I finally moved my blog to the new server. The new address is http://blog.arun-prabha.com/. Please update your bookmark. I’ll be redirecting this address to my new blog soon.
My blog was down for couple of days due to digg effect (again). I was in the process of moving to the new server and it was digged again before that. I’m going to start moving it to the new server within couple of hours. Please bear with any interruption till the move is fully complete. The new server should withstand the digg effects. My blog should be up again by tomorrow (hopefully).
My brother-in-law sent this link to me. Through meebo, you can login to the following instant messengers online:
AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber. (see the screenshot below)
You can see the login information on the meebo home page. Once you login, say for eg: into MSN, you’ll see a screen similar to one shown below:
It’ll show you your buddy lists on the right side (online and offline). It’s pretty useful if you are not with your personal computer. You don’t have to create a meebo account if you are going to just login and chat. You do have to create if you want to set some preferences.
Google finally took Google Earth 4 out of beta. It’s now officially released as a stable version. Click here to download Google Earth 4.
Some of the new features in Google Earth 4 are:
The author of the book Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is offering the book as a free download from his site. You can either download the entire book or you can download by chapters. The book is available in PDF and DocBook format. Go and grab your copy.
Thanks to nixcraft.
Engadget’s live update from Macworld has lots of news update and photos of Apple’s new iPhone and other products. The phone looks pretty and it has no keyboard. It’s touch sensitive and no stylus. You have to use your fingers. iPhone runs OSX. iTunes is going to sync all your media, contacts, calendars, photos, notes, bookmarks, email accounts etc. to your iPhone.
Update: Official iPhone website.
I registered with MyBloglog couple of weeks back and got my site to show MyBloglog visitors just last week. Forbes blog is now reporting that Yahoo bought MyBloglog. I don’t expect anything to change drastically in the way it functions. Yahoo paid a little over $10 million according to knowledgeable sources. According to Yahoo, Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The MyBloglog communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.
For those of you who are not aware of what MyBloglog is, Mybloglog is a social networking site for bloggers that enables readers of web pages to leave information about themselves, building a social network. Mybloglog is currently available on about 45,000 blogs, according to company chairman Scott Rafer, and has registered the photos and personal information (like the address of their blogs) of about 33,000 readers.
Tab Effect is a Firefox extension that provides transitional effect (similar to Xgl) when switching the tabs (Check the screenshot below). It’s a cool idea and could open the door for the development of more 3D effects in the browser. This is version 1.0 and it was released yesterday. It’s a work in progress and It still has some bugs to be fixed. The comments left so far in the extension page will give you an idea of what to face when you install it. I hope the extension developer will fix those bugs soon.
(The cube effect shown above is within the Firefox browser, not any OS transitional effects).
Thanks to Cybernet.
Sony Vaio VGX-TP1 with an HDMI out port, a DVD burner, a memory card slot, and the rest of the standard stuff like USB ports, audio out, wireless keyboard and a remote.
And the number one position goes to … Google and the reason - free meals, swimming spa, and free doctors onsite. Engineers can spend 20% of time on independent projects. What’s the position of Microsoft? 50. Here is the full list.
PrinterAnywhere is a free software that can print documents and photos on other people’s printers as easily as on the local one connected to your machine. You have to install their software and the other party(ies) should also have this software installed in order to print. You can print directly from your application such as Microsoft Word, Outlook, Photo Editor or any other program you work with.
An encrypted copy of your document is sent to the target printer over the internet. As long as the documents are in an electronic form on your computer, you can print them as usual (typically by selecting menu File – Print) on the remote printer.
They also have PrintAnywhere WebPrint, where you can now print documents directly from the web without having to install the software on your machine, but this is currently limited to the following file formats.
With WebPrint you can only print documents but cannot share your printers. Here is the instruction on how to print from WebPrint:
The concept is pretty interesting. I should be able to print my photos on my dad’s printer several hundred miles away. I haven’t tried this. I would like to give it a try, but I would appreciate if someone can give me their feedback if they had used this before. The site says they encrypt and send the file, but I would prefer not to print any sensitive documents over the network. It should be ok to print the photos. The site says no spywares or adwares included in the software.
I have already written twice about anti spyware/adware applications showing spywares/adwares in a freshly installed Acer Laptop. Tan Chew Keong has posted a similar article on 19th November, 2006. He has found out that his Acer TravelMate 4150 notebook contains the LunchApp.APlunch ActiveX control and is part of the suite of applications that are distributed by default in Acer notebooks. According to him, the activex control allows command-line arguments to be passed to the executable. He has given a sample HTML file which you can host it on your webserver and open it or open it directly with IE. It may not work with IE7, since IE7 prevents silent execution of the ActiveX control when the page is loaded. If you have an Acer laptop, please give it a try. I’ll give this a try in my Acer Travelmate 8204.
MyAvatars is a wordpress plugin which displays the photos/avatars of the visitors who leave comments. It gets the information from MyBlogLog.com. If that person doesn’t have an account, then clicking on the empty picture will take you to the account registration page. The installation is pretty simple, but if you have installed lots of themes like me, then you might have to manually change the comments.php in each theme folder. I just installed it in my blog. Let’s see how it works.
Ubuntu Satanic Edition is not another distro, based on Ubuntu (as of now). It’s applying new themes, icon, wallpaper etc. You need to have Ubuntu installed before you apply Ubuntu SE.
Installation:
Open a terminal and download the key:
gpg –keyserver pgp.mit.edu –recv-keys 9B1DB022
gpg –export –armor 9B1DB022 | sudo apt-key add -
Then add the following to Ubuntu repositories using sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
# Ubuntu Satanic Edition
deb http://parker1.co.uk/hell edgy main
deb-src http://parker1.co.uk/hell edgy main
Save and close the file. Issue the following commands.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install satanic-wallpapers
sudo apt-get install usplash-theme-satanic
sudo apt-get install satanic-gdm-themes
If you want to uninstall, follow the procedures below:
sudo apt-get remove satanic-wallpapers
sudo apt-get remove usplash-theme-satanic
sudo apt-get remove satanic-gdm-themes
Reboot. If you don’t see the original login screen after rebooting, login and issue the following command in the terminal:
sudo update-alternatives –set usplash-artwork.so \
/usr/lib/usplash/usplash-theme-ubuntu.so
sudo update-initramfs -u
Source: Thanks to Opensource Notebook.
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced today that it has created the first LCD panel that can produce independent images on each side of a mobile LCD display. Samsung’s new double-sided LCD can show two entirely different pictures or sets of visual data simultaneously on the front and back of the same screen. Other conventional double-sided LCDs can only show a reverse image of the same video data.
The breakthrough LCD product makes use of Samsung’s new double-gate, thin-film transistor (TFT) architecture. TFT gates are electronic components that convert the necessary voltage at the pixel level, which controls the liquid crystal alignment needed to reproduce on-screen images. Samsung’s new double-sided LCD has two gates that operate each pixel instead of one, so the screen on the front can display different images than the one on the back. The double-sided display makes use of Samsung’s proprietary Amorphous Silicon Gate (ASG) technology, which accommodates the increased number of TFT gates without increasing the size of the driver integrated circuits. Driver-ICs typically increase in size when more TFT gates are used.
The new Samsung mobile display requires only one backlight. The new double-sided LCD is 2.6mm thick and 2.22″ wide, with QVGA (240 x 320 pixel) resolution, and has brightness values of 250 nits for the front and 100 nits for the rear display. It will be exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show, which opens in Las Vegas on January 8.
