PDF processing using perl

Looking to modify PDF files using perl ?

perl.com has a nice article on how to use PDF::Reuse to manipulate the pdf files including adding bookmarks, combining files and more.

See the article here

Netscape - about to die...

Netscape.com (Click to view Fullsize)

Propeller.com

(Click to view Fullsize)

Looks like AOL is doing a good job killing Netscape in entirety !

Gnash - open source Flash player!

Gnash is a project which aims to create a player and browser plugin for the Adobe Flash file format which is free software, replacing the proprietary software niche currently occupied by Adobe Flash Player.

Gnash requires either of the following - AGG, Cairo, or OpenGL for rendering.

It supports SWF-4 version completely and parts of SWF-8-9 formats

To install Gnash -

sudo apt-get install gnash

sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-gnash

N800 - iphone Killer ?

Via Downloadsquad

Downgrade iPhone to 1.0.2

If you have upgraded your iphone to 1.1.1, luckily, there are few instances reported that you can now downgrade so as to avoid locking of non AT&T sims

Hit here to see how to downgrade

Anyone for hotmail ?

Hard to imagine anyone signing up for a hotmail account these days - So, Microsoft is trying their hardest offering you Cool Hotmail where you get to choose customized email addresses - however, you can do that only from the domain names that they have chosen for you just like those days when one used to have mailaddress@india.com or mailaddress@mail.com. Anyway, if you are still interested having a weird email address like address@mailmumbai.com or address@shree420.in and more, head out to Cool Hotmail

More Blogrush problems

We hear that the dashboard is not being displayed for couple of days now due to "upgrades"

Here is a note


Your Dashboard is currently unavailable as we are in the process of rolling out all the new changes to BlogRush. Please read our
recent announcement for all the details.


We're doing a major overhaul of our network and we'll be releasing a completely revamped Dashboard. Your new Dashboard will contain new charts and additional statistics aimed at helping you maximize the traffic we drive to your blog. We're also working on "per post" syndication activity and results.


We expect to have your Dashboard (and our other major changes) fully active in the next few days -- please be patient as we finalize our major systems upgrade. Rest assured that this will not affect your current account activity. All of your credit and syndication activities, as well as all of your referral activity, is still operating normally.


We apologize for any inconvenience. Please know we are working hard to help you generate more targeted traffic to your blog!

CSS Sprites

CSS sprites are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests made for image resources referenced by your site. Images are combined into one larger image at defined X and Y coorindates. Having assigned this generated image to relevant page elements the background-position CSS property can then be used to shift the visible area to the required component image.

Generate your own sprites on this site

India Pakistan T20 Final Video

Yuvaraj - 6 Sixes - England

Blogrush - already cheated

For those of you who are using Blogrush, there is bad news

Apparently, some users have started cheating the system and hence clickthrough ratio has been very low. Here is a message passed on by a friend who is using Blogrush


IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Click- through rates are very low right now due to problems with some users cheating the system. We are a few days away from removing all abuse from the system and you will see your click-rates increase. We are also moving to a Manual Review Process for all member blogs which will also increase the traffic you receive. Thank you for your patience -- we're working hard to improve this beta version of our service.

Google Calendar - not supporting Airtel

In India, Google Partners with Airtel to provide mobile search services. However, their application Google Calendar doesn't seem to provide support Airtel.

They do support Hutch/Vodafone which incidentally has partnered with Yahoo

Here are the list of service providers that Google Calendar supports -

India

• Hutch-Mumbai
• Hutch-Delhi
• Hutch-Gujarat
• Hutchison Essar Cellular Limited
• Hutch-Kolkata
• Spice Karnataka
• Spice Punjab

Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 for download

Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 is an early developer milestone for Firefox 3 and the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 1.9. Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox should not use alpha releases. Some of the changes included with Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 are:

• Basic and unpolished UI for starring and tagging pages has been added, as well as a richer Location Bar autocomplete algorithm that matches against page title (see Places UI Plan for more details)
• Prompt for remembering passwords is no longer a modal dialog
• Built in malware protection (which you can test here)
• Basic and unpolished UI for indicating richer website identity information has been added
• Support for web-based protocol handlers, though it doesn’t work in all situations (see bug 394483).
• A new Applications preference panel for configuring handlers for various content types (see bug 377784) has replaced the Download Actions dialog and the Feeds preference panel
• All Firefox add-ons must now use a secure method for auto-updating (see bug 378216 and this guide for more details)
• Firefox now quits properly (instead of just being killed) when Windows is shut down or restarted (see bug 333907)
• Added support for document.elementFromPoint method (see bug 199692)
• DOMWillOpenModalDialog events are no longer fired by the nsIPrompt implementation (see bug 391100)
• TYPE_PLUGIN has been removed from the Extension Manager code (see bug 392140)
• You can also see the full list of all bugs fixed since Gran Paradiso Alpha 7

Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 is available for the following platforms:

Microsoft Windows 2000 or later
Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Linux

Google - the king of search

Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that Google accounted for 63.98 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending September 1, 2007. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22.87, 7.98 and 3.41 percent respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.68 percent of U.S. searches.

More here

New Digg Features

Digg has revamped user profiles in their latest update making it easy for you to share your favorite stories and discover new interesting content by seeing what your friends are digging. It’s also even easier to find and add friends on Digg.

Hack your phone using Asterisk

Via Lifehacker

pidgin for Ubuntu

Looking to install pidgin 2.2.0 on Ubuntu Feisty ?

Remove your old version using sudo apt-get remove gaim

Download Pidgin from Getdeb

and

Pidgin Data files

and use sudo dpkg -i <>

What is Google trying to do ?

What is Google trying to do here ? Suggesting a search somewhere else ?

Trying to help competitors ?

See the Try your search on Yahoo, Ask ...

Tennix - tennis on your Linux system

Written in C using SDL, Tennix is a simple tennis game for your playing pleasure

On Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install libsdl-mixer1.2 libsmpeg0

Get the deb file from here

Install

sudo dpkg -i tennix_0.4.0-1\~getdeb1_i386.deb

Go to their home page to know about Game hints and keyboard shortcuts

Distrowatch.com hit by a massive DDoS

Looks like Distrowatch has been hit by a massive DDoS as reported on Digg

Here are some of the mirrors

USA: http://distrowatch.serve-you.net/
Ukraine: http://distrowatch.lafox.net/
Czech Republic: http://distrowatch.cz/
Romania: http://dw.rohost.com/
Austria: http://distrowatch.gds.tuwien.ac.at/

Twenty20 Live Cricket

For UK visitors please use Real Player and stream this

Advanced Glow Effects in Photoshop

Here is a tutorial to create some really sharp looking glow effects using a combination of layer styles, the pen tool and colour blending.

The end effect is quite amazing as you look in the picture above (click on the image)

See the tutorial here

Gmail features you may not know

Gmail has a lot of features :-) .. The gmail team has put up a list of features that are very useful once you know them ..

Here are the list of gmail features


1. Create event

2. Offline chat

3. Advanced search

4. Conversation update notification

5. Smart links on the right

6. Gmail for mobile application

7. Reply by chat

8. Gmail gadget for iGoogle

9. Open attachments in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, or view as slideshow

10. Custom "from"

SCO files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

Rejoice ...

No business strategy is more time-honored than using a sleepy Friday afternoon to drop some seriously bad news on investors, and SCO has followed the old playbook to the letter. At 3:21pm this afternoon, SCO sent a press release across the wire announcing that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. That sound you hear is the giddy chuckling of Linux devotees across the globe.

More on Arstechnica

Free iPhone unlocking for dummies

Download

• upload all 3 files to your phone in some location you prefer
• ssh in
• run iUnlock_Reloaded (./iUnlock_reloaded)
• be happy if its done

Via Engadget

Walter Mossberg - Ubuntu not for everyone

Mossberg in his WSJ column says Ubuntu isn't for nontechie users

Says it looks like Windows, but doesn't work like one

Clearly a novice but it is these people who we are targeting to start using Ubuntu

Cellular - why are you here ?

Why are you searching for Cellular ?

Are you looking for the Movie ?

or Cell Phone Providers ?

Leave a comment - This is a survey blog post to see how Google fares

Yahoo Mash - social networking

Yahoo Mash is Yahoo's new social networking effort. While I haven't checked it out it yet - here is their blog

Its currently invite only

Reboot your Frozen Linux based system

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't work ?

Try this

Hold down the Alt and SysRq (Print Screen) keys.

While holding those down, type the following in order. Nothing will appear to happen until the last letter is pressed: REISUB

Watch your computer reboot magically.

What the individual keys do in that sequence are not as important as what it does as a whole: stops all programs, unmounts all drives, and reboots.

To remember this,

Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring or R E I S U B - is just the word busier in reverse.

R gives back control of the keyboard
S issues a sync
E sends all processes but init the term singal
I sends all processes but init the kill signal
U mounts all filesystem ro to prevent a fsck at reboot
B reboots the system

Via Fosswire

Free iPhone SIM Unlock Software

Engadget reports that there is a free iPhone unlock software :-)

Go here

What more .. its open source too... here is a snippet

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
 const char * hehe = RE;
 int fd;

 credit();

 if (argc != 3)
   usage(argv[0]);

 void * secpack = malloc(0x800);
 ReadSecpack(argv[1], secpack);

 void * fw = NULL;
 int fwsize = 0;
 fw = ReadBL(argv[2], &fwsize);

 RestartBaseband();
 fd = InitConn(115200);

 GetVersion(fd);
 CFIStage1_2(fd);
 SendBeginSecpack(fd, secpack);
 SendErase(fd, 0xA0020000, 0xA03bfffe);
 Seek(fd, 0xA0020000 - 0x400);
 unsigned char foo[0x400];
 memset(foo, 0, 0x400);
 SendWrite(fd, foo, 0x400, false);
 SendWrite(fd, fw, fwsize, true);
 SendEndSecpack(fd);
 ValidateFW(fd, fw);
 printf("Completed.\nEnjoy!\n");
 free(fw);

 return 0;
}

Ubuntu Packages by "Seveas"

Dennis "Seveas" Kaarsemaker provides you 3rd party packages that Ubuntu don't include in their official repositories for various reasons

These packages include backports, custom packages and packages like libdvdcss :)

Go here to know how to add his repository to your sources.list

XMLHttpRequest - basics you should know ...

You have heard of it a number of times, haven't you ?

Here are few basic things you need to get you started

What is XMLHttpRequest ?

A Javascript object which can be used to retrieve data via HTTP

So, you can retrieve XML data ?

Not really, any type of data, not just XML

What's the dope ?

You can retrieve data from a server without having to refresh the page, this differs from the traditional page where you if you had to retrieve data - you had to do send the data to the server and retrieve it through a different page

Give me an example now!

var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.open('GET', 'http://techflock.blogspot.com', false);
request.send(null);
if(request.status == 200)
dump(request.responseText);

What happens to the browser when data is being retrieved ? Does it hang ?

You can prevent action when you are performing your operation. However if you want the user to still use the application when you are performing an operation, you could request the data asynchronously

Asynchronously ?

var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.open('GET', 'http://techflock.blogspot.com/', true);
request.onreadystatechange = function (aEvt) {
if (request.readyState == 4) {
   if(request.status == 200)
    dump(request.responseText);
   else
    dump("Error loading page\n");
}
};
req.send(null); 

the onreadystatechange property will have a function callback assigned which will handle the response of your action

Works on both Mozilla and IE based browsers ?

Yes, but differently - For Mozilla based browsers, the above works

For IE, you have to

var request = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP.3.0");

Great! Where can I find more ?

Mozilla Developer Site

Apple

Microsoft MSDN


Examples ?

Here

Shop Ubuntu gear!

Canonical has started a online store for your Ubuntu gear

Go here and shop away!

Linux - the fastest smartphone OS

Over the next 5 years, Linux is expected to be the fastest growing Smartphone OS with a compound annual growth rate in excess of 75 percent. By 2012, a recent study from ABI Research forecasts the Linux-based OS to account for nearly 31 percent of all smart devices in the market - representing more than 331 million cumulative shipments over the same period.

Read more

Backup your hard drive online

Basic CSS Tutorials

Max Design have nice simple tutorials on how to use CSS properties and understanding CSS floating

You should go here

the iPod touch

More here

Chade-Meng - the Google Engineer

Chade-Meng is a engineer at Google who likes to be photographed with Celebrities

So, whenever someone visits Googleplex, he is there with them for a Photo :)

Check his other photos

Flickr Mashups

Here is a list of Flickr mashups worth checking

Retrievr

Flappr

Captioner!

Fastr

Flickrball

Flickr Sudoku

Tickr for Flickr

Flickr Logo Makr

Spell with Flickr

Tagnautica

Linux to be Fastest-Growing Smartphone OS

Over the next 5 years, Linux is expected to be the fastest growing Smartphone OS with a compound annual growth rate in excess of 75 percent. By 2012, a recent study from ABI Research forecasts the Linux-based OS to account for nearly 31 percent of all smart devices in the market - representing more than 331 million cumulative shipments over the same period.

More here