Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: Historic discussion live from D 2007

Via Engadget

What are the big guys doing?

Almost all the big Internet companies (and probably software companies) have a Labs site where they dish out the latest they are working on.

Here are some of the most popular ones

1. Google Labs - http://labs.google.com

I guess many of us would know about this. This is where Google has their latest 20% innovations

2. Adobe Labs - http://labs.adobe.com

Adobe has probably defined Internet so quietly (or maybe Macromedia ;) ) that we use all of their products and yet be oblivious that its made by Adobe. At Adobe Labs, you will probably find the next generation Internet platforms that Internet companies work on.

3. Yahoo Next - http://labs.yahoo.com

Yahoo calls their playground - Yahoo Next. They have pretty interesting products lined up like My Web 2.0 Beta and is worth a check.

4. AOL Labs - http://labs.aol.com

AOL has a labs page too, their labs concentrates mostly on AIM and its plugins

5. Microsoft Research - http://research.microsoft.com
Doesn't exactly have too much of Web experiments, but they do have some interesting projects such as Nocturnal

Their http://labs.msn.com throws up something which probably associates them best -Service Unavailable

Know any other company playgrounds ? Leave us a comment!

Screencast in Ubuntu

Its easy to create a screen cast on Ubuntu using a program called byzanz which will save the screencast as an animated gif file.

To install byzanz

Use sudo apt-get install byzanz

To record your screencast, On a terminal, type byzanz-record filename ( the default option is to record for 10 seconds), but you can increase the duration. use byzanz-record --help for more options

How to Survive the Worst PC Disasters

PC World has an article running on what to do when you encounter a PC disaster.

If you are newbie, you might want to take a look at it and probably even save the article

Update on Picnik

We had posted about Picnik a while back, looks like there have been some improvements.

They have a Firefox Addon and some interesting options such as ability to capture whole pages as screenshots.

Try Picnik again

fvalidator - free javascript validator

fValidator is an open source unobtrusive javascript tool for easy handling form validation so that you don't have to painfully code if your form has too many fields.

Get it here

My Experience of Beryl on Feisty Fawn

I finally installed Beryl on a nvidia GeForce based machine.

I had to

sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl beryl-ubuntu beryl-manager emerald-themes

Had to add Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True" to my device section to get the Window titles back. I was also suggested to make DefaultDepth 24 in my Screen section of xorg.conf

One I had done this, restart X/Gnome and do a beryl-manager to get going. Little buggy but its worth the fun watching windows flying around :). Expose feature ! Wow!

I like the Beryl Manager > General Options > Shortcuts / Commands feature so that I can get my terminal open if I press Alt-t - ofcourse you could add any command that you want - say launch Firefox. Doing this in metacity involved some hacking through the gconf-editor

The options just stunned me - you could basically own what you want to do - you could configure anything and everything. Move over Vista

What I love as of now

1. Screen Edges

2. Desktop CUBE - wOw!

3. Configuration options

4. Stunning effects.

5. Non GPLed Themes - Sorry :)

6. Haven't had a crash yet :) Ok, It just doesn't like rxvt in the background, crashes pretty regularly. My system hangs once in a while. Ugh, SAD!
Late night fun!

How to NOT use an online ad

I happened to see a Google Ad for a job portal which interested me - So I click on it and to my horror I see the above screen which has that many 'mandatory' fields. How the hell do you expect someone to copy paste their resume the first thing you land on a page.

At the most you could get the user to signup with a basic password and send reminder mails if they don't fill the required fields soon enough.

The New Google Analytics !

Google released a new version of their Google Analytics product and the first impression is that its a huge makeover from the earlier version.

There are some nifty features such as exporting your analytics report to PDF or send the reports by email. You now operate through a Dashboard similar to Blogger, things can be customized in the dashboard.

The graph visualization is much better and usable, ranges work much better. Overall, a good improvement!

Install Gnome themes through gnome-art

Trying out Gnome themes (or for that matter, any themes) could be quite addictive.

At the same time, getting them from http:// art.gnome.org previewing the themes, untarring them is quite boring. Gnome provides a utility - gnome-art to do that for you - It lets you preview themes for applications, windows, backgrounds and splash screens, download or install them directly through a single window.

To install Gnome Art for Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install gnome-art

Start up gnome-art - gnome-art through the terminal
or

System > Preferences > Art Manager

It will download the theme data the first time and retrieves only the new files from then on.

You now can Preview, Download or Install directly

Sony Ericsson T250a - the entry level phone

Sony Ericsson T250a Specs:

- VGA camera
- Screen: 1.7-inch 65K-color TFT (128 x 160 px)
- WAP 1.2.1
- Polyphonic ringtones
- Speakerphone
- Vibrating alert
- Picture messaging (MMS) and text messaging (SMS)
- Predictive text input
- FM radio
- Alarm clock, calculator, calendar, phone book, stopwatch, and timer
- Infrared
- GSM/GPRS 850/1800 or GSM/GPRS 900/1900
- Talk time: Up to 7 hours
- Standby time: Up to 300 hours
- Size: 100 x 45 x 13 mm
- Weight: 82 grams

Try Ubuntu through Wubi

If you always wanted to try Ubuntu and didn't want to install it fiddling with partitions on your hard disk - you should really try Wubi.

Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application and it does this by installing Ubuntu into a single file as opposed to installing on a partition

Download the installer

Via Wubi

Slow Ubuntu Bootup ? Disable fsck on vfat

If you have installed Feisty and notice that your bootup is really slow - fsck might be one of the causes - dosfsck which is called via fsck everytime you boot takes quite a bit of time and slows down the boot process dramatically.

You can disable the fsck check by changing the entry "1" (checks file system everytime) to "0"

So, your fstab entry for vfat partitions would look something like this

UUID=301C-1A1D /media/hda1 vfat defaults,utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0

Gift of Gab

This Mother's day, Skype is promoting VoIP by allowing Free SkypeOut to anywhere in the world for a day.

If you haven't tried out VoIP before, it would be a good time to do so.

This offer would be valid only in US and Canada.