My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

Now that I own a Mac, I’ve to kick M$ and M$ products and praise Apple’s product. At least thats I’ve seen with every switcher. On the contrary, I’m now praising a M$ product - Photosynth. Its really cool and nice one. It analyzes a set of photos and presents you a 3D view of it. Its really wonderful idea and an amazing implementation as well. More over its not a desktop product like Picasa, rather its on the net. Check this out for yourself: http://labs.live.com/photosynth

written by Prakash G.R.

I’ve whole lot of plugins (Mylar, WTP, Subclipse…) installed in my Eclipse. Sometimes, I will have OutOfMemory Error and the workbench will close after showing an “Internal Error” message box. Today the “Internal Error” message box had an interesting error message. Here is the screen shot:

written by Prakash G.R.

Hugh Thompson has written an interesting entry about how he crashed an InFlight Entertainment System. Thankfully, it was not connected to the avionics and everyone survived.

Check this.

written by Prakash G.R.

These are small items, which do not belong to a separate blog entry. I’ll be adding more to this entry whenever I see one. If you have any such items, feel free to add in the comments.

Activating Windows Key:

This was an annoying thing to me. I work both in Windows and Linux everyday. Whenever I need to go to the menu, I need to remember which OS I’m working on and press the Windows ke/Alt F1 accordingly. Until I found a way to map the Windows key in Linux!

Open Keyboard Configuration (which is under System->Preferences)

In the table, you can find ‘Show the panel menu’ action under ‘Desktop’. Select the shortcut and assign Windows key. Now you can access the menu with Windows key, no matter which OS you are using

Full Screen Mode:

There are times when you want your application to be run in Full Screen mode. Firefox/Image Viewer by default support it. But not all applications, such as Text Editor/Eclipse. If you want to execute them in Full Screen here is the trick.

Open Keyboard Configuration (which is under System->Preferences)

In the table, you can find ‘Toggle fullscreen mode’ action under ‘Window Management’. Select the shortcut and assign your fav key (I’ve assigned F11). Press ‘Close’. Now no matter which application you are using you can press F11 and make it Full Screen. As you rightly guessed, pressing F11 again will bring it back to the normal mode. Now try Full Screen mode for Calculator and see the results

My Computer @ Desktop:

Having a My Computer icon in the desktop is really useful for a guy like me. If you are used to drag and drop your files in the Desktopto delete them, you would surely miss the Recycle Bin errrr Trash Can also. So here is how you can bring them to your Ubuntu Desktop.

Open Configuration Editor (which is under Applications->System Tools) In the tree, navigate to /apps/nautilus/desktop. Int the right hand side, you can see some check boxes with user-friendly (!!!) text like ‘computer_name_visible’ and ‘trash_icon_visible’. Check whichever items you would need in your Desktop. If you really want the same text as windows like ‘My Computer’ and ‘Recycle Bin’, you can change it there (’computer_icon_name’ and ‘trash_icon_name’). You need to change the type from Integer to String before you type in the new name. Remember, you can give Remember, unlike Windows, you can neither right click ‘My Computer’ and click ‘Properties’ to get the properties of your computer nor right click ‘My Computer’ and do ‘Manage’.

Related links:
Eclipse in Ubuntu
Putty in Ubuntu
Auto Login in Ubuntu
Screen resolution got struck in Ubuntu
Configure DSL in Ubuntu

written by Prakash G.R.

Stupid Project Lead; unrealistic deadlines; long work hours; less pay hikes; … So you think your jobs sucks? Better read this.

written by Prakash G.R.

Wrong. Google admits that search is not a solved problem and they are still working on perfecting it. If you are not convinced, you should answer why people who search for “email id of God” and “what color saree suits a dark woman” end up in my blog. And these kind of funny terms are increasing everyday.

Still not convinced? OK. Lets play a game. Given a site, you need to key in the search terms, so that the site is in first 10 results of Google. No parts of the domain name is allowed for obvious reasons. Shorter the length of words and smaller the number of words, smarter Google is (or smarter you are )

Go.

written by Prakash G.R.

Nominated Googlipse for Eclipse Foundation Awards.

Let me cross my fingers and wait for March 5th for the results to be announced at the EclipseCon 2007.

[Update: 23 Jan 2007]

The list of accepted nominations is huge with big players like Hibernate tools, Aptna IDE, Subclipse, etc. Its now too hard for a product like Googlipse (which is not even version 1 and focuses on a small community). Lets see …

written by Prakash G.R.

Java 1.6 (officially called as Java SE 6) is released few days back. It includes a number of new API including Manangement API for JVM, Zipped output & input streams, etc. Along with  Deque and NavigatableSet in java.util, they have added a new class in the java.util called ServiceLoader. Sounds to be a fine addition, yet to play with it. They have quiely slipped in a new method for copying arrays:

Earlier it was:
int[] newArray = new int[newLength];

System.arraycopy(oldArray, 0, newArray, 0, oldArray.length);
now with the new API,
int[] newArray = Arrays.copyOf(a, newLength);
With copyOf and copyOfRange methods, now Arrays class is really useful when you manipulate the array sizes. It took so many years for Sun to figure out the right need for such a useful API!

written by Prakash G.R.

Alright. 2 more days to go. Steve will appear on the stage and will come with few “one more thing…”. This year’s hottest expectation are iPhone, full screen iPod and iTv - in the same order. Everybody else is blogging about what they are expecting in the show. I’m not going to do it, as I’ve done it in last march itself. And most of them are now no longer valid. With the introduction of iTV, TV Tuner card won’t be in Mac; 1 TB barrier in hard disk is just now reached and so commercial products with such capaciy will take a little time. Wi-fi iPod is something I still hoping for. Lets see what happens…

Meanwhile, check the image in the home page of apple.com

written by Prakash G.R.

I’ve been running Weblogic on Ubuntu and had no problems. But somehow Eclipse was really slow. After a few minutes of Googling, I found that the root cause is the JRE shipped with Ubuntu. Its not the Sun’s JRE, but GNU’s. Its much slower than the Sun’s. Installing a Sun’s JRE and running Eclipse on it, made it faster. I’ve already blogged here about how the licensing terms of Sun blocks the vendors to ship the JRE. Now that Sun has open sourced Java under LGPL, probably the future versions of Ubuntu (or any other Linux distro) should ship with this better and faster JRE

Related links:
Ubuntu Titbits
Putty in Ubuntu
Auto Login in Ubuntu
Screen resolution got struck in Ubuntu
Configure DSL in Ubuntu

written by Prakash G.R.