Showing headlines posted by shantzg001

A quick googling for best desktop blogging client would yield just a few (read millions/gazillions) results. Having researched the subject a lot, my choices were finally limited down to BlogJet and BlogDesk, as per my feature set requirement goes (Primarily, off line editing, draft, WYSIWYG editing, categories, tagging support, pinging, trackbacks support, timestamping, past post editing, automatic image uploading) BUT there is one little problem. Both of these don’t work on Linux.

This router builds on the great lineage it has in its predecessors and shines ahead with being much more than a router, rather a complete headless linux PC. In most routers/modems, if you forget the password to your web-administration gui, the only option left is to reset the router, thereby losing all your settings etc. But not so with this little beast.

If you are writing a software which exposes APIs to be used by a third party, then first thing you have to do is to make sure that all the integers parameters have been validated. Every incoming value to your function should be considered as tainted.

We’ve been brought up with many different variations of this popular function. Some books/teachers like to write it as “int main”, some write it as “void main” and then there are some who make do with just “main”, forgoing the return type altogether. So, which one out of them is correct? Or does it even make a difference?

Your online abode is so difficult to keep secured. It can get hacked, you may install something wrong, a wrong configuration can wreak havoc, the server hard disk might crash, natural calamities, and what not. Your best option to secure yourself against all this is summarized in just one word “BACKUP”.

If you have multiple soundcards in your system and have to switch between them regularly you would definitely be under-whelmed by the less-than-stellar performance of ubuntu in switching between the sound cards.

Have you ever had to reinstall your ubuntu installation, and then bear the pain of manually installing the applications you've come to love (i mean use :)) everyday? If yes, then cheer up buddy, because all you really need is some magic (read scripting), some typing and spend some time digging the package names of your favourite applications.

An old-but-useful trick. It’s about customizing nautilus to display a context menu that has a few of your chosen scripts to weave their magic on the selected object. And the procedure to do this is summarized in just two steps

Doing “stuff” on linux is just so easy. By “stuff”, I mean everything from doing some normal day chores, downloading files, customizing things, automating routine tasks, etc. The backbone for this is “the terminal” (not the movie :P). I can do almost anything I want from the console.

This is a really sad day. Not only the organizers of National Conference On Free Software 2008 taking place at CUSAT seem to be utterly misguided when they decided to let Novell be on-board as their main sponsor, they even took the extreme step of bringing in police to silence the lone voices of the Boycott Novell protestors.

I didn’t go for GIMP / Inkscape etc because they were overkill for what I wanted to do. Many a times, I just wanted to touch up a screenshot or make a simple flow image by drawing a few boxes, use a few pointing arrows, and add some text here and there. All this could be done with the previous mentioned programs as well but took a bit more steps than I wanted (stroking the selections / paths for lines, boxes, circles, and even then, no arrows).

GLib is a utility library for C, which augments the standard C library in several purposeful ways to make your life that much easier while programming. GLib has many things to offer you.

I have an old noname cheapo webcam, that I dusted out of my junk (why? More on that in a post coming soon). I hoped that it would work in my Ubuntu setup out of the box like most of my other hardware. I connected it to my laptop's usb port. dmesg gave the following output:

Literally expanded, it stands for Long Term Support. Yeah right, but what does it actually mean. Does it mean I’ll keep getting updates till eternity or what? The explanation is quite simple really.

According to the ruling, the patents granted for business practices would have to undergo specific and stringent testing procedures to check the worthiness of granting a patent to it. Essentially, they are aiming to mandate a passing of “machine-or-transformation test” as a pre-requisite for granting a patent.

Worried about someone breaking into your house in your absence? Or just need to keep a tab on who enters your room while you are away? Well, all you need is a webcam, a linux PC/laptop and a twitter account. And you are set for real time updates through twitter about all that goes on at your abode behind your back (can even receive a text message/sms on your phone). Keep reading for the very simple setup you need.

After loitering around for so long, I finally got my lazy bum off the bed and installed Hardy Heron (8.04.1) onto my aging laptop. I’ve never been a sucker for eye-candy stuff, prefering to have more resources available for real work, instead of ooh-aahing over nice looking things all around my desktop. Well, but then I fell prey

FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community rejoices today as google finally lived upto their promise of releasing the android source code. Now, the things that is left to be evaluated is that how much of it is actually true, or whether there are some binary blobs still in there.

There is still a day left for the first Android based Device, T-Mobile G1, to come out into the hands of general public but I was in a for a small surprise as I went through my Google Analytics report for the last week. It had a mysterious number of 2 sitting at the bottom of my “Unique Visitors by Operating Systems” filter report. The “mysterious” part coming from the fact that the left most column displayed Android

As some of you know that I’ve taken up the development of the ultra-cool xwinwrap tool that allows you to use movies, screensavers etc as wallpapers for you linux desktops. Here is version 0.02 for you consumption that fixes a bug because of which the generated window was overlapping other windows.