nimret.org

Tips for Bash power users

admin — 2010-08-19T12:23:21GMT-08:00

Bashy folks might find this useful :)

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/bash-tips-power-users

Virtual hosting in apache2

admin — 2010-08-11T09:34:21GMT-08:00

I was configuring virtual hosting within kubuntu and noticed that apache2 appears to have some slightly different tools with regards to setting up virtual hosts as compared to the older versions of Apache. This might be useful for people trying to do the same to simulate a production environment locally on their boxes:

http://www.debuntu.org/2006/02/22/7-virtual-hosting-using-apache-2

Rocket Singh: awesome movie

admin — 2010-07-22T12:10:28GMT-08:00

I usually don't really care much for the typical masala indian movies ( I just have to suffer watching them with the missus while working on my laptop once in a while :). But there are a couple here and there which really bring out the quality amongst the quantity. Rocket Singh, salesman of the year is one such movie. It pretty much highlights everything that can be ( tho not always is) f'ed up over there in the biz world BUT most importantly it highlights the changes that are happening. A great story to boot. Highly recommended!

Cool book: Travels in the Mogul Empire

admin — 2010-07-19T16:11:50GMT-08:00

Google Books is an awesome resource along with the Gutenberg project for people who like free books. For folks like me who are very interested in history it's great cuz we can find really old gems like this one about a frenchman's trip to the Mughal court at the time of Aurangzeb.

Travels in the Mogul Empire by Francois Bernier

Why are SMSes 160 chars long?

admin — 2010-07-15T14:48:25GMT-08:00

Read an interesting post about why SMS messages are 160 chars in length:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html

After having worked at a couple of mobile internet startups it was kinda interesting to read up on the history on SMS technology.

getting Chrome to play nice with bblean

admin — 2010-07-02T10:46:24GMT-08:00

So I use a *nix style windows shell geared more towards power users called bblean. One of the features it provides is the ability to shade windows ala *nix window managers. It does this by overriding the style for the title bar for all the windows. This was causing a problem with Chrome since chrome draws it's own title bar replacement ( tabs in this case). It was really annoying.

Well, it turns out that this has been solved. Short answer is: blackbox -> bbleanskin -> Edit Exclusions and then just add 'chrome.exe' to the list.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=13766

very cool!

Good reads

admin — 2010-07-02T09:14:01GMT-08:00

Read a really good about the near-term history of the Iraq war called Fiasco.A pretty interesting read about the planning behind the war, what happened, what went wrong and what went right.

Another interesting book that I read was on Scrum called Scrum and XP from the trenches. It talks about the experiences of a team implementing agile techniques such as Scrum and XP for software development.

Both are recommended =)

MigLayout

admin — 2010-06-17T11:19:13GMT-08:00

I've been playing with Swing lately. The layout managers are quite a challenge and a UI with any kind of complexity beyond simple things quickly degenerates into gobs of unmaintainable code. It's no wonder that frustrated users usually end up using a gui/code generation tool. I generally prefer hand written code or declarative markup for UIs.

So if you're sick of laying out components in swing by hand, take a look at the MigLayout layout manager. It will solve all your problems.

No wonder it's item #3 in the list of most requested RFEs for java.

Loins of Punjab

admin — 2010-06-15T15:34:05GMT-08:00

Watched Loins of Punjab with the folks the other day - hilarious movie with a very cool ending! Recommended :)

Enjoy this youtube music video with scenes from the movie.

Speeeeeeeeed up firefox!

admin — 2010-06-03T15:00:45GMT-08:00

Though I've pretty much moved over to Chrome as my primary browser I still find Firefox useful sometimes, especially for the developer tools plugin. So here are some tweaks to wring out more performance for broadband connected users from firefox:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/speed-up-firefox-web-browser.html