Not So Technical Stuff!!!!

---

F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Season 2 Episode 8 (The One With the List)

Chandler - (Opens his new laptop)
      All right, check out this bad boy!
      Twelve megabytes of RAM,
      500-megabyte hard drive...

      ...built-in spreadsheet capabilities...

      ...and a modem that transmits
      at over 28,000 BPS.

phoebe - Wow! What will you use it for?

Chandler - Err...Games and stuff !!!
---

Same thing happened with me when I purchased my HP laptop a year back although mine was much better configuration than Chandler's Mac PowerBook Duo :P

Anyways, recently I realized (feedback from some of my friends !!!) that my blog contains more technical stuff. I guess the reason might be that I am not a word-smith at all, so I choose these topics just to make sure that I atleast can write/post something, give me some time to improve myself yar. So please stay with me for some more time.

Google's Quality Improvement Methods.

Today I came across two services launched by Google.

Image Labeler is a feature in game format where you can help Google to label images in Google index. So it will improve image search quality. This might be a older feature but I saw and played it first time today. Its really a good fun stuff.

Another feature, SearchWiki which is launched recently, allows user to customize search results. From now onwards, you will be able to see a "Promote" and "Remove" buttons after each search result. You can comment and see other searcher's comments on search results. You even can add any missing urls in the result too. The changes you made will only affect your own results. But I guess it will provide Google some feedback to improve its own ranking process.

I really liked the clever way of getting users all over the world themselves involved in this whole process so easily. Hats off to Google !!!

Yakuake: drop-down terminal emulator in Ubuntu.

Do you remember Quake 3 game? It has a drop-down console which will appear when "`" key is pressed(where you can enter cheat-codes :P ). I used to find this console very cool. And now I can have similar terminal on my linux box.
Yakuake is a drop-down terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology. So its installation on Ubuntu requires lots of KDE libraries. So I searched for other GNOME based options.
Tilda is one gtk+ based terminal emulator which really disappointed me. This is really slow especially with animation effects enabled. Guake is also a another good option.

After trying all these options, I installed Yakuake with all KDE libraries and Konsole and it is a perfect Quake-style terminal. The default shortcut to toggle the launch of this console is "F12". You can change this shortcut to "`" key but I have already configured this key for my "screen" application.

Here is the screenshot,

Gmail themes screenshots and GIMP watermarking.

I love google. After orkut, its time to give some nice look to your gmail box too. Recently google launched themes as gmail's setting option. You can read more about this the official gmail blog.

Official Gmail Blog: Spice up your inbox with colors and themes

In gmail settings, go to Themes tab where you can choose theme you like.

(Settings)

Here you can see some nice themes like Terminal for geeks,

(Terminal Theme)

But I liked Pebbles theme very much,

(Pebbles Theme)

may be because this is my favorite image which is my wallpaper since I started using Mac4lin, have a look,

(My Pebble Wallpaper)

As you can see, I embedded some text in these images as watermarks. I used GIMP to achieve this. This will protect my images from inappropriate reuse. Also it will identify myself on web and if somebody needs original image, will contact me back, so I guess its a nice practice to watermark published images.

Cube deformation on Ubuntu 8.10

In new CompizConfig Settings Manager 0.7.8(included in Ubuntu 8.10), you have this new plugin "Cube Deformation" which will make your desktops look like a sphere or a cylinder. Here are some screenshots of my desktop.

(Cylinder with 100% transparency)

(Cylinder with nice wallpaper)

(Sphere)

Try this plugin and let me know your experience!!!

Yes, this is you (gmail and googlemail) !!!

vinit.dhatrak@gmail.com
vinit.dhatrak@googlemail.com
v.i.n.i.t.d.h.a.t.r.a.k@gmail.com
v.i.n.i.t.d.h.a.t.r.a.k@googlemail.com

All above forms of your mail id are valid and points to a single account. Have a look at the screenshot.


Also, gmail allows you to create more alias of your id by using "+" sing in your mail id. So if you want to subscribe to some mailing list or some group then just use, "yourid+groupname@gmail.com"
e.g. 'vinit.dhatrak+kernelnewbies@gmail.com' or 'vinit.dhatrak+pidgin@gmail.com'

So you can distribute these alias among your contacts, then apply filters according to the destination id and archive them into separate folders.
Let me know if any more such variations exists.

F.R.I.E.N.D.S !!!!

This is what I am doing these days, watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S :D




(Actually I am at season 3)