeds up the work of replying to an email and having to separately cut off all the part that is not required. select text and only that part is quoted from the original message

Right-side labels

my linbox is now a 3 column layout else the list of mails would extend right till the end of the right corner

Email Addict

i am trying to depend less on this and trying to avoid checking email too much. studies say it takes 64 seconds to get back your concentration to what you were doing, once you finish your email checking. so it helps too

Random signature

buggy doesn't print out the entire quote...trails off with "..."

Signature tweaks

what exactly is this about?

Custom keyboard shortcuts

this is what i've been mainly using better gmail 2 for and there is keyboard shortcuts for just about all operations.

Superstars

i added this only after i read that you can search superstarred mails using the has: keyword, which makes it a really cool feature to find required mails quickly. its something like quick saved searches.

UPDATE: Finally figured out how wrong I was to add signature tweaks. Its the sure-shot way to easily top-post the reply, which makes reading replies in relation to their quoted context really difficult. since i am not at all in the habit of top posting it was a real PITA this new tweaks that i'd to copy paste the sig back down below.
Also check out this article on lifehacker, posted coincidentally around the same time.

Posting From:: office.
I'm feelin...: pissed off

Read It Later? No thank you. I don't need such an insecure extension

Read It Later is a (who knows what type) award winning firefox extension that's supposed to make the process of bookmarking pages for later reading as quick as a click of a tick(mark) icon in the address bar. Like foxmarks, it also lets you sync your list with other computers. so you know, usual scenario would be like find a bunch of cool links to read up on at workplace but you certainly don't have the time to get into them. You sync the list with your home computer and you can continue there. So where lies the problem?

The extension is simply awesome in what it does, but for one serious blunder that anyone concerned with a bit of security and privacy would be really worked up about. As I installed it on the computer assigned to me at the workplace (and this ain't a machine that's exclusively mine, the browser can be accessed by anyone and everyone in the organization), I checked out the RSS Sync feature which being the first time led into the Options dialog to adjust the RSS/Syncing settings. The feed password is shown in plain text. In bold!!. What's worse is that if you turn off syncing, the section showing the password is greyed out but the password is still easily readable. This extension isn't supposed to be a social "read it later" list. Its for one person's purpose. There isn't a way to not save the password and have a 'ask for password' prompt. This particularly I find is the case with most extensions in firefox that connect to some password protected account, though I haven't seen others that just display your password out there for all to see. Is XUL/chrome/Gecko, so retarded that there isn't even a password (asterisks only) field that can be put in extensions?

I changed the password online and it started showing up in the extension in plain text and that was it. I got rid of the extension before anything else. Now I gotta try and see if re-installing creates a new list feed or the same feed with my password.

I'm feelin...: relaxed
Blastin' my ears with:: JT Bruce - The Verge of Illusory Twilight

Web applications like RSS aggregators that I am focussing on, go through a lot of changes without necessarily making version number leaps. I on one hand find it really difficult to be convinced to move away from a service that I've been using since a long period. Though somehow in this case, given that the product I was reluctant to try out was a Google one, I just as well thought of comparing the experiences. Would also tell about also some things that I feel maybe my favorite bloglines could do better, but its more than adequate. It has got inbuilt mp3 streamer and flickr photo viewer...still.

Although I'd known of RSS feeds, since there were only desktop aggregators, and I started with the Sage extension, I moved to Bloglines when I saw the example on one of the go_open series on DVD, a South African TV show on open source i guess wholly or majorly funded by Canonical. Bloglines been the predominant choice till around October 7, 2005 when Google Reader came out. The only good thing that happened since then was that Bloglines was made to rethink its lazy attitude towards its monotonous interface with manual refreshes needed and come up with almost a complete rewrite. In the meanwhile they even got bought by Ask Jeeves...or is it just Ask! ? Soon enough Bloglines came out with Bloglines Beta just in time when Google Reader users were rising close to Bloglines, which has been much higher compared to other aggregators as well. Only few stats check if its really Google Reader, because both iGoogle and Google Reader use the same Google Feedfetcher. The good thing that Google Reader caused was to give Bloglines a rude awakening to pull themselves together and totally re-design the aggregator.

this is a test post from windows live writer...thanks to its liveliness it detected template and blog details of livejournal. so livelyyyy