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.

Samsung I400 Smartphone

Here are the features of the latest Smartphone that Samsung has released

Samsung SGH-I400

Specification - Standard: GPRS/EDGE Tri-Band (900/1800/1900)

Camera: 2.0-Megapixel

Camera - Display: 2.3-inch QVGA TFT (262K Colors)

Features: Bluetooth 2.0 (A2DP), USB 2.0

Full Web Browsing / Web 2.0 - Music Key / Dual Speaker - microSD (4 GB)

Size: 101 x 50 x 15.8 mm - Weight: 92 g

Google - BROKEN

Google seems to have just too many problems these days. One service seems to broken almost every day. Of the three services that I use, Gmail, Blogger and Groups, one of them is broken almost so very often

Google Groups seems to be down for over 5 hours now, there is no official communication on what's going on - there is almost no help if you want to from Google. You had Gmail users complaining that their messages and accounts were disabled for days together.

As someone puts it "Asking Google for help and getting it is like asking President Bush to speak intelligently .. aint gonna happen ."

Google isn't going anywhere with so many bad services. They have revolutionized the web like no one, unfortunately, its crumbling right now.

Firefox Extension - Password Exporter

While I prepare myself to upgrade to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, I've been backing up my data before I reformat my good old hard disk which currently has Mandriva 10.1.

In the process of the backup, I needed a Firefox password saver which would let me save passwords and then import them later - Password Exporter turned out to be the perfect answer - lets you export/import passwords to either a XML file or a CSV file and your xml file can be encrypted too. Neat.

This Earth Day... you should know...

The international panel of scientists predicts the global average temperature could increase by 2 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and that sea levels could rise by up to 2 feet.

Scientists have even speculated that a slight increase in Earth's rotation rate could result, along with other changes. Glaciers, already receding, will disappear. Epic floods will hit some areas while intense drought will strike others. Humans will face widespread water shortages. Famine and disease will increase. Earth’s landscape will transform radically, with a quarter of plants and animals at risk of extinction.

Read more

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04

Ubuntu 7.04 comes packed with a host of new features including data migration from Windows, new and easier ways to install multimedia codecs, binary drivers, as well as networking improvements and of course, GNOME 2.18, the 2.6.20 kernel and more.

Ubuntu 7.04 is the most user-friendly Ubuntu to date and includes a ground-breaking Windows migration assistant, excellent wireless networking support and improved multimedia support.

Windows migration tool - The new migration tool recognises Internet Explorer favorites, Firefox bookmarks, desktop wallpaper, AOL IM contacts, Yahoo IM contacts and imports them in Ubuntu. This offers easier and faster migration for new users of Ubuntu and individuals wanting to run a dual partition. In addition to single accounts, you can migrate several users' settings in Ubuntu.

Playing an MP3 or other media file just got a lot easier. If the required pieces are not yet installed, 7.04 will get the correct codecs for you, no more searching and no need for long and complicated instructions.

Stunning new desktop effects are available as a technology preview for users who choose to enable them. They remain turned off by default, for the benefit of users with older or less powerful chips and certain non-supported graphics cards.

New in 7.04 is Network Manager, a simple way to find and connect to wireless and wired networks. With a single click, view all the available wireless networks and their strengths. For those on a secured network, WPA support is built in right out of the box

Feisty features all new artwork; check out the new Desktop Background image, and a boot-up splash image that has more 'bling'. The new theme also includes a polished icon set.

Download here

Ubuntu Community Magazine

FullCircle - the Ubuntu magazine has a brief history of the various versions of Ubuntu as well as the preview of the upcoming Feisty Fawn release. Download it from the link below

Download link